U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, by Richard Breitman, Norman

"Science," the Greek word for knowledge, when appended to the word "political," creates what seems like an oxymoron. For who could claim to know politics? More complicated than any game, most people who play it become addicts and die without understanding what they were addicted to. The rest of us suffer under their malpractice as our "leaders." A truer case of the blind leading the blind could not be found. Plumb the depths of confusion here.

Re: U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, by Richard Breitman, No

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14. Reinhard Gehlen and the United States
by Timothy Naftali

THERE COULD BE NO MORE AMERICAN an event. It was the sixth and final game of the 1951 World Series. The New York Yankees, who came into this game leading the Giants three games to two, would ultimately win the championship, 4-3. Years later, sports fans would refer to 1951 as "the season of changes." This was the year that Joe DiMaggio, the Yankee Clipper, decided to retire. And it was also the season that introduced a new generation of ballplayers led by future hall-of-famers Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays.

There were 61,000 individual stories in the stands that day. Most of the men were World War II veterans. The women cheering alongside them might well have worked in a factory to keep the bombers flying and the ammunition dumps overseas filled. Some had lost loved ones in the war; indeed, there was probably no one at the game who did not know a family who had experienced a death. All were grateful that the war was over and that they were now sharing some peacetime prosperity.

Not everyone who saw DiMaggio play his last game had fought on the same side in the Second World War. Wearing tinted glasses and feeling somewhat uncomfortable at his first baseball game was a trim, well-dressed, middle-aged man of average height sitting with a group of similarly well-dressed middle-aged men. His visa indicated that he was a German businessman who specialized in international patent issues. What it did not say was that seven years earlier, Adolf Hitler had promoted this man to generalmajor (brigadier general) for his intelligence work on the eastern front. His documents also did not record that he was in the United States as the guest of the CIA, which for over two years had been subsidizing him in the expectation that he would one day become the first chief of a centralized West German intelligence service.

Reinhard Gehlen would never again be as anonymous as he was at Yankee Stadium in October 1951. The next year, his name began appearing in some Western newspaper accounts, which revealed his ties to U.S. intelligence and his ambitions for the future. [1] These first Western reports were merely the prelude to a massive Soviet propaganda campaign that would make Gehlen the poster child of an alleged postwar alliance between the NATO powers and the military leadership of the collapsed Third Reich. Even after his retirement from West German intelligence in 1968, Gehlen continued to inspire some fascination as Europe's greatest mystery man of the postwar period. To this day, his name is linked with neo-Fascist movements, Nazi war criminals, and even the KGB.

Beginning with those newspaper reports in the 1950s, there has been no lack of information about Gehlen in the public domain. In the 1970s, these reports were supplemented by books and a memoir by Gehlen himself. [2] Over a decade ago, researcher Mary Ellen Reese used materials declassified under the Freedom of Information Act and some expert interviewing to paint the first detailed picture of how Gehlen came to be employed by the United States, as well as why and under what circumstances Washington decided to reconstitute German intelligence using veterans of the Nazi era. Reese did a superb job, but there were serious gaps in the information she received. [3] Recently, Gehlen's CIA case officer, James Critchfield, published his memoirs of the eight years he worked with the German spymaster. [4] That book offered a very personal look at the development of the relationship between Reinhard Gehlen and the United States, but important questions remained unanswered.

Materials released by the CIA and the Defense Department under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998 permit a thorough analysis of the origins, implications, and results of the U.S. government's postwar sponsorship of Reinhard Gehlen and of the organization that became the Bundesnachrichtensdienst (BND), the West German Secret Service, in 1956. Four broad conclusions emerge from the thousands of pages of new documentation, which will be explored in this chapter. First, despite being the principal source of funding for Gehlen's activities for close to eleven years, the U.S. government never achieved the control over Gehlen's operations that it had expected, sought, or should have had. Second, Reinhard Gehlen often acted in bad faith in his dealings with the United States. He deceived a generation of U.S. intelligence officers about the details of his operations and violated the basic agreements that were designed to undergird the system of cooperation. Third, a substantial number of former members of SD Foreign Intelligence, the Gestapo, and the Waffen-SS were recruited into the organization when it was being funded by the U.S. government. Gehlen's recruitment of these individuals was not done at the behest of the U.S. government; however, after Washington learned about Gehlen's use of war criminals, it opted to do nothing about it. Finally, the CIA did not hold Gehlen and his organization in high regard as intelligence assets. The Agency's major goals in the Gehlen affair were to facilitate U.S. penetration of a future West German intelligence community and to ensure that neither Gehlen nor any of his subordinates turned their highly nationalistic and secret organization against the West.

