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CIA: Undermining and Nazifying Ukraine Since 1953

by Wayne Madsen, via Strategic Culture

The recent declassification of over 3800 documents by the Central Intelligence Agency provides detailed proof that since 1953 the CIA operated two major programs intent on not only destabilizing Ukraine but Nazifying it with followers of the World War II Ukrainian Nazi leader Stepan Bandera.
The CIA programs spanned some four decades.  Starting as a paramilitary operation that provided funding and equipment for such anti-Soviet Ukrainian resistance groups as the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (UHVR); its affiliates, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), all Nazi Banderists. The CIA also provided support to a relatively anti-Bandera faction of the UHVR, the ZP-UHVR, a foreign-based virtual branch of the CIA and British MI-6 intelligence services. The early CIA operation to destabilize Ukraine, using exile Ukrainian agents in the West who were infiltrated into Soviet Ukraine, was codenamed Project AERODYNAMIC.
A formerly TOP SECRET CIA document dated July 13, 1953, provides a description of AERODYNAMIC: «The purpose of Project AERODYNAMIC is to provide for the exploitation and expansion of the anti-Soviet Ukrainian resistance for cold war and hot war purposes. Such groups as the Ukrainian Supreme Council of Liberation (UHVR) and its Ukrainian Insurgent Army (OUN), the Foreign Representation of the Ukrainian Supreme Council of Liberation (ZPUHVR) in Western Europe and the United States, and other organizations such as the OUN/B will be utilized». The CIA admitted in a 1970 formerly SECRET document that it had been in contact with the ZPUHVR since 1950.
The OUN-B was the Bandera faction of the OUN and its neo-Nazi sympathizers are today found embedded in the Ukrainian national government in Kiev and in regional and municipal governments throughout the country.
AERODYNAMIC placed field agents inside Soviet Ukraine who, in turn, established contact with Ukrainian Resistance Movement, particularly SB (intelligence service) agents of the OUN who were already operating inside Ukraine. The CIA arranged for airdrops of communications equipment and other supplies, presumably including arms and ammunition, to the «secret» CIA army in Ukraine. Most of the CIA’s Ukrainian agents received training in West Germany from the US Army’s Foreign Intelligence Political and Psychological (FI-PP) branch. Communications between the CIA agents in Ukraine and their Western handlers were conducted by two-way walkie-talkie (WT), shortwave via international postal channels, and clandestine airborne and overland couriers.
Agents airdropped into Ukraine carried a kit that contained, among other items, a pen gun with tear gas, an arctic sleeping bag, a camp axe, a trenching tool, a pocket knife, a chocolate wafer, a Minox camera and a 35 mm Leica camera, film, a Soviet toiletry kit, a Soviet cap and jacket, a .22 caliber pistol and bullets, and rubber «contraceptives» for ‘waterproofing film’. Other agents were issued radio sets, hand generators, nickel-cadmium batteries, and homing beacons.
An affiliated project under AERODYNAMIC was codenamed CAPACHO.
CIA documents show that AERODYNAMIC continued in operation through the Richard Nixon administration into 1970.
The program took on more of a psychological warfare operation veneer than a real-life facsimile of a John Le Carré «behind the Iron Curtain» spy novel. The CIA set up a propaganda company in Manhattan that catered to printing and publishing anti-Soviet ZPUHVR literature that would be smuggled into Ukraine. The new battleground would not be swampy retreats near Odessa and cold deserted warehouses in Kiev but at the center of the world of publishing and the broadcast media.
The CIA front company was Prolog Research and Publishing Associates, Inc., which later became known simply as Prolog. The CIA codename for Prolog was AETENURE. The group published the Ukrainian language «Prolog» magazine. The CIA referred to Prolog as a «non-profit, tax exempt cover company for the ZP/UHVR’s activities». The «legal entity» used by the CIA to fund Prolog remains classified information. However, the SECRET CIA document does state that the funds for Prolog were passed to the New York office «via Denver and Los Angeles and receipts are furnished Prolog showing fund origin to backstop questioning by New York fiscal authorities».
As for the Munich office of Prolog, the CIA document states that funding for it comes from an account separate from that of Prolog in New York from a cooperating bank, which also remains classified. In 1967, the CIA merged the activities of Prolog Munich and the Munich office of the Ukrainian exiled nationalist «Suchasnist» journal. The Munich office also supported the «Ukrainische Gesellschaft fur Auslandstudien». The CIA documents also indicate that US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents may have interfered with AERODYNAMIC agents in New York. A 1967 CIA directive advised all ZPUHVR agents in the United States to either report their contacts with United Nations mission diplomats and UN employees from the USSR and the Ukrainian SSR to the FBI or their own CIA project case officer. CIA agents in charge of AERODYNAMIC in New York and Munich were codenamed AECASSOWARY agents. Apparently not all that taken with the brevity of MI-6’s famed agent «007», one CIA agent in Munich was codenamed AECASSOWARY/6 and the senior agent in New York was AECASSOWARY/2.
