“We were forced to go out and defend our country, our farms, the very land splashed with the blood of our forefathers. Human dignity obligated us to resist the trampling of our human rights, to resist servitude. We cannot accept the lies, the deceit, the perversion of truth and other evils harmful to our nation. Our efforts are praiseworthy. We have truth on our side and are justified in the eyes of the civilized world. The Almighty will bless and support our struggle.”
J. Kasperavičius1

        Analyzing official Western involvement in Lithuania from 1944-1953 is difficult.  The main reason for this is that CIA and SIS documents regarding the topic are not declassified.  The closest one can come is to analyze Soviet sources and to extrapolate on diary entries, partisan publications, and testimony transcripts.  The information in the following report will begin with an introduction and a background of medieval Lithuanian history.  Moving through World War II history to the history of the partisan fight for independence, an attempt to draw a picture of Western involvement in this fight and an analysis of its effectiveness will be made.
        
Introduction
        Lithuanian sons, daughters, fathers, and mothers have fought for the independence of their country many times over.  They have experienced ruthless massacres, betrayals, and degradation at the hands of Russians and Soviets.  One of the bloodiest chapters in this history was the one spanning from 1944-53, when Lithuanian guerrilla fighters amassed a force large enough to resist the Soviet forces streaming into Lithuania replacing the retreating Nazi occupiers.
        Ironically, this period in Lithuania’s history was one in which it ostensibly had the most support from foreign powers in the fight against Communism.  Many factors were in Lithuania’s favor with overt incidences such as the escalation of tensions over Soviet acquisition of nuclear power in 1949, the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan in 1947, Western military confrontations with communism in Berlin in 1948 and Korea in 1950, and the establishment of NATO in 1949; it is easy to see why the Lithuanian partisan fighters believed that liberation was close at hand.  Even covert events such as the passing of NSC 4-a, NSC 10/2, and NSC-68 in 1947, 1948, and 1950 respectively, could be construed as having created beneficial situations for the partisan cause.
        The early resistance in Lithuania against forced annexation was a defining moment for the start of the Cold War.  During this time, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) solidified its existence as an institution that could implement effective containment and “rollback” policies.  With the creation of the Office of Strategic Operations (OSO) and the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) in 1947 and 1948 respectively, the CIA was provided with vehicles to carry out operations within the Soviet Union using émigrés from the occupied states.
        Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, MI6) implemented similar strategies at the outset of the Cold War.  SIS operations experienced a large amount of Soviet counter-espionage, leading to many embarrassing moments for the British and the eventual closing of its Baltic operations in 1956.
        Forces on both sides of the Iron Curtain were working in Lithuania to achieve their own aims.  Two particular stories will be followed – those of Juozas Lukša and Jonas Deksnys.  Lukša embodied the partisan who was in favor of active resistance, always willing to give his life in the fight for freedom, as he eventually did.  Deksnys, a passive resistance advocate, was eventually turned from the partisan cause by the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD – Narodnii Kommissariat Vnutrennykh Del), and embodies the tragedy that was Western ability to recognize Soviet espionage.2
        The Lithuanian partisans met varying levels of success, depending on how one would consider they measured success.  They fought into the 1950’s, eliciting the comment that “the border regions do not easily lend themselves to destruction” from Stalin.3  The signing of the Panmunjon Armistice Agreement on 27 July 1953 and the bloody suppression of the Hungarian rebellion on 4 November 1956 eliminated hopes for a successful armed resistance, especially when coupled with savage Soviet gosudarstvennoye proverka (state searches) of the forests from 1948-1952.  While the partisans won individual skirmishes killing between 4,000 and 13,000 NKVD agents and regular Red Army troops, the proverbial battle was lost in 1952, when Alfonsas Ramanauskas (Vanagas), the last officer in the Lithuanian War of Liberation Army (LLKS –Lietuvos Laisvės Kovų Sąjūdis) declared a surrender.4
        The foreign intelligence operations can summarily be deemed failures.  The main reason for this failure was the thorough penetration of the SIS by NKVD agents.  Soviet operations resembled the Monarchist Association of Central Russia (a.k.a. “Trust”) fiasco of the early 1920’s.  The SIS had been duped into believing that the “Trust” was a legitimate anti-Bolshevik network, while it was actually run by Soviet state security – the Unified State Political Directorate (OGPU – Ob'edinennoe Gosudarstvennoe Politicheskoe Upravlenie).  So successful were the similar deception operations of the late 1940’s, that at times both NKVD radio signals under the guise of being partisan signals and genuine partisan signals sent to the CIA and the SIS appealed for increased aid to the partisans.
        This Soviet “game” ended hopes that there could be meaningful Western support of active, armed partisans. Consequently, the partisans, hoping for legitimate support, would receive support that was inadequate or infiltrated by the NKVD.   While the majority of these shortcomings were the result of massive NKVD infiltration, the ends that the partisans desired and the means that the West employed were skewed.  Many partisans believed in the imminence of a world conflagration and Western actions encouraged their hopes of this, but the West did not supply the full commitment that would have been needed to fully resist the Soviet occupation.
        To understand partisan motives and goals, one must look at Lithuanian history.  This history is essential to understand Lithuanian emotions, as is the case with most Eastern Europeans and their histories that seem to bear a direct influence on their present actions.  According to Gerutis,
A century of fervent national revival, culminating in the reestablishment of an independent state, produced strong commitments to national ideals and the national state.  The younger generation was sensitive to the medieval grandeur of Lithuanian statehood; it took modern Lithuanian’s independence as an axiom, and therefore refused to reconcile itself to its loss.  This...combined with the traditional hatred of Russian rule and the reaction to the alien totalitarian regime introduced by the Russian communists, crystallized into active opposition to the Kremlin’s occupation.5
        
        The Lithuanian partisans were among several groups resisting Soviet rule in the Baltics, collectively known as the Forest Brothers.  These guerrillas were driven by the hope that their countries’ brutal occupations would not be accepted by the Western powers.  The Americans and the British fostered these hopes by taking lines that promised their committments to liberating oppressed nations.  The partisans sat in their cramped, cold, and wet bunkers in the forests awaiting this aid, fearing the NKVD at every turn only to be “liberated” by insufficiently armed partisans who had been trained in the West and were all captured, deceived, or killed within two years of their arrivals.  In the end, these attempts at armed “intervention” were complete failures, benefiting neither the West nor the Lithuanians.

Pre-Tsarist Lithuania
        The 1251 crowning of Mindaugas as King of Lithuania by of the authority of Pope Innocent IV is considered the founding of Lithuania.  Mindaugas accepted Christianity, thus introducing the Latin religion into the largely pagan state.  In 1263, Mindaugas’ military commander Treniota and Duke Daumantas of Nalšiai had Mindaugas assassinated.  Treniota and Daumantas promptly abandoned Christianity.
        Christianity was not reintroduced until 1386 when the Lithuanian Duke Jogaila married the Polish Queen Jadvyga in an attempt to form a stronger alliance against their common Teutonic aggressors.  This union was offered by the Poles on the condition that the Lithuanians give up their pagan history and fully accept Christianization.  Jogaila accepted these conditions and took the Polish crown as King Władysław.
        Despite Lithuania’s late Christianization, Lithuanians strongly adopted the Catholic faith, identifying it with nationality.  As we will see later, religion was strongly associated with nationality for the partisans and for Lithuanians in general.  The Soviets would use this link to suppress religious expression and in doing so, quash nationalistic sentiments.
        The monarchical union with Poland that would become official much later began a historical association between Lithuanians and Poles.  Lithuania rose as a powerful state under Vytautas the Great, including the defeat of the German army’s Drang nacht Osten drive to the east in 1410 at the Battle of Tannenberg (a.k.a. Žalgiris or Grünwald).  With the defeat of the Teutonic Order, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania expanded to contain most of the territory between the Baltic and Black seas, making Lithuania one the largest countries in Europe in the early 1500’s.  Nonetheless, even at this time, much of southwestern Lithuania was part of Prussia, and would remain so until 1814.
        The union with Poland had never been clearly defined in a political sense until 1569, when Lithuania entered an official Commonwealth (Rzeczpospolita) with Poland through the Union of Lublin.  The coupling was brought about in large part to resist a Russian incursion led by Ivan IV (the Terrible).6  The formal Commonwealth caused the distinction between Lithuanian and Polish nobles to decrease while becoming increasingly Polish to a point where Lithuanian peasants were ruled by dukes who could not speak their language.

Tsars and Bolsheviks
        The first successful Russian invasion of Lithuania occurred on 8 August 1655, when Russian tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich’s troops entered Vilnius and started a fire that lasted for seventeen days.  Vilnius was looted and more than ten thousand Lithuanians were killed.7 
        Lithuania regained freedom in 1661, but it was short-lived; after the second Russian invasion ended in 1721, Peter the Great’s troops remained in Lithuania.  The Commonwealth was partitioned between Russia, Austria, and Prussia in 1772, 1793, and 1795, strengthening the hands of the Russian czars in the Baltic for the next 120 years.
        This Russian annexation was accompanied by a fierce policy of Russification in Lithuania that strangled most expressions of Lithuanian nationalism.  Russification intensified after peasant uprisings from 1860 to 1885, ushering in forty years during which “the publication of Latin alphabet books in the Lithuanian language was prohibited [from 1864-1904], policies of settling Russians in rural areas and of proselytizing for the Russian Orthodox Church were undertaken, [and] the rights of the Roman Catholic Church were curtailed.”8  A failed attempt was even made to send the name “Lithuania” to oblivion, by grouping all the Baltic States under the blanket term Northwestern Administrative Area (Severo Zapadnii Krai).9  This juxtaposition of repression of language and religion would become a common theme in Russian imperialism in Lithuania and the Baltics in general.
        Underground printing presses emerged in neighboring Prussia, where many Lithuanians resisded.  Printing schoolbooks illegally helping to keep the Lithuanian language alive, these presses accelerated Lithuanian publication capabilities and developed an extensive publication system.  This would play a crucial part in securing public support in the propaganda side of the partisan war.
        Lithuania remained mostly agrarian throughout its occupation.  As the rural population grew and Lithuanians grew increasingly resentful towards their Russian occupiers, a large wave of emigration occurred.  Estimates put one-third of all Lithuanians in the United States and Canada by the start of the Great War.10  This created strong ties with the West, as would be useful in the 1940’s, when American-Lithuanians would assist the partisan cause in America.
        The Bolshevik revolution also adversely affected the population of Russia, causing a large wave of emigration including Harry Carr and his family.  Leaving their timber company in Russia, Carr escaped to England, where he eventually got involved with the SIS.  By 1926, he was the head of their station in Finland, a major transit point for escaped partisans.  Carr played a large part in organizing (and failing to organize) outside support for partisans in all the Baltic countries in the late 1940’s, as we will see.11
        While under German occupation, the Lithuanian Council declared independence on 16 February 1918, gaining more official recognition in March 1918, with the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.  Nonetheless, Lithuanian came under German administration and Lithuanians fought with Bolsheviks, Germans, and Poles for two years before full independence was achieved.  After the conclusion of the World War I, the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, and Russia’s defeat in Warsaw, Lithuania was left on its own sans Vilnius, which had been incorporated into Poland in March 1922 after a plebiscite.  Once all hopes of a unified Russia were cast aside, the United States, England, and France recognized Lithuania in 1922, a full year after Lithuania had been accepted into the League of Nations.12  American-Lithuanians influenced the gaining of recognition from the United States, as recognition came on the heels of a million-signature petition to President Warren Harding demanding American recognition.13  Despite its slow recognition of Lithuania in 1922, the United States never withdrew de jure recognition, even during the Soviet occupation.14
        Lithuanians kept a wary eye on the Russians over the next forty years fearing what would happen to the nation squeezed between constantly hostile forces.  As would become a common theme in the maintenance of Lithuania’s independence, the preservation of sovereignty would depend largely on the whim of outside forces.
	Lithuania experienced a relative calm throughout the 1920’s and most of the 1930’s until 23 August 1939, when the USSR and Nazi Germany signed the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Treaty, also known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, in Moscow.  In a secret protocol to this pact, the signing parties agreed that:
In the event of a territorial and political rearrangement in the areas belonging to the Baltic States, (Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), the northern boundary of Lithuania shall represent the boundary of the spheres of influence of Germany, and the USSR.  In this connection, the interest of Lithuania in the Vilna area is recognized by each party.15
        