Gehlen's recruitment of SD and Gestapo officers is a particular focus of this chapter. From the U.S. Army's sponsorship of Gehlen in July 1945 through the end of CIA supervision in April 1956 (when Gehlen's organization was brought into the open as the BND), war criminals on Gehlen's payroll were technically employed by the U.S. government. Since the Heinz Felfe scandal of 1963 -- in which a former SD officer turned out to be a KGB mole in the BND -- the Gehlen Organization was known to include at least a handful of former SD and Gestapo officers, and over the years it has been suspected that there were a great many more war criminals associated with this operation. Christopher Simpson, who successfully ferreted out the stories of several Nazi war criminals who received U.S. sponsorship, wrote in 1988 that "at least a half dozen -- and probably more -- of his first staff of fifty officers were former SS or SD men." [5] But it has never been clear whether these were isolated cases. With the Gehlen Organization numbering four thousand people at its height during the period of U.S. sponsorship, it seemed an open question whether these few bad apples constituted a source of malevolent influence, a systemic problem, or were simply the result of a few stupid decisions in the field. Equally unknown with any precision was the extent of U.S. knowledge of these recruits.

Newly released information from the CIA and the Army make it possible to assess the extent of Gehlen's recruitment of former officers of the SD and Gestapo. It turns out that it was widespread. At least one hundred of Gehlen's officers and agents had served with the SD or the Gestapo, and the number may in fact be significantly higher. [6] Although these recruits did not represent a significant percentage of the Gehlen Organization, some of those hired had participated in the worst atrocities committed by the Nazi regime, and a couple of them reached postwar positions of authority. In addition, the evidence strongly suggests that Reinhard Gehlen himself knew the background of many of these recruits. The new materials also paint a complex picture of U.S. neglect and acquiescence, raising questions about the U.S. Army's and then the CIA's handling of the moral and security issues surrounding this experiment in institution-building in occupied Germany.

Gehlen and German Military Intelligence

Reinhard Gehlen was a professional military officer, who, in the 1920s, was commissioned in the small army permitted Germany by the Versailles powers after World War I. He served as a company commander and then joined the German Army's General Staff just before the outbreak of World War II. Excelling at staff work and endowed, it seemed, with inexhaustible energy, Gehlen rose to become chief of the Fremde Heere Ost (FHO), or Foreign Armies-East, a research and analysis unit that studied the Soviet armed forces. Unlike some of the men whom he would hire in the early postwar period, Gehlen was largely a manager and analyst with no operational authority. The FHO wrote reports using intelligence collected by the Abwehr, the intelligence service of the German armed forces. With the dissolution of the Abwehr in mid-1944, however, the FHO for the first time acquired direct responsibility for intelligence gathering on the eastern front. Gehlen was promoted to general major later that year, but his service as a general in the Third Reich did not last long. In April 1945, he was fired for exhibiting a defeatist attitude. [7]

Despite Reinhard Gehlen's meteoric rise in the German General Staff and his reputation for knowledge about the Soviet armed forces, it would take a remarkable series of events to explain how the U.S. government ever came to repose any confidence in him. Arguably, at the end of World War II, senior officials in the Allied intelligence community knew more about the personalities and capabilities of Nazi intelligence than any combatant has ever known about an enemy in the history of warfare. Thanks to the weakness of German communications security and the ingenuity of British code breakers, by 1944 the Allies were reading thousands of German intelligence messages a week, primarily the communications of the Abwehr. This intelligence triumph, commonly known as Ultra, set up the possibility of identifying, capturing, and subsequently turning into double agents most of Germany's spies in areas under Allied control. [8] By the end of the war, the Allies determined that they had controlled all but three of the principal spies reporting to German military intelligence. [9] With most of German intelligence under Allied control, the Nazis fell prey to deliberate military deception on both the eastern and western fronts.

Postwar analyses of captured German records confirm that Gehlen's FHO performed only marginally better than the average German intelligence unit in World War II. Its reports on the strength and composition of Soviet forces -- so-called order of battle information -- were quite good; what Gehlen and the FHO lacked was strategic imagination. FHO analyses of Soviet intentions, for example, showed a tendency to believe in German superiority. In his assessments of the battle of Stalingrad, Gehlen guessed wrong about the line of attack that the Soviets would take, consequently underestimating the precariousness of the position of the German 6th Army. In 1944, he predicted "a calm summer" because he believed the Soviets lacked the tactical ability to attack the two largest German army groups in the center and the north of the front. Yet on June 22, 1944, the Soviets launched their largest offensive of the war. [10]

To understand how the U.S. government found itself in the position of championing the cause of a barely mediocre intelligence chief and his second-rate intelligence service, one must look at the politics of U.S. intelligence as World War II ended. From the moment the last shot was fired, the U.S. military and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) entered into a competition for authority in occupied Germany that the OSS and its successor organization, the Strategic Services Unit (SSU), lost. [11] Until 1949, the U.S. Army was solely responsible for administering the American occupation zone. Accordingly, the military determined the operating conditions for rival intelligence services, favoring its own G-2 and Counterintelligence Corps (CIC). The SSU, which retained a corps of officers who had participated in the fabulously successful Anglo-American wartime counterespionage campaign, was denied a significant operational role. Decisions about the nature and shape of postwar German intelligence would be made by newly deployed U.S. military intelligence officers who were ignorant of Ultra and had no idea how incompetent German intelligence had been during World War II. As a result, they would accord Nazi spy managers like Gehlen far more respect than their wartime record warranted.

Combined with this misperception of the quality of German intelligence was a real ignorance about Soviet capabilities and intentions. United States intelligence -- the OSS as much as the intelligence components of the U.S. Army and Navy -- had very little information on the Soviet Union. It had been U.S. policy, enforced with conviction from the White House on down, not to spy on the Soviets during World War II because they were an ally. The FBI and the code breakers of the U.S. Army had circumvented this prohibition, but as of 1945 they had little to show for their efforts. [12] The OSS, on the other hand, had tied itself up in knots over whether to conduct operations against the Soviets. Its counterintelligence service, X-2, had to shut down its tiny Soviet intelligence collection project at the insistence of the White House in 1944. [13]

When veterans of the Allied counterespionage war, most of whom had found their way into the CIA after 1947, discovered that the U.S. Army was intentionally trying to revive the woeful German intelligence service under Reinhard Gehlen, these professionals would try futilely to end U.S. sponsorship of this ill-conceived experiment. It was bad enough that Gehlen lacked any understanding of operational security or reports assessment; worse, Gehlen himself was never briefed about the weaknesses of his own service in World War II. Not realizing how bad German intelligence had been, he would bring a cavalier attitude to the problems of operations and operational security in the early Cold War.

Gehlen and Major Boker

At some point in early 1945, Gehlen started planning for a world without Hitler. He directed his staff to prepare eight large collections of intelligence files and send them to various secret depots in southwestern Germany. Later, he claimed that he did so wi th the express purpose of providing this material to the Americans for use in the inevitable war against the Soviet Union. Gehlen's later behavior suggests that he, as a German nationalist, was also hiding it for a future German General Staff. Gehlen was captured by the U.S. Army in May 1945 and sent to the 12th Army Group Interrogation Center in Wiesbaden.

A month later, Captain John R. Boker, Jr., an ambitious junior officer and interrogator in the U.S. Army, was assigned to the Wiesbaden camp. Even before the European war had been won, Boker anticipated a future conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. Boker cut his teeth interrogating and then protecting a group of German Luftwaffe officers who had reconnaissance photographs of Soviet strategic targets to offer. A self-starter who was not inhibited by matters of rank, he sensed that he had a role to play if the U.S. Army was not to waste the intelligence potential of the many interned Nazis who knew something about the Soviet Union. "Now was the ideal time to gain intelligence of the Soviet Union if we were ever going to get it," he later recalled. [14] Nosing around the camp for Soviet experts, Boker made a point of interviewing Gehlen, who was known in the camp to have been the head of the German military intelligence service that dealt with the Soviets.

Gehlen warmed to the American, who apparently wasted no time in sharing with the German general his own belief that a clash with the Soviet Union was inevitable. [15] Gehlen revealed to Boker that he had placed key FHO files in safekeeping with the goal of eventually transferring them to the conquering Americans. Having already successfully schemed to protect the documents of the German air force intelligence officers, Boker knew exactly what to do. He told Gehlen to say nothing more to anyone else about the documents while he sought support from a higher authority to find Gehlen's former assistants and reconstitute the FHO's files.

