O
carte recenta face valva prin State pe motiv ca expune cum ar fi fost
lucrat JFK de interesele complexului militar-industrial prin precursorii
statului-serviciilor
http://www.amazon.com/The-Devils-Chessboard-Am…/…/0062276166
. Afla omul destule, chiar si de Malaxa, desi nu am gasit referinte
pentru mai multe din afirmatiile autorului despre contextul romanesc al
perioadei in discutie.
By 1952, Richard Nixon’s triumph as a
Cold War inquisitor had won him the number-two spot on the Republican
presidential ticket headed by war hero Dwight D. Eisenhower. But on
September 29, Drew Pearson, Washington’s leading muckraker, dropped a
bombshell on Nixon—one of his favorite targets—that briefly threatened
to end his political career. The story was part of a larger theme of
corruption that reporters like Pearson believed hovered over Nixon’s
career. Nixon, the humble son of Whittier, always seemed hungry for ways
to profit from his public service.
Earlier in the race, Pearson had
discovered that Nixon’s wealthy Southern California supporters had set
up a slush fund for the politician’s personal use—a revelation that had
nearly forced the vice presidential candidate to resign as Eisenhower’s
running mate. It took Nixon’s brilliantly homespun TV address to the
nation—which would go down in history as the “Checkers speech” after the
black-and-white cocker spaniel that had been given to Nixon’s daughters
by a supporter—to preempt the budding scandal and save his political
career. “And you know, the kids love the dog,” Nixon told the largest
audience that had ever tuned in for a political speech. “And I just want
to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we’re
going to keep it.” His shameless performance managed to transform a
case of blatant political corruption into a domestic drama that touched
the hearts of millions of Americans.
Nixon’s enormous relief was
shared by the GOP power brokers who had picked him for the race. It was
the Dulles-Dewey group that had tapped Nixon for vice president. Their
decision was conveyed to Eisenhower by Herbert Brownell Jr., a fellow
Wall Street attorney who had taken a leave from his blue-chip firm to
run the Republican campaign for the White House. The GOP brain trust
convinced the aging general that the young senator from California not
only brought regional balance to the ticket but the kind of slashing
energy and anti-Communist fervor that the campaign needed.
But now,
in the final weeks of the presidential contest, Pearson was again on the
verge of blowing up Nixon’s career. Reporting in his widely syndicated
Washington Merry-Go-Round column, Pearson revealed that the vice
presidential candidate had left out something very important from his
Checkers speech: namely, his crooked relationship with a Romanian
industrialist named Nicolae Malaxa. The wealthy Romanian émigré had
collaborated with the Nazis during the war, and later with the Communist
regime that took over his homeland. But Malaxa’s reputation, Pearson
reported, did not discredit him with Senator Nixon, who pulled strings
on his behalf to allow him to continue living in the United States and
to procure a major tax break for him.
Pearson knew that Nixon had
performed these favors for Malaxa in return for an impressive bribe.
But, lacking the documentary evidence, the columnist had to leave this
crucial piece of evidence out of his story.
There was indeed a
smoking gun: a $100,000 check from Malaxa deposited in Nixon’s Whittier
bank account. But Pearson was unable to get his hands on it. In a twist
of bad luck for Nixon, one of the tellers at his bank branch turned out
to be a Romanian refugee who loathed Malaxa. He sent a photostatic copy
of the check to political rivals of the notorious industrialist in the
exile community, who in turn forwarded the copied check to their contact
in the CIA, Gordon Mason, chief of the agency’s Balkans desk.
By
fall 1952, Allen Dulles was the number two man at the CIA and was in
line to take over the agency with an Eisenhower-Nixon victory in
November. As deputy director, Dulles was already making the agency his
own, working with loyal associates like Frank Wisner—who would soon take
over the agency’s action arm—on ways to escalate the covert war against
the Eastern bloc. But the ambitious plans that Dulles and Wisner were
hatching for a long-awaited Republican presidency suddenly seemed in
peril when Gordon Mason walked into Wisner’s office with a copy of the
Malaxa check. “Jesus Christ!” Wisner burst out. “We’d better see Allen
Dulles.”
As he had long demonstrated, Frank Wisner was quite willing
to recruit from among the ranks of ex-fascists for his espionage
operations in Eastern Europe—many of whom he had slipped past
immigration authorities into the United States despite their barbaric
wartime records. But Wisner, somewhat mysteriously, had insisted on
drawing the line with Nicolae Malaxa, whom he considered a particularly
“unsavory” character. In a March 1951 CIA memo, Wisner had even urged
that Malaxa—who had finagled his way into the United States after the
war as part of a Romanian trade delegation—be deported. Wisner had
served as the OSS station chief in Romania, and he considered the
country his turf. He was acutely sensitive to the factions and feuds
within the Romanian exile community, where Malaxa provoked feelings
passionate enough to tear apart all hope of a united anti-Soviet front.
