American spies roughed up Holocaust survivors to find Soviet infiltrators

It was part of an American intelligence program aimed at infiltrating groups that smuggled Jews to Palestine.

I did a bit more digging on William Yarborough’s time in postwar Austria and stumbled on a bizarre 1946 report from the Strategic Services Unit — an intelligence agency that existed briefly before it was absorbed into a newly created Central Intelligence Agency a year later.

The report described a raid conducted by the US Army and the Austrian police on …