During the Russo-German war OUN was armed by the Germans. Many Ukrainians fought in the auxiliaries. An entire division of the Nazis’ Waffen SS, Sixteenth SS “Galicia,” was composed of Ukrainians. Whole units of Ukrainians, German officers included, later formed the core of the UPA partisan army, the force behind the band of soldiers who appeared in Germany in 1947. Ukrainians claimed to have 50,000 soldiers in September 1944, scattered across the Ukraine, southern Poland, and eastern Czechoslovakia. From that summer, when the last German troops were driven from south Russia, OUN fought on its own. This was partisan warfare on a grand scale, and it did not end with V-E Day. Courier links increasingly broke down after May 1946, but in 1947 OUN leaders still claimed as many as 100,000 partisans under arms in eight large formations.

  In 1946 Soviet officials demanded the extradition of Bandera, by then ensconced in the American occupation zone of Germany, as a war criminal. Instead he was kept under surveillance in an operation the CIC knew as Anyface, to prevent attempts against him. Warned to hide even though the CIC had information potentially implicating him in war crimes, Bandera disappeared. Americans told the Russians they had no idea of his whereabouts. Meanwhile Bandera’s organization, with the help of British intelligence, reinvented the wartime Anti-Bolshevik Front as the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), a multinational proto-fascist and essentially anti-democratic union that long outlasted the secret war against Russia.

  Partisan struggle continued in the Ukraine, including those parts relocated within Poland and Czechoslovakia by Stalin’s border changes. Ukrainians had suffered terribly in the Great Patriotic War—three million sent to Germany as forced labor, half that number still missing, two and a half million killed. There were plenty of reasons for them to support OUN and very few to welcome Stalin’s return. Stalin’s response was vigorous. He posted strong Red Army forces to the Ukraine. Party activists sent to the Ukraine and Moldavia (now Moldova) included Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, and Konstantin Chernenko. Postwar work in south Russia became a stepping stone to power for many Soviet leaders. Marshal Georgi K. Zhukov went to command the Odessa Military District in July 1946. Zhukov had distinguished himself in the war and was perhaps Stalin’s best general. Speculation at the time centered on the possibility that he was being demoted. Others maintain Zhukov’s mission involved threatening Turkey, from which Russia wanted concessions. But State Department intelligence reports in 1947 observed that Zhukov was being used to stabilize the Ukraine. In fact, the local Communist Party headquarters at Odessa had burned down during riots there the preceding winter.

  With Zhukov in command, military operations now assumed major proportions. Soviet and Eastern European reports in 1946 several times claimed the “liquidation” of hundreds of partisans, whom the Soviets typically tried to associate with the Nazis. In the spring of 1947 the Polish army, officered by Russians, began evacuating local populations. There were also coordinated attacks in the tri-border region by Polish, Czech, and Soviet forces. But OUN remained powerful. The partisans struck back when they machine-gunned the Polish vice minister of defense.

  While Czech security strove to seal the border, they proved unable to prevent Ukrainian infiltration. That fall the Czech defense minister, Gen. Ludvik Svoboda, estimated that hundreds of partisans were still at large. The Poles claimed the elimination of six UPA “brigade groups” with two thousand partisans killed or captured. As for the Soviets, in a January 1948 speech reported by Pravda, Khrushchev declared, “The Ukrainian people have destroyed an insignificant bunch of Ukrainian nationalists and will annihilate the remnants of them.” Referring to the partisans in his memoirs, Khrushchev concedes the “flare-ups” of fighting “sometimes amounted to war,” and that partisan activity “became so serious that the Polish forces had to conduct full scale military operations.”

  But Khrushchev’s January 1948 speech cloaked a struggle far from over. Members of the unit that escaped to Germany estimated OUN/UPA armed strength at between 50,000 and 200,000 soldiers. They also revealed details of the structure of the partisan forces: administratively organized into “regiments,” with fighting units of platoon (40 men), company (150 men), and battalion (500 to 800 partisans) size. Most combat units were of company size and armed with light weapons, a half-dozen or more machine guns, and equal numbers of mortars.

