IN MAY 1945, ANTE PAVELIC, head of the Nazi-puppet Independent State of Croatia, vanished. For years, no one knew what had happened to him. There were vague allusions to conspiracies involving Austrian palaces, Italian monasteries and mysterious collaborators who passed the front lines in clerical robes - but precious little evidence.
Today, we have made available on the web a selection from the contents of Ante Pavelic's dossier kept by the US Army's Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC). These files in no way explain all of the unanswered questions about the escape of Ante Pavelic and other Ustase leaders from justice after the war. They do however provide a series of intriguing clues as to how this high-ranking Nazi collaborator avoided the fate of Nuremberg, and the shocking truth that the United States government helped facilitate his escape.
Following are notes to ten key documents in this collection, in chronological order from June of 1945 to September of 1947, when the CIC's surveillance of Pavelic ended abruptly. You can view all of the army files available on this site in both scanned and HTML format here.
| 1. First Sightings June 5, 1945 |
 As early as June 5, 1945 - just three weeks after Pavelic fled from Zagreb as the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) collapsed before a Soviet-Yugoslav offensive - the Rome headquarters of the Chief of Staff of the Allied Expeditionary Force informed his counterparts in 6th and 12th Armies of the "possibility" that Pavelic and another Ustase minister of the NDH were in the American Occupation Zone in Austria. This information was most likely received from the Yugoslav government; Tito gave orders for the Yugoslav Army to apprehend the column of refugees that Pavelic and the other Ustase were in, and Yugoslav agents had by then penetrated far into the Austrian province of Carinthia. |
| 2. Sanctuary August 8, 1945 |
 No one can question the thoroughness of American intelligence. Just two months later, on August 8, 1945, Rome Area Allied Command sent a memo to the CIC asking three pertinent questions: "a. Is PAVELIC in Rome? b) if so, where, c) is the San Gerolamo Monostery [sic] used as a haven."
The Monastery of San Girolamo, where Father Krunoslav Draganovic was quietly building the most effective Nazi-smuggling operation of the post-war era, was indeed being used as a haven for Pavelic and several other Ustase fugitives. That American intelligence knew about it in August of 1945 is especially damning, as San Girolamo remained the locus of Ratline activity for the next three to five years. |
| 3. The Sacred Heart of Rome January 22, 1947 |
 A year and a half later, Special Agent William Gowen conducts a surveillance operation around one of Pavelic's suspected hideouts in Rome. If senior members of the United States government were hoping to bury the Pavelic case by assigning it to an inexperienced and overwhelmed investigator, they picked the wrong man. As this report shows, Gowen approached the investigation like a hard-nosed police detective: following leads, conducting stake-outs, and developing informants within the network of Croat exiles and Vatican priests shielding Pavelic from arrest. Striking in this document is the mention of "such known Pavelic contacts as DRAGANOVIC, Krunoslav," the papal favorite, who was to Gowen key to Pavelic's apprehension. |
| 4. The Ratline Exposed January 30, 1947 |
 Special Agent Robert Clayton Mudd, who worked from Naples for most of his time in the CIC, delivers a bombshell: the first extensive glimpse amidst the fumbling in the dark of what would become known as the Ratline: a Vatican network to rescue fugitive war criminals, provide them sanctuary and escort them out of Europe and away from investigators. Paragraph five states: "This informant, directed by this Agent to try to penetrate the Ustashi intelligence network in Italy and Jugoslavia, has managed to do so and it has been determined that the network runs from GRUMO-ROME-VENICE-TRIESTE-LJUBLJANA-ZAGREB. The whole affair is run under cover of the Roman Catholic clergy whose priests in these monasteries are nearly all of Croat extraction. Complete penetration of this organization is a rather lengthy process but efforts are being continued in that direction. There is no doubt that Ustashi elements in Italy communicate with one another, and that the focal point of all intelligence and activity is the Monastery of Saint Jerome [NB - Anglicized San Girolamo], Via Tomacelli, 132, ROME." |
| 5. Plausible Deniability February 25, 1947 |
 There are many instances of bewildering cynicism on the part of American officers in regard to the breakthroughs being made by the CIC's agents; this is the first of many. Captain Robert M. Stuart, as a note when forwarding Agent Gowen's last report up the chain of command (after sitting on it for more than a month), emphasizes that "It will be noted that the presence of [Pavelic] in Rome is still open to question" - before passing on a extraneous and, in light of the reports coming in by Agents Gowen and Mudd, entirely minor lead. |
| 6. The Do Marius Report May 6, 1947 |
 The Pavelic dossier is filled with gaps and missing pages, but the "Do Marius Report" may be one of the first attempts at outright deception by the superiors of the agents working the Pavelic case. Attorney Jonathan Levy writes, "I've been working with FOIA documents since 1999 on the Ustashe and have made hundreds of requests. There are some real caveats specific to the Pavelic case.
