Arts/Review

BLOWBACK. By Christopher Simpson.
Collier Books, 1988, MacMillan Publishing
Co. New York.

Blowback: Spy jargon which describes the
negative domestic fallout from the U.S.
covert operations.

For many years, rumours of laxity in the
supposedly vigilant search for Nazi war

criminals and collaborators have floated
like bitter accusations around the icon of
democracy in North America. Belligerent
denials have held the accusers somewhat at
bay, yet the rumours have continued to
swirl, described cynically as “conspiracy
theories” promulgated by paranoid left-
wingers. Within government circles, these
rumours have been summarily dismissed,
usually as Soviet propaganda.

Latin America film fest;
Noriega and U.S. gov't

Jazz for El Salvador? Apparently so,
as Salvaide, the Canadian aid to El Sal-
vador organization, co-hosts musicians
Paul Plimley and The Mark Hasselbach
Band this Friday, Jan. 19 at the Van-
couver Unitarian Church, 949-49th Ave. at
8 p.m. Also featuring presentations of the
photographs, set to music, of Kent Curry
and Bill Shepherd, the event aims to raise
more funds to aid rural development in
the strife-torn Central American nation.
Tickets, at the door, are $8.

* * *

North Vancouver’s Presentation House
presents the acclaimed John Gray musi-
cal, Billy Bishop Goes to War, Wednes-
day through Saturday, Jan. 18-Feb. 10.
Performances begin at 8 p.m. Tickets are
$10 adults, $7 students and seniors.

Playwright Sam Sheppard’s The Curse
of the Starving Class is featured at the
Dorothy Somerset Studio, University of
B.C. campus Jan. 23-27. Showtime is 8
p-m., tickets are $5, phone 228-2678 to
reserve.

* ES *

A Latin American Film Festival takes
place at the Vancouver East Cinema on
Sunday, Jan. 28, 1 p.m. There are three
films, one each from El Salvador, Gua-
temala and Chile. Tickets are $6, phone
the El Salvador Information Office at
684-7342.

* ok %

Finnish woodwork in_ sculpture,
design and architecture is featured in the
show, The Language of Wood, at The
Vancouver Museum, 1100 Chestnut, until
Jan. 21. :

The photography of Akbar Nazemi is
on display at the Vancouver East Cultural
Centre Gallery through Feb. 4. Nazemi,
a film maker, displays photos of Iran and
Canada. The gallery is open 12 noon-6
p.m. daily.

* * *

U.S. soldiers surround Vatican embassy in Panama. KCTS show reveals Norie-
ga’s long links with the U.S.

” uesday, Jan. 30, 8 p.m. and Friday, Feb.

The Anawim Community Centre for
Justice and Peace presents its ‘‘Wednes-
day Lunch Series” of talks on peace,
justice and the environment through
March 7. Upcoming are addresses by
Chris Morrisey, who worked in the sha-
nytowns of Santiago, Chile for seven
years, on Jan. 24 and a talk on the con-
troversial Site C dam by Ray Eagle, a
co-founder of SPEC, on Jan. 31. Sessions
run on Wednesdays from 12 noon-1:30
p.m. at the centre, 3821 Lister St., Bur-
naby, phone 433-6749. Bring a bag lunch.

* * ok

Tube Talk: Knowledge Network airs
Native Indians: Images of Reality. Our
Children Are Our Future, concerning
Native foster children, Wednesday, Jan.
17, 8 p.m.; Hotu Painu, on the tragic
human cost of French nuclear testing in
the South Pacific, Thursday, Jan. 18, 9
p.m.; Artsworld examines Canadian
recording artist Jane Siberry on Friday,
Jan. 19, 8 p.m.

KCTS public television in Seattle airs
the classic documentary on Bob Dylanin
the mid-Sixties, Don’t Look Back, on
Sunday, Jan. 21, 9:04 p.m. It’s followed
by The Lenny Bruce Performance Film at
10:59 p.m. And while it may be too late
for some, those who can should catch the
highly acclaimed The Black Adder, a
comic revisionist British history series
which includes 16 installments totalling
nine hours scheduled as follows: Friday,
Jan. 19, 10 p.m. (Parts 1-4); Saturday,
Jan. 20, 7 p.m. (Parts 5-17). Each instal-
Iment is 30 minutes.

And don’t miss the Frontline program,
“The Noriega Connection” which, accord-
ing to the KCTS press package, “‘exam-
ines U.S. policy toward Panama and the
confusion and duplicity that characterize
the U.S. government’s long relationship”
with the former Panamanian leader
ousted by the U.S. invasion. It runs

3 a.m. and is closed-captioned.

The seriousness of such charges is under-
standable against the backdrop of Nazi
atrocities in both Europe and the USSR,
where so many people were slaughtered by
the Hitler’s forces it is doubtful the true
number will ever bé*known.

In August, 1983, the U.S. government
was forced to acknowledge its role in the
Klaus Barbie affair. Barbie (otherwise
known as the Butcher of Lyon) was a Ges-
tapo and SS officer in France recruited by
the U.S. counterintelligence corps for
espionage work in 1947. Barbie, a known
fugitive wanted by French war crimes inves-
tigators, was protected by the CIC and spi-
rited out of Europe through the infamous
“ratline” or Nazi escape route. The Ameri-
cans were assisted by a priest, also wanted
for war crimes.

