Raoul Wallenberg - Possible Connection To US Intelligence

Possible Connection To US Intelligence

In May 1996 the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) released thousands of previously classified documents regarding Raoul Wallenberg, in response to requests filed under the Freedom of Information Act. The documents, along with an investigation conducted by the publication US News and World Report, appeared to confirm the long-held suspicion that Wallenberg was an American intelligence asset during his time in Hungary. In addition to Wallenberg's name appearing on a roster found in the National Archives which listed the names of operatives associated with the CIA's wartime predecessor the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the documents also included a 1954 memo from an anonymous CIA source that identified a Hungarian-exile living in Stockholm who, according to the author: "assisted…in inserting Roul Wallenberg into Hungary during WWII as an agent of OSS". Another declassified memorandum written in 1990 by the curator of the CIA's Historical Intelligence Collection William Henhoeffer, characterized the conclusion that Wallenberg was working for the OSS while in Budapest as being "essentially correct".

More telling was a communique sent on November 7, 1944 by the OSS Secret Intelligence Branch in Bari, Italy which apparently acknowledged that Wallenberg was acting as an unofficial liaison between the OSS and the Hungarian Independence Movement (MFM), an underground anti-Nazi resistance organization. The OSS message notes Wallenberg's contacts with Geza Soos, a high-ranking MFM leader and further explains that Soos "may only be contacted" through the Swedish legation in Budapest, which was Wallenberg's workplace and also served as the operational center for his attempts to aid the Hungarian Jews. The same message's assertion that Wallenberg "will know if he (Soos) is not in Budapest" is also curious, in that by November 1944 Soos was in hiding and knowledge of his whereabouts would only have been available to individuals closely involved with the MFM. This conclusion is given further weight by additional evidence suggesting that communications from the MFM to US intelligence were transmitted first to Stockholm and then relayed to Washington via Iver C. Olsen, the American OSS operative who initially recruited Wallenberg to go to Budapest in June 1944.

This particular disclosure has given rise to speculation as to whether, in addition to his efforts to rescue the Hungarian Jews, Wallenberg may have also been pursuing a parallel clandestine mission aimed at politically destabilizing Hungary’s pro-Nazi government on behalf of the OSS. This would also seem to add some credence to the potential explanation that it was his association with US intelligence that led to Wallenberg being targeted by Soviet authorities in January 1945. Several other humanitarians who had helped refugees during World War II disappeared behind the Iron Curtain in the period 1949/50, several years after Wallenberg’s disappearance. OSS ties may have been of interest to the Soviets, but is not a complete explanation because some of those detained, i.e. Hermann Field and Herta Field, had not worked for the OSS. All of these humanitarians, however, like Wallenberg, had interacted with a large number of anti-fascist and socialist refugees during the War, and this experience was used in the Stalin regime’s factional politics and show trials.