Mr. Captive Nations vs. the CIA
The 'One Man Lobby' behind the 'Victims of Communism'
It has been said that three men founded the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, including former White House national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski (1928-2017)—but this isn’t true. Brzezinski was just an early advisor to the organization. The “Victims of Communism” (VOC) has two founding fathers, one of which has already been introduced as the “VOC patriarch.” The other he called “Mr. Captive Nations,” and a “hero of the Cold War.”
Lev and I came to an agreement regarding incorporation, the officers, and the initial board of directors. Lev would be chairman and I would be president and CEO. He nominated ethnic representatives with whom he had worked for years. I proposed people who were anticommunist to the core and of means.
Lev Dobriansky (1918-2008) was the founder and chairman for life of the National Captive Nations Committee, which Congress authorized to establish the VOC in the 1990s. More importantly for this installment of “VOC INFO,” Dobriansky also stewarded the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America through most of the Cold War. A largely forgotten and overlooked individual, he might be one of the most underrated Cold Warriors of the last century. If any single person deserved credit for creating the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, it’s probably him.
“Dr. Lev Dobriansky vs. the CIA…” began the subject line of a memorandum for the Office of the General Counsel at the CIA in late 1966. Around this time, Dobriansky gave a speech to the Asian People’s Anti-Communist League in South Korea about the “Captive Nations Movement,” and the CIA’s Soviet Bloc (SB) Division was tasked with producing a paper “which will cover the entire Soviet nationalities problem for Mr. Brzezinski,” who was serving on the Policy Planning Council of the State Department. As the SB Division chief subsequently explained to the CIA Deputy Director for Plans,
SB Division’s only project in this field is Project AERODYNAMIC, which lends support to a Ukrainian emigre group, the ZP/UHVR (Foreign Representation of the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council), via the Prolog Research and Publishing Assoc, Inc., in New York, which was established in 1953 to conduct the clandestine activities of the ZP/UHVR…
Although officials of the Department of State have been briefed on the Ukrainian project from time to time, the project itself has never been reviewed by the 303 Committee. A review by the Committee might be in order now, in view of recent attacks on Prolog, and what appears to be an effort on the part of Dr. Lev Dobriansky to smear CIA.
The ZP/UHVR was a tight-knit group of former “Banderites” (followers of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera) propped up by the CIA during the Cold War. Days before Christmas, someone from the Agency flew to New York for a three hour meeting at the Upper Manhattan office of the Prolog Research Corporation, a CIA front staffed by the ZP/UHVR, which included former pro-Nazi war criminals. Although the meeting was called “to get Prolog researchers to supply material on national tensions in internal USSR politics,” the ZP/UHVR leaders (“AECASSOWARIES”) had other matters to discuss.
The fight with DOBRIANSKY was uppermost in the AECASSOWARIES’ thoughts. AECASSOWARY 2 held DOBRIANSKY to be an extreme egotist, power-hungry, out to increase his prestige at any cost, even to destroy Prolog and collaborate with the Soviets. The whole thing is Soviet-staged, according to AECASSOWARY 2. DOBRIANSKY knows that CIA is scared, bases his tactics on that, and hopes to have additional monies flow into his hands. Further, AECASSOWARY 2 mused, DOBRIANSKY may have CIA contacts. This was disputed by [REDACTED]. Then they must be DIA, Pentagon, etc. AECASSOWARY 2 felt that CIA should have a channel to DOBRIANSKY through DOBRIANSKY’s friends in Washington, and somehow get him to toe the line. The US Government and CIA are too soft. There is a West-German, OUN/BANDERA, DOBRIANSKY plot against the good guys (CIA, Prolog, and the U.S. Government)… Attempts to reach a reconciliation are without results, for nobody on the other side wants positive results—the DOBRIANSKY goal is to isolate and finish off Prolog.
Prolog chief Mykola Lebed (“AECASSOWARY 2”), the “Foreign Minister” of the ZP/UHVR, was Bandera’s murderous deputy during World War II and was once associated with a Gestapo school in occupied Poland which included “exercises in the hardening of hearts” — torturing Jews. A US military intelligence report shared the view that Lebed was a “well-known sadist and collaborator of the Germans.” He became the CIA’s go-to Ukrainian nationalist for decades.
