http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11896-2001Apr27.html Documents Show Nazis' Role in U.S. Intelligence
By George Lardner Jr. Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, April 27, 2001; 3:28 PM
U.S. intelligence agencies used a rogue's gallery of Nazi war criminals after World War II, some of whom cleverly ingratiated themselves with the West, to help cope with the new threats posed by the Soviet Union and its communist allies.
The collaboration, rarely questioned on moral grounds, was detailed today in the unprecedented release of 20 long-secret CIA "name files," the first of several hundred that are to be made public under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act enacted by Congress in 1998.
The 10,000 pages, outlined in a news conference at the Holocaust Museum and released later at the National Archives in College Park, include files on Adolf Hitler and other notorious Nazis, from Gestapo chief Heinrich Mueller to former UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim.
In some cases, they serve primarily to refute lingering rumors, such as unfounded talk that Mueller and Waldheim may have been U.S. intelligence assets. In other instances, as Sen. Mike DeWine (R-Ohio), one of the authors of the law suggested, they tell us more "about ourselves: what we knew and when we knew it."
The most striking disclosures were about the "second tier" of Nazis who used their intelligence expertise, often directed against the Soviet Union, to align themselves with western powers. As a panel of historians enlisted by government officials to study the records concluded:
"Many lesser-known Nazis committed serious crimes, but in the postwar period received light punishment, no punishment at all, or received compensation because western intelligence agencies considered them useful assets in the Cold War."
Expressing her dismay, former Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman (D-N. Y.), one of the presidentially appointed members of the interagency working group in charge of the law, pointed out that three Nazis charged with war crimes, Emil Augsburg, Wilhelm Hoettl and Klaus Barbie, were all employed by the U. S. Army's Counterintelligence Corps [CIC] or the Office of Strategic Services.
© 2001 The Washington Post Company