CIA, Ford Foundation, and Political Warfare
CIA, Ford Foundation, and Political Warfare
How the CIA cultivated and controlled a propaganda and sabotage operation in West Berlin with a little bit of help from the Ford Foundation
Two documents and political warfare
In response to questions from the Secretary of State, George F. Kennan sent what came to be known as the Long Telegram on 22 February 1946 from Moscow. In it, Kennan zeroed in on the Soviet belief that saw itself living in:
antagonistic “capitalist encirclement” with which in the long run there can be no permanent peaceful coexistence.
Three years later, on 30 April 1948, Kennan — now Policy Planning Director at State — authored a memo that defined and organised political warfare for the department.
In the broadest definition, political warfare is the employment of all the means at a nation’s command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives. Such operations are both overt and covert. They range from such overt actions as political alliances, economic measures, and “white” propaganda to such covert operations as clandestine support of “friendly” foreign elements, “black” psychological warfare and even encouragement of underground resistances in hostile states.
By then, Soviet political warfare had already driven the United States — according to Kennan himself — into taking appropriate measures of its own.
And Berlin, because it was divided into two parts, found itself bang in the middle of it.
NKVD special camps
The Soviet Union’s NKVD — People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs — ran multiple internment camps in Soviet-occupied parts of Germany from May 1945 to January 1950. Inmates were former Nazis, individuals who were believed to have hindered the establishment of Stalinism in Germany, or other individuals arrested at random.
Many of these camps were repurposed concentration camps of the Nazi regime.
The legal basis for the arrests was the Beria-order No. 00315 of 18 April 1945, ordering the internment without prior investigation by the Soviet military of "spies, saboteurs, terrorists and active NSDAP members", heads of Nazi organizations, people maintaining "illegal" print and broadcasting devices or weapon deposits, members of the civil administration, and journalists. — NKVD special camps in Germany 1945–1950
Rumours of abuse were rife, and prisoners who had been released from these camps narrated tales of horrific conditions and a very high death rate among inmates. A group of German activists decided that the plight of inmates needed to be brought to the world’s attention.
Fighting group against inhumanity
The CIA established Berlin Operations Base — better known as BOB — in July 1945, but it came into its own after the Soviet Union blockaded Berlin in 1948. On 18 March 1949, BOB’s chief sent a memo to CIA headquarters introducing Operation Graveyard.
Graveyard was the CIA’s codename for Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit (KgU), or Fighting Group against Inhumanity. Founded in 1948 by Rainer Hildebrandt, a historian and publicist, and Ernst Tillich, a Protestant pastor — “Hilly and Tilly” to the CIA — the KgU set out to find former inmates of Soviet prison camps.
And that’s exactly what they did. Hildebrandt’s people would slip into East Berlin and meet former inmates. This activity was fraught with risk for both KgU’s people and the former inmates, and required considerable tradecraft to avoid the attention of the Soviet Ministry of State Security (MGB) and later the East German Ministry for State Security or Stasi (MfS).
After meeting the inmate and eliciting their story, the KgU activist would try to convince them to speak about their experiences in deliberately organised public lectures. This required deft handling by the KgU activist, and had brought the group to the CIA’s attention.
The New York Times — based on details provided by Hildebrandt — carried a report about the prison camps on 14 February 1949, causing negative publicity for the Soviet Union.
The CIA soon began supporting KgU — whose CIA codename became DTLINEN — through an American cutout in Berlin, sending DM1,000 and 100 dollars each month (roughly $4,000 today). The West German Ministry for All-German Affairs, also known as the Kaiser Ministry for Jakob Kaiser, its first minister, pitched in with additional funding for KgU.
Beyond activism
KgU soon expanded its activities beyond activism. On 20 July 1949, it got several youth to paint large ‘F’s throughout East and West Berlin. This was in commemoration of a failed assassination attempt on Hitler 5 years earlier. The F stood for freiheit and feindschaft (freedom and adversity). The Stasi arrested a few KgU sympathisers and punished them with prison sentences.
Brochures and stickers
As funding from the CIA increased, they also began producing propaganda brochures. At its peak, KgU was producing over 100,000 copies of five-six brochures every month, targeted at East Germany armed forces, communist party workers, and students.
They would print these brochures in West Berlin and smuggle them across the border into the east using balloons, a tactic refined during the second world war. Wolfgang Kaiser, a chemistry student at Humboldt University in East Berlin, even devised an ingenious drop mechanism for KgU that would drop leaflets and brochures over the target area using a slow-burning fuse.
They also produced and distributed several stickers meant to warn communists and minor officials. In one instance, a sticker produced in 1951 showed the hands of the clock at 11:55 — just five minutes to go. A single word on the face of the clock served as warning to minor officials that their actions today would be remembered, and soon they would face judgement.
KgU also pursued several poison pen campaigns against communist functionaries in the Soviet zone. The CIA observed in several cases that, when deployed against minor officials, these tactics would cause an immediate and pronounced slowdown of their performance. Sometimes, these officials even offered their services to resistance organisations like KgU in order to avoid retribution in the future.