AECASSOWARY agents took part in and ran other AERODYNAMIC teams that infiltrated the Vienna World Youth Conference in 1959. The Vienna infiltration operation, where contact with made with young Ukrainians, was codenamed LCOUTBOUND by the CIA.
In 1968, the CIA ordered Prolog Research and Publishing Associates, Inc. terminated and replaced by Prolog Research Corporation, «a profit-making, commercial enterprise ostensibly serving contracts for unspecified users as private individuals and institutions».
The shakeup of Prolog was reported by the CIA to have arisen from operation MHDOWEL. There is not much known about MHDOWEL other than it involved the blowing of the CIA cover of a non-profit foundation. The following is from a memo to file, dated January 31, 1969, from CIA assistant general counsel John Greany, «Concerns a meeting of Greaney, counsel Lawrence Houston and Rocca about a ‘confrontation’ with NY FBI office on January 17, 1969. They discussed two individuals whose names were redacted. One was said to be a staff agent of the CIA since 8/28/61 who had been assigned in 1964 to write a monograph, which had been funded by a grant from a foundation whose cover was blown in MHDOWEL (I suspect that is code for US Press). One of the individuals [name redacted] had been requested for use with Project DTPILLAR in November 1953 to Feb. 1955 and later in March 1964 for WUBRINY. When the Domestic Operations Division advised Security that this person would not be used in WUBRINY, Rocca commented that ‘there are some rather ominous allegations against members of the firm of [redacted],’ indicating one member of that firm was a ‘card-carrying member of the Communist Party.’ The memo went on to say that Rocca was investigating the use of the individual in Project DTPILLAR concerning whether that person had mentioned activities in Geneva in March 1966 in connection with Herbert Itkin». Raymond Rocca was the deputy chief of the CIA’s Counterintelligence Division. Itkin was an undercover agent for the FBI and CIA who allegedly infiltrated the Mafia and was given a new identity in California as «Herbert Atkin» in 1972.
In 1969, AERODYNAMIC began advancing the cause of the Crimean Tatars. In 1959, owing to Canada’s large Ukrainian population, Canada’s intelligence service began a program similar to AERODYNAMIC codenamed «REDSKIN».
As international air travel increased, so did the number of visitors to the West from Soviet Ukraine. These travelers were of primary interest to AERODYNAMIC. Travelers were asked by CIA agents to clandestinely carry Prolog materials, all censored by the Soviet government, back to Ukraine for distribution. Later, AERODYNAMIC agents began approaching Ukrainian visitors to eastern European countries, particularly Soviet Ukrainian visitors to Czechoslovakia during the «Prague Spring» of 1968. The Ukrainian CIA agents had the same request to carry back subversive literature to Ukraine.
AERODYNAMIC continued into the 1980s as operation QRDYNAMIC, which was assigned to the CIA’s Political and Psychological Staff’s Soviet East Europe Covert Action Program. Prolog saw its operations expanded from New York and Munich to London, Paris, and Tokyo. QRDYNAMIC began linking up with operations financed by hedge fund tycoon George Soros, particularly the Helsinki Watch Group’s operatives in Kiev and Moscow. Distribution of underground material expanded from journals and pamphlets to audio cassette tapes, self-inking stamps with anti-Soviet messages, stickers, and T-shirts.
QRDYNAMIC expanded its operations into China, obviously from the Tokyo office, and Czechoslovakia, Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Soviet Central Asia, the Soviet Pacific Maritime region, and among Ukrainian-Canadians. QRDYNAMIC also paid journalist agents-of-influence for their articles. These journalists were located in Sweden, Switzerland, Australia, Israel, and Austria.
But at the outset of glasnost and perestroika in the mid-1980s, things began to look bleak for QRDYNAMIC. The high cost of rent in Manhattan had it looking for cheaper quarters in New Jersey.
Assistant Secretary of State for European/Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, the baked goods-bearing «Maiden of Maidan,» told the US Congress that the United States spent $5 billion to wrest control of Ukraine from the Russian sphere since the collapse of the Soviet Union. With the recent disclosures from the CIA it appears that the price tag to the American tax payers of such foreign shenanigans was much higher.

