A number of u.s. intelligence records declassified under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998 provide new evidence and insight into the activities of officials of the Independent State of Croatia, a wartime ally of Nazi Germany. Under the leadership of Ante Pavelić, the Ustaša (oo-sta-sh) regime in Croatia persecuted and carried out atrocities against Jews and Serbs while maintaining amicable relations with the Vatican. At the end of the war, the Ustaša regime collapsed, but Pavelić, after a number of mysterious episodes, was able to escape to Argentina in 1948. Meanwhile the United States Army used Father Krunoslav Draganović, a senior Ustaša functionary who had helped suspected war criminals to escape from Italy after the war, as an agent against the Communist government of Yugoslavia.

Background: The Ustaša and the War

Ante Pavelić began his career as a Croatian separatist in the multi-ethnic, Serbdominated Yugoslav kingdom established after World War I. Pavelić went into exile in 1929, when King Alexander proclaimed a royal dictatorship in Yugoslavia. In 1930, at age forty, Pavelić founded the Croatian Liberation Movement—also known as the Ustaša (“rebels”)—a group of Croatian emigres pledged to conspiracy and terrorism in the aim of an independent Croatia. The Ustaša received financial and logistical support from Fascist Italy and Hungary, both enemies of Yugoslavia that expected to gain territorially if that state were destroyed.