6 February 2015

New Online Document Collection on US Intelligence Operations in Europe During Cold War Now Available

February 4, 2015 

The Dutch publishing house Brill today has published an online collection of 4,023 declassified documents (almost 25,000 pages of material) concerning U.S. intelligence collection operations and analytic reporting on Europe covering the period from the end of World War II in 1945 until the end of the war in Bosnia in 1995. And yes, I am the editor of the collection. A brief summary of the collection can be found here

The following are examples of some of more interesting documents contained in the collection: 

* Newly declassified documents concerning CIA’s use of Nazis for intelligence purposes during the Cold War. For example, a former Nazi named Walter Kopp (codename KIBITZ 15), who ran the CIA’s largest stay-behind network in West Germany during the 1950s, had to be fired and his network disbanded after CIA headquarters in Washington discovered that his extreme anti-semitic views could potentially compromise Agency operations in Germany if discovered by the German press. 

* The collection contains hundreds of pages of documents providing the first details of over a dozen failed CIA covert action operations in West Germany, East Germany, Albania, Bulgaria and Romania. For example, the collection includes: 

(1) 160 documents concerning the botched CIA covert action operation Project BGFIEND, which sought to overthrow the communist regime in Albania operation from 1948 to 1954 

(2) A dozen declassified documents concerning the CIA covert action operation Project QKBROIL, which sought to recruit a resistance army inside Romania using agents parachuted into the country. 

(3) Over 20 documents concerning the CIA covert action operation Project QKSTAIR/BGCONVOY, which sought to recruit a resistance army inside Bulgaria using agents infiltrated in to the country by parachuted and overland from Greece. 

(4) 38 documents concerning the CIA’s disastrous Project LCPROWL covert action program, which sought to use the West German anticommunist youth organization Bund Deutscher Jugend (BDJ) as cover for a clandestine paramilitary resistance organization. Many of the top leaders of the BDJ were former members of the Nazi Party, and many of the members had served in the Waffen SS and Hitler Jugend during World War II. 

(5) Ten documents concerning the CIA’s equally disastrous Project DTLINEN covert action program, which used the West German anticommunist organization known as the Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit (KgU) to hide a clandestine paramilitary stay-behind organization that operated in both East and West Germany. The operation collapsed from within after the Soviet and East German intelligence services penetrated the operation, leading to the wholesale arrest of many of the group’s members in East Germany. 

(6) 26 documents concerning another failed CIA covert action operation known as Project TPEMBER, which used a Berlin-based organization known as the (UFJ), or League of Free Jurists, as cover to operate a stay-behind resistance organization. Like Project DTLINEN, the Soviet and East German intelligence services quickly infiltrated their operatives into the top echelons of the UFJ, allowing them to arrest most of the organization’s covert operatives in East Germany. 

The collection also includes: 

* Over 50 documents concerning the CIA’s recruitment in the 1950s of hundreds of agents to man a series of clandestine stay-behind intelligence and sabotage networks spread throughout Western Europe. The documents show that these networks were still in place as late as the 1980s. 

* 30 documents concerning the CIA-funded radio broadcasting stations based in Germany, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. 

* 52 documents concerning the construction of sensitive nuclear test detection facilities in Europe and elsewhere around the globe in conjunction with the British government. 

* Over 150 formerly classified documents concerning French nuclear weapons testing in Algeria and in French Polynesia in the South Pacific 

* Hundreds of pages of internal CIA and US military intelligence studies, reports, memos and cables concerning the 

* Albanian intelligence and security services

* Belgian intelligence and security services

* Danish intelligence and security services

* Dutch intelligence and security services

* Finnish intelligence and security services

* French intelligence and security services (DGER/SDECE/DST)

* German intelligence and security services (Gehlen Org, BND and MAD)

* Greek intelligence and security services

* Italian intelligence and security services

* Norwegian intelligence service

* Polish intelligence services

* Portuguese intelligence service

* Romanian intelligence services

* Swedish intelligence services

* Swiss intelligence service

* Turkish intelligence services

* UK foreign intelligence service (MI6)

* Vatican intelligence service

* Yugoslav intelligence and security services 

The documents show that the US intelligence community not only received vast amount of information from these services, but also concurrently spied on their activities as well. 

There is a lot more that will intrigue and delight members of the public at large, as well as infuriate U.S. government security officers who have striven since 9/11 to keep this sort of material out of reach. 

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