The U.S. government said Barbie was the
only war criminal they had ever assisted and
they did not know he was a fugitive. They
were lying. In 1984 the former director of
the U.S. Justice Department’s war criminal
investigation unit estimated that approxi-
mately 10,000 Nazi war criminals entered
the country during the immediate post war
years, many of them with close ties to
underground organizations with distinctly
fascist agendas.

Blowback, by Christopher Simpson, is
not merely about.the winking immigration
official who, here and there, allowed a war
criminal with a transparent alias into the
United States during the post-war period. It
is not simply an expose of over-zealous
intelligence officers employing questionable
tactics in an honourable scheme.

It is, rather, a provocative and unsettling
book which uncovers a mountain of docu-
mentary evidence showing the extent of
U.S. reliance upon the use of Nazis and
collaborators-.n structuring American mil-
itary and foreign policy around anti-Soviet
and anti-communist ideology. It illustrates
the virtual takeover by U.S. counterintelli-
gence agencies of numerous organizations
which received funding from Nazi Ger-
many during the war, and from the U.S.
after 1945.

Simpson informs us that the opening
salvo in the Cold War was at Nordhausen, a
huge underground factory involved in
Germany’s “secret weapons” program
(rockets). Nordhausen ‘‘would also house
one of the major crimes of the war” using
slave labour to build the rocket works.
More than 20,000 Nordhausen workers
died of starvation and cholera. When the
U.S. Army arrived to liberate the slaves,
they found dead bodies stuffed under stairs
and in corner where prisoners had put them
out of the way.

The man who ran this machine was Wal-

a

- How Nazis found succour through CIA

ter Dornberger, a German general. He was
smuggled into the United States by the Air
Force, who put him to work on American
classified rocket research programs. Anothet
of the Nordhausen alumni who ended up in
U.S. rocket programs was Arthur Rudolph,

who was responsible for many atrocities at |

the facility.
Dornberger eventually became a senior
vice president of the Bell Aerosystems Div-

ision of Textron Corp., specializing in com- |

pany liaison with U.S. military agencies.
Rudolph is credited with organizing con-
struction of the Saturn V rockets which
launched American astronauts to the moon
during the 1960s.

According to Simpson, there is good rea-
son to reconsider the entire cold war period,
and everything which has flowed from it, in

_ the new light of what is now known about

U.S. clandestine activities with the Nazis.
The “negative blowback” from the use of
Nazis and collaborators is divided into six
major categories, among them:

1. Western political warfare and covert
programs employing Nazis, which has pro-
voked continual crisis between East and
West. In addition, “American efforts to win
friends in Eastern Europe, lessen repression
and improve civil liberties” have been wea-
kened, not strengthened.

2. Most damaging, the CIA’s “large scale
intervention in domestic American polit-
ics.” During the Fifties, the CIA assisted

“thousands of Waffen SS veterans and

other Nazi collaborators” into the East
European ethnic communities, laying “the
foundation for a revival of extremist right-
wing political movements inside immigrant

communities” which remain active today. —

This policy is being continued with, for
example, fascist emigres from Vietnam,
Nicaragua and Cuba, who play significant
political roles within those communities

and wield political influence regarding U.S.

policy towards those regions.

3. The U.S. government’s cozy relations
with Nazis and collaborators which has
helped war criminals evade justice. During

the Cold War, the U.S. portrayed the Nazis ~

they chose to work with as “heroes” whose
real purpose was to “liberate” the peoplé of
the USSR and Eastern Europe from com-
munism. This helped them justify what they
were doing. Today, the practice is denied
altogether, and the KGB is accused of
manufacturing evidence (“supposedly ...
with the tacit co-operation of the U.S. Jus-
tice Department,” Simpson writes) for pol-
itical reasons.

This is one of those must-read books,
because it answers those rumours of laxity
with something hard and concrete.

— Colleen Fuller

Bill Beeching dead at 76

BEECHING

Long-time communist activist and
former Saskatchewan Communist Party
leader William Beeching died in Regina
at age 76 on Jan. 4. 3

-civil war in 1939. He was incarcerated,

‘Communist Party in Saskatchewan from

‘His death .came shortly after the
release of his book, Canadian Volun-
teers: Spain 1936-1939, an account of the
MacKenzie-Papineau Battalion’s role in
the anti-fascist fight for Republican
Spain. (The book was reviewed in the
Dec. 4, 1989 issue.)

The Regina-born Beeching began
work at age 16:and went to Spain in
1937, serving as.a scout with the 15th
International Brigade until the end of the

with other Canadians, for his opposition
to the Second World War for two years.
Following his release in 1942, he served
overseas in the Canadian Army.
Beeching-was a ‘former editor of the
Canadian Tribune and leader of the

1957-69 and 1971-78.

An expanded account of Beeching’s
life and work will be’ carried in next
week’s Tribune.

es

10 e Pacific Tribune, January 15, 1990