        Another treaty signed between the USSR and Germany on 22 September 1939 outlined the signing parties’ designs on Poland after the “collapse of the Polish State.”16  This was an ominous sign for Lithuanians, demonstrating a cooperation between large powers surrounding their nation regarding a nation historically associated with Lithuania.
        A Secret Supplementary Protocol to the latter treaty shifted Lithuania from the German sphere of influence to the Soviet one.  It provided that this change would go into effect “as soon as the Government of the USSR [took] special measures on Lithuanian territory to protect its interests.”17  If Lithuanians had access to this document, they certainly would not have believed that it was a move later touted by Stalin as one aimed at, “saving...Lithuania from German designs.”18  The eventual imposed signing of the Mutual Assistance Treaty on 10 October 1939 forced Lithuania to allow 20,000 Soviet troops to operate on Lithuanian soil, signifying initial steps towards becoming a Soviet socialist republic.
        While only rumors had surfaced regarding the secret supplementary protocols signed in 1939, Stalin’s commissar of foreign affairs Vyacheslav Molotov made the Soviet Union’s intentions surprisingly and alarmingly clear in an interview with Lithuanian Foreign Minister Vincas Krėvė-Mickevičius on 30 June 1940:
You must take a good look at reality and understand that in the future small nations will have to disappear.  Your Lithuania along with other Baltic nations, including Finland, will have to join the glorious family of the Soviet Union.  Therefore, you should begin now to initiate your people into the Soviet system, which in the future shall reign everywhere, throughout all Europe.19 
        
        Even though this came on the heels of Stalin’s embarrassing loss in the Winter War in Finland, by 18 July 1940, “11 of the 12 mayors of principal cities, 19 of the 23 mayors of towns, and 175 out of 261 county heads were replaced” with Soviet representatives.20
        Soviet aggression went unchecked as the Germans and Allies were preoccupied with the war on Germany’s western front in France.  With increased Red Army presence in Lithuania, the Soviets prepared for the final blow to Lithuanian independence, which came in July 1940.  In a series of constitution-violating procedures, the Soviets were able to push through their plans to have the Lithuanian “government” “demand” to be incorporated into the Soviet Union.  Elections to the “People’s Diet” on 14 and 15 July were in typical Soviet fashion:
There was to be only one list of candidates...a fact which deprived the voter of his basic right – a choice of candidates...only Communist Party and some Communist-front organizations could submit their lists of candidates.  Total control of the elections was in the hands of the Supreme Electoral Commission, composed exclusively of Communists, and only persons approved by this Commission could become candidates.  Voting was compulsory...persons who did not vote were threatened with being branded as “enemies of the people.”21
        
        In a massive, peaceful boycott of the “elections,” Lithuanians defaced portraits of Lenin and Stalin, and some student protesters even composed “prayers”: “Hail Russia, full of woe, Stalin is with thee.  Mocked art thou in Europe and mocked is your uncouth fruit Stalin.  Holy Lithuania, our Mother, save us from the Asiatics.  We will be grateful now and at the hour of our death.”22
        Despite these threats, no more than 40% of the voting population participated in voting, while the Supreme Electoral Commission declared that “95.95% of those who had the right to vote had voted, and that 99.85% of all votes cast had been cast for the candidates of the Working People’s Union.”23  A week later, on 21 July 1940, the “People’s Diet” voted to demand the incorporation of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Lithuania into the Soviet Union in a session during which the bother of counting votes was not employed.24
        This illegal action was correctly seen as such by the United States as reported in the Select Committee of the United States House of Representatives to Investigate Communist Aggression report:
The evidence is overwhelming and conclusive that Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were forcibly occupied and illegally annexed by the USSR.  Any claims by the USSR that the elections conducted by them in July 1940 were free and voluntary or that the resolutions adopted by the resulting parliaments petitioning for recognition as a Soviet Republic were legal are false and without foundation in fact.25
        
        The Soviets accompanied their constitutionally dubious schemes with even more horrendous humanitarian violations.  After searching through 251,108 letters, the NKVD set aside 17,247 letters as anti-Soviet.26  These letters were used as evidence against Lithuanian “enemies of the people” according to one of the 14 of rules set out in Document 0054 which was signed by the People’s Commissar for the Interior of the Lithuanian SSR, Aleksandras Guzevičius on 28 November 1940:
(1) Members of leftist anti-Soviet parties
(2) Members of nationalist anti-Soviet parties
(3) Gendarmes and jail guards
(4) Tsarist and White Army officers
(5) Officers of the Lithuanian and Polish armies
(6) White Russian volunteers
(7) Those who had been expelled from the party of the Komsomol
(8) All political émigrés and unstable elements
(9) All foreign citizens and individuals with foreign connections
(10) All those with personal foreign ties, viz. Philatelists, Esperantists etc.
(11) High civil servants
(12) Red Cross officials and refugees from Poland
(13) Clergymen
(14) Former noblemen, estate-owners, industrialists and merchants.27

        This list of types of people lined up for deportation represented 23% of Lithuania’s population.28  In preparation for the “elections,” 2,000 Lithuanian journalists, politicians, businessmen, clergymen, and intellectuals, including future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, were deported to Siberia on the night of 11-12 July 1940.29
        Not only were the “bourgeois” intellectuals terrorized, but so were peasant farmers through the first wave of Soviet redistribution of farmland.  All farmers owning more than 75 acres of land were forced to give that land over to the state, affecting about 6% of Lithuanian farmers on 25% of Lithusania’s arable land.30  Ostensibly, this redistribution was meant to strengthen agriculture in Lithuania, but its true purpose of “ruin[ing] the productive, self-sufficient Lithuanian farmer and creating a ‘class struggle’ of the poor peasants against ‘kulaks’” was publicly admitted by First Secretary of the Lithuanian Communist Party, Antanas Sniečkus.31
        The first step taken towards uniting resistance groups in  Lithuania came on 9 October 1940, when resistance leaders Leonas Prapuolenis, X.X., Maj. Vytautas Bulvičius, Juozas Vėbra, Dr. Adolfas Damušis, and Dr. Pranas Padalis met in Vilnius.  They organized the Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF - Lietuvių Aktivistų Frontas) based on a system of small cells of five (penketukai) in which only the cell leader would know who the immediate superior was.32  They started with approximately 2,000 members attacking mainly local Lithuanian traitors and not Red Army troops.33
        On the eve of the German invasion, an additional 34,260 Lithuanians were deported under inhuman conditions to the Siberian tundra from 13 and 18 June 1941.34  Lithuanians were separated from their families in the middle of the night and stuck in cattle cars headed for gulags through the course of the first Soviet occupation, totaling nearly 80,000.  Lithuanians also left in massive numbers on their own and were replaced with Russian, Belorussian, and Ukrainian colonizers.
        The atrocities committed through Sovietization policies were feared by many Lithuanians, and would not be forgotten when the Nazis replaced the Soviets in 1941.
        
Nazis
        The “German designs” Stalin claimed to be protecting Lithuania from came to fruition on 22 June 1941, when Hitler initiated his attack on the Soviet Union – Operation Barbarossa.  German bombs started falling on Kaunas airport at dawn on the 22nd, and the LAF, along with other partisan groups began to mobilize.  At 09:28, LAF plenipotentiary Prapuolenis announced the formation of a Provisional Government with Kazys Škirpa at its head.35  When the Germans marched into the Lithuanian capital of Kaunas on 24 June 1941, they met no resistance, as Kaunas had already been cleared of Red Army by various resistance cells of the LAF in bloody battles.36
        The Provisional Government, having re-declared Lithuania’s independence, was tolerated by the Nazis at first.  Military units in Lithuania came under the control of German leadership and the German military leaders hoped to influence the government.  On 5 August 1941, six weeks after its inception, the Provisional Government was outlawed and the Civil Administration (Zivilverwaltung) took over administration of all the Baltic States.  German administrator Adrian von Renteln became the Commissioner General in Kaunas.
        Resistance to the Nazi regime in Lithuania went underground, started organizing, and started clandestine printing and distribution efforts.  Towards the end of 1941, several groups had sprung up which printed and distributed massive amounts of leaflets, letters, and memorandum.
         Also at the end of 1941, the Lithuanian Freedom Army (LFA – Lietuvos Laisvės Armija) was formed by Kazys Veverskis to engage in an armed struggle with the Germans.  Dormant during most of the war, the LFA became more active once the Red Army made its push back against the Germans.  It would become an important organizing force of the partisans towards the beginning of the partisan war in 1944.  Two main centers of resistance emerged with the Supreme Lithuanian Committee (VLK – Vyriausias Lietuvos Komitetas) representing the political Left, and the National Council (LT – Lietuvos Taryba) representing Catholic organizations.
        Despite this coalescing, or maybe because of it, Lithuania experienced a harsh Nazi occupation.  Before the war, Vilnius was known as the northern Jerusalem, since the Jews represented its largest minority.  More than 250,000 Lithuanian Jews were killed, signifying one of the largest percentage exterminations of Jews in the war.37  Lithuania also suffered one of the largest overall percentage losses of population at the hands of Hitler.  The most public display of resistance to German occupation was that unlike Estonia and Latvia, the Germans were never able to set up a Schutzstaffel (SS) legion in Lithuania.  According to Dorril’s sources, “while Lithuania was ‘largely written off as a racially inferior hotbed of discontent,’ Latvia and Estonia provided ‘an untapped resource of troops.’”38
        Without an SS legion in Lithuania, the Nazis had to settle for auxiliary battalions.  These were groups of approximately forty men armed and trained by the Germans to perform guard duties, to counter Soviet partisan fighter incursions into Lithuania, and in some instances to man the front lines.  In August 1942, there were twenty of these battalions totaling 8,388 soldiers.39  At times, some units of these battalions were used for the extermination of Jews.
        The level of collaboration of these battalions in Lithuania with the Nazis remains highly controversial, but according to Vitkauskas, many Lithuanians agreed to fight in the battalions to avoid being killed, to gather arms, or in the hopes of fighting the Communists.40  Many of these battalion participants took to the forests upon realizing that they were being used for means other than the defense of their homeland.  There, they fought Germans and Soviets alike.
        On 1 March 1943, Hinrich Losche (Reich Commissar of Ostland) and Adrian von Renteln again attempted to start up an SS legion in Lithuania.  In a public announcement on 17 March, the Germans claimed that the Lithuanians were “not worthy enough” to wear SS uniforms anyway.41  As Lt. Col. Grigori Stepanovich Burlitski, a former NKVD border guard42 who defected to the West in June 1953, testified before the US Congress in 1954:
Only 286 volunteers enlisted in the SS legion that the Germans were organizing [in Lithuania].  Thus, on March 17, 1943, the Germans cancelled the formation of the legion, closed all the higher educational institutions of Lithuania, and deported many Lithuanian intellectuals to concentration camps.  3,250 Lithuanians were imprisoned in Dachau alone.43
        