Despite Wisner’s feelings about Malaxa, he realized that Allen Dulles
was deeply implicated in the Romanian’s “unsavory” story. Dulles had not
only been Malaxa’s lawyer, he had introduced him to Nixon. The Malaxa
money trail, in fact, led in many compromising directions, including
Nixon’s bank account, Dulles’s law firm, CIA front organizations like
the National Committee for a Free Europe, and even some of Wisner’s own
secret combat groups. The Romanian industrialist, who reportedly stashed
away as much as $500 million (worth over $6.5 billion today) in
overseas accounts before he fled to the United States, had made himself
extremely useful as a shadow financier for the underground Cold War.
Malaxa was the type of charming scoundrel with whom Dulles enjoyed
doing business. The Romanian oligarch had no ideology; he believed only
in opportunity. He had a witty sense of humor and the dark good looks of
a dashing werewolf, with thick black hair and a pronounced widow’s
peak. He conducted himself with a cynical, Mittel-European confidence
that everyone had a price, greasing his way through life by smoothly
slipping cash to all the right people. Bribery came so naturally to
Malaxa that he once tried to buy off the dedicated U.S. Immigration and
Naturalization Service prosecutor who was handling his case—a man who,
to Malaxa’s great surprise, turned out to be incorruptible.
He began
his career in modest fashion, as a locomotive repairman, but he had a
talent for making connections and opening doors, and soon he amassed a
small fortune as a manufacturer of railroad equipment. In the 1920s, he
and his family moved into a mansion in Bucharest, where he entertained
the capital’s high society, and befriended the mistress of King Carol
II, Madame Magda Lupescu. In a deft, Game of Thrones–like move, he
cemented his royal connections by arranging for his own daughter to
become the mistress of the king’s son, Prince Michael. By forging a
partnership with the king, who proved equally avaricious, Malaxa became a
dominant player in the country’s steel, munitions, and oil industries.
In the 1930s, as Hitler built his war machine in Germany, King Carol’s
rule came under increasing pressure from a homegrown fascist movement
known as the Iron Guard. The virulently anti-Semitic organization blamed
Jews for Romania’s woes and targeted prominent Jewish figures such as
Madame Lupescu. Despite the debt he owed the king’s mistress for her
patronage, the ever-opportunistic Malaxa began currying favor with the
Iron Guard as the group grew more powerful, financing its activities and
flying its flag from the roof of his stone mansion.
In September
1940, the Iron Guard forced King Carol to abdicate and a pro-German
fascist government took power in Bucharest. With Hitler’s influence
expanding in Romania, Malaxa made another nimble move, merging his
industrial empire with that of Herman Goering’s brother Albert. “Your
interests, my dear Mr. Malaxa, are the same as ours,” the Nazi
industrialist warmly assured him.
In January 1941, Malaxa’s
green-uniformed Iron Guard thugs, feeling betrayed by Romania’s new
fascist government, launched a coup attempt, using the industrialist’s
mansion as a base for their assault. During the coup, the Iron Guard
fell upon the country’s Jews in one of the most horrific spasms of
violence in Romania’s history. Thousands of Jews in Bucharest were
rounded up and beaten and tortured, including one group of more than a
hundred—among them children as young as five—who were marched into a
municipal slaughterhouse and butchered. The Iron Guardsmen hung their
victims, some still alive, on meat hooks and “mutilated them in a
vicious parody of kosher slaughtering practices,” according to one later
account. The Iron Guard’s Bucharest pogrom was so depraved that it
shocked even the country’s fascist regime, which appealed to Hitler to
help put down the uprising.
After the coup was suppressed, Malaxa
was jailed as a leader of the conspiracy and his industrial empire was
confiscated by the Nazis and the Romanian government. But, in 1944, as
the advancing Soviet army drove the Germans out of Romania, Malaxa again
rose from the ashes, insinuating himself into the new Moscow-backed
regime. He was the only Romanian capitalist to whom the Communist
government returned his industrial property.
Nevertheless, Malaxa
was savvy enough to realize that his future was not bright in a
Communist Romania. He had already taken the precaution of salting away
much of his huge fortune in U.S. accounts. After the war, by making a
generous distribution of bribes—including jewels, Cadillacs, and
cash—Malaxa persuaded Romanian officials to allow him to travel to the
United States, ostensibly on trade business for the country. He arrived
in 1946 and never returned home.
Malaxa wisely chose to apply for
permanent residency, instead of American citizenship, knowing the
process was not as demanding. But his résumé was so eyebrow raising that
his battle to stay in the United States would drag on for years.
Malaxa’s OSS, CIA, FBI, and INS files bulged with condemnations of his
morally dexterous, shape-shifting life. One government report labeled
him “notorious.” Another called him “the most perfidious man in
Romania.” He was a “master of the art of bribery” who had ushered in an
“era of corruption” in Romania. He was a flagrant “opportunist” who “had
been on all sides of the fence at various times.” He had gone from
playing “Hitler’s game” to someone who “must be considered an agent of
the Soviet government and of the Romanian Communists in the United
States, even if he himself is not a Communist at heart.”
According
to a 1952 CIA memo, “perhaps the most concise appraisal of Malaxa” came
from an American diplomat who found him “entirely unscrupulous, turning
with the wind, and like a cat [he] has developed to a high art the knack
of landing on his feet. He is considered to be essentially a dangerous
type of man.”
