Wed, Oct 29, 2014 page7

• US use of ex-Nazis as spies more extensive than believed

  • NY Times News Service, WASHINGTON
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  In the decades after World War II, the CIA and other US agencies employed at least a 1,000 Nazis as Cold War spies and informants and, as recently as the 1990s, concealed the government’s ties to some still living in the US, 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 FBI and Allen Dulles at the CIA 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 CIA pressured prosecutors to drop an investigation of 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, FBI officials refused to tell even the Department of Justice’s own Nazi hunters what they knew about 16 suspected Nazis living in the US.

  The bureau balked at a request from prosecutors for internal records on the Nazi suspects, memos show, because the 16 men had all worked as FBI informants, providing leads on communist “sympathizers.” Five of the men were still active informants.

  Refusing to turn over the records, a bureau official in a memo stressed the need for “protecting the confidentiality of such sources of information to the fullest possible extent.”

  Some spies for the US had worked at the highest levels for the Nazis. SS officer Otto von Bolschwing was a mentor and top aide to Adolf Eichmann, architect of the “Final Solution,” and wrote policy papers on how to terrorize Jews.

  Yet after the war, the CIA not only hired him as a spy in Europe, but relocated him and his family to New York City in 1954, records show. The move was seen as a “a reward for his loyal postwar service and in view of the innocuousness of his [Nazi] party activities,” the agency wrote.

  His son, Gus von Bolschwing — who learned many years later of his father’s ties to the Nazis — sees the relationship between the spy agency and his father as one of mutual convenience forged by the Cold War.

  “They used him, and he used them,” Gus von Bolschwing, now 75, said in an interview. “It shouldn’t have happened. He never should have been admitted to the United States. It wasn’t consistent with our values as a country.”

  When Israeli agents captured Eichmann in Argentina in 1960, Otto von Bolschwing went to the CIA for help because he worried they might come after him, memos show.

  Agency officials were worried as well that von Bolschwing might be named as Eichmann’s “collaborator and fellow conspirator and that the resulting publicity may prove embarrassing to the US,” a CIA official wrote.

  After two agents met with von Bolschwing in 1961, the agency assured him that it would not disclose his ties to Eichmann, records show. He lived freely for another 20 years before prosecutors discovered his wartime role and prosecuted him. He agreed to give up his citizenship in 1981, dying months later.

  In all, the US military, the CIA, the FBI and other agencies used at least 1,000 ex-Nazis and collaborators as spies and informants after the war, according to Richard Breitman, a Holocaust scholar at American University in Washington who was on a government-appointed team that declassified war-crime records.

  None of the spies are known to be alive today.

  The wide use of Nazi spies grew out of a Cold War mentality shared by two titans of intelligence in the 1950s: Hoover, the longtime FBI director, and Dulles, the CIA director.

  Dulles believed “moderate” Nazis might “be useful” to the US, records show. Hoover, for his part, personally approved some ex-Nazis as informants and dismissed accusations of their wartime atrocities as Soviet propaganda.

  The Nazi spies performed a range of tasks for US agencies in the 1950s and 1960s, from the hazardous to the trivial, the documents show.

  In Maryland, Army officials trained several Nazi officers in paramilitary warfare for a possible invasion of Russia. In Connecticut, the CIA used an ex-Nazi guard to study Soviet-bloc postage stamps for hidden meanings.

  In Virginia, a top adviser to Adolf Hitler gave classified briefings on Soviet affairs. And in Germany, SS officers infiltrated Russian-controlled zones, laying surveillance cables and monitoring trains.

  However, many Nazi spies proved inept or worse, declassified security reviews show. Some were deemed habitual liars, confidence men or embezzlers, and a few even turned out to be Soviet double agents, the records show.

  Breitman said the morality of recruiting ex-Nazis was rarely considered.

  “This all stemmed from a kind of panic, a fear that the communists were terribly powerful and we had so few assets,” he said.
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