Lebed complained to his handlers that Dobriansky “has more and more identified with the far-right in American politics” as he slipped “more and more under the influence of the Bandera people.” In 1967, the CIA informed the 303 Committee, a high-level interagency panel that approved major covert actions, about Operation Aerodynamic, and that “right-wing Ukrainians in the UCCA (Ukrainian Congress Committee of America), have also denounced Prolog and its leader as soft on communism and as CIA tools.”
Some have said that Lev Dobriansky was a US intelligence officer in Germany during World War II. This could be another myth. He was born and raised in New York, but Dobriansky knew in his gut that “the vast majority of the 40 million Ukrainians, from the Carpathian to the Caucasus mountains, are at one, in mind and soul.” He was also certain that they continuously suffered from a “Soviet genocide which in terms of magnitude and extent far exceeds what the Nazis diabolically produced.”
Winston Churchill forgot about Kiev when he famously listed the capitals of Europe behind the Iron Curtain, but according to Lev Dobriansky, it was a “patent fact” at the dawn of the Cold War that “the Ukrainian nation itself is intrinsically anti-communist.” It seemed obvious to him that there was a “great historical chasm between Russian culture with its characteristic Asiatic orientation and Ukrainian culture with its typical Western ties. And anyone who has read the undistorted histories of these two peoples without having discovered this truth, has read indeed with dark glasses…”
By 1948, Dobriansky joined the Political Advisory Board of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America. That year he represented the UCCA at a hearing before the resolutions committee of the Republican National Convention. Among other things, Dobriansky advocated for the long-term goal of creating a United States of Europe including Ukraine. In the short term, the UCCA spokesperson called for “enlightened awareness of the multinational composition of the Soviet Union and the significant fact that in the vanguard of the nationalities strife there is the Ukrainian nation.”
In 1949, Lev Dobriansky began to teach at Georgetown University, and the CIA illegally smuggled Mykola Lebed to the US after his feud with Stepan Bandera reached a boiling point. The ZP/UHVR broke up with the fascist “Bandera Organization” (OUN-B) around the time that the CIA decided to support Lebed and the “Foreign Representation of the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council” instead of Bandera’s faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.
Unlike the CIA, which considered the Banderites to have an “anti-American” streak, Lev Dobriansky didn’t concern himself with this conflict until the 1960s. Shortly after arriving in the United States, Lebed attended the Fourth Congress of Americans of Ukrainian Descent in Washington, D.C. at which Dobriansky was first elected president of the UCCA. His reign lasted for more than thirty years. In the mid-1950s, the CIA produced a generalized list of Stepan Bandera’s “Anti-American Activities.”
The organization headed by Stefan Bandera is organized on principles directly contradictory to American beliefs… Totalitarian tendencies expressed by the Bandera organization are reflected in… Intolerance to any and all other thoughts, ideas, groups or organizations which are found in the emigration… Attempts to control every fact of emigre life… In its day to day activities, the Bandera organization heeds neither civil nor moral laws…
Activities of the Bandera organization abroad which are contrary to American laws and American principles… The organization of an underground Bandera organization in the USA which blindly executes all orders of the Bandera organization and the SB [Security Service] in Germany… The recruitment of American citizens into this illegal underground Bandera organization and forcing them to perform activities hostile to American interests… In performing the aforementioned acts, the Bandera underground organization utilizes individuals who are suspicious and who would seem to conduct their activities to the advantage of the Communists.
Early on the CIA decided that one of the objectives of Operation Aerodynamic should be to “unify the major Ukrainian groups… so that, under our control, the Ukrainian emigration take a united stand against the USSR which would be more consistent with American Foreign Policy.” By the time that Dobriansky finally stepped aside to join the Reagan administration, the UCCA was firmly in the grip of the Banderites, and they had an ally of the “Captive Nations Movement” in the White House.
