C.I.A. SAID TO HAVE LET NAZI INTO U.S.

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000303580003-1
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 22, 2010
• Sequence Number: 3
• Publication Date: February 6, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/07/22 : CIA-RDP90-00552R000303580003-1
NEW YORK TIMES
ARTICLE APPEARED 6 February 1986
ON L,; .,A'-5 :
C.I.A. Said to Have Let Nazi Into U.S.
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
A Yonkers man has been named as a
Nazi collaborator and war criminal
who, according to a Congressional
study last year, was knowingly slipped
into the United States by the Central In-
telligence Agency after World War H.
The disclosure revived charges that
the C.I.A. had misled Congress when it
denied such cases during hearings sev-
eral years ago. A C.I.A. spokesman
said there would be no comment.
Government officials yesterday Iden-
tified the man as Mykola Lebed, 75
years old, a Ukrainian Emigre who was
called "Subject D" in a report by the
United States General. Accounting Of-
fice last June on the Government's use
of Nazi and Axis collaborators for post-
war anti-Communist intelligence work.
Sentenced to Death
The report said he had been accused
of terrorist acts and had been convicted
and sentenced to death for plotting to
assassinate a high East European offi-
cial. It said that the C.I.A. had brought
him into the country under an assumed
name and that after his true identity
had been uncovered, the C.I.A. ar-
ranged for his permanent residency
under a law allowing it to bring 100 peo-
ple into the country without regard to
their eligibility under regular statutes.
The disclosure, which appeared first
in The Village Voice, was subsequently
confirmed by officials, including Dis-
trict Attorney Elizabeth Holtzman of
Brooklyn, who is a former Representa-
tive who headed Congressional inquir-
ies into the use of Nazi war criminals
by American intelligence agencies.
A man who answered Mr. Lebed's
telephone yesterday identified himself
as Mr. Lebed's landlord for the last 15
years and said his tenant had left this
week for vacation with his wife, who is
ill. The landlord, Ivan Hirnyj, said Mr.
Lebed had not served the Nazis, but
rathbr had fled from them. Mr. Hlrnyj
said that Mr. Lebed was working for
the American Government but that he
did not know in what capacity.
U.S. Inquiry Hinted
Neal M. Sher, director of the Justice
Department's Office of Special Investi-
gations, said he could neither confirm
nor deny any ongoing inquiry. But he
added, "Our policy is to look into any
allegation that comes to our attention
regarding Nazi criminals in the United
States."
Officials said yesterday that it was
not clear whether Mr. Lebed's sponsor-
ship by the C.I.A. would preclude any
legal action to deport him. Miss Holtz,
man said that a 1978 amendment to im-
migration law that she had sponsored
in Congress would bar Mr. Lebed and
anyone else who had participated in
Nazi persecutions.
The General Accounting Office re-
port, which omitted the names of Mr.
Lebed and others, said he was one of
five former Nazis or collaborators
"with undesirable or questionable
backgrounds" whom the office found
had been assisted into the country by
intelligence agencies for anti-Commu-
nist operations. The report sketched
the career of Subject D in general
terms.
But more elaborate accounts from
Army intelligence files and war histo-
ries, some quoted in The Village Voice,
called him a leader of the Ukrainian
terrorist army OUN-B. The accounts
linked him to the 1934 assassination of a
former Polish Interior Minister,
Bronislaw Pieracki, and to killings of
Jews and Polish intellectuals in Nazi-
occupied territory.
"He's an out and out terrorist," said
John Loftus, a Rockland, Mass., law-
yer and former Justice Department in-
vestigator who said he had originally
provided Mr. Lebed's name to the ac-
counting office.
The office's report said that the un-
named former collaborator had pro-
vided valuable intelligence data to the
Americans after the war and that the
C.I.A. then brought him into the coun-
try around 1948 under an assumed
name.
But two years later, the report said,
the Immigration and Naturalization
Service learned Subject D's true iden-
tity and involvement in the assassina-
tion and opened an investigation.
Thereupon, the report said, the C.I.A.
acknowledged details of his back-
ground and secured his residency in
this country in 1952 under a 1949 law
that allowed the C.I.A., with the high
level approval of the Attorney General
and the Immigration Service, to bring
in up to 100 people a year. Mr. Lebed
became a citizen in 1957.
"They lied.to me," Miss Holtzman
said yesterday of the C.I.A. She cited a
transcript of a 1979 Congressional hear- :
ing at which John D. Morrison, acting
general counsel of the C.I.A., testified:
"There have been accusations of our
consorting with and assisting people
such as the chairwoman has main-
tained - torturers and what not - and
this has been gone into and it was found
that we have not facilitated the en.
trance of any person of that sort into
the U.S."
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/07/22 : CIA-RDP90-00552R000303580003-1