Posted on 10/30/2014 9:09:40 AM PDT by Theoria
In the decades after World War II, the C.I.A. and other United States agencies employed at least a thousand Nazis as Cold War spies and informants and, as recently as the 1990s, concealed the government’s ties to some still living in America, newly disclosed records and interviews show.
At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, law enforcement and intelligence leaders like J. Edgar Hoover at the F.B.I. and Allen Dulles at the C.I.A. aggressively recruited onetime Nazis of all ranks as secret, anti-Soviet “assets,” declassified records show. They believed the ex-Nazis’ intelligence value against the Russians outweighed what one official called “moral lapses” in their service to the Third Reich.
The agency hired one former SS officer as a spy in the 1950s, for instance, even after concluding he was probably guilty of “minor war crimes.”
And in 1994, a lawyer with the C.I.A. pressured prosecutors to drop an investigation into an ex-spy outside Boston implicated in the Nazis’ massacre of tens of thousands of Jews in Lithuania, according to a government official.
Evidence of the government’s links to Nazi spies began emerging publicly in the 1970s. But thousands of records from declassified files, Freedom of Information Act requests and other sources, together with interviews with scores of current and former government officials, show that the government’s recruitment of Nazis ran far deeper than previously known and that officials sought to conceal those ties for at least a half-century after the war.
In 1980, F.B.I. officials refused to tell even the Justice Department’s own Nazi hunters what they knew about 16 suspected Nazis living in the United States.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Great way to prolong the Cold War, by feeding lots of false intel to both sides by these Nazis.
Much the same as using Mafia members to act as informers. Informers and spies are not necessarily nice guys.
And, frankly, Stalin was just as bad as Hitler, although FDR called him Uncle Joe and the NY Times insisted that he was a nice guy—and won its first Pulitzer Prize for whitewashing his mass murder in Ukraine.
So what.
You use scum to catch scum. It is the nature of the beast. Which Clinton and Gore were too stupid to realize.
Where, in this case, did it work?
Looks more like the vanquished got to weaken both of its former enemies while rebuilding its former empire. There are too many comparisons these days to the 1930s, especially in the European Union.
That’s a false comparison, since nobody uses a rival gang to spy on your primary target gang.
Amen to that. It is like Old Joe Kennedy said to FDR when he persuaded him to appoint Joe to head the newly created SEC. It takes a crook to catch a crook. ITA agree about Clinto and Gore. Especially Gore. We certainly dodge quite a bullet with him in 2000.
What with the jihadis having national-socialist philosophy, it’s the same thing as what was done here.
Disgusting that those Nazis didn’t face justice.
Agreed. It is on all the Allies that the “de-Nazification” process was handed over to Konrad Adenauer a mere two years after WWII ended; and three years after that, he unilaterally declared said process “over” (not complete). The same Adenauer populated his new government, and the businesses that were part of the so-called “Wirtschaftwunder” (or “economic miracle” that was funded courtesy of the USA via the Marshall Plan) with former Nazis too.
As some background, in eastern Europe, the Nazis had built some very effective intelligence gathering networks, some of which were still intact at the end of the war.
What happened with many Germans, their assumption was that they were no longer working for the Nazis, but were backing the western powers against the communists, figuring the war would continue between the US and the Soviet Union.
On a more mundane level, I visited a former Wehrmacht maintenance unit, that as late as the 1980s was still in operation, performing “3 shop” maintenance on US equipment.
When the US Army captured them, they were told to remove their insignia, and to keep working.
So as far as the spy networks were concerned, it was business as usual. The old boss the same as the new boss.
Old news, this has been going on for centuries. Using the captured enemies for spying and info is the nature of the beast. It works most of the time but that is what you get with using them.
Operation Paperclip as well. The US scooped up tons of Nazi brainiacs and put them to work designing weapons for us. Kept the Brits and Russians from using their expertise.
So your saying Werner Von Bruan should have been prosecuted?
Yes.
Well, actually, there have often been rival gangs among the Mafia, or times when several bosses fight each other for the leadership. But my point was, informers are not necessarily nice people.
Our German Scientists are better than Your (Russian) German Scientists, Na na na Na!!
Regards,
GtG
I never implied that any such players are “nice”; the nature of their allegiance(s) dictates otherwise. It is their usefulness and/or veracity that I question.
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