CIA Kept Quiet About Eichmann

[chequita guevara]

Documents show CIA kept quiet about Nazis

Anticommunist efforts might be hurt, they feared

By Hope Yen
The Associated Press

June 7, 2006

WASHINGTON · Determined to win the Cold War, the CIA kept quiet about the whereabouts of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in the 1950s for fear he might expose undercover anticommunist efforts in West Germany, according to documents released Tuesday.

The 27,000 pages released by the National Archives are among the largest post-World War II declassifications by the CIA. They offer a window into the shadowy world of U.S. intelligence and the efforts to use former Nazi war criminals as spies, sometimes to detrimental effect.

The war criminals "peddled hearsay and gossip, whether to escape retribution for past crimes, or for mercenary gain, or for political agendas not necessarily compatible with American national interests," said Robert Wolfe, an specialist in German history and former archivist at the National Archives.

In a March 19, 1958, memo to the CIA, West German intelligence officials wrote that they knew where Eichmann was hiding. Eichmann played a key role in transporting Jews to death camps during World War II. "He is reported to have lived in Argentina under the alias `Clemens' since 1952," authorities wrote.

But neither side acted on that information for fear of what he might say about Hans Globke, a highly placed former Nazi and a chief adviser in West Germany helping the United States coordinate anticommunist initiatives in that country.

Two years later, when Jewish authorities captured Eichmann, the CIA pressed journalists to delete references to Globke.

"Entire material has been read. One obscure mention of Globke which Life omitting at our request," CIA Director Allen Dulles wrote in a Sept. 20, 1960, internal memorandum, after Life magazine purchased Eichmann's memoir.

Among the other findings:

>Former Nazi officers such as Heinz Felfe, who served in the "Gehlen organization," the West German intelligence service that in its early years was sponsored by the U.S. Army and then the CIA, were typically hired by the Soviet Union to be double agents.

>The CIA routinely misled U.S. immigration officials in the mid-1970s about the role of CIA agent Tscherim Soobzokov and his connection to Nazi war crimes.

[Drake Tungsten]

If only the CIA were so competent today...

[chequita guevara]

They are, you just don't hear about it. Their mistakes are all just an elaborate ruse.

[MrFun]

Che, why do you hate your country?

[Arrian]

Man, the Cold War was dirty.

-Arrian

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
They are, you just don't hear about it. Their mistakes are all just an elaborate ruse.

Don't tell me you're following Ted now...

[chequita guevara]

I was being silly. The CIA is, however, a lot better than most people give it credit for being. It makes some bone-headed mistakes and misses some things, but they've got a rather good track record. After all, they were right about Iraq not having WMDs. Too bad the appointees told the Administraion whatever they wanted to hear.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
After all, they were right about Iraq not having WMDs.

Some of us were right about that, too.

[Az]

CIA

Not allowing evil Zionazi deathsquads to operate

[Cort Haus]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1792640,00.html

There were good reasons not to go hunting for Eichmann. In Bonn, the immediate fear was what Eichmann would say about Hans Globke, who had also worked in the Nazis' Jewish affairs department, drafting the Nuremberg laws, designed to isolate Jews from the rest of society in the Third Reich. While Eichmann had gone on the run, Globke stayed behind and prospered. By 1960 he was Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's national security adviser.

...

But it was not just Globke. When Eichmann was captured the CIA combed files it had captured from the Nazis to find information that might be useful to the Israeli prosecution. The results caused near panic among the CIA's leadership because, unknown to the junior staff who had looked through the files, a few of Eichmann's accomplices being investigated had been CIA "assets".

...

US intelligence had set up "stay-behind networks" in West Germany, who were supposed to stay put in the event of a Soviet invasion and transmit intelligence from behind enemy lines. Those networks were also riddled with ex-Nazis who had horrendous records.

One of the networks, codenamed Kibitz-15, was run by a former German army officer, Lieutenant Colonel Walter Kopp, who was described by his own American handlers as an "unreconstructed Nazi".

[MrFun]

Originally posted by chegitz guevara
IAfter all, they were right about Iraq not having WMDs. Too bad the appointees told the Administraion whatever they wanted to hear.

It's curious that others who have argued that there were WMDs there in the past, are ignoring this statement in this thread.

[chequita guevara]

Did you read further, Ogie, about how useless most of those Nazis actually were as far as intelligence goes, and how they began to use us for their own ends.

BTW, the stay behind group was later organized as Operation Gladio. They later began carrying terrorist operations in their own countries in order to heighten fears about red terrorists. The Bologna station bombing was a realy nasty peice of work of theirs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio

We openly sided with Nazis. Doesn't that bother you at all?

[DinoDoc]

I'm somewhat amused by claims of CIA competence.

[chequita guevara]

It must be a laugh a minute being you.

[Cort Haus]

CIA says Nazi general was intelligence source
From UPI 9/20/2000 20:28 (ET)

COLLEGE PARK, Md., Sept. 20 (UPI) -- The Central Intelligence Agency has for the first time confirmed that a high-ranking Nazi general placed his anti-Soviet spy ring at the disposal of the United States during the early days of the Cold War.

The National Archives said in a release Wednesday that the CIA had filed an affidavit in U.S. District Court "acknowledging an intelligence relationship with German General Reinhard Gehlen that it has kept secret for 50 years."

"The CIA's announcement marks the first acknowledgement by that agency that it had any relationship with Gehlen and opens the way for declassification of records about the relationship," the National Archives said.

Gehlen was Hitler's senior intelligence officer on the Eastern Front during the war and transferred his expertise and contacts to the U.S. as World War II reached its climax. While Gehlen's relationship with U.S. intelligence during the 1940s and 1950s has been the topic of some five books over the years, the eventual release of CIA documents pertaining to the development of his European spy ring could shed new light on the origins of the Cold War and early U.S. espionage efforts against Moscow.

Gehlen's network of agents in Europe - including many with Nazi backgrounds who were bailed out of prisoner of war camps by U.S. intelligence officers - was known as the Gehlen Organization and received millions of dollars in funding from the U.S. until 1956.

The CIA's acknowledgement of its dealings with Gehlen came in a response to an appeal of a Freedom of Information Act request by researcher Carl Oglesby, the National Archives said. The agency pledged to release its records on the general in accordance with the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act.

The Act established the Nazi War Criminal Records Interagency Working Group (IWG), which or more than two years has been declassifying documents related to World War II war crimes and releasing them through the National Archives.

"This shows that the law is working," said former Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman, a member of the IWG. "We now must work closely with the Agency to follow through with the release of these records."