The Ukraine Connection

Part 3 - The World Anti-Communist League

This is the third part of a series on Ukraine’s historical association with Nazism. It is important to understand the history to be able to make sense of developments in the present. The story continues with the World Anti-Communist League.

The World Anti-Communist League

Despite the demise of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), Jaroslav Stetsko remained active in his role as the chairman of the Bloc of Anti-Bolshevik Nations (ABN) and began forging links with other anti-communist organisations. Between 1956 and 1964, he made multiple trips to Taiwan and attended Asian People’s Anti-Communist League (APACL) conferences (Anderson & Anderson, 1986, p. 21). The APACL was formed by Chiang Kai-shek’s regime and South Korean intelligence, both propped up by the United States. The ABN/APACL collaboration involved the training of secret police and the creation of Radio Free Asia, modelled on Radio Free Europe (broadcast from Munich with CIA funding). 

In 1966, the ABN/APACL collaboration was expanded into the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), described by the authors of a book about it as an “ex-Nazi International” and “the largest and most important umbrella for Nazi collaborators in the world” (Anderson & Anderson, 1986, p. 35). Conceived along the lines of Hitler’s anti-Comintern policy, the WACL styled itself as a united front against communism, and its unconventional warfare methods, including assassinations, death squads, and sabotage, were modelled on those of the Nazis. Over time, it brought together, among others, the Croatian Ustashi (who murdered almost a million Serbs during World War II), the Romanian Legionnaires (who slaughtered 400+ Jews in a single day in 1941), Japanese war criminals rehabilitated by the United States to undercut the rising left (including Ryoichi Sasakawa and yakuza boss Yoshio Kodama), Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church (which, backed by the Korea CIA, expanded across five continents), and the Latin American Anti-Communist Confederation (CAL, founded 1972). The Mexican Tecos mentored many of the continent’s neo-Nazi movements and coordinated death squads throughout Central America, and there were close links between the WACL and Operation Condor. By 1979, the WACL had brought together (neo-)Nazi elements from 90 countries across six continents, including Arab and African countries, for the stated purpose of “opposing Marxism in all its forms” (Anderson & Anderson, 1986, pp. 109, 104). Seven of its 11 central committee members were accused war criminals. 

1979 saw major challenges to US power, including the Iranian Revolution, the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua, the toppling of a pro-US regime in Grenada, a guerrilla insurgency in Guatemala, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In 1981, the United States joined the WACL, with John Singlaub, a former perpetrator of Operation Phoenix, heading the American chapter (known as the United States Council for World Freedom, modelled on the European Freedom Council, founded in 1967). Singlaub openly advocated, in his own words, for “low intensity actions, such as sabotage, terrorism, assassination and guerrilla warfare” (cited in Anderson & Anderson, 1986, p. 120), consistent with NATO Gladio operations at the time. In 1982, the Council for World Freedom was given tax-exempt status, facilitating large donations from the rich. Among other operations, the Council for World Freedom was involved in smuggling money to the Contras, which deployed terrorist methods in Nicaragua. The model for doing so was the Crusade For Freedom, used in the 1950s to raise private money to support the American Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia (AMCOMLIB), which was part of the National Committee for a Free Europe, an anti-communist CIA front organization set up in 1949. 90% of the Crusade For Freedom funds came, not from public donations, but, rather, from the CIA, with the money being laundered by the State Department through the Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford foundations (Loftus, 2011, pp. 197-198). The establishment of the National Endowment for Democracy in 1983 also facilitated the funnelling of money (often from the Ford Foundation) to CIA front organisations, NGOs in particular (Blum, 2006, Chapter 19).

Particularly through its U.S. chapter, the WACL lent an air of respectability to the rehabilitation of Nazism under the guise of anti-communism and democracy promotion. Mainstream U.S. conservative academics, retired military officers, and members of the New Right signed up. No longer was the League a means of coordinating actions outside of official channels; President Reagan lauded organisations such as the ABN and the Contras, while Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe sent out broadcasts praising SS-Galizien (Anderson & Anderson, 1986, pp. 104, 38), presumably without the knowledge of the U.S. public under the terms of the Smith-Mundt Act. When, in 1985, the General Accounting Office mentioned Mykola Lebed’s name in a report on Nazi collaborators who had received special clearance to settle in the United States, the CIA made sure that any connection between Lebed and the Nazis was swept under the carpet (Breitman & Goda, 2010, p. 90-91). 

Following the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, the WACL emphasised democracy promotion rather than anti-communism, changing its name to the World League for Freedom and Democracy (WLFD); the APACL became the Asia-Pacific League for Freedom and Democracy (APLFD). It is telling that these two Anti-Communist Leagues did not disband with the defeat of Soviet communism, but, rather, rebranded: their aim all along was to rehabilitate fascism.

References

Anderson, S., & Anderson, J.L. (1986). Inside the League. Dodd, Mead, & Company. 

Blum, W. (2006). Rogue state: A guide to the world’s only superpower. Zed Books.

Breitman, R. & Goda, N.J.W. (2010). Hitler's shadow: Nazi war criminals, U.S. intelligence, and the Cold War. National Archives. 

Loftus, J. (2011). America’s Nazi secret. Trine Day.