  This data about UPA capabilities did not prevent State Department intelligence from concluding that resistance no longer seemed serious. But it also did not prevent Ukrainian appeals. A conference of emigrés in New York appealed to President Truman on August 31, 1947: “Ukraine is fighting for its freedom by means of its powerful insurgent army. We endorse her fight for freedom on the grounds of the Atlantic Charter. We believe that Russian aggressiveness would lose its power if [the] Ukraine were liberated and acquired self rule.”

  In Washington there was growing interest in operations in the denied areas. A 1948 NSC study advocated ties with anti-Soviet groups as a prime means of acquiring information. The OPC began to move in 1949, with Frank Wisner demanding the Gehlen Organization get agents into Russia. Division chief Franklin Lindsay labored to get the project going. At the CIA’s Office of Special Operations, Lindsay’s opposite number, Harry Rositzke, looked at Pentagon wish lists as pie in the sky—they included up to two thousand agents on the ground in Russia.

  But the hour was late in the Ukraine. Many UPA partisan companies were down to cadre strength. Although one unit conducted a daring five-week raid into Romania, Brig. Gen. Roman Shuchewycz, commander of the insurgent army, on September 3, 1949, ordered deactivation and conversion to an underground. The CIA’s Ukraine operation began two days later, when two agents dropped by parachute after a flight from Germany across Central Europe.

  Like so many others, this CIA project became a joint effort with the British. The Office of Policy Coordination differed with London over which emigré factions to back. SIS chose OUN. Officers at OPC believed the tide of history had turned against the partisans and preferred the Russian social democratic group National Labor Alliance, or NTS (Natsionalno Trudovoi Soyuz). The NTS formed in Belgrade in 1930, among emigrés of the first wave opposed to both Soviet and tsarist rule. It espoused parliamentary democracy. Like OUN, the NTS maintained courier services into Russia and tried to establish networks. Like Bandera, it had collaborated in the early days with the German wartime administration. But unlike OUN, NTS made no effort at partisan war. Rather, under Dr. Georgi S. Okolovich, the NTS ideologist Vladimir Poremski developed a “molecular theory,” in which widening sectors of society would oppose the Communists and ultimately overthrow Soviet rule.

  These views were advanced in pamphlets, in the NTS newspaper Posev, and on broadcasts of Radio Free Russia, the NTS station. An administrative headquarters was located in Paris and a field center in Frankfurt with more than two hundred personnel. The NTS recruited and trained its own agents near Frankfurt at Bad Homburg. The Russian emigrés already had relations with the Counter Intelligence Corps and Army G-2 as well as the Gehlen Organization and SIS. So it was easy for NTS to connect with the Office of Policy Coordination.

  Soon the Russian project was in full swing. Frank Wisner’s boys and the Gehlen Org did preliminary screening, recruiting the Russians under the same terms offered the Balts. Published estimates of the number of “special forces” agents trained before 1954 range up to five thousand. Most were members of labor units like the Albanian Company 400. This program functioned as a farm system, identifying suitable candidates for missions to denied areas. The number trained in the United States between 1948 and 1954, much lower, included at least two hundred persons with Nazi connections, people whom the State Department had to admit on grounds of national security.

  The SIS took the lead in actual infiltration. According to Kim Philby, Anglo-American cooperation on denied-area schemes was chilly. On the Ukrainian situation, Philby recalls the CIA arguing that Stepan Bandera was anti-American, that OUN represented extreme nationalism with fascist overtones, and that anyway its roots were among the “old” emigration. A meeting in Washington, Philby asserts, between the responsible CIA officers and the SIS chief for Northern Europe, Harry Carr, ended with the sides openly accusing each other of “wholesale lying.”

  Philby claims the accusations were justified, on both sides!

  London witnessed a conference at the highest level between the CIA and SIS in April 1951. Allen Dulles, now deputy director for plans and touring Europe to familiarize himself, seized the moment to coordinate with SIS. Dulles’s staff encouraged the British to abandon Bandera. At the London conference Harry Carr flatly refused despite a weakened position—two SIS missions sent into Russia during 1950 had both disappeared without a trace.

