WASHINGTON REPORT: The F.B.I. and the Servo-Croats

...Those same convictions lay behind the decades-long, utterly fruitless "investigation" and harassment of the Socialist Workers Party now called off...

...The difference is that while the hijacking involved American citizens, all previous acts of terrorism have been directed against Yugoslav citizens in this country, usually diplomatic ones, a class that does legitimately command some special treatment...

...From the point of view of the dead monster, the Yugos are Commies, to be smitten hip and thigh by any means available...

...foreign policy is guided by the Doctrine, then Yugoslavia's independence, since it is offensive to the Soviets, is no less so to Kissinger and Sonnenfeldt, It is disruptive of order, a possible source of friction between the Great Powers, sets a bad example for other small nations wishing to behave without regard to the Kissingerian-Brezhnevian division of the world into territories like those in Chicago in the old days...

...In New York as elsewhere, the tradition is that no one kills a cop and gets away with it...

...Like policemen in their swift vengeance, the Croatians had been made into a special class by the FBI's complaisance toward, if not complicity in, their terrorist attacks on Yugoslav diplomats and diplomatic buildings...

...What is much more easily conceivable to me, at least, is that the FBI, following its familiar methods of infiltration, prevents violence against the Soviets in this country by such dissident groups, not only permits but quite possibly assists Croatian violence against Yugoslav diplomatic missions...

...Of them all, is it conceivable that none feels the bitterness that Croatians feel about a situation now well over half a century old, that none wishes to protest with violence, by bombing the Soviet Embassy here, the Soviet Mission at the UN...

...They may well be responsible for the FBI's remarkably poor record in regard to the Mafia, which flourishes as the green bay tree but is demonstrably non-Communist and on occasion has been violently anti-Communist...

...Had the Croatians been an organization remotely suspected of Communist leanings, on the record the FBI would have been all over them, infiltrating, probably directing, even instigating crimes and then arresting the people committing them...

...At this point, things get even more embarrassing for the FBI...

...frank getlein...

...Perpetrators of criminal acts let off such as Nixon, Agnew, Kleindienst and Pat Gray, are very special cases...

...The outstanding obstacle to that hegemony and the most significant opposition to the complementary "Brezhnev Doctrine," according to which the Soviet Union is the ultimate arbiter as to the purity of other Communist countries' Marxism, has been and continues to be Yugoslavia...

...The complaisance, which is a matter of record, and the conceivable complicity, which is not, stem ultimately from the convictions of the late monster, J. Edgar Hoover, that all evil in the world came from Communism and that the threat of Communism was so imminent and so awful that absolutely any means were justified in fighting it...

...The hijacking of that plane was not the first, merely the most audacious act of political terrorism committed in the United States by Croatian terrorists...

...At one point in America's tortuous road to understanding Communism, the Yugoslav break with the Moscow that had been Tito's tutor was hailed as a gain for "our side...

...It powerfully motivates people to think twice before they shoot at policemen pursuing them for crimes committed more or less publicly...

...If U.S...

...It is thus that the primitive thuggery of J. Edgar Hoover becomes one with the more sophisticated thuggery of Henry Kissinger...

...next, the Poles, the Czechs, the Hungarians, the Roumanians, the Bulgarians...

...if the USSR eventually does come over the mountains...

...Unless we assume that the FBI is monumentally incompetent, complaisance or complicity has to be behind the total failure ever to capture a Croatian terrorist, ever to "solve" any of the outrageous bombings of the Yugoslav Embassy here, the Yugoslav Mission to the United Nations and assorted Yugoslav consulates...

...If the law can pull itself together to bring justice to murderers of policemen, it should do so to all murderers...

...The key word in both apparent conflicts is "seems...

...Edgar axis will come in whether the Justice Department is able to contrive some form of escape for the Croatians...

...All of these people have strong nationalistic, often church-related organizations in this country...

...Regardless of the dubiety, that tradition of implacable justice for cop-killers is unlikely to be put aside by the New York authorities in the case of the Croatian terrorists...

...Meanwhile, there's the murder rap in New York, which, even under Rockefeller, never quite got around to having a foreign policy except in regard to Puerto Rico and the Arabs...

...The big test of the Kissinger-Sonnen-feldt-J...

...AMD THE SERVO-CROATS It must have been embarrassing for the FBI when the French resolutely stood up to the Croatian terrorists and hijackers, compelled their surrender at the airport in Paris and then shipped them back to the States for trial on the federal grounds of hijacking and, infinitely worse, the New York state grounds of killing that policeman and wounding his comrades...

...Counting from the top you get the Estonians, the Latvians, the Lithuanians, and you could throw in the Finns for the Lake Ladoga lands...

...There are in this country, what would you say, how many dissident refugee groups of people who resent the absorption of their native lands into the Soviet Union in fact or in law...

...Similarly, the FBI cooperation with the Croatian hijackers by strongly urging five American newspapers to print the Croatians' propaganda seems to conflict with the existing international agreement to which the United States is not only a party but the principal sponsor and which forbids any concessions at all to aeroplane hijackers...

...The reason the tradition is legally dubious is that it creates a special class before a law which in theory knows no special classes...

...From the point of view of suave living monsters at State, this placates the restless spirit of J. Edgar and at the same time keeps the Yugos off guard, making them wonder exactly how much they can count on the U.S...

...Oddly enough, or perhaps not so oddly, the Kissinger-Sonnenfeldt Doctrine casts a shadow on that jubilation...

...You knock over a man in blue and the whole apparatus of law enforcement comes alive and angry, tracks you down, captures you and-if indeed it does not kill you in the process of capturing you-brings you to a swift and implacable trial which either dispatches you permanently or puts you away for a life term that comes as close as possible to actually being a life term...

...The apparent conflict in both cases is resolved by recalling the Kissinger-Son-nenfeldt Doctrine, under which order is maintained in the world in part by the American recognition of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe and the Balkans...

...On the face of it, this FBI secret war on foreign Communism seems to conflict with the Nixon-Kissinger-Ford policy of detente...

...The special treatment its victims have received from the FBI has been the ignoring of crimes against them, which amounts to a tacit encouragement of the criminals to commit some more crimes...

...It can further be argued that the community as a whole owes that retributive justice and its edge of extra protection to its policemen who, after all, daily risk their lives for the defense of the whole community...

...It's conceivable, no doubt...

...There is an obvious practical value in this tradition...

...It is not idle to speculate that this encouragement-which quite conceivably has been more than tacit-led the Croatians to believe they could do anything...

...finally the Ukra-nians and the Moldavians, and we are only talking about Eastern Europe and the Balkans...

...All of these people have legitimate grievances against the Soviet Union...

...The problem is an historic one of two traditions in conflict, both of considerable dubiousness from a legal point of view...

...that they did not constitute a class is shown in the trials and convictions of their fellow-criminals in the Watergate cases...

...Such acts have been going on for decades and the FBI has yet to lay a glove on any of the people responsible for any of the acts...