1943: Gestapo agent Tito and his band establish alliance with Anglo-American intelligence

Ever since the Soviet victory in the Battle of Stalingrad, when the balance shifted in favour of the USSR against the Axis empires, the Anglo-American imperialists halted their alliance with the Soviets, partnering with the Axis instead. One such band of Nazis was that of the Gestapo agent Tito, which established the 1943 alliance with the MI6 and later with the American intelligence through OSS (CIA predecessor) and Mossad-B.

The History of the USSR & the Peoples’ Democracies

Chapter 12, Section 1 (C12S1)

Saed Teymuri

A person in military uniform smoking a cigaretteDescription automatically generated

The years 1943 and 1944 were crucial years for Tito’s foreign policy for the next 40 years. It was in this time period that the Nazi agent Tito would foster bonds with the Anglo-American intelligence services. As mentioned previously the gradual retreat of the Nazis since the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk had led the British into a covert full-scale alliance with the Third Reich against the Soviet Union. This Anglo-German alliance was also manifested in the MI6’s support for the Gestapo agent Tito and his fascist clique. Klugmann, the very MI6 operative who is officially said to have convinced Churchill of the need for assisting Tito’s gang instead of the Chetniks, said the following about the change in British policy:

At a certain time, and exactly how and when history still has to disclose, the British political and military leadership, on a very high and top-secret level, must have received information, some of which it may have had all along, that there were leading elements inside the Partisan forces, inside the Yugoslav Communist Party, spies and provocateurs, Gestapo elements, Trotskyites, who could be ‘trusted’ (from the point of view of British imperialism), and could be used to betray the Yugoslav people’s liberation movement from inside, and carry out an Anglo-American imperialist policy.

This was the basis of the change of British policy from Mihailović to Tito in the period of 1942-43. It was carried out with the maximum secrecy and with that great measure of cunning and deceit for which British imperialism, with its long and unrivalled experience of cunning and deceit, has become notorious throughout the world. (From Trotsky to Tito, James Klugmann, 1951, Chapter 2) (IMG)

The MI6 officer Klugmann, unlike the other MI6 agents cited elsewhere throughout this book, was either a communist or a communist-coopted agent. His comments, which may appear as ‘biased’ in favour of the USSR, are completely corroborated by staunchly anti-Soviet sources not coopted by the communists

The imperialists, an article in the Soviet press – particularly the USSR Information Bulletin, a media outlet of the Soviet foreign ministry – correctly assessed in 1950, correctly regarded Tito as Hitler’s successor and acting as a bulwark against the USSR and the Peoples’ Democracies:

The imperialists rightly regard Tito as Hitler’s successor. (Tito-Rankovic Clique Has Established Fascist Regime in Yugoslavia, A. Kalinin, April 14, 1950. In: Information Bulletin, Soviet Union. Posolʹstvo (U.S.), p. 221) (IMG{Titoist Yugoslavia})

Precisely for this reason did the British military support Tito’s gang even though the latter viewed itself on the German side. The anti-Soviet MI6 operative Richard West wrote:

On 11 May the Yugoslav government in exile, probably under British coercion, instructed Mihailovic to make up his differences with the Partisans and to join the fight against the Germans.

Those Partisans who knew of the ‘March Consultations’ heard all this with private amusement. They still regarded themselves as on the side of the Germans against the British and the royalist exiles.

(Tito: and the Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia, Richard West, p. 153) (IMG)

And for this reason, the MI6 funded the Gestapo agent Tito even though the latter retained his connections to German intelligence:

During the summer of 1943, more British officers parachuted into the territory held by the Partisans, while the RAF started to drop supplies of clothing and food for the ragged and hungry guerrillas. Tito had not yet … cut off his ties with German agents such as Hans Ott. Even in late November 1943, when Britain was pouring in arms and supplies to the Partisans, Tito’s transport department obtained a herd of horses from the Germans, in return for allowing shipments of chrome to enter the Reich. (Tito: and the Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia, Richard West, p. 163) (IMG)

Under the command of the blood-soaked Gestapo agent Tito, numerous Yugoslav communists and patriots had been killed at the frontlines of the anti-fascist war. It was necessary for Tito’s gang to increase the number of its troops, so to appear ‘popular’ and ‘powerful’, and to infiltrate thousands of Nazis to become members of the Yugoslav Communist Party or army, as means of rendering the fascists in the YCP into a powerful minority if not a majority, helping to tilt the ‘democratic’ balance of power in the Party and army in favour of the Tito faction against the communists and democratic freedom-fighters. For the Nazi troops, in the face of the advancing Red Army troops, it was important that they join the Yugoslav Titoist army so to present themselves as ‘anti-fascists’ and save themselves from purges by the USSR and the Peoples’ Democracies. This last point in turn would have given the British the excuse to covertly fund and arm the Nazis under the guise of ‘anti-fascist’ work. The combination of all of these factors was manifested in the fact that:

2,000 members of the SS Handzar division, joined the Partisans and formed Tito's "Sixteenth Muslim Brigade" in September 1943. (The War in Bosnia, 1992-1995: Analyzing Military Asymmetries and Failures, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, Thesis Advisor: David Yost Co-Advisor: Donald Abenheim, Thesis Author: Gheorghe Anghel, June 2000, pp. 18-19) (IMG)

The Tito group’s permission to thousands of Handzar SS Nazi-Ustase operatives to infiltrate the YCP, hence to access internal YCP documents, constitutes a form of espionage for the Nazis.

In the Soviet Union, the MI6-backed Gestapo agent Tito had a network of supporters. The Titoist network in the USSR was led by the MI6 agent Lavrenti Beria:

My father also relied on the [fake ‘anti-Nazi’] resistance fighters who had remained in their own countries [because the Nazis, having killed many of the actual anti-Nazi guerillas, had leniently allowed these fake ‘anti-Nazi’ ‘resistance’ fighters to stay in their own countries]. He thought that … Hungarian Nagy, the Czech Slansky and the entire Yugoslav group of Tito, Djilas and Rankovic had endorsed his view…. (…). In Yugoslavia, my father’s networks and those of the British had collaborated with Tito during the war. My father followed with attention the affairs of that country. One day, when the Yugoslav leader Kardelj complained to him about Tito’s tyrannical character, he replied: ‘Don’t you think that we are all in the same boat?’ He took care to add, however, that heads of state who mattered always had negative sides. Rankovic, the head of Yugoslav security, was more primitive than Kardelj, but Tito had total confidence in him, which was why he often acted as intermediary between Tito and my father. (Beria: Inside Stalin’s Kremlin, Sergo Beria, pp. 196-197) (IMG)

In contrast to the British, Roosevelt disagreed regarding Yugoslavia:

President Roosevelt wanted to rid the world of empires, whether that of the British in India or of the French in Indo-China, and this attitude may have coloured his outlook on Yugoslavia. (Tito: and the Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia, Richard West, p. 177) (IMG)

Indeed, the US President:

Roosevelt … did not share Churchill’s enthusiasm for Tito…. (Tito: and the Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia, Richard West, p. 177) (IMG)

Roosevelt was a true friend of Stalin. Nonetheless, not much could be done by the democratically elected President of the United States, for he did not have many agents in the US military and intelligence bodies, whereas American finance capital dominated such means of violence. Hence, the clear gaps between the US intelligence service and Roosevelt can be observed as early as 1943, when the OSS began funding and arming the YCP partisans – by then a mix of Soviet-friendly Yugoslav patriots, democrats, and communists on the one hand and the anti-Soviet Anglophilic Nazis, Ustase, and jihadists on the other. Fighting alongside all these different factions within the YCP forces were the OSS officers who even commanded 600 Yugoslav Partisan forces. Joseph F. Jakub, a prominent US intelligence and diplomatic official, said:

The performance of the OSS team supporting the Partisans from Italy between October and December 1943 was a testament to the American's ingenuity and energy in moving huge quantities of captured Italian materiel in combat conditions to Yugoslavia. Indeed, it was in the best ‘can-do’ traditions of Donovan's organization. When OSS dispatched Sterling Hayden in November to Bari, he quickly established a base on behalf of Allied Forces Headquarters at the Italian port of Monopoli, which lay some 30 miles to the south, which became the principal operating base when Bari was bombed by the Germans soon thereafter. With 400 Partisans, 14 schooners, and assorted other vessels, Hayden directed the resupply of the Partisan-held island of Vis, mostly using Italian arms prized away from the British Command. OSS Bari, meanwhile, delivered 6500 tons of uniforms, food, medicine, weapons, and ammunition to the Partisans via a motley assortment of some 60 seagoing vessels between 15 October and 31 December. The Americans provided 150 000 gallons of petrol to a British torpedo boat facility in the Dalmatian islands that had been established at OSS Bari's request to protect the supply fleet, and delivered large amounts of diesel Oil, kerosene, petrol, and lubricating oil to Tito's forces. In conjunction with SOE's Force 133, OSS organized, equipped, and transported to Dalmatia a 'brigade' of 2000 fighters who had been recruited from among Yugoslavs interned in Italy. OSS assigned an officer to manage the Partisan supply facility on Vis and organized a shipping line between Bari and the three major Sicilian ports 'to assist in transporting 7000 tons of captured enemy material to Bari for trans-shipment to Yugoslavia ... By the end of December 1943 four Partisan bases at Bari, Monopoli, Molfetta, and Manfredonia were in full operation under the command of OSS officers with a staff of some 600 Partisans. (‘Spies and Saboteurs: Anglo-American Collaboration and Rivalry in Human Intelligence Collection and Special Operations, 1940-1945’, Joseph F. Jakub III, p. 135) (IMG)

The OSS involvement marked the beginning of a decades-long relationship between Tito’s fascist clique and the US intelligence. In the absence of an official ‘Third Reich’, it was inevitable that Tito would be recruited by the post-war era’s most powerful fascism-friendly regime: the regime of the United States. The CIA was founded in 1947. However, by the late 1940s, Tito indeed consistently consulted the CIA. The prominent pro-Tito Yugoslav scholar and politician Joze Pirjevec said:

According to Dedijer, Tito himself frequently met CIA functionaries in Belgrade and together they planned common policy. This did not escape the attention of the Soviets. (Tito and His Comrades, Joze Pirjevec, 2015, p. 212) (IMG)

Note that Dedijer was the official biographer of Tito.

The above excerpt refers to the ‘common policy’ of Tito’s gang and the CIA. Every policy of Tito’s group was in common with that of the CIA fascists. Not wrongly did the Soviet press reports frequently emphasize that ‘American imperialism bought the Gestapo agent Tito and his clique for a low price’. In fact, Tito’s regime, arising from the comprador classes (kulaks, bureaucrats, comprador merchants, comprador bankers, etc.) allied to Anglo-American finance capital, was furnished with American imperialist financial and military supports of all kinds. Furthermore, as confirmed by the Cominform resolution of 1949,:

The Tito clique transformed Belgrade into an American center for espionage and anti-Communist propaganda. (Communist Party of Yugoslavia in the Power of Murderers and Spies, Cominform, November 1949. MIA. The same document can be found in the ‘Revolutionary Democracy Organization of India’ archives section) (IMG)

The remarks by the Cominform are well-documented as correct, and more and more evidence of the correctness of the remarks will be presented throughout this book. However, some of the evidence will be presented here as well. A top American intelligence operative who parachuted into Yugoslavia to help Tito said in his memoirs:

As the tempo of the Cold War increased in 1948, driven by the ruthless installation of full Communist governments in Eastern Europe, I was asked to join in the creation of a new postwar secret operations organization. Known first as OPC (Office of Policy Coordination – a deliberately bland name), it later became a part of CIA. Almost immediately we were directed to find ways to strengthen Yugoslav capabilities to remain independent of Moscow. (Beacons in the Night: With the OSS and Tito’s Partisans in Yugoslavia, Franklin Lindsay, p. 336) (IMG)

By 1952, the prominent anti-Soviet US diplomatic official George Earle admitted that Tito was “our” (i.e. imperialist America’s) “communist”:

Tito … was, after all, nothing but a murderous Communist. He happens to be our murderous communist…; so we get along with him. (“The Katyn Forest Massacre: Hearings Before the Select Committee to Conduct and Investigation of the Facts, Evidence, and Circumstances of the Katyn Forest Massacre”, 82^nd Congress, Parts 5-7. 1952, p. 2208) (IMG)

The other Nazi agents who were the henchmen of Tito also participated in this relation with the CIA. The log of the director of the CIA is basically like the diaries or the daily memoirs of the high command of the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA director’s log for December 13, 1951 states:

Chief, OS/Belgrade reports that Gen. Velebit has informed Ambassador Allen that all arrangements for liaison between CIA and the UDB in Belgrade will be complete within a week. The Yugoslav officer selected to conduct this liaison will be the direct representative of Interior Minister Rankovic but will sit in the Yugoslav Foreign Office for cover purposes and to avoid the precedent of allowing foreigners to go directly to the Interior Ministry. This procedure follows that proposed by CIA during the original conversations with Gen. Velebit. (DIRECTOR’S LOG, Top Secret, CIA, December 13, 1951, p. 208) (IMG)

The CIA cooperation with the UDB was since long before 1951. One of the intermediaries was the Joint Distribution Committee, the intelligence organization to which the Mossad was subordinated. However, according to the above quote, all arrangements for liaison between the ‘former’ Gestapo agent Velebit and Rankovic’s fascist secret service and the CIA was to be fully completed within a week. Thus by late December 1951, the CIA’s liaison with the UDB on all fronts was to completed. Even before 1951, the UDB served the interests of the CIA, but 1951 smoothened such a relationship.

The cooperation between the Mossad and Tito’s fascist secret service goes back at least to the mid-1940s. Aspects of this intelligence cooperation have been documented elsewhere in this book. However, to provide an introduction to this, here is some information. Uri Bialer, an official researcher for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, remarked:

Yugoslavia had always been the location of one of the most important Mossad centers in Eastern Europe. This situation was the result of the special relationship which the Yugoslavs had developed in the course of the Second World War and thereafter with representatives of the Yishuv who had operated in the framework of the British war effort. After the war, it seems to have been buttressed by ideological perceptions. As one of the Mossad emissaries in the Balkans phrased it: “The Yugoslavs saw in the [Mossad] an embodiment of the struggle against imperialism. The Yugoslavs … as former partisans, … felt an emotional affinity for the small nation struggling against an enemy that vastly outnumbered and overpowered it.” (Between East and West: Israel’s Foreign Policy Orientation 1948-1956, Cambridge University Press, Uri Bialer, 1990, p. 114) (IMG)

History would prove that Yugoslavia would continue to be the most important center of the Mossad activity in the bloc of the USSR and the Peoples’ Democracies. The ties of Tito’s group to the Israeli military goes back to World War II, when Tito’s group established liaison with Dan Lanner, a traitor to the ‘Palmach’, the Hebrew socialist military force that was later unfortunately subordinated to the IDF. Prominent Mossad official Ehud Avriel wrote in his memoirs:

The third and most spectacular assault was on the main radar station on Mount Carmel. The commander of the 1st Battalion of the Palmach, then stationed in the vicinity of Haifa, had received instructions in the beginning of November to prepare for the eventuality of the 'related struggle'. His name was Dan Lanner, although once it had been Ernest Loehner, the son of the exclusive Vienna shopkeeper, Rudolf Loehner, who at the last moment and by pure chance had been plucked from the doomed at Cladovo to accompany a small, lucky group of youngsters to Palestine. Since then he had served as a parachutist-liaison officer in Tito's headquarters during the Yugoslav partisans' war of liberation, and from a Palmach commander he was to rise to the rank of general in Israel's army. The young man who only a few years earlier had been an 'illegal immigrant' himself was now commanding an operation to help secure the arrival of what was left of the victims of Nazi Europe. (‘Open the Gates!: A Personal Story of “Illegal” Immigration to Israel’, Ehud Avriel, 1975, p. 230) (IMG)

No doubt during the period 1941 to late 1942, an alliance with the Israelis against the Third Reich was necessary. In the early stages of World War II, Israel – as the settler-colony of American imperialism – had to contribute some of its resources to engage in an intelligence war with Nazi Germany. Involving the “Jewish Agency in Palestine” into fighting the Nazis would have certainly been progressive in the first stages of the Great Patriotic War, (1) because it contributed resources to fighting the Nazis, and (2) because for fighting the Nazis, it was forced to reallocate some of its resources away from slaughtering the Arabs and onto helping in the fight against the Nazis. Of course, the Jewish Agency in Palestine contributed so little to the fight against the Nazis, but insofar as it did, it did a correct thing, for it shifted resources away from murdering the Arabs and onto fighting the Nazis. From late 1942 onwards, the Israeli regime (‘The Jewish Agency in Palestine’) began to sponsor the Nazis as a bulwark against the Soviets, and so from then on, Israel played a reactionary role. Hence, the Mossad (Ha-Mossad Le-Aliyah Bet) began to support Tito’s group after late 1942 – particularly in 1943:

Some 240 Palestinian Jews volunteered to parachute into the Balkans in 1943 and the British established training camps in Cairo and Haifa. The following year, 32 men and women were, in fact, dispatched in joint British-Allyah Bet missions into Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Italy, Slovakia, Austria, and Yugoslavia. (…). The most successful of the Palestinian agents, Yesheyahu Trachtenberg, better known as Shaike Dan, had a remarkable wartime and postwar intelligence career and is remembered as the savior of thousands of Romanian Jews. (‘CIA AND NAZI WAR CRIM. AND COL. CHAP. 11-21, DRAFT WORKING PAPER_0001’, Chapter Eleven: American Intelligence and the Jewish Brichah, CIA Draft Working Paper, pp. 7-8) (IMG{Israel})

In the later phase of the Great Patriotic War, the Soviet Red Army arrived in Yugoslavia and, in collaboration with Yugoslav communists, liberated Belgrade. The arrival of the Soviet Red Army in Yugoslavia partially undermined the lobbying power of the Titoist faction in the YCP while catapulting upwards the communist agents there. As such, the Soviet presence and the Yugoslav communists yet again emerged as a force with which the Gestapo agent Tito had to reckon. Once again, Tito needed to cause a leap from quantity to quality, to inflict a quantitative change so to yield a qualitative change. The consolidation of power in the hands of Tito and his gang thus required the elimination of hundreds of thousands of communists and the planting of Titoist agents at the critical positions in the ranks of Yugoslav state apparatus.

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Note: the phrase “The anti-Soviet MI6 operative Richard West wrote” does not show in the original book, as the book had previously indicated that Richard West was a member of the British intelligence service and an enemy of the USSR.

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Image Credits

CIA logo. In the article ‘A cosa serve la CIA? Scopriamolo insieme’ by Francesco Polimeni. https://www.spiare.com/blog/a-cosa-serve-la-cia/

Yusuf Karsh. Photo of Tito, 1954. https://karsh.org/josip-broz-tito-2/

MI6 logo in Call of Duty. https://callofduty.fandom.com/wiki/MI6