  The CIA and the British remained deadlocked, with the practical result that support continued for both the Ukrainians and the NTS. In 1951 the British dropped three parties of six agents each: into the Ukraine, the foothills of the Carpathians, and southern Poland. None ever reported back. At least one team consisted of veterans of the Nazis’ SS “Galicia” Division. A CIA four-man unit was unproductive, as were several missions the secret warriors dispatched to the Ukraine and Moldavia. Remnants of OUN and Bandera forces held out in the Carpathians until 1952, but the bands were slowly tracked down.

  Intelligence agents operated at grave disadvantage. The population was closely controlled and state security everywhere. It was only in 1951, apparently, that the CIA learned the printing processes the Russians used to produce internal passports and other documents. Planes to drop agents into denied areas were flown by the British through Cyprus and by the CIA through Greece and western Germany. But the partisans had been broken by the time agent teams began to arrive, so the underground proved unable to provide shelter.

  The dilemmas were quite direct for Michael Burke. In 1951 the CIA contract officer, recalled from the Albania project, obtained a line slot at Frankfurt, Germany, on the Russian infiltration program. Burke missed the Mediterranean easiness of Rome and would not be much enamored of German rigidities, but the mission had precedence. He took charge of the CIA’s biggest field operation, as Burke put it, “a large disparate body of Americans with varying skills and talents, dispersed in a dozen locations throughout the country, a myriad of ongoing activities of varying quality, and dozens of indigenous men and women agents ranging from individual couriers to organized resistance movements.”

  In May 1951 the CIA sent another army officer to Germany as Director Smith’s personal representative. Gen. Lucien K. Truscott, Jr., thoroughly represented the Old Army. He had learned to play the bugle from the bugler in his father’s cavalry regiment, then grew up to join the army, winning a battlefield commission in World War I. A forty-six-year-old Texan and a professional’s professional, Truscott and Bedell Smith had both been at Fort Leavenworth in the mid-1930s, and in World War II Truscott had served briefly on Eisenhower’s staff, which Smith headed. Truscott became one of the most successful U.S. commanders in Sicily, Italy, and France. He had had some unconventional warfare experience—with Lord Mountbatten at the Combined Operations Command at the time of the Dieppe raid and other commando actions—and went on to help found the American Rangers. Truscott had retired in 1947. Walter Bedell Smith induced him to return to Germany, where he had been an occupation commander shortly after the war.

  Truscott had a natural ability for intelligence and a good nose for security. He quickly became concerned with agent losses in Russian operations. Investigating the CIA’s relationships with the Gehlen Org and the NTS Russians, he found many ways the missions might be compromised. With Germany the CIA’s biggest show—the station at Frankfurt comprised fourteen hundred officers at this time—weaknesses were serious business. When OPC and OSO consolidated in 1952, Truscott gained the power to issue orders in the agency’s name. He initiated a formal inquiry. When Allen Dulles came through on a tour of CIA stations, Truscott used his briefing to warn of the collapse of infiltration operations. The general’s prestige and known connections with Director Smith were such that he could make even Allen Dulles, who once walked out of a Truscott talk, sit down and listen to the rest of the gloomy news.

  In late December 1952 came the collapse of yet another CIA-SIS joint operation, which ought to have given the Americans pause. This concerned Poland, where for years the spooks assumed they were in contact with an anti-Soviet underground called WIN (Wolnosc I Niepodleglosc, or Freedom and Independence). The roots lay in World War II when Polish resistance to the Nazis had been crushed in the 1944 Battle of Warsaw as Soviet armies stood by and watched. Stalin then proceeded to contrive a Soviet satellite state in Poland. The WIN consisted of Poles, mostly resistance veterans, as an anti-Soviet underground. But its first commander had been arrested and tried in a 1947 Soviet crackdown after the Americans and British cooperated in spiriting out of the country the former prime minister and other Polish nationalists. Why the intelligence services did not conclude that WIN had been destroyed right there remains a mystery. Around that time Harry Carr of SIS had approached Gen. Wladislaw Anders, Poland’s wartime field commander on the Allied side, who naturally had WIN connections, and sought to forge links to the underground.