        In a strong attempt to organize Lithuanian political resistance, seven political groups ranging from the political left to right, began negotiations to create the Supreme Committee for the Liberation of Lithuania (VLIK – Vyriausias Lietuvos išlaisvinimo komitetas).  On 25 November 1943, several groups signed an agreement at 9a Parodos Street in Kaunas to ratify their foundation on “pivotal national interests...supporting democratic principles.”44  They strove to lead “the effort to free Lithuania, to reestablish the organs of the sovereign state of Lithuania, to restore democratic order in Lithuania, and to protect the country against bolshevism and other events that threatened to tear apart the lives of Lithuanians.”45  With Steponas Kairys elected as its head, VLIK’s position was that “Lithuania’s sovereignty [was] temporarily impeded by foreign forces.”46
        On 16 February 1944, the traditional Lithuanian independence day, VLIK re-declared independence in a statement that was partially published in the New York Times.  This publicity can be in large part credited to contacts that had been established with the West through the SIS in Stockholm.  One such contact was Vladas Žilinskas, Deputy Ambassador to Stockholm from Lithuania prior to the closing of the Lithuanian embassy in Stockholm in the summer of 1940.47  Remaining in Sweden, Žilinskas met Alexander “Sandy” McKibbin, an SIS agent who was strongly anti-Communist.  During the summer of 1943, Žilinskas introduced McKibbin to Algirdas Vokietaitis, a partisan representative.  By the start of 1944, Vokietaitis was an active agent for SIS, having made several illegal trips to Sweden.  He even received 600-700 Swedish krona per month for living expenses.48  These ties were broken in August 1944, when Vokietaitis and Kairys, in an attempt to cross the Baltic Sea to Sweden, were captured by Germans and sent to the Stutthof concentration camp in Poland.49
        In January 1944, with an ominous Soviet push into the Baltics, Lithuanian officials began negotiations with German authorities concerning the formation of a Lithuanian army to resist the return of the Soviets.  Gen. Povilas Plechavičius was chosen to head what would come to be known as the Vietinė Rinktinė (Home Army).50
        For the week of 21 February 1944, a call was put out for volunteers to join a Home Army led by Lithuanian officers with the sole purpose of fighting off Soviet partisans and bandits who were terrorizing Lithuanian citizens.  The troops were to receive orders only from their Lithuanian officers and were not to be used outside of Lithuania.  By 1 March 1944, approximately 16,000 Lithuanians had joined twenty battalions with 750 soldiers per battalion.  The large response indicated Plechavičius’ immense popularity and the desire of Lithuanians to fight for their independence.51
        Since the Nazis originally only expected 5,000 Lithuanians to join, they easily convinced themselves that Lithuanians were ready to mobilize for the German cause.  As this was not the case, disputes quickly erupted between Plechavičius and the Germans over expanding the call for volunteers to 100,000.52
        With Plechavičius’ refusal to subordinate his command to German officers, Hitler decided that he had had enough.  On 15 May 1944, Plechavičius was arrested and deported to the Silaspils concentration camp in Latvia along with several of his officers.  Before his deportation, Plechavičius issued a declaration to all Lithuanians who had joined the Home Army to desert their cadres and flee to the woods with their weapons.53
        Starting in April 1944, right before Germany’s capitulation, a majority of VLIK members were also arrested and sent to concentration camps in Germany.  Among them was Jonas Deksnys (Hektoras, Alksnis, Tarvydas, Alfonsas, Edvardas, Petrenko, Daunoras, Lunch, K. Rudokas, Kamilė), a member of the Union of Lithuanian Freedom Fighters (LLKS – Lietuvos laisvės kovotojų sąjunga).  LLKS, formed on 26 December 1940, was made up of “youthful intellectuals of a liberal nationalist persuasion.”54  LLKS put out its own underground publication, Laisvės kovotojas (“Freedom Fighter”), and joined VLIK in 1943.  As a writer for LLKS, Deksnys was high on the list of those to be arrested.
         In an effort to re-establish command before the Red Army entered Lithuania, Rev. Mykolas Krupavičius was elected political chairman of VLIK in Berlin.  VLIK was revived in Würzburg, Germany as the allies approached Berlin.  There, Krupavičius and Kairys were reunited with thirty-two other VLIK leaders who had been recently liberated from a nearby prison in Bayreuth by Allied troops.  Among the Allied troops were Antanas Vaivada, an American-Lithunian army officer, who brought with him Stasys Žymantas, future head of recruiting Lithuanians to work for SIS.
        From Würzburg, VLIK command moved to Pfullingen, Germany in the French occupation zone at the behest of Gen. Raymond Schmittlein of the French Deuxi?me Bureau.55  VLIK continued to welcome more resistance groups into their ranks, bringing the total number of groups represented to eleven.

Reds Again
        In terms of sheer numbers, the Soviet reoccupation would be worse for the Lithuanians than the Nazi occupation was.  During the Nazi occupation, 1/16 of Lithuania’s population was deported and during the Communist occupation, that number rose to 1/6.56  The total number of Lithuanians killed, deported, or who fled Lithuania during World War II and immediately thereafter was 850,000 (1/3 of all Lithuanians).57
        Partisan leader Juozas Lukša had the following to say regarding the Soviet “liberation”:
So far, the Lithuanian people had been “liberated” three times in nearly as many years.  In 1940, the Russians had come marching into our land to “liberate” us from “capitalist and Fascist exploiters.”  In 1941, the Germans had marched in after them and thereby “liberated” us from “Bolshevik bondage.”  And now, the Russians were back again – this time to “liberate” us from “the tyranny of Nazi hangmen.”  But since we still recalled how they had gone about “liberating” us the last time, we didn’t think we had any cause to rejoice.58
        
        As can be seen by Lukša’s statement, “liberating” is the incorrect term to use in describing the second Soviet occupation of Lithuania.  Gen. Ivan Cherniakhovsky and his Third Belorussian Front made up of five NKVD rear defense regiments (up to 1,500 troops per regiment) reoccupied Vilnius on 13 July 1944 and Kaunas on 1 August 1944.  Stalin promptly ordered the continuation of deportations from the first occupation.  In seven major deportations under Stalin, approximately 80,000 Lithuanians were sent to Siberia, over 40,000 from 22-23 May 1948 alone.59
        On 30 August 1944, the Supreme Soviet of the Lithuanian SSR adopted the “Ordinance Regarding the Liquidation of Effects upon Agriculture Left by the German Occupation.”  This ordinance continued the redistribution of farmland that had started during the first Soviet occupation.  This time, farms could be reduced to 12.5 acres if the “owners had actively collaborated with the German occupation personnel.”60  This loose definition gave the Soviets plenty of leeway when determining which farmsteads to subject to redistribution.
        By 1948, the pre-collectivization taxation scheme had intensified to the point where some kulak (literally “fist,” or “tightwad,” describing rich farmers who took advantage of the peasants) farmers found themselves paying 84% taxes on their gross product, forcing many of them to abandon their land.61  Under Soviet categorization, nearly every farm in Lithuania qualified as a kulak, on 26 February 1947, the first collective farm was established in Lithuania, and ten months later, only twenty existed.62
        Citing Soviet scholar M. Gregorauskas, a large reason for the initial failure of the collective farms was “kulak nationalistic banditism and terror” preventing farmers from collectivizing.63  Nonetheless, by 1952, 96% of Lithuania’s farmers had been forced onto collective farms.64
        By 1945, estimates place 22,000-28,000 Lithuanian partisans in the woods.65  The Soviets attempted offering amnesties as a way to convince the partisans to come out of the woods.  On 9 February 1945, the Lithuanian SSR government offered “pardons” to those who lay down their arms.  On 5 April 1945, secret NKVD directive 0033/11 gave instructions on how to recruit partisans who sought amnesty into the NKVD ranks.66
        By rescinding on amnesty offers, the NKVD caused the partisans to increase resistance rather than to deteriorate their efforts.  Before Veverskis’ death towards the end of 1944, Veverskis handed leadership of the LFA over to Adolfas Eidimtas (Pybartas), and started the Lithuanian Defense Committee (LGK –Lietuvos gynybos komitetas) in an attempt to organize resistance.  Several other post-German occupation groups attempted to organize resistance groups, including the Lithuanian Liberation Council (LIT – Lietuvos išlaisvinimo taryba) and the Lithuanian Armed Resistance Movement (LGP – Lietuvos ginkluotų pajėgų vyriausioji taryba).  According to Vitkauskas, “these organizations did not restrict themselves to passive, unarmed resistance; their purpose developed into a fierce war for freedom.”67  Detachments (būriai) of fighters began spontaneously forming throughout Lithuania.  They soon organized into groups (rinktinės) which eventually organized into seven regions (apygardos) of armed resistance: Vytis, Didžioji Kova, Žemaitis, Vytautas, Tauras, Dainava, and Kęstutis.
        Juozas Lukša was involved in the Tauras region of Suvalkija in southwestern Lithuania.  Having owned 82 acres of land, his father, Simonas Lukša, was one of the farmers affected by the Bolshevik redistribution.68  Lukša would become one of the main partisan leaders, and would help to organize resistance and contacts with the West.  Born in 1921, Lukša gave up legal life in 1946, withdrawing to the forests of Suvalkija.
        Like most partisans, Lukša adopted several pseudonyms in order to conceal his identity and to augment the apparent number of partisans.  Lukša would have counted as at least eleven partisans, having used the code names Juodis, Kazimieras, Vytis, Skirmantas, Kęstutis, Skrajūnas, Daumantas, Krivulė, Miškinis and S. Mykolaitis.69
        Lukša climbed through the ranks of partisan leadership, becoming a captain in November 1946 on merit.  At the same time, he became the deputy head of Supreme Staff of Armed Partisans (VGPŠ – Vyriausiasis ginkluotųjų pajėgų štabas) and was assigned the responsibility of overseeing all partisan groups and their coordination.70
        There existed three types of partisans with strict chains of command within each group.  Active participants lived in underground bunkers, in the woods, or in farm shelters.  They were armed with the weapons of their enemies, fighting mainly with Soviet Pulyemot Maxima machine guns and German “sweethearts” manufactured at Škoda Works.71  These partisans actively participated in confrontations with Soviet troops, raiding several different types of targets, ranging from individual communist administrators to groups of up to 3,000 troops.72  A typical group of partisans consisted of 7-10 men who encouraged discipline and organization by wearing old Lithuanian Army uniforms with indications of rank and merit on them.73  The average life span for this type of partisan was two years.  One reason for this was that freedom fighters swore to never be taken alive, as was outlined in the LFA constitution.  This constitution asserted that partisans must undertake “tight security precautions,” be “severely disciplined,” and demand “extreme secrecy.”74
        There were also armed supporters who maintained their normal lives, helping the partisans only when called upon.  Unarmed supporters constituted the third layer of partisan resistance.  Many women were involved in the resistance, mainly as couriers falling under this third classification.
	Forest Brother operational and strategic goals help to illuminate whether they should be classified as guerrillas, class warriors, or bandits.  According to Pajaujis, the long-range operational goal of the partisans was “restoration of Lithuania as an Independent State.”  Deep-seeded nationalism was common among the partisans, as is illustrated in a collection of Lukša’s memoirs in which the glossary of terms used by Lukša clarifies that when Lukša referred to his “second wife,” he meant the Nijolė Bražėnaite, the women he had married, making Lithuania his first one.75
        According to Pajaujis, the strategic goals were sevenfold:
(1) to prevent Sovietization of the country by annihilating Communist activists and the NKVD forces in the countryside; (2) to safeguard the public order, to protect the population from robberies, either by civilians, or by Red soldiers; (3) to free political prisoners from detention wherever circumstances allowed it; (4) to enforce the boycott of the “elections” to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR or to the leadership of the puppet state, and thus to prevent the falsification of the will of the Lithuanian nation and the creation of a false base for the legality of the Soviet-imposed regime; (5) to disrupt the draft of Lithuanian youth into the Red Army; (6) to obstruct the nationalization of landed property and collectivization of agriculture; (7) to prevent the settling of Russian colonists on the land and in the homesteads of the Lithuanian farmers deported to Siberia.76
        
