September 22nd marked “Resistance Fighting Day”. It was on this date in 1944 that anti-Communist guerrilla forces in Estonia declared war on the Soviet Union’s ‘occupation’ of their state. Parallel paramilitary factions rapidly formed in neighboring Latvia and Lithuania. For over a decade, these partisans - popularly known as the Forest Brothers - waged a brutal, ill-fated insurgency against Soviet authorities. They remain venerated today in the region and beyond as "courageous freedom fighters," immortalized by commemorative monuments, street names, and statues throughout the Baltic states.

In reality, the vast majority of the tens of thousands of Forest Brothers were Holocaust perpetrators and Nazi collaborators. In many cases, militants joined the movement due to fear of prosecution and punishment for their activities during World War II. While waging their anti-Soviet crusade, the Brothers also murdered tens of thousands of innocent civilians, including many children. However, critical scrutiny of the Forest Brothers’ genocidal legacy is criminalized throughout the Baltics. Academics, journalists, and lawyers have been jailed for exposing the truth.

The same legislation moreover prohibits any public discussion of how the Jewish populations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were slaughtered in their virtual totality, largely before the Wehrmacht arrived in June 1941 under Operation Barbarossa. Western powers are aggressively complicit in this historical cover-up. In July 2017, NATO produced a slick propaganda film heroizing the Forest Brothers. Meanwhile, mainstream pundits routinely whitewash Baltic Nazi collaboration, on the risible basis that local populations simply sought to resist Communist rule.

There is another core component of the Forest Brothers’ history that their advocates at home and abroad are keen to conceal. Namely, the Baltic Nazi guerrilla war was covertly supported financially, materially, and practically by MI6. Britain’s foreign spying agency assisted their attempted insurrection by supplying explosives and weapons, infiltrating and exfiltrating agents, and sponsoring assassinations and sabotage attacks. Yet, MI6 records documenting this dark alliance are unforthcoming. Evidence of London’s cloak-and-dagger assistance to the Forest Brothers is provided largely by declassified CIA files.

The documents indicate Langley glommed onto MI6’s secret bond with the Baltic insurgents sometime after British intelligence first struck up a relationship with the Forest Brothers, in the precise manner London recruited Nazi-created ‘stay-behind’ units in Ukraine before World War II was even over. It was the CIA’s first covert action targeting the Soviet Union, and the Agency was extremely concerned about its exposure. “Any breaches of security” revealing US involvement would lead “to an immediate cessation of financial support” for the Brothers.

‘Offensive tasks’

An April 1952 CIA file indicates Langley was willing to pump in excess of $110,000 - close to $1.5 million today - into “clandestine support” in Riga. The Agency’s mission was “contacting, organizing and developing agent and underground facilities” for covert “black” operations against the Soviet Union, courtesy of the Forest Brothers. However, MI6 took umbrage at the CIA’s proposed drop zones in Kurzeme, Latvia, as this would “endanger” British assets in the area.

MI6 argued it was already “in contact with partisans in Kurzeme and had adequate intelligence and operational coverage of this part of Latvia.” British intelligence thus requested the CIA postpone its plans until autumn 1952. Then, London would “arrange for the reception and further movement” of the CIA’s Latvian assets. “As a result of the British protest,” Langley’s “conflicting interests” with MI6, and the agency’s offer of “providing aid and reception to our personnel… it was reluctantly decided to postpone” the mission.

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The next month, a CIA memo lamented, “There has been no significant activity in this project…as a result of the postponement of the operation into Latvia.” Resultantly, its agents were “being reassessed to determine their willingness and fitness” for clandestine activities later in the year. The note went on to record that “the British have informed us” how, in recent weeks, MI6 had successfully airdropped supplementary agents into Riga, while exfiltrating one of its chaos agents.

In June 1952, a CIA document detailed the minutes of successive recent talks in London between MI6 and its US counterpart on “operations in the Baltic states.” On May 29, an “exploratory discussion” on CIA skullduggery later that year and “possible assistance which might be provided” from MI6 agents “already in the country” was convened. British intelligence “defined their interest in maintaining contact with the resistance movement in Latvia”:

“[MI6] found from experience that single agents, living semi-legal lives in the Baltic States, were not able to develop intelligence gathering networks. They felt that the best way to cover the limited intelligence requirements in Latvia was by encouraging the resistance organisation to brief its contacts among the legally living population to obtain the intelligence and pass it back through the illegal groups with whom [MI6] was in contact.”

London had reportedly “briefed their recently infiltrated Latvians to this effect.” MI6 was “further interested in building up” the Forest Brothers, so they could assume “more offensive tasks”, such as penetrating the local Soviet administration. “It was also hoped that this resistance organisation would provide the jumping off point for agents to more important targets in the East,” the document noted. “It was however clear that only Baltic personnel could be dispatched by this means,” the CIA added.

“[MI6] felt that for the present its interests in Latvia were adequately covered by the agents whom they had already infiltrated. Their plans therefore were directed to maintaining these agents. This did not mean the introduction of an independent party by the CIA could not provide a valuable contribution.”

‘Intelligence targets’

Both agencies had significant concerns about the state of operations in Lithuania. The CIA was worried about Soviet penetration of the Forest Brothers. While MI6 had “recently exfiltrated a Lithuanian…whose bona fides” weren’t in doubt, the “general situation was becoming ever more difficult.” Younger generations in the Baltics increasingly accepted “Sovietisation”, and the Red Army and KGB were successfully countering armed groups, and “the apparent hopelessness of the cause of independence” was becoming ever clearer to those who rejected Communism, including the Forest Brothers themselves.

Undeterred, “it was agreed to discuss the establishment of a mechanism for guaranteeing the effective running” of CIA and MI6 missions in the Baltics over the next year. The pair “would consider mounting a test joint operation possibly in Lithuania in the spring of 1953.” Clandestine efforts in the intervening time would be “fully co-ordinated”. While the Baltic states themselves didn’t offer a particularly useful intelligence yield, their geographic position was ideal for striking further into the Soviet Union.

MI6 was reportedly “exploring the dispatch of Lithuanians to targets further east” and considered it “advantageous to establish contact” with other local resistance groups, beyond its main proxy, the BPDS - Lithuania’s United Democratic Resistance Movement, a key Forest Brothers cell. The British were also “anxious” to expand their “coverage” in Estonia, which “was more favourably situated geographically for intelligence targets further afield.” The CIA concurred and “hoped to send a party in, possibly in the spring of 1953.”

Over subsequent years, MI6’s involvement with the Forest Brothers waned, while the CIA’s grew, with Agency funding for the assorted military groups increasing significantly, and operations expanding to include psychological warfare, such as the funding of underground anti-Communist publications locally. The Agency also bankrolled the travel of Baltic émigrés to the US and Stateside conferences on the region’s future liberation. However, due to a combination of successful KGB infiltration and intensified counterinsurgency operations, the Forest Brothers were fully neutralized by 1959.

While the Forest Brothers’ struggle ultimately ended in failure, the CIA and MI6 continued to support fascist and Nazi elements within and outside the Eastern Bloc - most significantly in Ukraine - in service of precipitating the Soviet Union’s collapse. Moreover, the experience provided a clear blueprint for covert Anglo-American sponsorship of separatist militias, which has been deployed to devastating effect over and over again in every corner of the world in the decades since.