Mykola Lebed once recommended a pair of Ukrainian Americans to the CIA as candidates to lead the Voice of America’s Ukrainian section: UCCA president Lev Dobriansky, and Walter Dushnyk, a member of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists who served on the staff of US general Douglas MacArthur during World War II. Over a decade later, Lebed raged to the CIA about Dobriansky, Dushnyk, “and other UCCA men of Banderite persuasion.”
During the summer of 1951, someone from the CIA had a wide-ranging conversation with Walter Dushnyk and requested him to “do an extensive paper” about the “Ukrainian emigre organizations” and the “Ukrainian liberation movement.” Dushnyk, who was close to Lebed and Dobriansky, mentioned that the UCCA president “is not interested in the party squabble and minor cleavages within the emigration. He probably is not even aware of much of this activity. [Dushnyk] stated it is doubtful whether Dobriansky reads any Ukrainian papers.”
Earlier that year, Dobriansky told US Senators that he was in “constant contact” with anti-communist resistance movements in Ukraine, Belarus, Turkistan, Georgia, and elsewhere, which represented an “ideological atomic bomb,” and a fifth column that “has to a large extent infiltrated the Soviet army.” Dobriansky reportedly “did not go into detail about the anti-Communist underground,” but he “complained to the Senate foreign relations and armed service committees that up to now this government’s Central Intelligence Agency and the ‘Voice of America’ have largely neglected this opportunity.”
“Does the Ukrainian Congress Committee have contact with the Ukrainian underground in the Soviet Union? If so, how is this contact maintained?” wondered the CIA’s Soviet-Russia division chief in 1952. To answer these and other questions, he requested that the Agency “explore the possibility” of recruiting Dobriansky as an informant.
In the coming months, Lev Dobriansky and Walter Dushnyk led a small mission to Europe, sponsored by the US government, which is how they met Stepan Bandera. According to the CIA, “an attempt was made by prominent members of the former German General Staff to get in contact with the Mission. However, on the advice of the American representatives, Dobriansky did not meet with the members of the former German General Staff.”
The objective of the “Dobriansky mission” was “to reconcile Russian and Ukrainian emigres” in order to include the latter in the CIA’s American Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia (ACLPR), which was in the process of organizing Radio Liberty. For the sake of brevity, let’s just say that they apparently returned to the US feeling they had been “stabbed in the back” and “exploited by the Russian chauvinist interests within the Government.”
“We shall continue to expose the Russia First movement in this country for which all considerations must be subordinated to the prime interest of preserving for all time the territorial integrity of the Holy Russian Empire,” Dobriansky declared in a major speech to the UCCA in 1953.
The UCCA president demanded a Congressional investigation of “one of these Russia First nests,” also a major CIA front, the ACLPR. “Through this investigation we seek only the reorganization of the American Committee and the founding of an American rather than a Russia First policy toward the success of anti-Soviet emigre activity.”
Not long after Dobriansky returned from Europe, Dwight Eisenhower was inaugurated as president, and Dobriansky gave a lecture on “Western psychological strategy toward the USSR” at a military intelligence conference at Fort Meade in Maryland.
A staffer on the Psychological Strategy Board of the US government and former Congressman who held a “Conference of Psychological Warfare” in Washington both spoke at the banquet that followed that year’s annual general meeting of the UCCA. Although the Eisenhower-Nixon campaign had embraced the rhetoric of “liberating” communist countries (instead of just “containing” them), Dobriansky “complained that the new policy was scuttled four weeks after Mr. Eisenhower took office.”
“The United States has only a few years to put across a liberation program for iron curtain nations before the Soviet Union embarks upon world conquest,” the Milwaukee Journal paraphrased Dobriansky in 1954. Meanwhile he served as a consultant to the House Select Committee to Investigate Communist Aggression, but more about that another day. Dobriansky did not trust that the CIA was doing its job to fight communism. In 1956, he told the press that there is an “urgent need for constant congressional control over the CIA.”
A month before the Republican and Democratic conventions in 1956, a “Conference on Freedom and Peace Through Liberation” adopted a foreign policy plank by Lev Dobriansky. It sounded like him: “We strongly reaffirm our rejection of all concepts which would abandon the captive nations in the Communist colonial empire,” and in particular, “the Communist conception of peaceful co-existence.” The Republican National Committee appointed Dobriansky as the chairman of its Ethnic Division (and again in 1959-60).
