By Christopher
Lee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 7, 2006; Page A21
The CIA organized Cold War spy networks that included former
Nazis and failed to act on a 1958 report that fugitive Nazi
war criminal Adolf Eichmann was living in Argentina, newly
released CIA records show.
The records were among 27,000 pages of documents made public
yesterday at the National Archives. They shed new light on
the secret protection and support given to former Nazi officials
and Nazi collaborators by U.S. intelligence agencies as fighting
communism became the central aim of American foreign policy
in the years after World War II.
"It was not U.S. policy to track Nazi war criminals once
the Cold War began," said historian Timothy Naftali of
the University of Virginia, a Cold War expert who has studied
the new documents.
"The CIA based its decisions about using former SS men
or unreconstructed Nazis solely on operational considerations.
. . . Hiring these tainted individuals brought little other
than operational problems and moral confusion to our government's
intelligence community," he added.
The subject of postwar collaboration between U.S. intelligence
and former Nazis that the government sought to use in the struggle
against the Soviet Union has been documented, but historians
said the previously inaccessible documents have enabled them
to fill in many blanks in the historical narrative.
About 60,000 pages of CIA records had already been released
since 1999, after a 1998 federal law opened up secret government
files relating to war crimes by the German and Japanese governments
during World War II.
Historians reviewing the records for the government published
a 2004 book, "U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis," based
on 240,000 pages of FBI records, 419 CIA files and 3,000 pages
of U.S. Army information. It detailed the Army's postwar relationship
with former officers of the German Wehrmacht's intelligence
service, which are available at the National Archives.
The materials released yesterday include operational documents
detailing the activities of the CIA and its contacts abroad,
historians and other officials said during a news conference
at the National Archives.
"It's a rare release of operational files," said
Allen Weinstein, head of the National Archives and chairman
of the interagency working group overseeing the declassification
of records about World War II crimes and criminals. "The
files are also more inclusive than any other CIA files made
public before. . . . This time, the documents are nearly all
without redactions, providing researchers and historians the
clearest view yet of the postwar intelligence world."
The release of the records stalled last year with the deadline
for the interagency project approaching when the CIA balked
at declassifying more detailed documents about the agency's
postwar ties to Nazis. But the CIA caved in under pressure
from Sen. Mike DeWine (R-Ohio), an author of the original legislation,
and other prominent backers of that law. Congress passed a
new law extending the life of the interagency panel by two
years, to early 2007.
Some of the newly released documents show that between 1949
and 1955, the CIA organized "stay-behind" networks
of German agents to provide intelligence from behind enemy
lines, should the Soviet Union invade western Germany.
One network included at least two former Nazi SS members --
Staff Sgt. Heinrich Hoffman and Lt. Col. Hans Rues -- and one
was run by Lt. Col. Walter Kopp, a former German army officer
referred to by the CIA as an "unreconstructed Nazi." The
network was disbanded in 1953 amid political concerns that
some members' neo-Nazi sympathies would be exposed in the West
German press.
In a March 1958 memo to the CIA, the West German foreign intelligence
services (BND) wrote that Eichmann, a top Gestapo official
who helped orchestrate the mass murder of Jews, "is reported
to have lived in Argentina under the alias CLEMENS since 1952." The
memo also mentioned a rumor that Eichmann lived in Jerusalem.
In fact, Eichmann was in Argentina and was using the name
Ricardo Klement -- but apparently neither the CIA nor the West
Germans acted on the information, Naftali said.
"Tragically, at the moment the CIA and the BND had this
information the Israelis were temporarily giving up their search
for Eichmann in Argentina because they could not figure out
his alias," Naftali wrote in an analysis of the documents.
Eventually, Israeli Mossad agents abducted Eichmann in Buenos
Aires on May 11, 1960. He was tried in Jerusalem, sentenced
to death and hanged on May 31, 1962.
Robert Wolfe, a former federal archivist and an expert on
captured German records, said the new CIA documents illustrate
the "sorry results" of recruiting former Nazi intelligence
personnel to U.S. efforts to keep the Soviet Union in check.
"The alleged intelligence those recruits peddled was
mostly hearsay and gossip designed to tell their American interrogators
what they wanted to hear, in the hope of escaping retribution
for past crimes, or for mercenary gain, or for political agendas
not necessarily compatible with American national interests," Wolfe
said.
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