The Nazis Next Door (9 page)

Whatever happened during the war was of no consequence to the CIA.

Soobzokov put in three years with the CIA in the Middle East, earning $150 a month, but his spy handlers had bigger plans for him. In 1955 the agency helped him, his wife, and their growing brood move to the United States. Within a year of his arrival, Soobzokov was put up for his new assignment: a member of the CIA’s Hot War team. He would be trained to secretly stir discontent in the Soviet Union from the outside, recruiting other operatives from the Caucasus, disseminating “anti-Soviet propaganda” inside Russia, and engaging in what the CIA called “psychological warfare.” At the same time, he would be readying himself to sneak back into Russia and jump into the fray inside the country if the need arose. This was a particularly sensitive assignment—and potentially hazardous—and the CIA wanted to determine whether he was up to the task before giving him the final go-ahead. For days and weeks, it would be peering into every corner of Soobzokov’s life to determine his suitability for the job: two days’ worth of interviews at the Statler, more than ten hours in all. Lie-detector tests. Psychological testing. A physical exam. Fingerprinting, photographing, a handwriting analysis, and background checks. If there were soft spots in his resumé, CIA’s security officials were determined to find them before they took him on their team.

The day came that chilly morning in February for the start of his interviews. Soobzokov wasn’t feeling great as the session at the Statler began just after 10:30 a.m. He hadn’t gotten much sleep, he had a bit of a cold, and the four or five shots of whiskey he’d downed the night before weren’t helping matters much. But what he lacked in energy he made up for in passion. For hours, as the interviewer pored through details of his life, Soobzokov regaled him with tales that demonstrated, in vivid hues, how he had come to so despise the Russians. He told how the repressive Soviet regime had seized his father’s farm when Soobzokov was a boy, and how his father had died in prison. He told how he himself was jailed merely for trying to take some cloth for his destitute family. He told how he had deserted from the Russian army during the war and was shot in the shoulder during his escape. He told how he had led thousands of his fellow countrymen from the Caucasus by horse and cart to the Romanian-Hungarian border to seek refuge from the Russians. Finally, he told how he came to America for the promise and opportunity that it offered wartime refugees like himself.

It was a powerful performance, and Soobzokov, confident as ever, showed not the slightest hint of nervousness as he laid out his life story. That is, until the interrogator began to dig more deeply into what exactly had happened during the war after he deserted the Russian army. The ever-present sparkle in his eyes that the CIA psychologists had remarked upon seemed to almost disappear at the mere mention of the war. What exactly had Soobzokov done in those brutal years? The record in Soobzokov’s file was murky; it seemed clear that he had connections to the Third Reich after the Germans invaded Russia, but precisely what he did, when, and for whom amounted to a black hole of vagaries and contradictions. His interrogator needed to plug the holes—if for nothing else than to ensure that this avowed Soviet hater was not simply some well-trained Russian mole who was now disguising himself as an anti-Communist.

So where exactly had he gone after deserting the Russians? the interviewer wanted to know. There were some indications from the file that he took sides with the Germans after they invaded the North Caucasus in 1942. Was that right?

Soobzokov squirmed.

Yes, he acknowledged, his tone defensive. He had switched sides to join the Germans, he said. He had turned on the reviled Russians, and he would do it again. He explained how he had deserted the Russian army, turned himself in to a German commander, and gladly offered to fight the Soviets.

And then? There was also the suggestion in the files that he had joined up not with the German fighting forces, but with the Waffen SS. These weren’t “regular” army troops fighting in wartime; this was the brutal military branch of the Nazi security force created by Heinrich Himmler, responsible for countless war crimes.

Again, Soobzokov squirmed. Would he risk lying to the CIA? They obviously knew a lot about him—more than he wished. His CIA interviewers in the Middle East had never asked him such things. Yes, he finally acknowledged. That was true, too. He had joined the SS, not just the German military, and was made an officer—an
Oberleutnant
—and dispatched by the Nazis to Hungary and Austria. But it wasn’t how it seemed. His job was merely to lure fellow Circassians to the fight. He was a recruiter with a fancy title. He had done some farm work for the Germans too, requisitioning food, Soobzokov said. He had little allegiance to the Nazis. It was all about helping his fellow countrymen and fighting the Soviets; nothing more, he insisted.

