Doubts about Derwinski By Jonathan Marshall December 27, 1988 President-elect Bush's appointment of former Republican congressman and

undersecretary of state Edward Derwinski as head of the new Veterans Department slipped by the American media and public, puts a lowprofile personality in a relatively low-profile job. But before the U.S. Senate approves him, it ought to ask the nominee whether he intends to represent American veterans or Nazi veterans, American democratic ideals or those of foreign dictatorships. Those questions are apt, given Derwinski's record of service in an organization riddled with former Nazi collaborators and his alleged role in passing intelligence secrets to the South Korean secret police in the late 1970s. As a Republican member of Congress from Illinois, Derwinski long espoused the right wing agenda of the so-called "captive nations" lobby, whose activists support measures to roll back Soviet control of the Balkan nations and even to break up the Soviet Union into its constituent nationality groups. This fiercely anti-Communist coalition, dominated by Eastern European and Soviet migrs, played a key role in organizing ethnic support for Republican presidential campaigns, through the National Republican Heritage Groups (Nationalities) Council. Derwinski headed the executive board of the council's immediate predecessor, the Heritage Groups for Reelection of the President in 1972. With him on the executive board were:

Frederic Malek, who did President Nixon's bidding in investigating the overrepresentation of Jewish officials in top government offices; Laszlo Pasztor, who as a young Hungarian in World War II joined the local equivalent of the Nazi Party, the Arrow Cross, and became a junior diplomat to Berlin in the later stages of the war; Philip Guarino, a close friend of the Italian fascist plotter Licio Gelli and member of his secret masonic lodge, which Italian authorities accused of conspiring against the state; Lev Dobrianski, a right-wing Ukrainian-American activist and founder of the World AntiCommunist League, which was later denounced by the head of its British chapter as "a collection of Nazis, Fascists, anti-Semites, sellers of forgeries, vicious racialists and corrupt self-seekers"; and Anna Chennault, another WACL activist and prominent member of the Taiwan and South Korea lobbies.

According to Russ Bellant, author of the recent study ``Old Nazis, the New Right and the Reagan Administration'' published by Political Research Associates in Cambridge, ``at least four people charged with war crimes were in leadership positions'' of Derwinski's ethnic support group. The leader of Byelorussian-Americans for Reelection of the President, for example, was Stanislaus Stankievich, who administered the town of Borrisow for the SS in World War II. According to former Justice Department investigator John Loftus, Stankievich ordered the murder of 7,000 Jewish men, women and children in 1941, one of the most savage and notorious killing orgies of the war. A US government report noted that he ``worked first with the Soviets, then with the Nazis, then again for the Soviets. He appears to be an opportunist who will work for anyone who will pay him.[gf60]Subject is considered a security risk." Even so, he worked for the CIA's Radio Liberty in Munich and finally got a visa to enter the United States in 1959. Three members of the advisory board of the Latvian section of Derwinski's group also had unsavory records.

Boleslavs Maikovskis was charged with triggering bloody, anti-Jewish pogroms in the Latvian towns of Audrini and Rezekne, where he was chief of police under the Nazis. (Maikovskis left the United States for Germany rather than face deportation last year.) Alfred Berzins, now dead, was ``a fanatic Nazi'' and ``responsible for murder, ill treatment and deportation of 2,000 persons'' according to US government charges. And Vilis Hazners, accused by US officials of overseeing horrible wartime atrocities against Jews, later came to the United States where ran the Latvian Officers Association, ``a thinly disguised self-help group made up in large part of Waffen SS veterans,'' states Christopher Simpson, author of Blowback, a masterful account of CIA's recruitment of former Nazis. Other activists in Derwinski's organization included Nicholas Nazarenko, leader of the Cossack American Republican National Federation, who admitted serving the SS in Romania as an interrogator of POWs. His views don't seem to have changed much in forty years. In a speech in 1984, he referred to Jews as a ``Fifth Column'' who had to be ``arrested and imprisoned'' as a defense against international Communism. Yet another ethnic Republican in Derwinski's orbit, Ivan Docheff, was once a leader of the National Legion of Bulgaria, a group denounced publicly by other Bulgarian Americans as ``fascist.'' He was a guest of the White House in 1984 while under investigation by the Justice Department for war crimes committed while he was mayor of a German-occupied Bulgarian city. Derwinski remained a leader of this ethnic effort at least as late as 1976, when he chaired the Republican Heritage Groups Council. When candidate George Bush recruited many of these Derwinski associates into his campaign through the American Nationalities Coalition in 1988, revelation of their background caused a stink. American Jewish leaders called news of their work for Bush a ``shocking revelation'' and ``outrageous and frightening.'' Several of those named in press reports, including Pasztor and Guarino, subsequently resigned from the campaign. Such associations were not out of character for Derwinski. As former House Foreign Affairs Committee staffer Robert Boettcher once observed, ``When racists or dictators were criticized, Derwinski put aside his personal distaste for some of their policies and courageously defended them if they were strong antiCommunists.'' Boettcher had first-hand knowledge of Derwinski's views. He ran the investigation of South Korean influence peddling in the late 1970s for the House subcommittee on International Relations, chaired by Rep. Donald Fraser, D-Minn. Derwinski was the ranking Republican on the subcommittee. An outspoken defender of the Korean military dictatorship, he tried to cut funds for the probe. During the height of the investigation, in 1977, the head of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) for the entire Northeastern United States contacted Fraser to defect and tell his story. Fraser handled the plans with the utmost secrecy, informing only Derwinski of the upcoming defection. ``The staff briefed Derwinski at 4:15 p.m.,'' Boettcher noted. ``By five o'clock, the KCIA had learned that one of its officers in New York, unnamed, was about to defect.'' Fortunately, the FBI found him before the KCIA did. The Wall Street Journal later reported that the State Department, CIA and Pentagon concluded that Derwinski most probably had betrayed the defector. (He denied it, claiming to be a victim of ``guilt by association'' for his ``consistent support for South Korea.'') The Justice Department actually brought an obstruction-of-justice case before a grand jury, which reportedly concluded that he was indeed guilty. But the case was ultimately dropped because the most persuasive evidence, an intercepted telephone call between Derwinski and Korean officials, was too sensitive to release in court. But the repercussions continued. The affair ``crippled the Fraser investigation for six months,'' according to Boettcher. ``The Departments of State, Justice, Defense and the CIA stopped providing classified material to the subcommittee because of the unresolved breach of security.''

Derwinski came out fine. He is the proud recipient of the South Korean government's Gwangha Medal in honor of his contribution to its foreign policy. After his defeat for reelection in 1980, Derwinski joined the Reagan state department. Today he is slated to become a member of the United States cabinet. Will Congress greet this former colleague with a pat on the back? Or will it stand up for America's veterans and reject as their representative a man who opposes all they fought for?