Ian Murray wrote:
> 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
--
Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu