Accused War Criminal Wins Appeals Court Ban on Deportation

A federal appeals court on Wednesday rejected longstanding U.S. attempts to deport accused war criminal and former CIA employee Edgars Laipenieks of La Jolla, a Latvian who admitted beating Communists while working for Nazi occupation forces during World War II.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that U.S. Justice Department officials failed to prove allegations that Laipenieks, 71, persecuted Jews and political prisoners held at the infamous Riga Central Prison in Latvia.

According to the court, evidence showed that Laipenieks persecuted only suspected Communist criminals while working as an investigator for the Latvian Political Police, a Nazi puppet organization.

“They said I was responsible for killing 60,000 Jews,” Laipenieks told The Times Wednesday. “My God, I never had anything to do with the Jews. I was in the Latvian Political Police, like the FBI or CIA, tracing Russian and Communist killers. That was my only job.”

Laipenieks said he is employed today as a security guard, and resides in a trailer on a construction site in La Jolla.

The U.S. Justice Department Office of Special Investigations in June, 1981, sued to have Laipenieks expelled from the country, claiming that in filing a visa application, he had concealed his role as head jailer at the Riga prison in Latvia during World War II. Witnesses who testified in 1982 at a deportation hearing in San Diego said Laipenieks was responsible for ordering the executions of at least 200 prisoners from 1941 to 1943.

12 Witnesses

Former prisoners and people still living in Latvia, which is now part of the Soviet Union, were among 12 witnesses who testified in person or via videotape to support the government’s claim that Laipenieks had participated in acts of persecution. One witness said he was forced by Laipenieks to pray for and then bury an old man whom Laipenieks had allegedly beaten to death. The witness testified that he was then beaten by Laipenieks and other guards.

Laipenieks admitted during the hearing that after being recruited by the Nazis, he “roughed up” a few Communist prisoners, but he said he never seriously hurt or killed anyone.

After the hearing, an immigration judge ruled that the government had failed to establish grounds for deportation. However, the Immigration and Naturalization Service appealed the decision. In September, 1983, the Board of Immigrations Appeals ordered Laipenieks deported on grounds that he assisted in the persecution of Communists based on their political beliefs.

The Court of Appeals found differently, and Laipenieks expressed pleasure with its decision.

“Sure, I’m happy,” he said. “Wouldn’t you be happy if you were in my place? I always thought that the American justice system would be right. When you’re a war criminal, you run and hide, but I didn’t because I’m not a criminal. I never did anything wrong to my knowledge. I’m not a madman.

“When the Russians overran our country, they killed our people by lining them up against the wall and shooting them in the neck,” Laipenieks said.

Bob Mandgie, assistant district director of detention and deportation for the Immigration and Naturalization Service in San Diego, said Wednesday that he hadn’t yet seen the Court of Appeals’ decision, but added that he expected it to be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“If they’ve gone this far on it, they’ll probably go all the way,” Mandgie noted.

Meanwhile, Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies in Los Angeles condemned Wednesday’s court’s ruling, calling it, “a classic example that the only winners of the Cold War are the Nazi war criminals.

“When the final story is written about the crimes of these kinds of people, the historians will say that the victims of the Holocaust died twice,” Hier said. “The first time is when they were brutally murdered at hands of the Nazis and their collaborators. The second time is when their brutal murderers escaped justice and lived free.”

When Laipenieks was born in 1913, Latvia was a part of the Russian empire. During World War I, Latvia became an independent state. The Communist party was abolished and it became a crime to be a member.

In June, 1940, the Soviets invaded Latvia, deporting thousands of Latvians to Siberia and killing thousands of others. A year later, attacking Nazi forces entered Latvia and occupied the region until 1944.

Laipenieks before the war was a school teacher and a star athlete, competing in the 5,000-meter run at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. He said he joined the Nazis’ Latvian Political Police after the Russians murdered his parents and father-in-law.

Collaborated With Nazis

The LPP collaborated with the Nazis to apprehend Communists and to arrest individuals who the organization identified as having participated in atrocities during the Soviet occupation. Laipenieks worked for the LPP until 1944, when he fled Latvia to avoid the impending Russian invasion.

After the war, he traveled to Chile, where he became a citizen and coach of country’s Olympic track team. In 1960 he obtained a U.S. visa and became a physical education professor and coach at the University of Denver.

It was during that time that Laipenieks said he was first contacted by the CIA, which was seeking information about Communists in Latvia. Laipenieks said he was recruited by agents to persuade Russian athletes to defect while competing in Western nations.

In 1964, Laipenieks was hired by the Mexican government to design facilities for the 1964 Olympics in Mexico City and to coach the Mexican track team. Laipenieks said that while in Mexico, he continued to work for the CIA.

About five years later, he came came to California to coach track at La Jolla Country Day School. Three years after that, he accepted a coaching job at the since-closed San Diego Military Academy. When the military academy closed, Laipenieks worked as a caretaker, first in Rancho Santa Fe, then in Valley Center, about 30 miles north of San Diego.

Laipenieks applied for U.S. citizenship in 1973. But his application, he was told, was rejected because his name was on a list of 37 alleged war criminals living in the United States. He was suspected of violating a 1978 federal law which provides for deportation of aliens who took part in the persecution of any person because of race, religion, national origin or political opinion while in German-occupied territory between 1933 and 1944.

However, according the Court of Appeal’s majority opinion written by Judge Thomas Tang and issued Wednesday, the government failed to prove that Laipenieks had persecuted people solely because of their political opinions.

“Laipenieks and the LPP had a legitimate basis for investigating Communists,” Tang wrote. “In light of the potentially legitimate basis for investigating . . . we believe it incumbent on the government to establish clearly and convincingly that individuals were persecuted solely because of their political opinion.

“While we certainly do not condone the treatment that prisoners apparently received at the (Riga) prison, we do not find Laipenieks’ admission (that he occasionally struck prisoners) sufficient to support deportability.”.

Tang, joined by Judge Robert Beezer, rejected written statements from nine Russian witnesses, saying that their depositions against Laipenieks may have been written in the Soviet Union under “intimidating” circumstances.

Tang noted that the witnesses even failed to identify photographs of Laipenieks.

But lone dissenting Judge Robert Boochever said the court should have deferred to earlier findings of the Board of Immigration Appeals, which ruled that the Soviets had been imprisoned solely on the basis of their political beliefs.