From 1957-58, Dobriansky taught at the National War College, in addition to Georgetown University. In January 1958, he was commissioned as a Lieutenant Colonel in the US Army Reserve. According to the Ukrainian Weekly, this was done “by directions of the President and the Secretary of the Army” for the purpose of attaching Dobriansky to the 352nd Civil Affairs Unit, “which concerns itself with military government administration and supervision over countries with populations of over 25 million people.” The Ukrainian American newspaper claimed, “It is the only reserve unit of this kind in the United States.”
Recalling his days in the 352nd Civil Affairs Unit, a former staff director of the Senate Republican Conference once said, “this was that unit that was supposed to take over the governance of the Middle East in time of war! These folks couldn’t—I mean it was just a laugh, and we sat through these incredibly boring lectures and stupid exercises,” which took place at Georgetown University. In 1969, the Students for a Democratic Society at Georgetown exposed the “352nd Homemade Junta,” to which Professor Dobriansky was still assigned.
It is one of only three units of its type in the entire defense establishment of the United States. These units, unique in the peacetime history of the Army, both as to mission and scope of operations, are trained to administer an entire nation or major geographical area. This unit is preparing to administer a wide range of activities from public health to counter-insurgency. Its particular geographical concern is the Middle-East.
Under an agreement negotiated with the university in 1952, the 352nd became affiliated with Georgetown and is permitted to use university resources to house and facilitate its operations…
A hypothetical scenario is described in one of the training manuals of the unit. Invited to Aden, [Yemen] by the existing government, the Civil Affairs Unit would facilitate specific programs in economic, political, educational, military, social, psychological, and religious spheres in order to maintain a stable government attuned to U.S. interests…
And who is the target population? “Entire minority groups can be considered the enemy or target population. To carry this to the extreme, the entire population of a country or area (more than one country) can be considered the target.” It is understandable why the Civil Affairs unit concentrates a large part of its effort on counter-insurgency.
When Dobriansky joined the 352nd, Bandera’s deputy Yaroslav Stetsko was trying to get his first visa to the United States. He chaired for life the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), the OUN-B’s coordinating body of former pro-Nazi “freedom fighters” that represented the “captive nations” of the Soviet Union. The ABN was likely the “ideological atomic bomb” that Dobriansky told Senators about. In February 1958, the CIA learned that “the Banderists are extremely angry at the Americans at the moment,” because the US Consul General in Munich denied Stetsko’s visa at the last minute.
For years, the State Department had recommended that Stetsko’s “various applications” to visit the US “be handled by delaying tactics.” The Office of East Europe hinted at the reason for this strategy: “Stetsko has established some influential friends in the US.” In addition to Stetsko’s “role in the Ukrainian Government” that the OUN-B tried to establish in Nazi-occupied Ukraine, the State Department had other concerns:
The activities of Stetsko and his political organizations in intimidating entire refugee camps in the post war years; the use of assassinations and gangster-like methods to keep Ukrainians in line during this period; the extent and nature of Mafia-type operations, possibly extending into the US; and Stetsko’s connections and control over these forces.
A month later, the CIA chief in Munich alerted the Director of Central Intelligence that Dobriansky was lobbying behind the scenes to get visas for Stepan Bandera (“AECAVATINA 1”) and Yaroslav Stetsko (“AECAVATINA 2”). The CIA intercepted a letter from Dobriansky to Stetsko, which indicated that the UCCA president reached out to allies in Congress.
“ALTHOUGH NOT SPECIFIED IN LETTER WHEN AECAVATINA 1 AND 2 DESIRE VISIT U.S. IT APPARENT THAT TO BE IN NEAR FUTURE. AECAVATINA 1 MADE NO VISA APPLICATION… BUT WILL PROBABLY SO DO WHEN RECEIVES FAVORABLE REPLY FROM DOBRIANSKY.”
Within a week the CIA learned that Stetsko obtained his visa. Meanwhile, the ABN leader had been in Mexico City for a “Preparatory Conference of the World Anti-Communist Congress for Freedom and Liberation.” The three major sponsors of the Preparatory Conference were the ABN, the Asian People’s Anti-Communist League (APACL), and the Mexican “Inter-American Confederation for the Defense of the Continent” (IACDC), which hosted the meeting.