        Strong motivation to achieve these goals came from the religious fervor of the Lithuanian partisans and the persecution they experienced.  Under the Soviets, religion was stifled with the closings of two seminaries in 1946, and the imposition of a maximum quota of 150 seminarians, with approximately 200 being dismissed.77  This greatly affected the partisans, who were deeply religious.  In his memoirs, Lukša recounts several occasions in which he would pray before a mission.  Many partisans saw their struggle as an integrally religious one:
Dark and great storm clouds are gathering in the West.  They shall smash with thunder and lightning, they shall sweep from the holy land of Lithuania all foreigners and crush all the Lithuanian traitors and fawners.  But you, Lithuanian, should not await the liberating storm by sitting on you hands.  You must join this holy struggle against Bolshevism with weapon in hand.78 (emphasis added – D.R.)

        On 14 December 1947, Lukša, along with Kazimieras Pyplys (Mindaugas, Audronis), successfully escaped from Lithuania through Kalinangrad, ending up in Poland.  Despite their antagonistic history, Lithuanians and Poles cooperated to a certain extent during the second occupation.  Starkauskas states that when NKVD troops entered Vilnius in 1944, they encountered both Lithuanian and Polish partisans.79  Poland was often used as a transit point for partisans early on during the resistance.  Nonetheless, some animosity remained, as noted by Valiunas: “There was no real impediment to friendly relations with Latvia and Estonia, but Lithuania and Poland were still torn by the old dispute over Vilnius.  The Lithuanians could not make any concessions with regard to their historic capital.”80
        During their time in Poland, Lukša and Pyplys delivered a letter from Lithuanian Catholics to Pope Pius XII written by Father Juozas Stankūnas.  This letter, received by Pope Pius XII on 1 October 1948, enumerated acts of Soviet repression against Lithuanians, Soviet restrictions on religious expression, and Lithuanian resistance to these limitations.
        Despite fervent Lithuanian Catholic beliefs, “the Vatican accepted the letter with some reserve, in part because it was first publicized in the international press before reaching the Papacy.  There was no formal or, as far as is known, informal response of the Pope to this appeal for help.”81
        This lackluster response was echoed by the majority of Lithuania’s ordinary priests.  According to Vardys, “with very few exceptions, the majority of priests can be described as sympathetic supporters who, when asked, would provide the partisans with religious services, although not at all convinced that the armed resistance had a chance of winning or that this was the most suitable way of achieving aims.”82
        
Jonas and Juozas – Contacts with the West
Jonas Deksnys
        American endeavors into civilian intelligence began with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) under William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan.  President Roosevelt created this agency in 1945 as an answer to the bungling intelligence that had allowed surprises like the attack on Pearl Harbor to occur in 1941.  In an attempt to keep his ally Stalin’s trust, Roosevelt ordered Donovan to keep OSS operations oriented against the Nazis.  Donovan followed this mandate, at times going so far as to share tactical information with Soviet intelligence for nothing in return.83
        The OSS lost its relevance after the Nazi capitulation in May 1945, as it had no intelligence leads outside of Germany.  With Harry Truman’s assumption of the presidency, the OSS was abolished in September 1945.  It was replaced with the Central Intelligence Group (CIG), which met many of the same problems that the OSS faced, especially heated inter-agency rivalries with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC – military intelligence).
        VLIK was the first group to make contact with the CIC, with Jonas Deksnys as its representative.  In July 1945, Deksnys was summoned to Bayreuth for the American Armed Forces’ “war time trial session,” whose purpose was to expedite ex-prisoners’ cases.  While being questioned by head of the tribunal, Lt. Col. Smith, Deksnys informed him that Lithuanians had fought both the Nazis and the Soviets, both openly and through clandestine publishing.  He further described that since 1943, Algirdas Vokietaitis had been in contact with the West through Stockholm.  Asked if Lithuanians had any ties with the Soviets or the Red Army, and whether partisans accepted Communists into their ranks, Deksnys explained that they did not.  Smith invited Deksnys to deliver a letter to Frankfurt describing the Lithuanian underground.84
        In Frankfurt, Smith introduced Desknys to Maj. Shimkus, with whom he spoke about Western aid for Lithuania.  Shimkus told Deksnys that “Lithuanian hopes for the possibility of Lithuania breaking free of Soviet influence [had] no basis.”85  Hopes of receiving aid from the CIC at that time were feeble, as the CIC was more concerned with rooting out Nazi war criminals.
        Shimkus asked why the refugees did not just return to Lithuania to fight.86  Deksnys must have been asking himself this question recently as well.  Due to his failure to elicit American support and rumors that he had divulged information to the Nazis regarding VLIK while under their arrest, Deksnys was being neglected by VLIK.87
        Since VLIK accepted so many different political groups, it began to suffer from its own openness.  VLIK leadership in Pfullingen experienced dissention over the constitution, admission of new groups, and experienced political jockeying for leadership positions.  Much of this personal political ambition was exhibited by Deksnys.
        In an effort to gain the upper hand in being in command of the Lithuanian resistance abroad, Deksnys started making plans to sneak into Lithuania to gather information regarding the status of the partisan movement, and to pass along information from the West regarding the international situation and Lithuanian exile efforts.  Deksnys and Klemensas Brunius (Prapuolenis) returned to Lithuania to set up meetings with partisans in the hopes of becoming chief emissaries for the partisans abroad.  These trips were monitored by Soviet security forces; Deksnys was not arrested, as the Soviets had plans that were more devious for him.
        Deksnys and Brunius met with Col. Juozas Vitkus-Kazimieraitis on 28 November 1945 in southern Lithuania, where resistance was strongest.  The news they brought described an international situation in which aggressive maneuvers would most likely not be supported by the West in the short run.  This struck up the initiative to restructure partisan tactics and organization in such a way that it would be more suitable for a prolonged struggle.88  The initiative to consolidate communication between partisan groups took place in April 1946 at the first conference of partisan groups from all regions of Lithuania.
        For his return to Germany, Deksnys was provided with forged passports by Dr. Juozas Albinas Markulis (Noreika).  Markulis, who had been born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and had moved to Lithuania in 1930, impressed Deksnys with his fervor and resources.  As it turned out, Markulis’ passports had been obtained from the NKVD, and Markulis was one of their agents.  Markulis easily convinced Deksnys that since VLIK’s existence abroad had caused it to “lose touch” with the Lithuanian cause, a separate organization should be formed in Lithuania to maintain contact with the partisans and communicate with the West.89
        Upon Deksnys’ return to Germany, he met with Stasys Žymantas (originally Žakevičius), who, in an attempt to return to Lithuania from exile in Denmark in May 1945, decided last-minute to cancel his trip upon warnings that he would be arrested by NKVD forces upon arrival in Lithuania.90  Instead, Žymantas stayed in the West and was recruited by the head of the SIS’s Baltic operations, Moscow-born Scot “Sandy” McKibbin, to lead the SIS’s Lithuanian operations.
        Žymantas and McKibbin met in March 1946 in Lübeck, Germany to discuss Deksnys’ graphic description of the partisan movement.91  Deksnys told them about partisans who would defile the faces of their dead partners so that civilians forced to look at the dead bodies would not recognize them and be identified by Soviets as relatives or supporters.  Some partisans would even commit suicide by blowing their faces off with grenades so that they could not be recognized.
        In Lübeck, Žymantas and McKibbin agreed to support Deksnys in the formation of a group such as the one Markulis had suggested.  The SIS disregarded VLIK, accepting Deksnys’ claim that they were Nazi collaborators whom the partisans did not trust.92
        Deksnys returned to Lithuania in May 1946 with another emissary, Vytautas Stanevičius, to assist in the formation of the United Democratic Resistance Movement (BDPS – Bendrasis demokratinis pasipriešinimo sąjūdis).  The BDPS was signed into existence on 10 June 1946 by Deksnys, Stanevičius, Lukša (as Juozas Vytis), Markulis, and “Varkala,” the only active partisan leader to attend the meeting.  The BDPS was created with the hopes that it would be in command of all partisan operations in Lithuania.  It issued passive resistance directives that made partisans wary of the BDPS’s true commitment to their concerns.  In a top secret “instructional bulletin” issued by the BDPS on 16 March 1947, it was suggested that, “since we do not foresee new possibilities in our struggle, our suggestions of new forms of warfare are based on the need to reduce needless sacrifice...and on the current world political situation – on the fact that it has become known that there is no basis to expect a war soon [italics original].”93
        While the BDPS may have had a more accurate appraisal of world climate, the partisans in 1947 still maintained that a third World War was drawing near:  “We must admit that the hour of deliverance has been delayed...the unceasing Bolshevik propaganda fools the people of lower intelligence...facts clearly show that an armed conflict is a matter of the near future, not of several years.”94
        According to a 7 June 1947 issue of Laisvės žvalgas (Freedom Watchdog), a newspaper from Lukša’s Tauras district, “the world’s greatest scholars and most famous strategists – Eisenhower, Montgomery, Adm. Nimitz and scores of others are gathering weapons and plans from all countries to collectively eliminate criminal-infected Moscow as the sole hindrance of freedom.”95
        Many partisans had no choice but to look at the situation in this light, as they were already armed and fighting.  Soviet offers of amnesty to partisans were not trusted, since surrendering partisans were often tortured to divulge more information about the movement.  Seeing their only option as fighting the Soviet occupation, partisans refused to accept directives calling for a switch from active to passive resistance.  Some even called those in favor of passive resistance “Bolshevik agents,” and they were not far off the mark.96  To maintain sovereignty over partisan operations, the partisans insisted that military officers receive equal voice in the BDPS, which they did in November 1946, through the VGPŠ with Lukša at its head.97
        Nonetheless, three days after the creation of the BDPS, the Supreme Committee for the Restoration of Lithuanian Independence (VLAK – Vyriausias Lietuvos atstatymo komitetas), was signed into existence, lead by Markulis with Deksnys heading the foreign relations department.  This was set up to counter VLIK’s predominance as the leading partisan representative organization in the West.  According to Vitkauskas, “everyone was ‘satisfied.’  The Soviet MGB had an agent at the head of a new resistance organization, and Deksnys fulfilled his ambitions to be the partisan representative abroad.”98  To add to that, the SIS was pleased that it had been able to place liaisons in Lithuania who would be able to relay information between Britain and Lithuania.  In this sense, VLAK was a front organization for both the NKVD and the SIS.

Juozas Lukša
        After the war, the biggest problem American intelligence faced was a critical lack of information on the Soviet Union.  Since legal precedent was not yet in place to give the CIG or the CIC permission to get directly or heavily involved in Lithuania, contacts between the United States and Lithuanian representatives formed slowly.
        The development of American foreign policy regarding the Soviet Union cannot be discussed without a study of George F. Kennan’s influence on that policy.  The wartime ally was becoming increasingly antagonistic now that the common enemy had been defeated.  Kennan meticulously interpreted this trend in his Long Telegram “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” vastly affecting opinions in Washington including President Truman’s.
	Kennan’s 8,000-word Long Telegram, transmitted on 22 February 1946 from Moscow to Washington, held the seeds of what would solidify as American policy through the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine.  Kennan expounded on the opinions set forth in the Long Telegram with “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” published in Foreign Affairs in 1947 under the pseudonym “X.”
        The threat from the “devious, monstrous, incalculable, and inscrutable” Soviets, as Kennan saw it, was that the Kremlin’s “political action is a fluid stream which moves constantly, wherever it is permitted to move, toward a given goal.  Its main concern is to make sure that it has filled every nook and cranny available to it in the basin of world power.”99  He outlined what would become the American policy of containment, stating that “it is clear that the main element of any United States’ policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies,” adding that the United States “must continue to regard the Soviet Union as a rival, not a partner, in the political arena.”100
        These opinions resounded with Harry Rositzke, the head of the Soviet division of CIG, who began to consider placing American agents in the Soviet Union for intelligence gathering.101  The only problem was that this was illegal at the time and that the American-Soviet relationship had not yet worsened to the point where that would be a necessity.
        The CIG became the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on 26 July 1947 with Truman’s signing of the National Security Act.  The Act also created a National Security Council (NSC) and the position of Secretary of Defense.  On 19 November 1947, the NSC issued Directive NSC-4, enabling the CIA to begin an anti-Communist propaganda campaign overseas.  A secret addition, NSC-4A, charged the CIA’s Director with conducting covert psychological warfare using unvouchered funds.102  To fulfill this directive, the Office of Special Operations (OSO) was created within the CIA with Rositzke at its head.
        The Cold War was picking up steam, with the Berlin blockade cautiously beginning 1 April 1948.  Several policymakers were able to convince themselves that the Soviet Union was looking for war, while some insisted many others informed them that the Soviets were too weak to go on the offensive.  Nonetheless, on 18 June 1948, the NSC passed NSC 10/2, which created the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) with Frank Wisner at its head.  The OPC existed in between the CIA and the State Department as an independent organization that would have the go-ahead to engage in extra-legal activities.  The OPC’s cloudy definition and extreme secrecy afforded government officials “plausible deniability” if their operations were uncovered.103
        During its four years in existence, the OPC would allow “assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.”104  By July 1948, Operation Bloodstone, managed by an interdepartmental committee known as SANACC 395, was enacted to “authorize the CIA to support any group...who could produce anti-Communist propaganda.”105  The true purpose of this group was to hire any refugees involved in resisting Soviet power to serve American interests by carrying out operations in their home countries.106  Lithuania, with its 30,000 reported partisans, was deemed an “excellent” prospective country for this clandestine warfare, despite the fact that, as Girnius puts it, “at the end of the Second World War, the Red Army had several times more soldiers than Lithuania had inhabitants.”107
        Rositzke was placed in charge of Operation Bloodstone with veteran OSS agent Charlie Katek in charge of a training camp in Kaufbeuren, Germany, about 150 miles east of Pfullingen, where VLIK had settled.  Katek’s head of Soviet operations was George Belic, who was mainly concerned with traveling the countryside to find émigrés willing to fight for their countries’ liberation.108  With the help of Vaivada, who had by that time ended up in Rositzke’s department, Belic was put in touch with Krupavičius (the political head of VLIK) and Col. Antanas Šova (the military head of VLIK) in Pfullingen.
        Initial hopes of assistance skyrocketed when Juozas Lukša arrived in the West.  After a bloody journey out of Lithuania during which Lukša had lost three of fifteen bodyguards despite having taken precautions so careful as to repeatedly smear the soles of their shoes with turpentine to mask their scent from Soviet guard dogs, Lukša met with Deksnys in Stockholm.109  He continued to Germany to meet with VLIK representatives, indicating Lukša’s suspicions of Deksnys’ trustworthiness and superiority.110  Arriving in Germany, Lukša told Vaivada a story of a meeting between partisan leaders who had been summoned by Markulis on 18 January 1947.  Lukša, skeptical of Markulis’ authenticity, warned partisan leaders not to go to the meeting, opting to observe from the woods.  The meeting was ambushed by NKVD agents who arrested those in attendance.  According to Lukša, further investigation revealed that Markulis had been turned by the NKVD in 1944, prompting the partisans to abolish VLAK.111
        Lack of communication between all the players worked in favor of the NKVD.  Deksnys was in Stockholm being wooed by the SIS, and Lukša, still in Lithuania in 1947, had no means of contacting Deksnys or the SIS to inform them of Markulis’ NKVD connections.  This prompted Lukša’s first trip out of Lithuania in April 1947, when Lukša, along with Krikščiūnas (Rimvydas), met with Deksnys (as Hektoras) in Poland.  Deksnys kept the news from the meeting to himself.  He was unable to contact Markulis to check Lukša’s stories, since the doctor had been taken to a safe-house in Leningrad by the NKVD after three assassination attempts by Lithuanian partisans.112
        On 24 June 1948, Lukša (as Krivulė) along with Juozas Pajaujis, escaped from Lithuania once again, this time heading from Stockholm to Baden-Baden, Germany with a stop in Paris.  In Paris, Lukša and Pajaujis picked up French visas courtesy of Dr. Stasys Bačkis (Dr. Aušra), a Lithuanian chargé d’affairs in Paris who had connections with VLIK and the Deuxi?me Bureau through Gen. Raymond Schmittlein.
        Once in Baden-Baden, Lukša and Pajaujis met with Deksnys and the VLIK executive board.113  From 7 to 9 July 1948, they discussed how, “the fight for the liberation of Lithuania should be led by: a) at home – already established and unified resistance groups, and b) abroad – by VLIK and its Executive Board (VT – Vykdomoji Tarnyba).” 114  The VT had the right to form a government in exile, and reserve a place in it for a representative from Lithuania.  No comments were made on VLAK, as at that point, it no longer existed, effectively eliminating Deksnys as its representative.115
        Furious with Lukša’s insistence that the partisan resistance be active, Deksnys exclaimed, “if Lukša’s line is accepted, they’ll shoot us all.  Let them shoot him too.”116  Lukša and Deksnys went their separate ways, with Deksnys returning to Sweden.  There, he would meet McKibbin and gain support for a mission back to Lithuania to gather intelligence and to oversee the Lithuanian Resistors’ Union (LRS – Lietuvos rezistentų santvarė), a revamped VLAK foreign relations board.
        Meanwhile, using VLIK’s already established contacts with Schmittlein and Bačkis, Lukša was brought back to Paris in August 1948.  While in Paris, Lukša (as Daumantas) wrote his book Partizanai už geležinės uždangos (Partisans Behind the Iron Curtain), giving an account of the armed resistance in Lithuania.  He described his impatience towards getting back into the fight:
I can't understand why I am here.  I left the bloodstained fields of Lithuania.  Our beloved Lithuania which is so crucified, screaming with pain, and I am not suffering the same death as thousands of others...I yearn to live, yet I also long to have my bones laid alongside of those of my friends who are the real freedom fighters.  Laughter, plenty of happiness, no worries and screams of coquetting women...[these] things become so precious when they are so difficult to obtain.117
        
        Lukša had trained in Paris for eighteen months when the French cancelled his mission last-minute in December 1948, suspecting his group of treachery, and citing the recent loss of a Swedish team as reason to cancel.118
        In January 1949, VLIK chairman Krupavičius and VT chairman Vaclovas Sidzikauskas were flown to Washington to meet with State Department and CIA officials.  There, they were promised political, material, and financial support, in a formal agreement signed by VLIK and the CIA.119  This support would come in two forms.  First, the formation of constant contact with the Lithuanian underground by carrying out operations within Lithuania and maintaining radio contact with them.  The second goal was to disseminate “information,” that is, to spread anti-Communist propaganda in Lithuania.120
        The CIA’s annual $40,000 grant radically changed VLIK’s and Lukša’s outlooks on the war.  In 1947, Sidzikauskas wanted to “conserve the country’s potential,” whereas upon returning from Washington on 15 June 1949, he told a press conference that he believed that, “the Baltic problem is now one that is inseparable from European politics.”121
        The formerly frustrated Lukša turned to the Americans, and Belic welcomed the “intelligent, dedicated idealist” who was relieved that “finally I’m with people who think that we are worth our freedom.”122
        While VLIK and Lukša saw CIA support through rose-tinted glasses, Lukša’s compatriots struggling in Lithuania were more cynical.  In 1949, Lukša received a letter from Krikščiūnas, the partisan leader of the Dainava region whom Lukša had traveled to the West with in 1947.  “Rimvydas” concludes with the suggestion that Lukša “write your own conclusion, just curse the Americans.  I hate those ‘golden pigs’ worse than the Russians.  From your letter, I understand that they are mocking you.  Tell those beasts to go through the barbed wire themselves.”123
        According to Klemensas Širvys (Sakalas, Frank), at Katek’s training camp in Kaufbeuren, émigrés learned how to use Morse code, send radio messages, and how to blow things up.124  On 1 October 1950, Lukša (as Skrajūnas), Benediktas Trumpys (Rytis), and Širvys, who would be their radio operator, prepared for a secret flight into Lithuania.  They were each provided with a Schmeisser MP-32 sub-machine-gun, a few grenades, radios, transmitters, generators, cyanide tablets, ten watches, 3,000 rubles, 2,000USD, and food.125
        The three men, along with Julijonas Butėnas, who came along to watch, flew from Munich to Wiesbaden, where they had to wait a couple of days for better weather.126  Receiving last-minute directions from “George [Belic],” the two Czech pilots immediately began plotting the northeasterly course for their unmarked C47 plane.127
        The three parachuters, along with Butėnas, the two pilots, and two supply containers, flew over Hamburg and then along the Swedish coast.  As they approached Lithuania, they flew at an altitude of 200 feet in order to evade radar detection.  Širvys had not even noticed that the plane had crossed the Nemunas River, as they approached the Klaipėda region.  The plane suddenly climbed to 500 feet, the lowest level safe for jumping, and the three men “stepped into the dark.”128
        
The “Red Web”
        The team landed not in their intended drop zone of Kazlų Rūdos forest, but approximately 100 miles away, in Žygaičių forest in the Tauragė region of Lithuania.129  The Lithuania that they landed in contained slightly over 5,000 active guerrillas who were being “mopped up” by the militia, and NKVD agents ran most of the remaining groups.130  The situation was bleak from the moment of their landing: Lukša landed in a tree, badly injuring his shoulder and one of the parachutes carrying their food and gear could not be located.
        They wandered for approximately two weeks at night searching for their contacts.  With their bare hands, they buried the equipment from the parachute they did locate as its weight had slowed their progress.  They eventually linked up with their partisan contacts, indicating in their first message back to Germany only that they had arrived safely, and not of the bleak situation.131  The message failed to reach Munich on 22 October 1949, as the transmitter batteries had gotten damp from being buried.132  Using a makeshift generator, Širvys was able to send the message the next day, at which point he settled down to an inactive partisan life, listening for signals from the West.  Lukša started on a tour of his district to judge the state of the partisan battle.
        The team eventually learned that the missing package had been located by a local peasant, but that it had been turned over to “partisans” who turned out to be NKVD agents dressed as partisans.133  This indicated to the NKVD that Lukša had returned to Lithuania, and plans were quickly made to “liquidate” him.134  Since 1948, Soviet efforts at putting down the surprisingly tenacious Lithuanian resistance had increased, and the tactics employed became much harsher.
        In February 1944, on Stalin’s orders, Mikhail A. Suslov had been assigned the position of “special emissary to pacify Lithuania.”135  Suslov was put in charge of the Organizational Bureau for Lithuania (Orgburo) within the Central Committee of the CPSU, which was set up on 11 November 1944.  Here, he oversaw the development of Soviet ideology in Lithuania.  The objective was to “soften-up” the country towards the ideas of class warfare and collectivization of farms.136  Several divisions of border guards who had just been used to carry out massive deportations of Kalmucks, Chechen-Ingush, and Crimean Tatars were assigned to Suslov’s mission to deal with the partisan war.  These initial missions were successfully resisted by the partisans, and by late summer, even Suslov admitted that Lithuania was firmly controlled by “1,067 partisan groups and 839 bandit groups.”137
        The Kremlin sent General Sergei Nikiforovich Kruglov, “one of the most cruel and merciless executioners,” to Lithuania in September 1944, to strengthen the “Soviet hold over the ‘liberated’ countries.”138  Calling a top-secret organizational meeting of his officers in Panevėžys, he ordered the intensification of the effort to “liquidate” resistance in Lithuania.139  To organize this, Kruglov, Deputy Director of Soviet counterintelligence (SMERSH – Smert’ shpionam, “Death to Spies”) established a special NKVD Department for “Bandit” Affairs (OBO – Osobi banditskii otdel).140  
        In a technique used to seed dissention between resistance groups and the public, Kruglov ordered the formation of istrebiteli, or “destroyer” groups (stribai) of up to thirty troops.  Lithuanian civilians would be told that joining stribai would exempt them from being drafted into the Red Army.  The purpose of the stribai, namely to wage war against the partisans, would not be revealed to the people joining them.141  The stribai caused considerable tension between the populace and the resistance, as partisans would sometimes even find that friends and family members had joined them.142
        In addition to the eight regular Red Army divisions, Kruglov’s OBO added at least 70,000 NKVD troops to fight the partisans in 1948.143  These troops, forming razvedovatelno poiskovaya gruppi – reconnaissance-search groups of 15 to 20 NKVD soldiers, were given orders to conduct “state searches” (gosudarstvenoye proverkii), combing the forests for “bandits,” with permission to shoot anyone who attempted to run away, even people who were unarmed.144  The methods used to suppress the partisans were brutal: “Extreme forms of torture, quartering, tongue-cutting, eye-gouging, burying heads down in ant hills, etc., were employed to break the fighters.  Mutilated corpses were dumped in town squares – and reactions of passerby were surreptitiously observed in an attempt to identify relatives and friends of ‘bandits.’”145
        The proverkii were effective in encircling the partisans, who often lived in concentrated underground bunkers.  Usually conducting searches during the day, the groups would seek out partisans for battle in the open, or even in villages.  As described in the Burlitski testimony:
It was like beating the forests for wild game, except that the game was human.  Day after day we formed long lines and combed the forests and the swamps, arresting, shooting, burning...Even my well-disciplined soldiers were sickened by their jobs.  Often after a particularly grim manhunt I would find them in their quarters half-mad with drink; whatever was left of their human feelings was drowned in alcohol.146
        
        In many cases, NKVD troops would desert their divisions in disgust, as was the case for the NKVD 2nd and 4th Special Task Divisions during the 1950-1951 repression.147
        Kruglov also introduced efforts to create fake partisan groups composed of NKVD agents trained at a special NKVD school in Vilnius.148  In some cases, NKVD agents donning partisan uniforms would be sent out to murder civilians in an attempt to convince people that the partisans were merely bandits.149
        These “pseudo-guerrilla”150 groups were also used to infiltrate the partisan cadres themselves.  NKVD agents posing as partisans would go into the woods to retrieve intelligence.  Towards the end of the battle, NKVD agents even impersonated American and British agents to lure partisans.  The photograph on the front cover of Lukša and Trumpys to his left (Širvys stands to Lukša’s right in the original) was confiscated by NKVD agents. The faces of Širvys and Trumpys were replaced with the Soviet agents’ faces and were used by them to convince partisans that the NKVD agents had made contact with Lukša.151
        Such elaborate schemes were not always necessary.  The intelligence-thirsty Rositzke and Harry Carr, the ever-trusting controller of the SIS’s Northern Area, began to grow suspicious of one another’s missions.152  Even when Deksnys was taken, the SIS didn’t suspect a thing.  In fact, they thought that Lukša had been arrested and turned.  In a meeting between Rositzke and Carr, both insisted that their operations were clean:
        R:	Do we know which of these operations is already under Russian control?
        C:	Ours isn’t.
        R:	How can you be so sure that your agent isn’t under control?
        C:	We’re sure.
        R:	But how can you be?
        C:	Because we’ve made our checks.  Our group is watertight.
        R:	So’s ours, but one group is penetrated.
        C:	Harry, I think we know our business on this one.153
        
        In an ironic twist, the notes for the meeting were taken by NKVD master double agent Kim Philby.154
        In reality, Deksnys was the one who had been turned.  Before Deksnys’ trip back to Lithuania, an Estonian team had been captured and tortured by Soviet security forces.  They were forced to send misinformation back to Swedish intelligence (where Deksnys had ended up) that Lukša had already arrived in Lithuania in 1948.155  This caused Capt. Ore Liljenberg, Deksnys’s handler, and McKibbin to agree to a Swedish-covered SIS mission to hurry a Baltic group to the other side of the Iron Curtain.156  In this way, the misinformation fed to SIS by the Estonian team enabled Soviet state security minister Gen. Viktor Abakumov and his Lithuanian equivalent, Maj. Gen. Dimitri Yefimov, to organize a date, time, and place for a rendezvous with Deksnys in Lithuania.157
        On 24 April 1949, Deksnys set out from Hamburg, Germany for a trip on S-208, a reconditioned German E-boat captained by Capt. Hans Helmut Klose.  With Deksnys, Briedis, Pyplys (Audronis, Mažytis), and Sveics (a Latvian double agent) under the deck, Klose sailed S-208, under the guise of being a Fishery Protection Service vessel, to Bornholm, Denmark to refuel and await better weather for a landing at Palanga, Lithuania.158
        On May Day 1949, the group successfully landed on the coast of Lithuania.  Deksnys was unable to initiate a meeting with their intended contacts and was forced to wait at a safe house.  Sveics was able to separate himself from the group and raise the local NKVD.  Consequently, Deksnys and Briedis were captured by Soviet agents in an ambush on 7 May 1949.159  Pyplys escaped and headed to Suvalkija to find other partisans, Briedis was murdered without trial, and Deksnys, after his capture, was subjected to severe torture.  He consequently collaborated with the NKVD.  Subsequent messages sent by “Briedis” to the SIS came under suspicion as they took on propaganda-like overtones.  McKibbin knew the operation had failed when he received signals from Pyplys inquiring what had happened to Deksnys.160
        At least six British-sponsored missions following Deksnys’ fell to his treachery, and Lukša’s mission met a similar fate.161  On 19 April 1951, Julijonas Butėnas and Jonas Kukauskas were successfully dropped into Lithuania.  After burying their equipment, Butėnas separated to search out Lukša, while Kukauskas met up with Širvys, who had survived a year in his bunker without having seen Lukša.162  Kukauskas stayed at Širvys’ bunker with a guide while Širvys went to dig up Kukauskas’ supplies with some help.163  Upon returning, Širvys found an exploded bunker and a dead guide and learned that Kukauskas had been arrested.
        While under arrest, Kukauskas was tortured and broken into betraying Lukša and Butėnas.  Upon being surrounded, Butėnas bit into his pure cyanide “L-tablet” to escape being captured just two weeks after having landed in Lithuania.164  Lukša had been staying with Adolfas Ramanauskas (Vanagas) when he was contacted by Kukauskas, who wanted to set up a meeting in the Pabartupis village forest near Kaunas.165
        Unaware that Butėnas was dead or that Kukauskas had been turned, Lukša agreed to meet with Kukauskas, but not without taking precautions.  Asking his fellow partisans to shoot him in the face if the meeting was an ambush, Lukša had several bodyguards escort him to the meeting.  As Lukša’s body has never been found, one can only speculate whether he exploded a grenade in his bunker, or if he was shot and buried secretly by the NKVD.
        Meanwhile, the NVKD had been sending correctly encoded radio messages back to Munich through Kukauskas with the radio set that they had removed from Širvys’ bunker before blasting it.166  As Kuodytė puts it, by this time, “the so-called games between Western intelligence services and the NKVD” were well underway.167  The objectives of these “games” were laid out by the NKVD initiatives of 1949 and 1950 called Volna (Wave), and Lyes (Forest) respectively.  These severely crippled Western attempts at placing spies in the Baltics:
The central task in this case is to mislead the British intelligence service through fictitious “opportunities” in the Soviet Union, and track down their agency...Not to relate Lyes with Volna, so that if difficulties arise on one line of communication, it will still be possible to preserve the potential for observing the American and British intelligence services.168