"Surviving US Intelligence documents are often appallingly incorrect or based on poor sources of information, and some could be deliberate misinformation. A history professor who recently visited NARA also confirmed that the Pavelic and Ustashe material in general was misfiled or often just missing," Levy says. The Do Marius Report was obtained from the CIA. In the report, an Italian agent confers with the anonymous author about a meeting with Ante Pavelic, who comes across rather like an old fellow in the tavern than a hunted Nazi collaborator. He claims his dispute with the Serbs came down entirely to an issue over the NDH's border with Serbia, rather than his regime's genocidal frenzy which began within weeks of the Ustase taking power in Zagreb in the Spring of 1941. Neither here, nor really anywhere else in the CIC files, is there any mention of Pavelic's destruction of the Croatian Jewish community, or the barbarism of their manner of execution. The author has quoted Pavelic in one long block of text throughout most of the report, but the Poglavnik inexplicably shifts to the third person in the final paragraph of the document. One or more pages of this document are missing. "James Angleton and Alan Dulles were both involved with Pavelic and his Ustashe," Levy says. "It was in their interest to make sure that much of the information simply vanished. For example, no one has ever been able to locate significant US Intelligence files on Pavelic from his stays in Argentina, Chile, and Spain." According to Levy, former CIC Special Agent William Gowen - who is the last surviving member of the Rome CIC team involved in the Pavelic case - believes that the Do Marius report may have been produced by Angleton. Later, as director of CIA Counter Intelligence, Angleton would open the floodgates to Nazi fugitives fleeing from Europe for use in the anti-Communist crusade. At this time he was in charge of a joint British-American OSS unit known as "SCI-Z," which had earlier stonewalled the CIC on the eve of the latter's planned arrest of Walter Rauff, the inventor of the Nazi's mobile gas chamber. With Angleton's assistance, Rauff become one of the most prominent German Nazis to escape. |
| 7. Imminent Arrest c. July, 1947 |
 Whatever his superiors thought of it, the hard information that Agent Gowen was collecting couldn't be ignored. After months of steady work, it appears that he had propelled an irresistible force of momentum leading towards Pavelic's arrest. This document, dated by other researchers as having been produced in July, 1947, appears to be notes organized from an interview with an informant (it is clearly marked "TRANSLATION" at the top, but is otherwise unidentifiable). It confirms an earlier report by Gowen which detailed the precise address at which Pavelic was hiding, and offers detailed instructions on how to access his abode. Pavelic "is living on Church property under the protection of the Vatican, at Via Giacomo Venezian No. 17-C, second floor... On the right the rooms are numbered 1,2,3, etc. If you knock once or twice at door No. 3 an unimportant person will come out. But if you knock once or twice times [sic] at door No. 3, door No.2 will open. It leads to the room where Pavelic lives." Included is a list of other prominent members of the Ustase also living in the same Vatican sanctuary. |
| 8. "Hands Off" July 7, 1947 |
 At first glance, this appears to be the sort of banal request that Pavelic be arrested that appears elsewhere in the file, this time from Bernard J. Grennan, Chief of Operations at the CIC in Rome. He conveys the desire of the Assistant Chief of Staff that Pavelic "be taken into custody on sight and that this office be notified immediately when such apprehension is made."
