The CIA's Secret Ukrainian Gambit: How Cold War Paranoia Forged Alliances with Nazi Collaborators
A newly surfaced 1998 CIA historical study draws back the curtain on one of the agency's most morally complicated early partnerships — its deliberate recruitment of Ukrainian nationalist leaders with documented ties to Nazi Germany. Classified SECRET and spanning 25 pages, this internal report was compiled by CIA historian Kevin C. Ruffner and traces the operational origins of America's embrace of men whose wartime records were, at best, deeply troubling. What emerges is a portrait of pragmatism overriding principle at the dawn of the Cold War.
Historical Context
By 1945, the wreckage of Europe was already being divided into new battlefields. As the Red Army consolidated Soviet control across Eastern Europe, Washington's attention shifted rapidly from defeating Nazi Germany to containing Soviet expansion. Ukraine — vast, strategically vital, and seething with anti-Soviet sentiment — became an attractive theater for covert operations. The problem was finding reliable local partners willing to work against Moscow.
Enter the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its armed wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). These groups had spent the war years in an uneasy, often active collaboration with Nazi Germany. OUN leader Stefan Bandera and figures like Yaroslav Stetsko — who would later head the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations — had welcomed the Wehrmacht's 1941 invasion as a potential path to Ukrainian independence. The Nachtigall Legion, a Ukrainian unit operating under German command, became a symbol of that collaboration. Massacres in Lviv in 1941, in which OUN-affiliated forces participated, remained a raw historical wound.
The Strategic Services Unit (SSU), the OSS's postwar successor and CIA precursor, nevertheless opened contact with these émigré networks in occupied Germany. Under Director William Quinn, SSU officers including Boleslav Holtsman worked Munich's displaced persons camps, identifying Ukrainian nationalists who possessed intelligence value — knowledge of Soviet territory, Red Army order of battle, and underground resistance networks still operating inside Ukraine.
What This Document Reveals
The Ruffner report documents in clinical detail how the CIA's predecessor agencies moved from cautious contact to active operational partnership. Mykola Lebed, the UHVR's Foreign Minister and a figure whose wartime role in OUN security operations was known to U.S. handlers, became a central CIA asset — eventually relocated to the United States under the AERODYNAMIC program. The report traces cryptonyms including CAPARISON, BELLADONNA, and KILKENNY, offering rare operational texture to relationships that were, for decades, officially denied.
Perhaps most striking is the document's frank acknowledgment that American officers were aware of their recruits' backgrounds. The report does not exonerate; it explains. Intelligence officers weighed the nationalists' anti-Soviet credentials against their wartime records and, consistently, chose utility. Referat-33, an internal SSU analytical unit, processed intelligence flowing from these networks even as questions about Nazi collaboration remained unresolved.
Why It Matters Today
This document is not merely historical artifact. The OUN's legacy remains fiercely contested in contemporary Ukraine and across the diaspora, carrying direct relevance to how Western governments have framed Ukrainian identity and resistance in the post-2014 and post-2022 periods. Understanding that America's relationship with Ukrainian nationalism was built on a foundation of strategic compromise — not ideological solidarity — adds essential nuance to current policy debates.
The full 25-page report is available now in the Intelligence Archive.
Read the declassified document: Cold War Allies: The Origins of CIA's Relationship with Ukrainian Nationalists