        The most astonishing level of penetration into the SIS was that of Harold “Kim” Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross, the “Cambridge Five.”169  One would think that Philby was behind the treachery involved with the Baltic missions, since he had so much access to other SIS files.  In reality, chances are he knew very little about them, if anything at all, since, according to Dorril, Carr and McKibbin never fully divulged information about the missions.  They were concerned with keeping the particulars secret vis-?-vis the Americans.170

Left Alone in the Woods
The SIS Gives Up
        Nonetheless, it was the NKVD that was subverting the operations, not the Americans, as is illustrated by the last SIS mission into Lithuania. Zigmas Kudirka’s (Conrad) mission epitomized the defeat of all the previous missions.  A young Lithuanian émigré in London, he was brought into the SIS in 1951, at which time McKibbin still thought the Lithuanian operations were not too badly off.171  After spending a year rowing agents from Klose’s S-208 to the shore in a rubber boat, Kudirka stayed in Lithuania when he stepped out of S-208 at Palanga during the fall of 1952.  He had no idea that Deksnys had been captured or that Briedis had been executed.172  Kudirka was to be the radio operator for his partner on the trip, “Edmundes,” a Soviet double agent.173
        Adhering to warnings from Edmundes, Kudirka spent the next two years leaving his safe house only at night, spending his time relaying Edmundes’ falsified reports to the SIS.  As neither the SIS nor Kudirka knew of Edmundes’ betrayal, the SIS figured that Kudirka was “hanging in there,” while Kudirka lived a life of fear propagated by Edmundes’ exaggerated reports of NKVD activity in the region.  In response to repeated appeals for his rescue, Kudirka received the following response from Žymantas in 1956: “We cannot organize your return.  Chin up.  Your situation is not that bad.  Try organizing your own escape through Sweden.”174
        This message came shortly after the SIS had started investigating the soundness of its operations.  In May 1956, the American-Lithuanian CIA officer Louise Bedarfas determined that all actual British agents in the Baltics were dead.175  In order to clean house, George Young (Scott) was assigned to verify Bedarfas’ assessment.  Young quickly affirmed that the NKVD was firmly in control of the SIS operations in the Baltics.  As a result, McKibbin “was allowed to retire,” following Harry Carr’s demotion to Copenhagen’s resident station in 1955.176
        Kudirka attempted to remain tight-lipped on his association with the SIS when he was arrested by the NKVD a couple of months later.  His interrogators proved his efforts useless, as they told him that they knew about everything he had done.  They proceeded to impart to him the information that they had gleaned from Edmundes over the last two years.177  Kudirka was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, but was released after two during the Khrushchev era of relaxing Stalinist punishments.

CIA Closes Shop
        With his appointment to the head of the CIA in 1951, George “Beetle” Smith saw the failure of Lukša’s and Kukauskas’ military missions and was prompted to hire Gen. Lucian Truscott to reassess the CIA’s activities in the Baltic.  Truscott’s initial inquiries prompted Frank Lindsay (Deputy Chief of the OPC) to staff a “Murder Board” to examine all OPC operations.178  When juxtaposed with recent advances in spy-plane technology, émigré infiltration missions were deemed too dangerous and too costly to continue.  Consequently, the CIA, under its new director, Allen Dulles, closed its Baltic operations in 1952.  John Foster Dulles’ statement that “the captive peoples should know that they are not forgotten” illustrates that further American aid was not forthcoming.179  By the end of 1952, it was estimated that only 700 partisans remained in Lithuania.180
        Without Western support, with waning hopes for a world conflagration, and diminishing public support, the partisans still managed to survive in the woods for a few more years.  In a Radio Vilnius declaration on 19 October 1955, Party Secretary of Lithuania Antanas Sniečkus offered amnesty to “the men in the forest,” admitting the continuing existence of “bourgeois nationalist bandits lurking in the forests.”181  On 22 March 1956, another amnesty declaration indicated that partisans were still harassing the Soviets.  By 1956, Adolfas Ramanauskas (Vanagas), the last partisan leader, was arrested and hanged in Kaunas.

Conclusion: Hope, Motivation, Expectations, and Illusions
        The assistance from the West ended up meeting neither what the partisans had hoped for nor what they had been promised.  Partisan expectations of the West ran high, and understandably so.  Considering how grossly outnumbered the partisans were, they needed to hope for Western intervention.  For them, it seemed impossible that the West would not come to their rescue, as illustrated in an issue of Prisikėlimo ugnis (Resurrection Flame) from 31 December 1949:
[After the war], the Red Tyrant, despite having quieted his propaganda on world revolution and world takeover, was not dozing.  Like a tiger with retracted claws, he crept quietly behind the Iron Curtain, swallowing the occupied states...Our homeland is not alone in suffering the Communist tyranny, for the Poles, the Bulgarians, the Romanians, the Hungarians, the Czechs, - 100 million hearts thirsting for freedom awaiting liberation along with us.  And liberation will certainly come because the world already knows of and is resolved to crumble the prison of nations the has come as a result of the Bolshevik horror.182

        Not only did the partisans believe in the certainty of liberation, but they also believed that it would come on the wings of a world conflagration.  The partisans who saw the Soviet occupation as being only temporary were awaiting military aid, especially in light of the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine, even though these documents did not promise military aid to Lithuania.  According to the 15 March 1947 issue of the partisan bulletin Laisvės Rytas (Freedom’s Morning),
President Truman stated that the US will not be involved in the politics of isolation and that it will finally take action so that peace would be put into practice in the world...Truman promised support for the nations fighting for their freedom, and the communist press attacks Truman rather severely for this speech, however, the communist press also shows its fear, for it sees a rapidly approaching end to Communism.  All these latest events show that at this time the final stage of preparation for war is under way.183

        The partisans thought that the West would have no choice but to intervene in the Baltics given the harsh Soviet repression.  Like the Front pour la Libération Nationale would do in the 1960’s in Algeria, Lithuanian partisans hoped the violent Soviet suppression of partisans’ national expression would induce the West to respond.  Unfortunately, the NKVD was so efficient, that even when the West did step in, the assistance was successfully countered.
	This failure could also be explained by the lack of a committed response.  As Vermont Royster suggests:
Doctrine, sound in principle, should be applied only by two criteria.  First, only in areas where our vital interests are affected, the operative word being ‘vital’...not every place in the world is equally important to our own or the world’s peace and security.  The second criterion is whether it is within our power to act effectively.
        
        Royster’s comments were originally applied to American involvement in Vietnam, but can also be applied to the Lithuanian case.  Lithuania was not of vital interest to the United States, yet the United States continued to “apply doctrine” in Lithuania by supporting the émigrés.  The United States and the West were mainly concerned with gathering intelligence on the Soviet Union to shore up their critical lack of intelligence.  Both the SIS and the CIA constantly sent the Forest Brothers requests for intelligence on specific factories, shipyards, ports, and power stations.184  In one case, the SIS requested that a Latvian partisan (to prove his loyalty) venture deep into Russia to gather radioactive water from a river in the Urals where the SIS believed a nuclear power plant had recently been built.  By the SIS’s reasoning, if the Latvian was too frightened to go into Russia, he could have sent back water from anywhere.185  The SIS was willing to risk his capture just to provide some intelligence (which ended up being intercepted and modified by the NKVD nonetheless) and to prove his allegiance.
        While Truscott was investigating Rositzke’s operations in Kaufbeuren, his aide, Tom Polgar, made the CIA’s objectives clear when he asked Rositzke what the émigrés hoped to accomplish once they were returned to Lithuania, “if 270 German divisions had failed to topple Stalin?”186  David Murphy, who was slated to replace Rositzke as head of Soviet operations in Germany, answered that, “even if they don’t send back good intelligence, we’re causing the Russians a lot of headaches.”187  Rositzke added that, “those in the Kremlin must be scared shitless,” refusing to admit his failure even as Truscott concluded that, “lives are being risked just to see what happens when men put their feet in the water, but they’re finding nothing.  We’re not getting any intelligence.”188
        With the passing of NSC-68, American efforts shifted towards passive support.  Signed on 7 April 1950, NSC-68 advised the necessity of:
* Development of programs designed to build and maintain confidence among other peoples in our strength and resolution, and to wage overt psychological warfare designed to encourage mass defections from Soviet allegiance and to frustrate the Kremlin design in other ways.
* Intensification of affirmative and timely measures and operations by covert means in the fields of economic warfare with a view to fomenting and supporting unrest and revolt in selected strategic satellite countries.189

        With this policy shift, the United States undertook less intrusive of means of countering the Soviet regime.  One of these was the beginning of radio broadcasts into Lithuania via the Voice of America (VOA) starting on 16 February 1951.  Unlike most other Eastern European countries that were under Soviet occupation at the time, Lithuania did not receive Radio Free Europe (RFE) or Radio Liberty (RL) broadcasts until the 1970’s.  Originally, RFE resisted broadcasting into Lithuania because “some questioned whether the Baltic peoples would survive what was perceived as a Soviet campaign of cultural genocide.”190  Nevertheless, RFE had started hiring Baltic staff in 1951, when the State Department objected on the grounds that “RFE had been established because VOA, as an official instrument of the American government, could not broadcast hard-hitting propaganda to Communist countries with which the United States maintained diplomatic relations.”191  This applied to Lithuania since the United States still recognized Lithuanian independence de jure.  By 1953, these restrictions were removed since there was no reason not to broadcast into Lithuania, but by then, Bob Lang, the director of RFE, claimed that:
The station did not need the added burden of three new broadcast services at a time when it was just beginning to achieve a measure of success in its programs to Eastern Europe...the view, widely shared within the organization, [was] that broadcasts to the Baltics did not merit the added cost and technical complications given the small number of potential listeners involved.192
        
        The number of potential listeners in Lithuania was small, as massive Soviet interference efforts would block almost all broadcasts, requiring VOA to broadcast on twenty-six different frequencies every day.193  Nonetheless, the broadcasts from VOA and those established from the Vatican on 4 May 1952 were very popular.  While it would be hard to say that the radio broadcasts, as Puddington puts it, “alter[ed] the course of Communist history within a few years,” Lithuanians were certainly affected by them.194  As Bagušauskas asserts, “hopes that liberation will be fulfilled, that the communist system would collapse, and that Lithuania would sooner or later peacefully restore its statehood were present whenever world radio services were present in Lithuania.”195
        As the Cold War continued, the partisans expressed recognition of the changing world situation with subtle changes in their publications.  Since Lithuania assumed the backseat regarding active support from the West, partisan newspapers such as Laisvės Varpas (Liberty Bell) wrote that:
A short, but arduous period is approaching during which will show how much Lithuania deserves its restored independence...Today’s primary weapon, which the enemy fears most, is a belief in a brighter national future, our national consciousness, our unity, our inflexible will to resist the foreign intruders.196
        