Wayne Madsen is an investigative journalist, author and syndicated columnist. He is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and the National Press Club.

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too afraid
too afraid
Jul 31, 2016 1:59 PM

I get headaches and paranoia just reading this, as if some monster appears.
I wonder how humanity will react if the “even bigger piles of shit” will be made public.

Acsending
Acsending
May 17, 2016 3:33 PM

Wow…CIA strategy absolutely worked…So many Ukranians turned into nazis…I wish there would be more materials like that in the media. I recently came across this interesting site called Russia Insider, they cover many common topics and offer to fight against corporate media beast together https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/russia-insider-a-media-revolution I think all supporters of alternative media should gather and support each other in this huge and difficult struggle against MSM because only with joint efforts we can win

Theodorakis
Theodorakis
May 17, 2016 10:04 AM

Guys, I know Mary Dejevski is often used by the Guardian as the Devil’s Advocate. In her latest piece, however, it seems she is directly talking to the “Off-Guardian”:
“When western condemnation of Russia over Ukraine was at its height, many people used social media to insist that the arguments were more finely balanced. When official contacts were severed, they said dialogue should remain open. These were not so-called Kremlin trolls, but non-specialists with a different view.”
And I don’t know about your media markets, but the one in SE Europe I inhabit just scrapped the imperial narrative and Ukraine was left pretty much alone with its Eurovision “victory”. Even US shills here seemed too tired to defend this travesty.

Sam Nelson (@Sam194275)
Sam Nelson (@Sam194275)
May 16, 2016 9:21 PM

How much more can this beautiful people take? What they have suffered for the last hundred years is beyond description, horror, starvation, white slavery, murder, death, directed disease, one thing after another. It is for sure we know that getting rid of communism is not the solution, getting rid of the families behind the communist is the only solution, but, how can we do that when they basically through corporations own the world? Politicians will not disturb their apple cart it is paying off big for them, the police and military’s are captives of a pay check, they will not help us, what can we do and how can we do it? We, us, not just Ukraine, for, in a short time we shall all know what the Ukrainian people have went through and are going through even today. In Venezuela the people are hunting down dogs and cats to eat, soon there will be no food to eat at all, because, all the food is controlled by corporations, owned by the King of the world, who only wants for us death and misery. Yeah, we are in a pickle but we can’t eat it we can only hope to survive it.

Daniel Rich
Daniel Rich
May 16, 2016 3:36 AM

I assume most have passed away, but some ‘conspiracy nuts’ from back then, where right on the money, even if they were ridiculed at the time…

jimsresearchnotes
jimsresearchnotes
May 15, 2016 6:10 AM

Reblogged this on EU: Ramshackle Empire and commented:
I’ve always thought it odd that Ukraine’s turn to Nazism is never mentioned in the west, nor that it had its roots so far back in modern history. Very useful post!

Guest
Guest
May 15, 2016 6:40 AM

This is the point that makes me disgusted with the mainstream media
They ignore the neo nazi in govt – the speaker of the ukrainian parliament founded a neo nazi organisation. They ignore the right wing paramilitaries that roam the streets beating up old people, communists just about anyone who does not agree with the regime. Then the guardian will right articles like how Russia is racist!!! Completely ignoring that fact they condone far worse violent racism in the Ukraine. And that no country is racism free
Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?

Eurasia News Online
Eurasia News Online
May 15, 2016 3:31 AM

Reblogged this on Eurasia News Online.

joekano76
joekano76
May 15, 2016 12:50 AM

Reblogged this on TheFlippinTruth.

susannapanevin
susannapanevin
May 15, 2016 12:15 AM

Reblogged this on Susanna Panevin.