The chief of the USFET (U.S. Forces European Theater) intelligence center at Wiesbaden, Colonel W R. Philp, was as important as Boker in the initial creation of a relationship between Gehlen and the U.S. government. Philp had supported Boker's work with the German airmen, and he understood that Gehlen might be an even more productive source. To prevent the Soviets or the British from asking after Gehlen, Philp removed Gehlen's name from the list of POWs in U.S. custody. He also permitted Boker to track down Gehlen's key associates outside the regular channels for locating POWs. Sometime in the summer of 1945, Boker and three American colleagues moved into a separate house in Wiesbaden, where Gehlen was also permitted by Philp's order. [16]

By mid-July, Boker and his team had recovered seven of the eight batches of documents hidden by Gehlen's people. [17] In the same period, they were able to locate and bring to Wiesbaden all of Gehlen's key members and staff. Even at this time, Boker and Gehlen were discussing a much broader operation. Gehlen told Boker that he had been able to establish contact with Oberstleutnant Hermann Baun, who ran the intelligence networks on the eastern front (known as Walli) that had fed reports to FHO during the war. [18]

Boker and Philp sold the idea to the U.S. Army that Gehlen and his former staff could write useful historical studies for the U.S. Army, so in August 1945, Gehlen and his associates were flown to the United States along with many of their documents to work with a Pentagon team that was writing a history of the Soviet-German war. [19] Baun stayed behind in Germany. The U.S. military intelligence chiefs intended to use him to see what could be recovered of the Walli wartime intelligence networks.

This effort by a group of determined U.S. Army officers in Wiesbaden initially escaped the notice of the OSS and the SSU. In October 1945, however, the team working with Baun approached the chief of the SSU's German mission, requesting advice on improving the security of this new operation. [20] Astonished by the U.S. Army's audacious quest to reconstitute the German intelligence service's lines into the East, and miffed at not having been told before, the local SSU viewed the Army's operation warily.

Concern in the field about this operation extended beyond the veterans of the ass. The Army's own counterintelligence service, the CIC, had also not been briefed about Boker and Philp's project. Increasingly, former Nazi intelligence agents carrying U.S. documents were caught by the CIC. In each case, the CIC -- whose job it was to arrest former German intelligence officers -- were told to let these men go free because they were working for the United States. [21]

Rusty

Gehlen returned to U.S.-occupied Germany in July 1946 with authorization to reconstitute the FHO, including the Walli networks that Baun had been pulling together. [22] From the moment Gehlen returned through July 1, 1949, the U.S. Army was his principal sponsor. In this period, the Gehlen project acquired the code name "Rusty" and grew from a few hundred veterans of the FHO and the remnants of the Walli networks to encompass about four thousand officers and agents. [23] Rusty's operations, which Baun continued to supervise for Gehlen, also spilled out from the eastern zone of Germany to the French zone of occupation, to occupied Austria, Italy, and Soviet-controlled Poland and Romania. [24]

Newly released documents from this period indicate that, despite the exponential growth in Rusty's activities and payroll, the number of U.S. Army officers assigned to monitor the organization remained at two. [25] United States supervision, such as it was, in effect meant U.S. control over the logistical and financial transfers to Gehlen. His U.S. minders took care that he had the chocolate, women's cosmetics, gas, and cigarettes needed to barter on the black market for additional operational money and the U.S. dollars that would also be traded at a profit for the still-used Reichsmark. As for operational control, there was none. [26]

What did the United States get in return? The U.S. Army in Germany considered the Gehlen Organization their "most dependable and prolific source of information on Russian military intentions and strength." [27] These Germans were a stopgap measure for a U.S. military intelligence system that was poorly trained and understaffed. Gehlen offered continuous tactical coverage of the Soviet armed forces in what would become East Germany. Lacking any agents in the Kremlin or the Soviet military headquarters, Gehlen relied on mundane but effective techniques to build a picture of the enemy's force. Gehlen agents loitered along key rail lines, watching for the movements of Soviet troops and noting the serial numbers of equipment and weapons. The patches on Soviet uniforms also gave away the formations that were in the area. Descriptions of these, too, were added to the mosaic until a pattern emerged. Having few German speakers or people with deep knowledge of German cities and towns, the U.S. Army could not replicate the tactical team that Gehlen appeared to have at his fingertips. [28]

Besides this basic information on Soviet deployments in eastern Germany, the Gehlen Organization made itself useful by providing coverage of Soviet radio communications, especially transmissions of the Soviet air force. In the difficult fiscal climate of the early postwar period, the U.S. military had limited resources to mount a signal intelligence campaign against the Soviets. The U.S. Army, for example, would nor establish a radio listening station of its own in West Germany until the mid-1950s. Until that time, the U.S. Army relied on the British for high-level cryptographic work and on Rusty for the day-to-day listening on radio frequencies used by Soviet pilots, tankers, and grunts. The latter traffic was lightly encoded if at all, but in the event of a major offensive careful listening might pick up hints of what was to come. [29]

