On June 4, 2025 I will address the United Nations Security Council Arria Formula Meeting “Understanding and Resolving The Ideological Roots of the Ukranian Crisis.” (The meeting starts at 10 A.M. Eastern. You can watch it live here at UN Web TV.)
My presentation to the UNSC focuses on the secret history of U.S. recruitment, funding, arming, and training of Ukrainian nationalists (many of whom were wanted Nazi war criminals) during the Cold War — a topic I’ve researched and written about extensively over the years.
My Hidden History Revealed podcast series takes a deep dive into the Central Intelligence Agency’s covert collaboration with the Nazis in Ukraine which was kept from the American public for more than half a century.
Documents declassified under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998 finally revealed the truth: that the CIA began recruiting Ukrainian nationalists as anti-Soviet sabotage forces at the beginning of the Cold War in the late 1940s, with the ultimate goal of regime change in the Soviet Union.
On Episode 1, I’ll tell you the incredible story of how CIA Director Allen Dulles personally brought Mykola Lebed — a high-ranking Ukrainian Nazi war criminal and convicted murderer — to the United States, and gave him a job at the CIA.
Despite efforts by a few intrepid journalists to expose Lebed, and Department of Justice Nazi-hunters to prosecute him, the U.S. government protected Lebed until his death in 1998.
Who was Mykola Lebed? Depends on who you ask.
By various accounts, he was an assassin, a freedom fighter, a terrorist, a hero, a villain, a prisoner, a refugee, a Nazi collaborator, a propagandist, a spy, and a ruthless war criminal.
To the Central Intelligence Agency, which bankrolled his activities for close to half a century, he was known as “Uncle Louie.”
In 1934 Lebed was sentenced to death for the murder of Polish official Bronisław Pieracki. The sentence was commuted in 1936 to lifetime imprisonment, and Lebed managed to escape prison during the the German invasion of Poland in 1939.
In 1940, The OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) split into two factions: the OUN-B for loyalists of Stepan Bandera, and the OUN-M for followers of Andrei Melnik. Lebed was a leader of the #Bandera group.
The Nazis sent Bandera to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1942 after he declared Ukraine an independent state. Lebed then became the de facto leader of the Bandera faction, which largely controlled the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), through the end of the war. Over the following few years, the UPA was responsible for tens of thousands of murders.
After the end of World War II, Western intelligence agencies sought to acquire OUN members as informants and infiltrators. The OUN was avowedly anti-#Communist, and it already had a network of trained guerilla fighters at the ready for an anticipated Soviet offensive.
The United Kingdom’s MI6, their analogue to the CIA, opted to work with the Bandera, who later died under mysterious circumstances, allegedly murdered by the KGB.
The CIA chose to work with Lebed, then the Foreign Minister of the Ukrainian Supreme Liberation Council (UHVR). Lebed still had considerable influence among Ukrainian nationalists.
In the 1950s the Agency put Lebed to work in a propaganda operation called PROJECT AERODYNAMIC, setting him up with offices in New York City where he created Ukrainian language, anti-Soviet radio programs, pamphlets, and books to be distributed in the USSR.
Later, the CIA shielded Lebed from allegations and deportation because he was too valuable of an asset and any publicity could compromise the entire project.
More on PROJECT AERODYNAMIC here.
In this thread, you’ll find links to hundreds of documents about Mykola Lebed’s illegal work for the CIA, and the efforts of DoJ Nazi-hunter John Loftus to prosecute Lebed in the 1980s. (That fascinating story will be explored further in Episode 3 of the series.)
This episode of “Hidden History Revealed” originally aired on Feb. 18, 2024, marking the two-year anniversary of the Russia-Ukraine War.
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