He seemed to grow more uneasy with each question.

Didn’t these people get it? This was a war. You did what you had to do to survive.

The interrogator pressed on. What about the Nazi atrocities in his homeland—the widespread killings of Russian civilians, of Communists, of Jews? Was he involved in that, too?

No, no, Soobzokov said. There was none of that. He had never harmed civilians. Only soldiers. He had no problem with the Jews.

“All men are my brothers,” he insisted.

Dutifully, the CIA interrogator noted the denials in his file. But he was skeptical. Soobzokov’s explanations seemed too convenient, his manner too evasive.

On every other topic aside from the war years, Soobzokov had seemed “open and honest,” the report noted. The stories flowed easily. Yet when the topic turned to the Nazis—particularly his murky duties with the SS—he grew nervous and was “somewhat reluctant
to go into any details,” the report said. Soobzokov had insisted “that he was not involved in any crimes against humanity generally attributed to the SS elements of the German forces operating in the USSR during World War II,” the interviewer noted flatly. But his shifting denials “were not convincing.” Indeed, the report concluded that “there is a strong possibility that Subject may have participated in unsavory activities for the Germans, which might well be categorized under minor war crimes.”

Minor war crimes
. It was a jarring choice of phrase, meant to ease concern. There was no fear of Soobzokov’s involvement in “major” war crimes perpetrated by the Nazis, the interviewer was suggesting. If anything, these were Nazi war crimes that the CIA deemed somehow ordinary and run-of-the-mill.

If the CIA’s lie-detector tests were right, another agency report concluded, Soobzokov was lying “regarding war crimes and is, no doubt, hiding a number of activities from us on that point.” It seemed certain, the interviewer wrote, that Soobzokov was involved in some “minor” war crimes—again, that word—“but the major ones are unknown to us.”

Whatever his crimes, they would not stand in the way of Soobzokov’s employment. In fact, another CIA officer reviewing Soobzokov’s file noted that if Soobzokov really was involved in Nazi war crimes and atrocities, minor or otherwise, it could actually work to the CIA’s advantage: his fear of exposure could be used as leverage to ensure his loyalty, he wrote. He surely wouldn’t want his war record exposed, the thinking went, and so he was more likely to remain loyal. His Nazi past could be used to the CIA’s advantage.

A month later, the results of Soobzokov’s assessment came back: he was CIA material. He had the job.   

With his assessment complete, he would be signed on as a contract employee at the agency. He would keep his job in New Jersey at the Plymouth auto lot—it provided good cover for his intelligence work—but he would now have a new, $600-a-month post on the CIA’s Hot War team to go with it.

The past was past. Whatever had happened in Europe, Soobzokov now had a future with the CIA.

For all the region’s rugged beauty and rich history, the coastal highlands of Soobzokov’s homeland in Russia’s sprawling southwest corner have long been a place of battle and bloodshed. From the Middle Ages to the Cossacks and the Ottoman Empire, through to the Russian Revolution, the North Caucasus was a storied place of fearless warriors and epic clashes. But in the summer of 1942, the blood-red land of Krasnodar above the Black Sea, a settlement founded by Catherine the Great herself, met its most merciless enemy yet as Hitler invaded Russia from the west.

Armed with machine guns, Gestapo men in their notorious “poison green” uniforms stormed the region in tanks, horse-drawn carriages, and motorcycles. More than two thousand miles from Berlin, the Nazis occupied the region for six months of terror, scorching its rich farmlands, leveling its historic buildings and railroads, and killing many thousands, soldiers and villagers alike. Hitler’s aims were never a matter of mere military objective. Mobile SS execution squads roamed the rugged countryside in search of the Nazi leader’s undesirables. For reasons of ideological purity, in the North Caucasus alone the Nazis killed some twenty thousand Jews and thousands of supposed Communist “partisans” and Bolsheviks. Many were shot. Some were burned to death. Others were hanged from the majestic weeping willows so plentiful in the once-bucolic region.