        The suppression of the Polish revolt in Posnan in June 1956 and the brutal 3 November 1956 Soviet military invasion of Budapest, Hungary effectively ended partisan hopes at military intervention.  This loss of hope accented by President Eisenhower’s 31 October 1956 statement, made days before the Hungarian invasion:
After World War II, the Soviet Union used military force to impose on the nations of Eastern Europe governments of Soviet choice – servants of Moscow.  It has been the consistent United States policy...to fulfill the wartime pledge of the United Nations and that these countries, overrun by wartime armies, would once again know sovereignty and self-government.  We could not, of course, carry out this policy by resort to force.  Such force would have been contrary both to the interests of the Eastern European peoples and to the abiding principles of the United Nations.  But we did help to keep alive the hope of these people for freedom.197
        
        From the beginning of the second Soviet occupation, partisan responses to the lack of support from the West contained an iota of hope, as illustrated by Lukša’s statement that the West “condemned us to death at Yalta, Potsdam...They continue to repeat the mistakes, not daring to raise a voice of protest against the annihilation of our nation, not even wishing to know that we are not yet disappointed with them, that we are continuing the struggle with their ‘ally,’ not knowing defeat.”198 (emphasis added – D.R.)
        When the United States responded to the Hungarian invasion with only words, Lithuanian opinions could be summed up by an excerpt from Elena Jučiūtė’s memoirs:
The [Lithuanian] people were particularly disappointed with the Western states, which speak so many beautiful words about human rights, the right of national self-determination, freedom, humanitarianism, but in this case were unwilling to support with a firm word a small nation, heroically fighting for its freedom.  None of us had expected such turpitude from the free world; we had a better opinion of them, and for this reason, the disappointment was devastating.199
        
	According to Soviet sources cited by Starkauskas, 20,093 partisans were killed between 1944 and 1953. Nearly 18,000 were taken prisoner and 38,604 left the forests, surrendering their weapons.200  Those who died did so in an attempt to bring about their own liberation.  After half-hearted attempts by the West to assist their cause, the Forest Brothers were left in the woods on their own.

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1 Rupainis
2 From 1934-1946, the NKVD was the main body for internal affairs of the Soviet Union.  For a few months in 1941 and then again from 1943-1946, the People's Commissariat of State Security (NKGB – Narodnii Kommissariat Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti) existed as an independent organization alongside the NKVD.  In 1946, the NK’s (People’s Commissariats) were renamed “ministries” (Ministrestvo), yielding the MVD and the MGB.  The MGB became a “committee” (KGB – Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti) in 1954, at which point the MVD faded into obscurity.  NKVD will be used in referring to Soviet security forces throughout this paper, although in some cases, the MVD or MGB would be more appropriate from 1946-1954.
3 Remeikis, 270
4 Misiūnas, 89. Misiūnas cites Tauras as giving estimates towards the lower end, while Soviet estimates range towards the higher end.
5 Gerutis, 313
6 Misiūnas, 3-4
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid., 7
9 Vardys, 6
10 Misiūnas, 7
11 Dorril, 268-270
12 Vardys, 19
13 Ibid., 18-19
14 Although de jure recognition of Lithuanian independence was never withdrawn by the United States, de facto recognition was re-instated on 2 September 1991 after the breakup of the Soviet Union.
15 Kennan, 178
16 Ibid., 180
17 Ibid., 182
18 Pajaujis, 6
19 Misiūnas, 25-26
20 Ibid., 25. Misiūnas cites the Third Interim Report of the Select Committee on Communist Aggression, 83rd Congress, 2nd Session for this surprising statement by Molotov.
21 Pajaujis, 18
22 Gerutis, 315
23 Pajaujis, 19
24 Ibid., 19-21
25 Third Interim Report of the Select Committee on Communist Aggression, House of Representatives, (Tauras, 17).  This report was published in October 1954.
26 Pajaujis, 24
27 Misiūnas, 41
28 Pajaujis, 24
29 Misiūnas, 40; Pajaujis, 24
30 Vardys 142-147
31 Ibid., 143
32 Gerutis, 318
33 Ibid.
34 Audėnas, 51
35 Gerutis, 324
36 Kaunas was the temporary capital of Lithuania from 1920 until 1940, as Vilnius had been occupied by Poland.
37 http://www.balticsww.com/tourist/lithuania/history.htm
38 Dorril, 270
39 Remeikis, 61
40 From conversation on 9 January 2002
41 Vardys, 80
42 In 1945, the NKVD’s armed forces were comprised of 680,280 soldiers of which approximately 500,000 were “border troops.”  Their main function was to guard the borders, but they would at times verture as far as 50 miles from the border.  (Anušauskas, 46)
43 Remeikis, 268
44 Valiunas, 38
45 Liekis, 3
46 Valiunas, 38
47 Mockūnas, 138
48 Ibid., 139
49 Kairys was released, as the Gestapo was not able to determine his identity.  (Valiunas, 43)
50 The Vietinė Rinktinė has several translations into English, causing for considerable confusion.  Translations include Home Army, Home Defense, Local Defense, Lithuanian Home Formation, Territorial Defense Force, etc.  Home Army will be used in this paper.
51 Gerutis, 295
52 Ibid., 296
53 Audėnas, 57-58
54 Gerutis, 332
55 Valiunas, 52
56 Bražėnas
57 Remeikis, 267
58 Daumantas, 10
59 The major deportations took place in September 1945; February 18, 1946; December 17, 1947; May 22, 1948; March 24-27, 1949; May 27-28, 1949; March, 1950.  May 1948 was the largest. (Vansevičiėne)
60 Vardys, 145
61 Ibid., 149
62 Ibid., 149
63 “Nationalistic banditism” appears constantly as the preferred Soviet classification of partisans.  Vardys, 152; Remeikis 175.  It is still used today, as can be seen by Vladimir Putin’s constant referrals to Chechen guerrillas as “bandits.”
64 Vardys, 152
65 Girnius, 197
66 Kuodytė, 71
67 Vitkauskas, 1
68 Ibid.
69 Juodis – head of partisan movement organizational division; Kazimieras – LGP deputy chief in Vilnius; Vytis – staff head of Geležinis Vilkas group (Tauras district), press and propaganda division chief, Laisvęs žvalgas newpaper editor; Skirmantas – head of Birutė group (Tauras district), head of district intelligence divinsion; Kęstutis – head of expedition to Poland to establish links with Western intelligence; Skrajūnas – United Democratic Resistance Movement (BDPS – Bendrasis demokratinis pasipriešinimo sąjūdis) presidium representative envoy to West; Daumantas – author of Partizanai už geležines uždangos (Fighters for Freedom); Krivulė – in trip through Poland in 1949; S. Mykolaitis and Miškinis – used from return to Lithuania in 1950 until his death in 1951.  Origins supplied by Vitkauskas email and various sources.
70 Vitkauskas, 2
71 Gerutis, 355; “sweetheart” is a term Lukša uses to describe his machine gun in Fighters, 239.
72 see Rupainis for partisan activity timelines
73 Vardys, 96
74 Tauras, 35
75 Daumantas, 7 (Letters)
76 Pajaujis, 95
77 Remeikis, 489
78 Remeikis, 51
79 Anušauskas, 47
80 Valiunas, 40
81 Remeikis, 485
82 Anušauskas, 85
83 Grose, 15-19
84 Mockūnas, 115-117
85 Ibid.
86 Ibid.
87 Ibid.
88 Pajaujis, 99
89 Bower, 82
90 Ibid., 58
91 Dorril, 282
92 Dorril, 282-283
93 Remeikis, 217-218
94 Ibid., 220-221
95 Gaškaitė-Žemaitienė, 58
96 Remeikis, 55
97 Ibid., 55
98 Vitkauskas email
99 Judge and Langdon, 33
100 Ibid., 33-35
101 Bower, 86
102 Ibid., 86
103 Grose, 105
104 Bower, 89
105 Ibid.
106 Ibid., 90
107 Bower, 91; Girnius, 34
108 Bower, 92
109 Lukša, 178-184 (Fighters)
110 Anušauskas, 79
111 Ibid., 78
112 Bower, 96
113 Ibid., 80
114 Ibid.
115 Vitkauskas, email
116 Mockūnas, 289
117 Bower, 123
118 Ibid., 122
119 Mockūnas, 419
120 Ibid.
121 Ibid., 421
122 Bower, 123
123 Grinius, 358
124 Širvys.  In his video interview, Širvys describes how one day, they learned how to blow up a “good-sized” tree.
125 Bower, 125; Širvys
126 Širvys
127 Bower, 125; Širvys
128 Ibid.
129 Vitkauskas, 2; Širvys
130 Dorril, 293
131 Bower, 126
132 Širvys
133 Ibid.
134 Vitkauskas, 2
135 Tauras, 73
136 Vardys, 102
137 Bower, 46
138 Dorril, 278
139 Ibid.
140 Vardys, 103-105
141 Sūduvis, 195
142 Ibid.
143 Misiūnas, 91
144 Anušauskas, 59
145 Jurgėla, 232
146 Gerutis, 370
147 Misiūnas, 91
148 Ibid.
149 Ibid.
150 Ibid.
151 Vitkauskas (conversation 9 January 2002)
152 Bower, 127
153 Ibid.
154 Ibid.
155 Mockūnas, 321-322
156 Ibid., 315
157 Ibid., 321
158 Dorril, 291
159 Mockūnas, 360-367
160 Bower, 123-124
161 Anušauskas, 82
162 Bower, 136
163 Širvys
164 Bower, 136
165 Vitkauskas, 3
166 Bower, 136
167 Anušauskas, 82
168 Ibid.
169 Now the “Cambridge Seven.”
170 Ibid.
171 Bower, 153
172 Ibid., 166
173 Liudas Šimonėlis (Šilaitis to Soviets) was a Lithuanian lieutenant turned Soviet agent.  He never revealed his identity in Britain on the grounds of fearing that NKVD agents would find him.  (Mockūnas, 491)
174 Bower, 188
175 Dorril, 511
176 Bower, 174; Dorril 512
177 Mockūnas, 493
178 Bower, 165
179 Ibid., 180
180 Misiūnas, 93
181 Gerutis, 375
182 Gaškaitė-Žemaitienė, 63-64
183 Remeikis, 211
184 Bower, passim.
185 Ibid., 170
186 Ibid., 158
187 Ibid.
188 Ibid., 159
189 Judge and Langdon, 68-69
190 Puddington, 295
191 Ibid., 296
192 Ibid.
193 Kuodytė, 91
194 Puddington, 36
195 Kuodytė, 91
196 Gaškaitė-Žemaitienė, 70
197 Judge and Langdon, 91
198 Remeikis, 47
199 Remeikis, 278
200 Anušauskas, 53
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Razgaitis   1