CIA, KGB, Mossad – They All Hired Nazi War Criminals as Spies

The gas vans that used exhaust fumes to kill thousands of Jews during transportation were designed by SS colonel Walter Rauff. He was a friend of Holocaust architect Reinhard Heydrich, and oversaw the killing of 100,000 people. Yet, a few years after World War II, the Israeli secret service hired him as a spy and helped him flee justice to South America. Rauff also worked for West Germany’s intelligence agency, founded under C.I.A. supervision by another Nazi turncoat, lieutenant general Reinhard Gehlen.

The Allies swore to bring Nazi war criminals to justice, but only few were caught and tried. In the 1960s, Israel deployed elite operatives to capture or kill Nazi war criminals. Most famously, Mossad teams spirited Adolf Eichmann from Buenos Aires to trial in Jerusalem, and assassinated Herbert Cukurs (the ‘Butcher of Riga’) near Montevideo. But in Israel’s early years, its existence threatened by Syria, Jordan, and Egypt, it was forced to obtain intelligence from Rauff and other Nazis who had contacts in those countries. During the Six-Day war, too, Israel benefited from intelligence provided by ex-Nazis, and it was a ex-Nazi commando, Otto Skorzeny, whom the Mossad hired to infiltrate Egypt's’s missile project, which employed German scientists, technicians, and security staff.

Fugitives: A History of Nazi Mercenaries During the Cold War, a new book by Danny Orbach, is a trove of astounding stories of how exigency and realpolitik converged with the ruses and wangles of ex-Nazis keen on saving their skins.

The book pieces together a disquieting yet compelling picture of how the C.I.A., the K.G.B., and Mossad recruited Nazi mercenaries without any qualms, helping them evade war-crime trials if it served a purpose. It’s based on declassified documents, including details from Mossad’s archives, and interviews with retired intelligence officers.

The cold war largely ramped up because of the CIA mentality. We are still reaping the benefits today. The Ukraine war and Iran as an enemy is a direct descendant of support for the Bandera OUN for a decade after the war and for deposing the elected Iranian government for daring to thing they controlled their own oil. And the border flood of 5 million flooding into America? Read about United Fruit, Dulles and Guatemala in 1954.

The CIA has authored more misery for America than can be believed. And in return, they murder JFK, did LSD tests on unwitting US soldiers, smuggled Cocaine into Mena Arkansas, gave us GHW Bush and Clinton, and possibly Obama. They snaked Trump and riddled his white house with spies out to cut him off at the knees etc.
Best of all, the “intelligence” community missed the fall of the Berlin wall, the USSR, and 9/11.

So much for that “if we only knew what they did for us”.

Yeah, and we are paying the price. An example there is found with Unit 731. It was a holocaust unit that put nazis to shame. There were zero survivors. they murdered around 400,000 in chemical and biological warfare experiments... including US POWS. They did that as a control to their experiments to ensure their disease weapons were not limited by race.
It was utterly insane. We arrested the leader, Shirō Ishii and protected him from war crimes and paperclipped him. The Chinese and Soviets both knew we had him because we told them so before we gave him immunity.

So how did that one thing blowback? In 1950 Korea and China were filthy ignorant places. When the Korean war broke out, immediately they had outbreaks of disease and plague as one would expect. Remember all those biological warfare claims they tortured our POW airmen over?
That wasn’t just a communist lie out of thin air, those NORK and Chinese idiots believed it MUST be true. After all, they knew we had Shirō Ishii on our side, and they were experiencing the same outbreaks of plague they had in WWII.

So when Bud Mahurin was being tortured, and tortured to make a biowarfare confession, things like that were a direct effect. They thought that eventually with enough oriental brutality, they could get the truth out of some pilot.

We should have got the information we could from Ishii and hanged him with some Soviet and Chinese witnesses.

Intelligence activities have caused untold misery and it’s hard to find any benefits we have reaped from them.
I know... “if we only knew... “. etc etc yadda yadda...

The top 3 at NASA were all “not an ardent” former Not Sees. Von Braun, Debus, and some other guy whose name escapes me.

Less well known, while rocket scientists were part of a Paperclip operation, the US government also imported a metric crapload of propaganda specialists, and chemical and biological warfare specialists. A lot of them ended up at Edgewood Arsenal and elsewhere.

The deployment of L.S.D., first at the CIA, and through government contracts at major universities, has the hallmarks of a destabilization operation. This was throughout the 1950s. It was then “mainstreamed” and flooded in the civilian population at large in the 1960s, particularly California. The whole “Hippie” phenomenon was a government operation, or repurposed anyway.

Our turn towards British inspired OSS/CIA models turned America into untrustworthy sneaks rather than the John Wayne mentality we should have.

I'm reevaluating so much of what I thought I knew after the revelations of the last few years. Your comments are getting me to think about how maybe the introduction of the CIA wasn't a good thing. I've known about many of their transgressions (Iran, Guatemala, etc) for a long time, but I always thought that it was done with a higher purpose of defending the West from Communism. Now I'm not so sure that is completely what it was about. Confusing times.

Unfortunately the reality was we didn’t have control of Japan like we did in Germany.

Remember, the US was planning to invade Japan directly with Operation Downfall. The US was expecting half a million casualties. The atom bombs fortunately stopped that. But the price was accepting the surrender of Japan. We didn’t completely wipe out the government like we did in Germany.

It wasn’t right to let the members of unit 731 go. But would it have been worth 500,000 US casualties to bring them to justice?

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