WASHINGTON — In the decades after World War II, the C.I.A.
and other United States agencies employed at least a thousand Nazis as
Cold War spies and informants and, as recently as the 1990s, concealed
the government’s ties to some still living in America, 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 F.B.I.
and Allen Dulles at the C.I.A. 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 C.I.A. pressured prosecutors to drop an
investigation into 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, F.B.I. officials refused to tell even the Justice Department’s own Nazi hunters what they knew about 16 suspected Nazis living in the United States.
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 F.B.I.
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 United States had worked at the highest levels for the Nazis.
One
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 C.I.A. 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 C.I.A. for help because he worried they might
come after him, memos show.
Agency
officials were worried as well that Mr. von Bolschwing might be named
as Eichmann’s “collaborator and fellow conspirator and that the
resulting publicity may prove embarrassing to the U.S.” a C.I.A.
official wrote.
After
two agents met with Mr. von Bolschwing in 1961, the agency assured him
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 American military, the C.I.A., the F.B.I. 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 who was on a government-appointed team that
declassified war-crime records.
The
full tally of Nazis-turned-spies is probably much higher, said Norman
Goda, a University of Florida historian on the declassification team,
but many records remain classified even today, making a complete count
impossible.
“U.S.
agencies directly or indirectly hired numerous ex-Nazi police officials
and East European collaborators who were manifestly guilty of war
crimes,” he said. “Information was readily available that these were
compromised men.”
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: Mr. Hoover, the longtime F.B.I.
director, and Mr. Dulles, the C.I.A. director.
Mr.
Dulles believed “moderate” Nazis might “be useful” to America, records
show. Mr. Hoover, for his part, personally approved some ex-Nazis as
informants and dismissed accusations of their wartime atrocities as
Soviet propaganda.
In
1968, Mr. Hoover authorized the F.B.I. to wiretap a left-wing
journalist who wrote critical stories about Nazis in America, internal
records show. Mr. Hoover declared the journalist, Charles Allen, a
potential threat to national security.
John
Fox, the bureau’s chief historian, said: “In hindsight, it is clear
that Hoover, and by extension the F.B.I., was shortsighted in dismissing
evidence of ties between recent German and East European immigrants and
Nazi war crimes. It should be remembered, though, that this was at the
peak of Cold War tensions.”
The C.I.A. declined to comment for this article.
The
Nazi spies performed a range of tasks for American 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 C.I.A.
used an ex-Nazi guard to study Soviet-bloc postage stamps for hidden
meanings.
In
Virginia, a top adviser to Hitler gave classified briefings on Soviet
affairs. And in Germany, SS officers infiltrated Russian-controlled
zones, laying surveillance cables and monitoring trains.
But
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.
Mr.
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.
Efforts to conceal those ties spanned decades.
When the Justice Department was preparing in 1994 to prosecute a senior Nazi collaborator in Boston named Aleksandras Lileikis, the C.I.A. tried to intervene.
The
agency’s own files linked Mr. Lileikis to the machine-gun massacres of
60,000 Jews in Lithuania. He worked “under the control of the Gestapo
during the war,” his C.I.A. file noted, and “was possibly connected with
the shooting of Jews in Vilna.”
Even
so, the agency hired him in 1952 as a spy in East Germany — paying him
$1,700 a year, plus two cartons of cigarettes a month — and cleared the
way for him to immigrate to America four years later, records show.
Mr.
Lileikis lived quietly for nearly 40 years, until prosecutors
discovered his Nazi past and prepared to seek his deportation in 1994.
When
C.I.A. officials learned of the plans, a lawyer there called Eli
Rosenbaum at the Justice Department’s Nazi-hunting unit and told him
“you can’t file this case,” Mr. Rosenbaum said in an interview. The
agency did not want to risk divulging classified records about its
ex-spy, he said.
Mr.
Rosenbaum said he and the C.I.A. reached an understanding: If the
agency was forced to turn over objectionable records, prosecutors would
drop the case first. (That did not happen, and Mr. Lileikis was
ultimately deported.)
The C.I.A. also hid what it knew of Mr. Lileikis’s past from lawmakers.
In
a classified memo to the House Intelligence Committee in 1995, the
agency acknowledged using him as a spy but made no mention of the
records linking him to mass murders. “There is no evidence,” the C.I.A.
wrote, “that this Agency was aware of his wartime activities.”
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