The CIA Knew: How America Recruited the Men Who Massacred 100,000 Poles — and Buried the Evidence
There is a document sitting in the CIA's public reading room that the American government would prefer you never read carefully.
It was declassified only after a federal lawsuit forced it into the open. It was scrubbed — pages removed, sections blacked out — before release. And even in its sanitized form, it contains an admission so stark that it reframes the entire modern debate about Ukraine, the UPA, and why the West has never properly confronted what happened in Volhynia in 1943.
The document concerns a man named Mykola Lebed. And through Lebed, it concerns the CIA's deliberate decision to recruit, protect, and rehabilitate the leadership of the organization that issued the order to exterminate 100,000 Polish civilians.
This is that story.
What Happened in Volhynia
Before Lebed, before the CIA, before the Cold War calculations — there were the villages.
Between 1943 and 1945, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the military wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B), conducted a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Polish civilian population of Volhynia and Eastern Galicia — territory that was then occupied Poland.
This was not warfare between combatants. It was the methodical extermination of a civilian population.
In June 1943, UPA commander in Volhynia Dmytro Klyachkivsky issued a written order for the "general physical liquidation of the entire Polish population." His secret directive stated: "We should make a large action of the liquidation of the Polish element. As the German armies withdraw, we should take advantage of this convenient moment for liquidating the entire male population in the age from 16 up to 60 years. We cannot lose this fight, and it is necessary at all costs to weaken Polish forces. Villages and settlements lying next to the massive forests should disappear from the face of the earth."
This was not improvised violence. It was policy.
On July 11, 1943 — a Sunday — UPA detachments simultaneously attacked 99 Polish villages across Volhynia at dawn. In a single day, 8,000 Poles were killed. Men, women, children. Many were not shot but hacked with axes, stabbed with pitchforks, and burned alive in their homes and churches.
By the end of July 1943, the UPA had raided 530 Polish villages and settlements, killing 17,000 people. August brought another wave: 301 settlements attacked, 8,000 more killed. In the village of Wola Ostrowiecka, 529 people were murdered — 220 of them children under the age of 14. In Ostrówki, 438 people died, including 246 children under 14.
When it was over, an estimated 100,000 Polish civilians had been killed. The Polish Parliament formally recognized these events as genocide in 2016. Ukraine has never done so.
The mass graves remain largely unexhumed. Polish families still do not know where their grandparents are buried.
Enter Mykola Lebed
Mykola Lebed was the OUN's third-in-command and the head of the SB — the Sluzhba Bezpeky, the organization's internal security force. He was one of the central figures in the Ukrainian nationalist movement during and after World War II.
His wartime record was not hidden. It was documented.
In 1934, Lebed participated in the assassination of Polish Interior Minister Bronisław Pieracki. He was tried and sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. He escaped when Germany invaded Poland in 1939.
During the war, Lebed ran the SB — the organization that, according to the CIA's own files, carried out "murders of dissenters from the OUN line." According to U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps memos from 1948, Lebed "killed some Ukrainian partisans who were fighting for the same cause."
In his own 1946 booklet on the history of the UPA, Lebed described the UPA's mission as being "to clear the forests and the surrounding areas of foreign elements." CIA-adjacent historian Philip Friedman, cited in the CIA's own documents, stated that this meant "not only Poles but Jews and Russian partisans as well."
The CIA's own declassified file on Lebed states it plainly: "Massacres and other acts of terror were also carried out against civilians, against Soviet prisoners of war, against entire Polish villages in the Ukraine, and against Jews fleeing from Nazi persecution."
There is no ambiguity in this language. The CIA, in its own internal documents, acknowledged that the organization Lebed led carried out massacres of Polish civilians.
The Recruitment
In 1947, two years after the war ended, the CIA recruited Mykola Lebed.
He was brought to the United States in 1949 under an assumed name, bypassing normal immigration law through a provision of the CIA Act of 1949 — a classified section allowing the agency to import 100 individuals per year "for reasons of national security regardless of their past."
His entry was so sensitive that it required sign-off at the highest levels of the U.S. government. According to the declassified GAO report and CIA files, Attorney General James P. McGranery, CIA Director General Walter Bedell Smith, and the Commissioner of Immigration all secretly agreed to admit Lebed to the United States.
His wartime record was concealed from immigration and naturalization authorities.
In 1957, Mykola Lebed became a United States citizen. He settled in Yonkers, New York. His telephone number was listed under his real name.
For decades, he ran CIA-funded Ukrainian émigré intelligence operations — the Prolog Research Corporation, a CIA front organization operating out of New York — producing propaganda and intelligence directed at Soviet Ukraine. He was, in effect, the CIA's primary Ukrainian asset throughout the Cold War.
The organization whose leadership massacred 100,000 Polish civilians was being run, with American taxpayer funding, out of a brick house in Westchester County.
The Cover-Up
The full story of Lebed's recruitment only began to surface in the 1980s, when a Village Voice investigation — later confirmed by a General Accounting Office probe — identified him as "Subject D" in a classified federal study of Nazi collaborators assisted in entering the United States.
The GAO found that despite its overall conclusion of "no evidence of any U.S. agency program to aid Nazis," Lebed was one of five cases involving individuals with "undesirable or questionable backgrounds who received some individual assistance in their U.S. immigrations."
When the CIA file on Lebed was obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, investigators found pages missing — removed from the National Archives by the CIA four years after the events in question. Other sections were blacked out under FOIA exemptions citing "intelligence sources" and "national security."
Brooklyn District Attorney Elizabeth Holtzman, who reviewed the GAO findings, called the Lebed case "extremely disturbing," noting that the CIA had previously assured Congress it had never used the 100-person immigration provision to facilitate the entry of Nazi collaborators.
The CIA declined to comment.
Why the West Never Confronted the UPA
The Lebed case is not an isolated incident. It is the mechanism that explains one of the most persistent mysteries of postwar European history: why the mass murder of 100,000 Polish civilians by the UPA remained almost entirely unknown in the West for decades — and why Ukraine was never pressured to confront it.
The answer is structural. The CIA built its postwar Ukrainian intelligence apparatus on OUN and UPA networks. Acknowledging that these networks had committed genocide against Poles would have undermined the entire Cold War operation. So the knowledge was classified, the perpetrators were protected, and the historical narrative was managed.
OUN propaganda presenting its members as pure anti-Soviet freedom fighters — propaganda that began in 1943 when Germany's defeat became obvious and the OUN began rehabilitating its image — was not only tolerated by American intelligence. It was actively amplified. Lebed's CIA-funded Prolog Research Corporation pumped this narrative into Ukrainian diaspora communities in the United States for thirty years.
The result is the world we live in today. A generation of Ukrainian Americans raised on an OUN-sanitized version of history. A Ukrainian political culture in which UPA figures are national heroes. A Zelensky government that names Special Operations units "Heroes of the UPA." And a baffled Western press corps that has no framework to understand why Poland is furious.
They have no framework because the CIA spent forty years ensuring they wouldn't.
What the Documents Confirm
Let us be precise about what the declassified record establishes:
One. The CIA was aware, by its own internal documentation, that the UPA conducted massacres of Polish civilians. This is not disputed. It is in their files.
Two. The CIA recruited, protected, and brought to the United States the leadership of the organization that carried out those massacres — specifically Mykola Lebed, the OUN's third-in-command and head of its security apparatus.
Three. The CIA concealed Lebed's wartime record from immigration authorities, removed documents from the National Archives, and successfully prevented his prosecution for war crimes for decades.
Four. Using Section 8 of the CIA Act of 1949, the agency imported Lebed at the highest levels of government approval — with the Attorney General and CIA Director personally signing off.
Five. Lebed then ran CIA-funded operations producing propaganda that shaped the postwar Ukrainian diaspora's historical memory — systematically erasing the UPA's crimes against Poles from the narrative.
This is not conspiracy theory. It is the documented record of the United States government, available in the CIA's own public reading room.
2026: The Bill Comes Due
On May 26, 2026, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a decree naming an active Special Operations Forces unit "Heroes of the UPA."
On June 19, 2026, Polish President Karol Nawrocki revoked Zelensky's Order of the White Eagle — Poland's highest national honor.
Zelensky mailed it back.
Western media called it a "diplomatic spat." A disagreement between allies. A distraction benefiting Moscow.
It is none of those things.
It is the final installment of a bill that has been accumulating since 1943. A bill that the CIA helped defer for eighty years by recruiting the killers, burying the evidence, and funding the propaganda that told the world there was nothing to see.
Poland has been asking for eighty years. For recognition. For excavation of the graves. For an acknowledgment that 100,000 of its civilians were systematically murdered by the organization now honored on the shoulder patches of Ukrainian Special Forces.
The CIA knew. The U.S. government knew. They made a choice.
Poland is still waiting for someone to un-make it.
Primary Source Documents
CIA Document: "To Catch a Nazi" — The Mykola Lebed File Declassified in Part, Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/01/17 CIARDP9000965R000201220002-6
https://t.co/KcR9ikXSqB
CIA Document: The History, Development, and Organization of the Ukrainian Resistance Movement, Including the OUN, the UPA, and the UHVR Approved For Release 2002/01/04 CIA RDP8300415R010100150006-6 https://t.co/ZdjxsHqnsx
CIA Document: AERODYNAMIC Operations File — Ukrainian Resistance
https://t.co/WUM8iFaRjW
CIA Document: Mykola Lebed Personal File — Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act
https://t.co/gxmgdfLFnw
Dzień 25. przypominania o tym, że Paweł Kozanecki zabił dwie kobiety i nadal może swobodnie wykonywać zawód adwokata, a dzięki wyrokowi sędziego Karola Radaszkiewicza jedyną karą, jaką za to poniesie, będzie 1,5 roku noszenia bransoletki na nodze.
‼️OGIEŃ‼️
MATERIAŁ OBOWIĄZKOWY‼️
Poseł @paweljablonski_ wyjaśnia zdradę Polski przez K13XII.
I to w 3 min i 17 sek!
Przekażcie to dalej, żeby prawda zwyciężyła!
RT I ❤️‼️
💪🇵🇱✌️
Zmierzcie się z tym zwolennicy UE: z Brukseli dostaliśmy dotacje dla samorządów, rolników i granty dla firm, a zarazem wykończenie przemysłu ciężkiego i górnictwa, właśnie trwające wykańczanie przemysłu maszynowego i chemicznego, zawyżone ceny ciepła, podwojone ceny energii i nieracjonalne, potwornie kapitałochłonne zadania inwestycyjne w energetyce, skutkujące utrwaleniem zawyżonych cen energii na kolejne pokolenia.
Weszliśmy w utratę konkurencyjności, stabilności energetycznej i spadek dynamiki produkcji przemysłowej, dorzucając do tego ubezwłasnowolnienie w kwestii nadzoru nad handlem, wymiarem sprawiedliwości, a wkrótce być może także migracjami i zbrojeniówką.
Realizujemy niekorzystny deal, którego w całości nigdy nie negocjowaliśmy.
@MarekJozefiak 1. Jaki jest kraj pochodzenia tych instalacji, my tylko montujemy...
2. które źródła OZE oprócz biogazu moga pracowac w podstawie systemu?
3. Można by długo dyskutować, ale myśląc poważnie o bezpieczeństwie energetycznym nie ma na razie alternatywy