THE STRANGE CASE OF EERIK HEINE AND THE CIA

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CIA-RDP75-00001R000400190143-6
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RIPPUB
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K
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4
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November 17, 2016
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June 2, 1999
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143
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Publication Date: 
April 20, 1966
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NSPR
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. ? 1 N./ .II. ..-?.16 Approved For Release 6: CIA-RDP75-00001R00040 - STATINTL APR 2 0 1966 SPECIAL REPORT rrA f Eerik Copyright, 1966, The Evening Star Newspaper Co. ' By ORR KELLY Star Staff Writer In the high-ceilinged main courtroom ' 'of the Federal building in Baltimore, Chief Federal Judge Roszel C. Thom- ,. ? sen listened intently as the lawyers , before him argued their case. ? On the surface it was -a routine case: Civil Action No. 15952, a complaint in... damages for slander, Eerik Heine, : plaintiff, v. Juni Raus, defendant. It seemed to be . a petty dispute between two members of the Estonian commu- nity. But at one point, Judge Thomsen kileaned forward and said: , "If further information were re- vealed, it might expose the entire U.S. counter-espionage apparatus." Clearly Heine v. Raus was something special. Over the last 171/2 months, the file on tivil Action No. 15952 has grown into a documented tale of intrigue as gripping and as puzzling as any spy story. The plaintiff, Eerik Heine, is a 46- year-old Estonian. He now lives in . Rexdale_Ont., a suburb of Toronto, and by his own story of his life is one of the great freedom fighters of all time. On three separate occasions, he said in his suit, Raus accused him of being a Communist and an agent of the the dread Soviet secret police. Raus, the man ,accused of slandernig Heine, is an admitted agent of the Central Intelligence Agency and, in CIA's own words, "was instructed to disseminate such information . . . so as 1, to protect the integrity of the Agency's foreign intelligence sources." :laW firms. His attorneys were Paul R. 'Connolly, a top trial lawyer, and E. 'Barrett Prettyman,.. Jr., former assist-, ant --IkS.'"?Attorney General, former 'White_House special, assistant and a' 'major figure in negotiations for the release of the Bay of Pigs prisoners. ? The7-stateinents- he Td niacre-abOut Heine; Raus said in his answer, were! ;made in his official capacity as com-: :mender of the Estonian Legion and, he ; added, he "was in possession of re- ? sponsible information received by him, from an official agency of the' United States government.' ? The CIA was not mentioned, how- !ever, until a year later. Raus' charges created a bitter split' .in the Estonian community in North lAmerica, which numbers some 20,000 to 30,000 persons. August Kuklane .of 4714 St. Thomas Ave., Baltimore, a contrac- tor and Maryland commander of the Estonian Legion, recalled in a recent interview his reaction when he first, heard the charges. "I have such a feeling as someone. 'hit me on head," he declared. ' Kuklane said he put the issue very' forcefully to both men. "I pointed my finger at Heine and I told him, 'You know what that means. If you are guilty, it means the rope..' And I told ' Yuri Raus, 'If this man is innocent, you have done a deadly sin,' ". Raus is 39, lives at 6508 Osborne Rd., 'Hyattsville, Md., and is an engineer for the Bureau of Public Roads and nation- al commander of an Estonian veterans' organization, Eesti Vabadusalas_te Liit (the Legion of Est,onian Liberation,1 :Inc.) Heine is asking $10,000 in compensa- tory damages and $100,000 in punitive+ ,damages in the suit, filed in the U.S. ,District Court in Baltimore on Nov. 6, . 1964. He is represented by two Wash- ington attorneys, Ernest C. Raskauskas land Robert J. Stanford. The importance of the case began to , emerge when, early in January, 1965, Ram' answer was filed through Hogan & HartAp,pmewidAllehirlitWiftgair) Legal Dilemma Members of the Estonian community urged Heine to file suit so that the Under strict instructions from the truth or falsity of the accusations could CIA, Raus is prevented from telling his be learned. side of the stoor.: ;In a court hearing en the has last weeks. his attorney, Prettyman,: awwwvie 040a11114114Wite even. wire .eager: EERIK HEINE U.S. judge has ever faced. Raus has claimed absolute privilege because, he says, he was acting as an official of the U.S. Government. Further he? is bound by a secrecy agreement