In Cold War, U.S. Spy Agencies Used 1,000 Nazis

The New York Times ^ | 26 Oct 2014 | Eric Lichtblau

[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.

[QuisCustodiet1776]

I’m retired CIA. A few opinions if I may:

At least while I was there:

1. The CIA has lots of successes that no one ever hears about.

2. Much of what you read in the press about the Agency is just silly.

3. Both congress and the executive use it as a whipping boy because they know the Agency will not defend itself publicly. So they will flat out lie and say they were not briefed when in fact they had been briefed in detail for months.

4. The Agency is (well was anyway) probably the most ethical and constitutionally focused US government entity. The people who work there, especially those that work overseas, tend to be extremely bright and hard working.

5. The CIA is no where near perfect and was going downhill rapidly when I left. A government is just a reflection of the culture.

[SunkenCiv]

Smart move. Willy Brandt’s gov’t in WG was riddled with Soviet agents. Of course, fans of the USSR are not unknown here either.