The Taiwan-based APACL ultimately spearheaded the creation of the far-right World Anti-Communist League in 1967, but the Banderite-led ABN more or less dominated this first attempt. They “practically owned” the IACDC, according to Marvin Liebman, the Secretary General of the Preparatory Conference, who once thought this would be “my anti-Comintern.”
It wasn’t long before Liebman resigned his position, and realized that Stetsko “may well have been indirectly responsible for the slaughter of my mother’s family” in Ukraine. Allegedly he began to receive nonstop phone calls from Stetsko’s people: “You will die, Jew Bolshevik! You have sabotaged the great anticommunist cause! Death to the Jew Bolshevik!” According to Keith Allen Dennis, a historian of the World Anti-Communist League, Marvin Liebman turned over all records from the conference to Lev Dobriansky, who didn’t make it to Mexico City but was named to the steering committee.
That spring, Walter Dushnyk spoke to a “Mr. Wolf” about Yaroslav Stetsko. Dushnyk, who represented the UCCA at the Mexico City conference, conveyed that Stetsko wanted to meet with US intelligence, and “apparently is anxious to discuss” the “Moslem groups (stemming from the Soviet Union and living in the Near East) who are associated with the ABN.” Some of these groups stemmed from the Nazi Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories. According to a CIA memorandum for the chief of “SR/3” (Soviet-Russia division 3—Ukraine?), “whom Dushnyck knows personally,”
Stetzko may be in the United States for a few months and can be reached through Dushnyck at any time… In my opinion Stetzko should be met by qualified officers who would debrief and assess him… Furthermore, since the matter has gone so far, it would be a personal affront to Stetzko if he were not met… Dushnyk asked whether Bandera will be permitted to come to the United States. I told him that from the “operational elements” of the United States Government there was no objection…
“Mr. Wolf,” apparently from the CIA but posing as “a representative of the U.S. Government on the highest level” from the Defense Department, didn’t want to meet with Stetsko directly, and gave Dushnyk a list of questions for him about the OUN-B’s strength and intentions. Stetsko insisted on speaking face to face, so he got rebuffed. “However, the rebuff is not a final closing of the door…"
Although prior to this intended meeting we had agreed that we would explore the possibility of a direct contact between the “interested” U.S. agencies and the [OUN-B], I believe that… such conversations would be premature. I believe the present approach as suggested above will serve the purpose of hearing out what Stetsko has to say…
That summer, Yaroslav Stetsko spent July 4 with Lev Dobriansky and gave testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). “This organization is monolithic in character, violently anti-Communist, and totalitarian in concept,” the CIA groaned about the OUN-B to its Legislative Counsel. “The more radical is the United States Government in its international dealing and policy, the less there is danger of an atomic war,” Bandera’s deputy advised HUAC.
“Mr. Stetsko, you are an outstanding Ukrainian nationalist leader,” said a former aide to Senator Joseph McCarthy who had participated in the red-baiting line of question that prompted Paul Robeson to tell HUAC in 1956, “I am here because I am opposing the neo-Fascist cause which I see arising in these committees… [Y]ou are the un-Americans, and you ought to be ashamed of yourselves.”
In 1959, ten days before Stepan Bandera’s assassination in Munich, the OUN-B leader got his first visa to the United States. According to historians Richard Breitman and Norman Goda, (“former”) Nazis in West Germany’s Foreign Intelligence Service convinced the CIA to give the green light. The KGB tried to make the assassination look like a suicide, and when that failed, to pin the conspiracy on Bandera’s old allies in West Germany, in particular Theodor Oberländer, the Federal Minister for Displaced Persons, Refugees and Victims of War. Oberländer was attached to the Nazi army’s Banderite “Nachtigall Battalion” in 1941. Mykola Lebed ranted to his case officer in 1966,
CIA bows to West German pressure. OUN/B is protected and in operational relationship with the West Germans. The West Germany embassy in Washington asks that Stetsko be allowed to come to the U.S., and in he comes… Dr. Oberlander is the protector of the Banderites, and we bow to Oberlander and his ilk in West Germany. Then, too, Dobriansky is in close contact with Oberlander, as is Walter Dushnyck and other UCCA men of Banderite persuasion. CIA must see the political ramifications of Dobriansky’s scheming. AECASSOWARY 2 went into a discussion of the “American Security Council” with which Dobriansky is connected and mused that this outfit must have some covert U.S. government backing. Could CIA not make Dobriansky toe the line through somebody in that council?
Another Wikipedia myth is that Lev Dobriansky and Yaroslav Stetsko co-chaired the National Captive Nations Committee (NCNC). Dobriansky set up this body following what appears to have been one of the proudest accomplishments of his life. In 1959 the UCCA president drafted a Congressional resolution that Dwight Eisenhower signed into law, which designated the third week of July as Captive Nations Week, “until such time as freedom and independence shall have been achieved for all the captive nations of the world.”
According to Public Law 86-90, this included “submerged nations” of the Soviet Union (such as “Idel-Ural” and “Cossackia”) that Dobriansky’s nemesis George F. Kennan claimed were “invented in the Nazi propaganda ministry.” Lev Dobriansky typically gets all the credit for authoring the “Captive Nations Resolution,” which a former Secretary of State once privately described as “one of the wildest kinds of cold war kind of thing you ever seen in your life.”
Dobriansky actually had some help from a friend, the former staffer on the Psychological Strategy Board who spoke at the UCCA banquet in 1953, and earlier that year told the CIA that “the Dobriansky mission” to Europe was “stabbed in the back.” He was also the staff director of the House Select Committee to Investigate Communist Aggression, so more about him another day, when we further explore the “Captive Nations lobby.”
In early 1959, the chairman of the Republican National Committee made an announcement at the White House about the formation of a 44-member committee to “draft a long range statement of party policy and objectives.” Lev Dobriansky served as vice-chairman of the task force on national security and peace, which included the Senate Minority Leader, Everett Dirksen. If he had not already done so, the UCCA president met Eisenhower at a White House luncheon for this RNC “study group.”
The following year, Eisenhower signed Public Law 86-749, which authorized the establishment of a monument in Washington honoring the 19th century Ukrainian poet, Taras Shevchenko. Dobriansky played a big role in lobbying for this statue. In the spring of 1960, he spoke at a special hearing in the House of Representatives on the matter. Around this time, Dobriansky commented on the U-2 spy plane that was shot down in the Soviet Union, “Most of the territory flown over by the U-2 is captive non-Russian… We could forthrightly bring into question the legitimacy of Moscow’s arguments on international law.”
Later that spring, Dobriansky participated in a week-long seminar at the U.S. Army War College that was in large part about the Soviet Union. Allen Dulles, the Director of Central Intelligence, was among the many prominent people to attend the seminar, which included the US Army Chief of Staff, the Secretary of the Army, the Ambassador to the U.N., and the president of Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. According to the Ukrainian Weekly,
The occasion provided the UCCA Chairman with innumerable opportunities for exchanges of ideas and information dealing especially with the USSR. Talks with Mr. Dulles and his groups were most enlightening… The “Captive Nations Week” was extensively discussed and Dr. Dobriansky, who now is also chairman of the “National Captive Nations Week Committee,” met a number of seminar participants who have joined the national committee.
In September, Lev Dobriansky and Mykola Lebed were among those called to give testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee about Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s crimes against Ukraine. Dobriansky called Khrushchev “the greatest and most infamous genocidist alive today.” Lebed, the “well known sadist” who allegedly tortured Jews at a Gestapo school, elaborated on the reign of terror that Khrushchev supposedly unleashed on Ukraine:
With hot irons they tortured those prisoners who were caught. They cut into the skin and tore the skin off from the living body. They also nailed people on the cross. They cut off the sexual organs, and breasts of women. They cut out eyes broke bones in legs and arms and extracted nails… At the same time a degree of bacteriological warfare was started. They poisoned medical capsules with certain injections of typhus… which were supposed to be used to cure a patient. In that way, instead of curing him they inflicted certain other diseases which became very widely spread after the injection. Also, water for public use was poisoned. Cigarettes and chocolates were tampered with in this matter. After consuming them, people became sick… These methods were applied in order to terrorize the population of Ukraine and depress its will to resist the regime.
By 1961, Lev Dobriansky already began to complain that the State Department let “our 1,000-megaton political weapon,” Captive Nations Week, “rust and corrode under a heap of political cliches about simply remembering the captive peoples.” The “fire-breathing” UCCA president called for a “full-scale congressional inquiry” into the contradictions of Foggy Bottom, which didn’t actually want to “liberate” the “captive nations” via World War III. Making a speech in Taiwan, he “called for close cooperation of all anti-communist movements in the world.”
In the year that Barry Goldwater clinched the Republican nomination for president and Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, Lev Dobriansky was the vice-chairman of the RNC’s nationalities division. “GOP Woos Immigrants From Red-Ruled Nations,” said one headline from United Press International, which reported that the RNC launched a major “ethnic campaign” in part because “the ‘fair employment’ provisions of the new civil rights law have caused concern among naturalized Americans… who fear being pushed out of jobs by the Negro.”
Dobriansky told the UPI, “We take umbrage at any imputation that we plan to rely on the so-called ‘ethnic backlash’ during our campaign… This is the first time the Republican Party has been really aware of the tremendous vote represented by the country’s [white] ethnic groups.”
A year later, according to the CIA, Dobriansky invited a Ukrainian American publicity man for American Airlines to advise the UCCA on how to raise money, whose “main suggestion was to get into contact with right wing industrial circles in Southern states.” Four days later, this same individual approached a member of the ZP/UHVR to ask what he held against Dobriansky.
The answer was that he did not approve of Dobriansky affiliating the UCCA with “extreme right wing elements incl. Birchers.” The founder of the conspiracist John Birch Society was an original member of the National Captive Nations Committee, even if he accused the first US president to declare Captive Nations Week of being a “conscious, dedicated agent of the Communist conspiracy.”
About a month before the 1964 elections, LBJ’s chief of staff Walter Jenkins was charged with “disorderly conduct” after police busted him in a sting operation having sex with another man in a public bathroom. “I know most Americans would not likely believe this,” admitted Lev Dobriansky, but the UCCA president and Goldwater campaign advisor insisted that Nikita Khrushchev’s ouster (on the day that Jenkins resigned) was “designed to offset details of the Jenkins scandal.” It was all political theater to influence the US election, because the Communist deep state decided that “the Johnson administration would serve their purposes neatly.”
Mykola Lebed (“Uncle Louie”) told the CIA that his troubles with Dobriansky really started in 1965, “beginning with the issue of the earth from the Ukraine,” in other words, who would get to install an urn of Ukrainian soil at the base of the Shevchenko monument in Washington. Until then, the CIA-backed Ukrainian nationalists had a “largely amicable” relationship with Dobriansky.
Lebed admitted “that there had been a certain amount of back-biting here and there as a result of Uncle’s continuing problems with the Bandera groups,” but it wasn’t until 1965 that Dobriansky’s attitude became “increasingly violent and hostile.” Lebed alleged that the UCCA president “receives a substantial part of his income” from OUN-B, which he speculated had contacts in the Defense Department, because “from time to time [Banderites] have stated that they are expecting to get large support from the American government.”
The autumn 1966 issue of the Ukrainian Quarterly, a journal published by the UCCA, delivered news of a report from Soviet Ukraine (“OUN MEMBERS IN THE SERVICE OF IMPERIALIST INTELLIGENCE SERVICES [—] PRESS CONFERENCE IN KIEV”) that identified the ZP/UHVR as “a group of paid agents” for the United States. “With the kind of use made by the CIA of certain exiles, the puppets in Kiev needn’t become too hysterical,” commented the UCCA editor (Walter Dushnyk), or maybe it was the chairman of the editorial board (Lev Dobriansky).