with the CIA which apparently prevents the court or Heine's lawyers from inquiring into the nature of his duties as a CIA agent. In a hearing on March 11, Connolly stained up, the dilemma faced by Judge Thonisen: . ",lf indeed the plaintiff is an innocent law-abiding citizen, a dedicated fighter for his homeland, if he is a person who has all hid life opposed the Soviet Communist conquest of his homeland and has fought. Soviet , principles and something has been said of him to damage his reputation, it is indeed a monstrous thing that has happened to him. "On the other hand, if this man posing as a freedom fighter, posing as an Estonian partisan against Soviet rule in his homeland, if he has in fact been a Soviet agent, then what has happened to him is no more than any American I think would believe was his just desserts. "The difficulty in approaching such a case is that at the outset we do not know which is true, and if we could try the issue of whether it is true or not, perhaps that particular issue would be satisfied; but the law and the Supreme Court itself has established a clear-cut principle that prevents Inquiry. .." One-Sided Story Yd ; ? than Heine to -have the full truth mitie; "Methods of torture, the beatings, "You have to know that to get full public' But at PieljaVeffirdileittg*104 201:4#08i1266stler Ri1451,13eliRe00400g190.111113fece etory is aVailabl . you have e worst agony vies a ey use to kill with your own hands a govern- ',Ong before the CIA involvement in electricity, especially on the sexual thee ease was made public, Connolly organs. ment officer or soldier and that I did ; and Prettyman began the preparation "And two times I was taken out from' that same year. I killed a district of of their defense by taking a deposition my prison and led to a nearby forest 1Viljandi officer. . . . Feb. 27 and March 1, 2, and 3, 1965. -eee from Heine. They questioned him on where they had a secret execution Q. When did you have this killing . place, and two times they, you know, when you had to do it with your bare The 924-page transcript of the deposi- made a mock killing or mock shooting. hands? time now ' on file in the court, gives , They put me on the edge of that grave, A. He was still alive, wounded sever- , Eerik Heine's detailed story of his life. 1 and then, you know, first time only ly, and I shot him myself. N . c they had rifles on their shoulder, and I Q. You then went up to the car and- captured by the Russians three tithes, waited for when it comes, and nothing - shot him? According to Heine's story, be was escaped twice, spent some seven yearsY comes; the second time they even fire, A. Yes. , daring 5,000 mile trip across the north In Russian prisons and once made, , a 'but not at me, but to subdue me so that R. Where? daring tell about these activities they sus- A. In the face. of Russia while there was a price on pected I was a part of." his head as a guerrilla fighter. While Heine was in the Soviet prison Sentenced to Death The line of questioning during the in Tartu, his parents emigrated to taking of the deposition indicates the 'Germany ? this was during the period In August of 1947, Heine said in the ? attorneys might have a question as to of peace between the USSR and Ger- deposition, he went alone 2,500 miles whether the man who calls himself enany ! established by the Molotov- across Russia in an attempt to rescue Eerik Heine is, in fact, really Eerik Ribbon trop Pact ? , and he and several an Estonian woman from a Siberian Heine. One version of the stories circe? other prisoners were exchanged for deportation camp. But, he said, she lating about him, he himself said, is German Communists in April 1941. was afraid to accompany him so, that the real Eerie Heine died in the When war broke out between Germa- instead, he brought four adults and two forests of Estonia as a freedom fighter fly and the USSR, Heine was trained as children safely back to Estonia. and that he has been replaced by a an officer by the Germans, had his In 1950, he said, while he was attend- superbly clever Soviet agent. blood type tatooed inside his left arm ing a music festival, agents of the "They say I am not I," ed. he eemMent-! and was assigned to an Estonian unit of Soviet secret police pounced on him. the Waffen SS ? the crack frontline He was sentenced to death, he said, , troops of the German army. After but the sentence was commuted to 25 Heine's Story . service in the Ukraine, he was sent years in prison and he spent the next back to Estonia and became a member six years in a variety of Russian ? The following account of the life of of the political police ? which, he prisons. What is publicly known about Eerik Heine, then, is