Administrative warfare
After that, KgU ventured into administrative warfare. They forged a letter from an East Germany state-owned trading company and sent it to Fabian & Company, a mining firm, instructing them to stop export of quartz to its trading partners abroad. It worked.
Then they forged a letter from the government in East Berlin and sent copies to state-owned stores in a town in Saxony, carrying orders for the stores to immediately reduce prices for goods. The forgery was only discovered after all the goods had sold out.
KgU carried out hundreds of such administrative warfare operations.
Sabotage
KgU activists also engaged in sabotage, using acids to damage factory machinery. In one instance, by damaging a hydraulic press at a factory, they could interrupt production for three shifts.
Wolfgang Kaiser, who had lost his place in Humboldt University on account of his being a resident of West Berlin, had become KgU’s chemicals expert. He made fuses for propaganda balloons, smoke grenades, acids for machinery sabotage, and incendiary chemicals to burn propaganda noticeboards.
These would often be picked up from Kaiser’s location and delivered to other KgU activists for sabotage by a messenger named Gustav Buciek, who worked with the Telegraf newspaper. But Buciek had a criminal past, which enabled the Stasi to blackmail him into spying for them.
Besides Buciek, the owner of the shop from which Kaiser purchased chemicals was also a Stasi agent. With the information provided by these two agents, the Stasi made a clear connection between Kaiser and KgU’s acts of sabotage.
They got a man named Baumbach, Kaiser’s friend from college, to get back in touch. Initially, the Stasi planned for Baumbach to dissuade Kaiser from working for KgU. But Baumbach identified himself to Kaiser as a Stasi agent and began paying him small amounts of money for information about KgU.
Kaiser was officially unemployed. Although KgU utilised his services, they only paid him a small honorarium, which he reportedly blew on alcohol. All the while, he was desperate to get back into university.
When the Stasi found out, they sent Kaiser an offer through Baumbach. If Kaiser turned himself in and collaborated, they would return to him his spot at the university. Kaiser accompanied Baumbach to East Berlin at 3 a.m. on 8 May 1952 and presented himself at a police station. He expected to be interrogated and then reinstated at the university.
Instead, he was arrested, held in detention by the Stasi (who promised him he wouldn’t be executed), prosecuted in the Supreme Court of East Germany (where the judge began the trial by assuring the defence that Kaiser would not receive the death sentence), and executed by guillotine on 5 September 1952.
Kaiser wasn’t the first or last KgU activist to be executed by the GDR.
Friction and the Ford Foundation
Through the length of the trial and afterwards, the Stasi bombarded West Germans with propaganda about Kaiser and KgU, making it look like a terrorist organisation that was producing nerve agents and explosives. Kaiser was even referred to as the "Poison alchemist Kaiser". Public opinion in West Germany was far from sympathetic to KgU, and this led to friction between the Kaiser Ministry and the CIA.
The ministry, as one of the two sources of funding for KgU, had significant leverage over them. And this irritated the CIA, which was tired of the ministry’s timid approach, and wanted full control.
That was about when the Ford Foundation, in an astonishing coincidence, gave KgU a significant grant, freeing the group of its dependence on the Kaiser Ministry.
This was a source of severe heartburn for the minister.
The Ford Foundation had just undergone a series of changes. Henry Ford’s death in 1947 had resulted in the foundation inheriting the bulk of the Ford family fortune, about $500 million in privately owned stock yielding $50 million in dividends.
The trustees of the foundation had commissioned H. Rowan Gaither, head of the Rand Corporation (ahem) to create a structure and philosophy for the new organisation. Gaither’s report became the guiding principle for the foundation’s investments and transformed it from a Detroit-focused philanthropic organisation to one with more global ambitions and a clearer vision of its role in the American Cold War strategy.
By August 1952, the foundation was providing KgU with support worth DM31,500 each month. But with the West German government unhappy about a private American organisation directly funding KgU, the CIA stepped in and took over from Ford Foundation, funding KgU entirely from its own coffers to the tune of $70,000 per month by mid-1953.
With prison camps having been dismantled in 1950, KgU no longer needed to find and interview former inmates. And with the Stasi going hammer and tongs at its activists in East Berlin, sabotage died a natural death. KgU did, however, continue producing brochures and pamphlets all the way until the CIA quietly wound them up in 1960.
If you enjoyed reading this post, you might also enjoy reading my spy novels: The Let Bhutto Eat Grass series of spy novels deals with nuclear weapons espionage in 1970s India, Pakistan, and Europe.
Further reading
Active Measures by Thomas Rid
I am so interested in how you do your research! This was so detailed and interesting. Propaganda balloons?! Poison pen?! These are the things I wished I learned in history class. With espionage and world powers, there’s so many moving parts that it’s easy to lose track of how expansive and collaborative history is.