None of this mattered to Allen Dulles when Malaxa
turned up at his office at Sullivan and Cromwell. The pertinent fact was
that the Romanian had a huge fortune, and he was willing to spend
millions of it where Dulles wanted him to. In return for financing
Dulles’s far-flung anti-Communist network—which stretched from Buenos
Aires to Bucharest—Malaxa secured Dulles’s influential help in his
battle to stay in the United States. Some of Malaxa’s treasure went to
prominent Romanian exile leaders who hoped to take power after the
Communist regime was toppled. Other funds went to Juan Perón’s
Argentina, where Malaxa was involved in a rising neofascist movement,
and France, where he underwrote “scholarships” for exiled Romanian
“students” who turned out to be veterans of the vicious Iron Guard.
By 1948, Malaxa was ensconced in a luxurious apartment on Manhattan’s
Fifth Avenue, but his wheeling and dealing had begun to attract unwanted
press attention. In May, gossip columnist Walter Winchell exposed the
notorious collaborator who was freely enjoying the city’s pleasures—the
“Balkanazi on Broadway,” he called Malaxa. Winchell noted that the
“distinguished” firm of Sullivan and Cromwell had recently dropped the
Romanian as a client, presumably because he had grown too hot.
But
Dulles did not abandon Malaxa; behind the scenes, he entrusted the
Romanian’s immigration battle to his political protégé Nixon. In return
for Malaxa’s substantial gift of $100,000, the California senator began
vigorously lobbying INS officials on his behalf and pushing an
immigration bill through Congress that was designed to win Malaxa U.S.
residency. When those efforts stalled due to determined resistance from
legislators who were repelled by the émigré’s past, Malaxa and Nixon
tried a different tack. With the help of Nixon cronies in Southern
California, Malaxa announced that he was setting up a pipeline factory
in Whittier that he called the Western Tube Corporation. Nixon wrote a
letter to the Defense Production Administration, claiming that Malaxa’s
project was “strategically and economically important, for both
California and the entire United States.” The Western Tube factory was
never built, but the phantom project succeeded in winning Malaxa a huge
tax windfall. And it kept alive the Romanian’s immigration campaign.
California congressman John Shelley later denounced the Western Tube
affair as “a complete fraud, a springboard for [Malaxa’s] entry to the
United States.”
As the smoldering Malaxa scandal threatened to erupt
into flames in the final days of the 1952 presidential race, Dulles
moved quickly to douse it. After Wisner and Mason showed him Malaxa’s
$100,000 check, the deputy CIA director knew that he would have to send
it up the chain of command to his boss, General Walter Bedell Smith. But
Dulles also realized that, in this case, passing the buck was as good
as destroying the evidence. CIA director “Beetle” Smith had served as
Eisenhower’s intensely dedicated chief of staff during the war, and he
was just as devoted to Ike’s presidential victory as Dulles.
It was
Gordon Mason who was given the unpleasant task of showing the evidence
of Nixon’s corruption to General Smith, who predictably flew into a
rage. “Smith was a man who could cuss in three languages and in almost
every sentence,” recalled Mason. “He also had a violent temper, and he
acted as though I personally was trying to scuttle Eisenhower.” Smith
demanded that Mason immediately gather up every scrap of incriminating
material against Nixon and bring it to his office. “The story was
cleaned from the books,” said Mason. Wisner, too, had no doubt what was
done with the evidence. “Beetle just flushed it all down the toilet.”
Without a copy of the Malaxa check, Drew Pearson could not keep the
story going, and it soon petered out. On Election Day, Eisenhower and
Nixon swept to a decisive victory, winning 55 percent of the vote and
carrying thirty-nine of the forty-eight states.
After the Republican
triumph, Dulles and Nixon were finally able to speed Malaxa’s
immigration case through the bureaucracy. In December 1953, officials in
Eisenhower’s Justice Department bypassed Congress and the INS and
granted Malaxa permanent residence through an administrative decree.
Justice Department officials explained that they had reached their
decision due to the unique technical services provided by the Western
Tube Corporation. The fact that Malaxa’s company did not actually
exist—and never would—was politely overlooked by the new administration.
Nicolae Malaxa lived out the rest of his days in the comfort of his
Fifth Avenue apartment. He began to fancy himself a great benefactor. In
January 1953, shortly before Eisenhower’s inauguration, Malaxa reached
out the hand of friendship to a prominent Jewish exile named Iancu
Zissu. Malaxa sent word that he was eager to meet with Zissu, who was
the cofounder of a Romanian exile group. The odd meeting took place in
the New York apartment of a popular Romanian singer. According to one
witness, “Malaxa told Zissu that he had wanted for some time to know him
because he is a great friend of the Jews and a great admirer of the
Jewish religion. Malaxa stated that if he could change his own religion,
he would adopt the Jewish faith.”
As he bid Zissu farewell, Malaxa
“assured him that those who had been his friends had never had reasons
to regret it.” It was a surprising burst of goodwill—or, more likely,
another attempt by the wily millionaire to buy political support.
From the financial patron of Iron Guard butchers to “great friend of the
Jews”—it was just one more grotesque twist in a life filled with them.