  Poland seemed a logical theater for CIA political warfare, certainly a place to argue for democracy as against communism. WIN seemed the ideal instrument. Frank Lindsay powered up the Wurlitzer. The Poles sent couriers to the West, letters to emigré families, and radio messages to the Western intelligence services; they had, they said, five hundred WIN operatives, twenty thousand who could be mobilized, and a hundred thousand sympathizers. The WIN messages asked for money and supplies. The British and Americans did not know these messages were from the Russians, who were running WIN as a deception game.

  In February 1949 the British bowed out of the affair. OPC then furnished all the money for WIN, more than a million dollars over three years. In 1951 Lindsay recruited John Bross, another of those former lawyers and OSS types, who had been a Jedburgh commando, to run the Polish business as his deputy. Bross also knew about CIA’s German base since he came to the agency from a job as legal counsel to the U.S. high commissioner in Germany. Like others, Bross was completely fooled—once at a meeting he threw out the number 37,000 as a figure for Polish underground troops fighting the Soviets a month after the feared war for Europe began. In 1952 WIN asked for a list of the targets the CIA wanted destroyed in the event of that war, certainly something Russian intelligence would need to know. The CIA sent the list. Bross became queasy when WIN followed up by asking for an American general to be parachuted to the alleged underground to buck up its morale. Bross put his foot down. The Russians, knowing the game was up, blew the operation for its propaganda value. A star agent first recruited by the British revealed himself as a Russian spy, recounting how WIN had deceived the West. Then the Soviets staged a show trial of other WIN figures, hapless Poles whom the Russians had pulled in with this false-flag operation.

  This latest failure, and the consolidation of the CIA’s Directorate for Operations, were the end for Frank Lindsay. Burned out with the chain of disaster, Lindsay announced his departure. Allen Dulles asked him to write a paper on the lessons learned in all these covert actions. Dulles and Lindsay went over the draft one weekend day at Dulles’s home. The conclusions, uniformly negative, reflected Lindsay’s understanding of the Russians’ tight security everywhere behind the Iron Curtain. Dulles could not abide this, but Lindsay stuck to his guns. He left for the Ford Foundation. His replacement as chief of DO’s Eastern Europe Division would be John Bross. The CIA’s secret war ground on.

  There were many reasons for concern. Until 1951 the Soviets had the advantage of information from Philby, but he was not their only source. From 1950 on they received reports from Heinz Felfe, a senior officer of the Gehlen Org, plus Canadian spy Gordon Lonsdale. The Russians also used the flow of refugees and Displaced Persons, a main source of recruits for OPC and the SIS, to insert spies into Western operations. Among the most valuable was Capt. Nikita Khorunshy, who defected in Berlin in 1948, telling CIC his reason was love for a German girl. Like many Russian DPs, Khorunshy moved to Frankfurt. There he became associated with NTS. The emigrés relied on his recent knowledge of conditions in Russia and hired Khorunshy for their training school at Bad Homburg. Thus the Soviets had a spy at the very center of the operation run against them. Using intelligence from Khorunshy, they were able to supply agents with the specific qualifications sought by the Western services, spies who compromised their CIA missions. Khorunshy meanwhile, beginning in 1951, funneled the Soviets with a stream of data on individuals trained through the NTS–Gehlen Org–OPC network. He also suggested and provided the knowledge for an assassination attempt against NTS chief Okolovich. The betrayal of a 1953 team he had trained at Bad Homburg finally uncovered Khorunshy.

  The CIA lost another sixteen agents in at least five missions during 1952 and 1953. British losses are still unknown, as are those of the Office of Special Operations, which ran its own agents into the denied areas. Each time the base dispatched one of CIA’s aircraft to carry a team, it took a tremendous chance the plane would be downed behind the Iron Curtain. Agency officers agonized facing the go/no-go decisions for these flights. Although Khorunshy was arrested in 1954, the Soviets captured a solo agent plus yet another CIA team. Mike Burke estimated an agent’s chances with all the best backup the CIA could furnish at no better than 50 percent. Whatever the odds, losses mounted with very little to show.