based on the insists, was sharply distinct from the what happened to Heine during those deposition and on a lengthy interview Gestapo. years comes almost entirely from his with the plaintiff in Rexdale, where he In 1944, he returned to the army and own story as told in the deposition. He lives in a four-bedroom, $18,000 bunga- fought in the front lines, was released as a prisoner of war in low with his wife, who is a registered November, 1956, learned that his C Eerik Heine was born Sept. 15, 1919' He was asked during the taking of mother was then living in Canada and there in 1957. He was also reunited there, he said, nurse, and a 70-year-old woman he Capture and Escape ; identifies as his mother: joined her Ire". Tartu, Estonia to the wife of the ' the deposition how many Russians he with Elsa Varres, a tall, handsome owner of northern Europe's 'largest; had killed, woman with dark blonde hair and tpieeo en anufacturing plapt. ' "You know, sir," he replied, "we ' flashing blue eyes, whom he had not were not that kind of people that kept He first came to public attention in, seen since they were in a camp in records like the Russians about their August of 1940 when the Communists, Germany, and they were married in killings. I may say, maybe a hundred, in the process of taking over the coun- Toronto on Dec. 28, 1957. maybe 200, who knows." try, hung the Red flag from the Tartu, Heine's life during the next seven But the overwhelming firepower of the Soviets proved too much and the years was almost totally devoted to the city hall. , "When they raised the Red flag ore front in the southern part of Estonia --cause of Estonian liberation. the city hall, I went with a couple of 'near his home town of Tartu?collapsed. "I had a feeling God Almighty had something for me," he said in an my young friends to try to pull that Heine was captured and spent the interview, "?some kind of mission? down, the Red flag and put up our winter of 1944-45 in a Russian slave some kind of work put upon me. Other- Estonian tri-color," he says in the labor camp where, he said, the prison- wise why save me through all those deposition. ens lived in subhuman conditions and horrible things--all hunger, pain and "We struggled there in these cure where death from beatings, starvation torture?" dors and in the tower there. We were and murder by criminal prisoners was pulled down by these Communists and an everyday occurrence. on that day when we struggled there, At the height of a snowstorm in Subject of Book the three, four youths that we were, March of 1945, he said, he ciawled . thousands of people gathered around through the four barbed wire fences ' In a long series of interviews, he told when news got out that we were there, surrounding the prison?across what his life story to Arved Viirlaid, an thousands of people gathered around the prisoners called the "death zone" author and the husband of his wife's : that city hall, and they began to sing ? and escaped. From there, he walked sister. A fictionalized account of his our national anthem and these Commu- and rode trains across northern Russia, life, which Ileum reters to as "my nists were struck with terror and we ' heading always toward the west, atitobiography," has been published in used that moment to slip out of there,. toward Estonia. both Estonian and English under the the crypt, and we were free, but not for To keep from starvation, he said, he title, "Rain For the River," and it has long.' stole food ? and it was the theft of a helped to make Heine well known ' The NKVD put Heine's parents under loaf of bread that led to his capture among Estonians. ' house arrest and spread the word that outside of Leningrad. He has also worked, without signifi- they would be killed if he did not , He was transferred with a group of cant success, to get support for a plan, surrender. He gave himself up. ? Estonian prisoners to a camp in Es. to send propaganda materials into tonia, from which he escaped into the Estonia by way of balloons. He hopes Tale of Torture forests, where he became a member of to continue with this project when his I a small guerrilla band, he said. lawsuit against Haus has come to an When asked about his experiences at i end. the hands of an NKVD major named, : b Killing , Some members of the Estonian Marrazian, he replied; Descries , . .community have found this activity . Under questioning by Reuss attor- disturbing because another man sev- . Approved For RelealOp a' t iyaheriAgrohibtsviffitoRrsiim i ttentecl himself Theni st, sought roar be= , la ADD 0 n ince ttaKr.tat.sAtit."01kWatTOkt,';*ZIEVeCEr ttt,t* ?, not a politician," he ran for a position :45.7537,77. on the 35-member board of the Estonian 3t1D41111, itaigIfInacyy, ? 