The difference from the previous orders to this effect which appear in the file is that now - on July 7, 1947 when this memo was issued - Pavelic's whereabouts were known, and Grennan had agents in the field prepared to carry out the order. A previous report by an outside investigator passed on an informant's note that every time Pavelic and his entourage were about to be arrested, "they were moved elsewhere by Allied personnel who were hiding them." It would be difficult to divert American agents moving in for an arrest in a similar manner without difficulty. Then, one week later, Agent Gowen's supervisor, Gono Morena, received a blunt message from his supervisors - one he thought important enough (and, quite possibly, incriminating enough) to append to this document - something that no other agent saw fit to do on any other file in the dossier. It is the closest thing to a smoking gun found in a sheaf of documents that has been purged, picked clean, and still only released begrudgingly:
New instructions: "Hands Off", In Unholy Trinity, the first book to expose the CIC documents, Mark Aarons and John Loftus note that after this "the operation [to arrest Pavelic] was allowed to quietly die. The apparent determination to arrest this notorious Nazi mass murderer disappeared, just as Pavelic himself had seemingly done in May 1945... Senior US officials were then developing their own network of ex-Nazis, and were beginning to co-ordinate activities with both the Vatican and London... No one cared about Nazis as long as they were anti-Communist." (p 82-83). |
| 9. "A Cultured Person and Social Liberal" August 29, 1947 |
 Agent Gowen has been told "Hands Off"; this document is either a master forgery or he is putting the best face on the situation. "British and American officials were playing bureaucratic chess," Loftus and Aarons write. "The intelligence operatives on the scene were merely their pawns and really did not understand the game's rules." Here, Pavelic is alleged to be under British as well as Vatican protection, which in part explains the agreement by London to the American proposal that the Italian authorities be brought into the discussions on any sensitive operation to arrest Pavelic, despite their notorious unreliability. Whatever the case, within forty-five days, Ante Pavelic has gone from a hunted war criminal to a misunderstood man whose own victims, the Serbs, have already forgiven him for the mass-murder of between three hundred and five hundred thousand of their kin. |
| 10. A Staggering Blow to the Catholic Church September 12, 1947 |
 This document is, in effect, the swan song of Agent Gowen and, for all intents and purposes, the entire investigation of the Pavelic case. Speaking for the record, and drawing attention to it in their short, punchy prose, Gowen and his partner note:
These agents have received the following impression of PAVELIC's contact with the VATICAN. PAVELIC's contacts are so high and his present position is so compromising to the VATICAN, that any extradition of Subject would deal a staggering blow to the Roman Catholic Church. Within 18 months, Ante Pavelic and his closest collaborators in the operation of the slaughterhouse of the Independent State of Croatia would be safely out of Italy and the Balkans and on their way to freedom in the West. Even as the Ustase was abandoned by Croats in droves, both during the war and immediately thereafter, the consequences of allowing this small extremist sect to survive have been incalculable. Far from becoming the pliant anti-Communist puppets that Angleton, Dulles and other American intelligence operatives wanted them to be, Pavelic's Ustase were reborn as a terrorist movement in the West, responsible for more than a hundred attacks on innocent civilians and public landmarks, including the Statue of Liberty. Sadly for the United States and the rest of the world, the handling of Pavelic and the Ustase was not an aberration, but a blueprint for successive American administrations, as shady characters nurtured by the CIA in countries like Afghanistan and Nicaragua have gone on to have truly spectacular careers in atrocity and terror. This is to say nothing of the moral consequences of offering an umbrella of protection to the highest-ranking Nazi collaborators to escape justice after the war. |