Emboldened by the initial success of the biggest military invasion in history, Hitler demanded “severe” reprisals against any Russian who dared to support the “bandit gangs” of Communist partisans who continued to resist him. He put Heinrich Himmler in charge of the region-wide sweeps for enemies. By order of the Nazis, the death of any German soldier was to be met with the killing of up to a hundred Russians.

The killings grew more and more ruthless. In the Caucasus’s Krasnodar region, roughly twice the size of Switzerland, the Nazis herded local Circassians—soldier and civilian, young and old, male and female—from homes, hospitals, and orphanages, and packed them eighty at a time into mobile killing machines unlike anything the world had ever seen. “The killer of souls,” the villagers called the death trucks. Methodically, the victims would be loaded into airtight, windowless vans, with two specially engineered exhaust pipes winding their way back inside. After ten minutes or so, once the carbon monoxide had been pumped in and the futile cries for help had died away, the bodies of the victims, some just young children, were dumped in a dirt trench, a makeshift death pit.

Out of some sixty-seven hundred victims in Krasnodar, only one person, a nineteen-year-old worker named Ivan Ivanovich Kortov, was ever known to have survived the gassings. He was left for dead in the pit with all the others, after passing out amid a scene of horror that he could describe afterward only in a hushed voice. “The crushing confinement, the total darkness and the smell of exhaust fumes made people scream and cry and beat against the walls,” Kortov recounted. “It was awful to watch
the children’s death struggle and be unable to help.”

The Nazis did not act alone. They had help—help from some of the very Russians whose homeland Hitler had invaded.

It was a pattern that would play out in town after town, region after region, country after country, as Hitler’s men swept eastward through Europe. From the Vichy regime in France to the Iron Guard in Romania and beyond, Hitler’s brutal propaganda attracted throngs of collaborators—one million strong, by one estimate—by seizing on their simmering hatred of Communists and Jews and deputizing them as the Nazis’ local warlords. Far from Berlin, the collaborators worked to imprison Hitler’s enemies, staff his concentration and slave-labor camps, and carry out his genocidal plans. It was an alliance with grotesque results.

In Krasnodar, many Russians in the region fled or resisted the Nazis, urged on by Soviet radio broadcasts and newsreels calling on countrymen to stand up for “the Great Patriotic War.” But in a region rife with ethnic divisions, a number of native clans cast their lot with the invading Germans, acting as macabre local tour guides to help identify enemies, round them up, and kill them. Some Russians manned the death vans. On one particularly savage day, others held villagers at gunpoint inside a burning farmhouse, with their neighbors screaming to get out. Perhaps the only group held in lower regard than the Bolsheviks in some local circles were the Jews, perceived as the political allies to Stalin. When the Nazis invaded the region—with their massive firepower, their brazen aggression, and their disdain for both the Jews and the Bolsheviks—they offered blood-soaked promises to do away with both groups at once.

So horrific were the atrocities in Krasnodar that the Russians, after wresting control of the region back from the Germans in 1943, made it the site of the first Nazi war crimes trials in all of Europe, even before the war had ended. Many Nazi collaborators had already escaped with the fleeing Germans, but eleven who were captured were put on public trial in a packed movie theater; the war crimes of the local collaborators were seen as almost worse than those of the Nazis themselves. It was there, in Krasnodar, that the accused Nazi collaborators first uttered the refrain that was to become the standard defense in such cases for years to come: the Nazis made me do it. “You see before you,”
one defendant said at his trial, “an abominable traitor who was forced to go this route by the actions of the loathsome fascists.”

Eight of the eleven Nazi collaborators were ultimately convicted and sentenced to death. They were hanged from three wooden gallows in the town marketplace before some thirty thousand Russians, once their neighbors, who had gathered for the primitive spectacle. This was “the hour of retribution,” a local newspaper declared. “Death to the traitors!” townspeople shouted. As the eight bodies swung listlessly in the wind, a church bell rang nearby, and a priest asked the townspeople to pray for the collaborators’ souls. Few did.

Had Soobzokov been one of those collaborators in Krasnodar? What, exactly, had he done? These were questions that Soobzokov never really had to answer, even as he rose up the ranks within the CIA in the late 1950s. The CIA, unconcerned with any moral “lapses” in his past, did not press him to explain what he did during the war, and he certainly did not volunteer it.