Shortly before Lev Dobriansky departed for Seoul to make a speech to the Asian People’s Anti-Communist League in October, he reached out to the FBI, which alerted the CIA that Dobriansky “expressed interested in obtaining information” about the ZP/UHVR and Prolog. (“Dr. Dobriansky said that, although he has no documentary proof, he feels sure that the Supreme Ukrainian Liberation Council receives financial backing from the Central Intelligence Agency.”)
The CIA later told the 303 Committee, “German intelligence officers have been made aware of CIA sponsorship of the Prolog organization.” The Banderites’ German allies could have confirmed rumors about the ZP/UHVR and CIA. The UCCA president apparently wanted Congress to investigate. “Dr. Lev Dobriansky vs. the CIA and the Supreme Ukrainian Liberation Council,” said the November 1966 memo to the CIA Office of the General Counsel.
As you know, we enjoy a special relationship with Prolog. Prolog has criticized Dr. Dobriansky for his involvement with American right wing political factions, which, in view of Dobriansky’s position of Chairman of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, (UCCA) they feel implies backing by the entire Ukrainian emigre community…
Putting aside Dobriansky’s alleged “goal to isolate and finish off Prolog,” the UCCA president had become a thorn in the side of Operation Aerodynamic.
Dr. Dobriansky advocates complete nonparticipation with the Soviet Union. He is against cultural exchanges and tourist travel, and he criticizes as pro-Communist those emigres who endeavor through personal contact with Soviet citizens to present and sell the Western point of view. Prolog has been engaged in extensive contact operations against Soviet citizens both in the United States and in the Soviet Union.
The Agency briefed Lebed on “the inevitably severe problems” raised by the UCCA president. The Prolog Research Corporation was a CIA front in the US, ostensibly targeting Soviet Ukraine, but with too much “spillover to the United States.” In early 1967, a leader of the UCCA questioned the right of a ZP/UHVR member to attend a meeting in New York, “since Prolog is connected with CIA.”
By now, Lev Dobriansky was the economics editor of the Washington Report, a newsletter published by the American Security Council (ASC), which according to journalist Russ Bellant was originally “staffed primarily by former FBI agents.” The ASC was an influential militarist think tank that Lebed wasn’t crazy to think “must have some covert U.S. government backing.” Subscribers may recall that the former library of the ASC Foundation now lives on the campus of a right-wing CIA feeder school with close ties to the VOC.
Dobriansky was of course a supporter of the Vietnam war, which he reportedly viewed as "a conflict between communist colonialism and free nationalism.” Dobriansky diagnosed opponents of the war with the disease of “nuclearitis.” A Vietnam veteran who became a “full-fledged officer” in the CIA and the Prolog Research Corporation once criticized Dobriansky’s “assertion that nuclear war in the struggle for the liberation of Ukraine is not all that bad.”
At the first World Anti-Communist League conference in Washington, future VOC co-founder Lev Dobriansky moderated a panel discussion, “The Human Cost of Communism,” which included two survivors of “Russian concentration camps,” a former advisor to Chiang Kai-shek, and a Cuban lawyer whose Havana law firm had “represented the United States Government and major American banks and corporations.”
In 1968, the right-wing Young Americans for Freedom presented “International Communism on Trial” at Georgetown University—a mock tribunal inspired by the Nuremberg Trials. Lee Edwards, the other future co-founder of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, coordinated the event.
Georgetown economics professor Lev Dobriansky was the university sponsor. Edwards recalled in his memoir that they indicted “an international conspiracy to commit crimes against humanity that resulted in the deaths of an estimated 100 million people (an estimate that anticipated the conclusion of The Black Book of Communism three decades later).”
The story of Lev Dobriansky will have to be continued. Edwards eulogized him in 2008 as a “hero of the Cold War.” Dobriansky was truly a “founding father” of the VOC. One of his daughters is on the board of trustees, which is chaired by the daughter of Lee Edwards, the 91 year old “VOC patriarch.”
Paula Dobriansky, an original signatory of the neocon Project for a New American Century, who might just be a more polished version of her father, has had a far more distinguished career in Washington. At the time of his death, she served in the State Department as the Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs and George W. Bush’s Envoy to Northern Ireland. It was early on, with her help, that the VOC lined up an impressive International Advisory Board, as if to cover up the extremist underbelly of the “Victims of Communism.”