1963. He received 400 or 500 votes more than his closest competitor?he terms it ,a "landslide"?and could then expect to be named the president of the council. But, because of the rumors about him, he said, he declined that post. He is, however, one of some 60 candidates in another election to be held next month. With financial help from Estonian acquaintances who were eager to learn the truth or falsity of the charges against him, Heine filed suit in Novem- ber of 1964. e- Accuses Raus He asserts that Juri Raus accused him of being a Communist and a K.G.B. agent on Nov. 9, 1963 at a meeting of the board of the Legion of Estonian Liberation in New York; on July 4, 1964, at an Estonian gathering at Laurel Acres, Pasadena, Md., and on or about Sept. 4, 1964, at a gathering at Estonian House in Baltimore. In his answer, filed on Jan. 3, 1965, Raus admitted that he had said, at the New York meeting, "that he was in possessin of responsible information received by him from an official agen- cy of the United States governtnent to the effect that the plaintiff was a Soviet agent or collaborator. . He also admitted speaking to Kuk- lane, the Baltimore Estonian, on an earlier occasion than the dates men- tioned in the suit "in substantially the same terms," but he denied making the statements at the times mentioned in , the suit. In an affadavit filed a few days later, Raus said that he was born and reared in Estonia, that he was 38 years old, that he came to the United States as an emigre in 1949 and that he is now a naturalized citizen. At that time, he said, he was a GS-12 in the Bureau of Public Roads at a salary of $10,605 a year and that he was married and had two children, aged five and two. His only other Eerik Heine says this German passport was issued to him a Soviet prison. showing the movie and lecturing, primarily to Estonian audiences, or his experiences as a guerrilla. It was shown in Baltimore May 18 and in Washington May 19, 1963. The only hope for Estonia. he told his audiences, is the complete over- throw of the Communist world. "I am," he said during a recent interview in the book-lined living room of his home in Toronto, "a Goldwater man." It was during his tour of the United States, he said, that he first began to hear the rumors that he was a K.G.B. agent although the first of the three specific instances of alleged slander cited in his complaint occurred in New York on Nov. 9, 1963. The beginning of Heine's lecture tour coincided with another incident that shortly after his release from support for a similar -balloon project and was then exposed as a Soviet agent. The only reference to that incident in the court papers now on file, however, was when Heine was asked, during the taking of the deposition, if he had heard of the man, identified as Arthur Itamann. He said he had read about him in the Estonian newspapers, but had never seen or corresponded with him. . Heine's activities as an advocate of Estonian liberation came to a climax of sorts in the spring of 1963. In March of that year, he completed a 21/2-hour, 16-mm. film about the Estonian guerrillas, called "Legendi Loojad" or, in English, "Creators of Legend." income, he said, was $1,000 a year received ?as a captain in the Army in the court record until January of 1966. Privilege Claimed The CIA was not mentioned until long after the taking of the Heine deposition in February and March of last year. That was on Jan. 11 of this year, when Raus' attorneys filed a motion for summary judgment. They claimed he had absolute privilege be- cause he was acting as an official of the United Stales government. Attached to the motion was a one- page affadavit signed by Richard Helms, deputy director of Central Intelligence, in which he said: "On those occasions specified in, paragraphs 5, 6 and 7 of the complaint, the defendant Juri Raus was in poss- ession of information furnished to him Toured Cowark brought him into prominence in the ved For Relerotaw.i.rectemegneatyciAi eir,chenklicstsqentrAIntelligepce Agency, and kinyily.v.wittnibQpW11:60c14Ort? the 1)101'0i He then toured the United States, clescrioes nunseit aa'a APR 2 0 lcISR Continue& Approved For Release 2000/08/26 C A RDP75 014994M04939ANchip-6 on such occasions ne was acting witilirr int-e-iurgence-- , the scope and course of his employ- inter alia to Soviet Estonia and to ' ment by the Agency on behalf of the Estonian emigre activities in foreign , United States." ountries as well as in the United The motion filed by Prettyman and tates. Connolly said: "The Central Intelligence Agency has "Under these circumstances, there employed the defendant from time to , arises in favor of the defendant an . t absolute privilege which precludes, .il me ? concurrently with his duties on ehalf of the Bureau of Public Roads ?: even under a showing of actual malice, 0 carry out specific assignments on any possibility of recovery by the 11 plaintiff. As a matter of law, the de- i chalf of the Agency. , fondant is entitled to judgment." ' i "On those occasions specified in' They were on good legal grounds. In ' aragraphs 5, 6 and 7 of the complaint, a number of cases, the Federal courts he defendant was furnished informa-I have held that it is in the country's ion concerning the plaintiff by the Central Intelligence Agency and was interest to protect government officials from libel or slander suits for things instructed to disseminate such informs- tion to members of the Legion so as to they say in the course of their official protect the integrity of the Agency's duties ? even if they speak falsely and I with malice. 'foreign intelligence sources. According- But in this case ? the first the ;:ly,e when Juni Raus spoke concerning th plaintiff on the occasions about opposing attorneys know of involving the CIA ? there was the added element which complaint is made, he was , of secrecy, im osed by law on the CIA. . acting within the scope and course of. is employment by the Agency on behalf of the United States . . . Judge Disturbed , I t "After a personal review of the" I Agency's activities pertaining to Eerik' In their reply, Heine's attorneys, fieine, I have reached the judgment on Raskauskas and Stanford argued that ehalf of the Agency that it would be. it was unfair to permit the defendant to ontrary to the security interests of the add a totally new element to his de- Jnited States for any further inform a- fense more than a year after the suit ion pertaining to the use and employ- bad been filed. ent of Jun i Raus by the Agency in "He leads this Court to believe that ' onnection with Eerik Heine to be he - li-as? extremely limited resources ' closed ... from which to conduct this litigation, "I am herewith directing Jun i Raus and nowhere does he suggest, ,:that in, t make no further disclosures concern- Ig his employment by the Agency or the event that his then subsisting elating to this matter without specific ? defenses proved to be fictions, he has 7 uthorization by proper officials of the, the majesty of the United States, the Central Intelligence Agency." 1 money of the CIA, and the mockery of Attached to the affadavit was a' absolute privilege hovering on a stand- secrecy agreement signed by Jud Raus ?by basis, to be thrust upon this Court on May 29, 1963 in which he promised and the plaintiff in the case of need," never to divulge information obtained they said. because of his association with the CIA Judge Thomsen seemed deeply lwitheut written permission. disturbed by? the dilemma he faced. At \ one point, he said: ". . . I think that the plaintiff is ? Where's the Answer? entitled, assume the plaintiff is a During the hearing last Thursday, Communist, assume he is everything Judge Thomsen seemed several times you say, every body has some rights in to be on the verge of 'granting Raus' I this country.. ." And later he added: "All people in the United States, just as Mr. Justice Frankfurter said, 'There are some things you cannot do to a dog,'. ? . and I think it applies in this case.... You are not going to persuade this court that there is anybody in this country who does not have some rights. motion for summary judgment based on his claim of absolute privilege. But he ended the hearing with a request for one more attempt to see if the CIA is able to provide any further informa- tion. It was then that he expressed his concern that the revelation of any more? ? about the ease "might expose the entire U.S. counter-espionage appara- tus." ' CIA Afficlayi , t , What is the whole truth about Eerik ......., '.. -,4 , '''''. . Heine? On April 4, responding to the concern In the more than a thousand pages' expressed by the judge, Raus' attor- already in the court record, there is no , neys filed a new affidavit signed by satisfactory answer. At this stage of Helm in which he gave more details of the case, in fact, Raus relying on the Raus' employment by the CIA. He. defense of privilege, has not even as- said: serted that the things he said about "For a number of reasons, including Heine are true. his past history and his position as Because of the secrecy surrounding National Commander of the Legion of thecae, the full story of Eerik Heine, Estonian Liberation, the defendant has. Jud Raus and the CIA may never be' been a source to this Agency of foreign Approved For Release 2000/08/26: CIA-RDP751Y6601R060466190143-6 APR 2 0 1966