This arrangement suited Gehlen very well. The Army increased its demand for reports from the Germans and left Gehlen alone to expand and recruit as he saw fit. [30] Although Gehlen's principal minders in the U.S. Army asked him whether he had any war criminals at headquarters, they did nor require that he submit biographical data on his field personnel and the agents they recruited. Gehlen refused to volunteer the real names of his employees, and he had them register for U.S. gas coupons and food rations under assumed names. [31]

Under these lax conditions, Gehlen was able to employ a sizeable number of Nazi war criminals without U.S. interference. He hired much of the SD's Balkan network, including the leadership of the Iron Guard, the Romanian Fascists whom the SD had protected in exile. The leader of these Balkan operations (which carried the code name "General Agency 13") in the Gehlen Organization was Otto von Bolschwing, who would later become a notorious employee of the CIA after Gehlen dropped him for incompetence. [32] Bolschwing was himself a war criminal, having served in the SD's anti-Jewish office with Adolf Eichmann in the 1930s and as an SD advisor in Bucharest during the anti-Jewish pogroms of 1941. Among Bolschwing's agents when he worked for Gehlen was Horia Sima, the former chief of the Iron Guard who had inspired the anti-Jewish pogrom, and former SS Romanian experts Kurt Auner, Ernst Schlandt, and Joachim Vacarescu. [33]

Gehlen also turned to SD and Gestapo officers to create a counterintelligence service, headquartered in Karlsruhe. Newly released CIA Materials confirm that there were at least eleven former SD or Gestapo men who worked for this section, known initially as "Dienststelle [substation] 114," then as GV-L. [34] For example, Herbert Boehrsch, whom Gehlen used as a contact to German-speaking expatriates from the Sudetenland, had been with the SD in Prague; Walter Otten had been an SS-Sturmbannfuhrer working in the SD office in Bremen; and Otto Somann, with the exalted rank of SS-Oberfuhrer, had served as Inspekteur of the SD and Sicherheitspolizei (Sipo) office in Wiesbaden before being seconded to the Gestapo. Personal participation in wartime atrocities might have been difficult to prove for some of these men, though they all belonged to criminal organizations. Bur the criminal behavior of Emil Augsburg, who joined GV-L in October 1948 (when it still had the cover name Dienststelle 114), is beyond doubt. Augsburg, who fancied himself an expert on Slavs and the eastern front, was detailed to a Sipo unit for "spezialle Aufgaben" ("special duties") in Poland in 1939-40 and the western USSR in 1941. Spezialle Aufgaben was a euphemism for the execution teams that killed Jews and suspected Communists. [35]

Remarkably, the more criminal elements of Rusty were neither in the Romanian operation nor in GV-L, but belonged to Dienststelle 12 or GV-G, an office that organized penetrations of the Soviet zone through Berlin. CIA material reveals that a number of men who had played roles in the Holocaust worked for Gehlen in Dienststelle 12. The chief of GV-L was Erich Deppner, a deputy to SS-Brigadefuhrer Wilhelm Harster, the SD and Sipo commander in the occupied Netherlands. [36] Deppner at the very least witnessed the deportation of over 100,000 Dutch Jews to extermination camps. He also was personally responsible for executing Soviet prisoners of war interned in wartime Holland. The chief of Dienststelle 12's Berlin station was another SS man, Ernst Makowski, who had been a Gestapo officer in southwestern Germany. [37] Also in the Berlin office was Obersturmbannfuhrer Karl Guse, who had been chief of the Gestapo in Rome before the German invasion in 1943, and Werner Krassowski, an SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer who served in Poland as a concentration camp guard with an SS Totenkopf (Death's Head) regiment in 1939-41 and then served with an SS unit in the Baltics. [38]

The man with the most blood on his hands in the Gehlen Organization was perhaps Konrad Fiebig, who had served with the Einsatzkommando 9 of Einsatzgruppe B in the Belorussian town of Vitebsk and was later charged with the deaths of 11,000 Jews. [39] Before ending his Nazi career, Fiebig was named a judge in the Sondergericht judicial system, which was used by the SS to kill political enemies. Despite his past, Fiebig was hired in 1948 as a Rusty courier in Stuttgart and worked for West German intelligence into the early 1960s. [40] Fiebig was not the only Einsatzkommando veteran in Gehlen's organization. Walter Kurteck had been in Einsatzgruppe D in 1942. [41] He had worked on Operation Zeppelin, a scheme for sabotage and assassinations behind Soviet lines and for the executions of political commissars in Russian POW camp. Equally tainted, though not a veteran of an Einsatzkommando, was Alexander Doloezalek, who had worked in the Race and Settlement Office in Poznan and Lodz. [42] His office was responsible for recycling the clothing and other property taken from Jews deported to death camps. Doloezalek was a case officer for Dienststelle 62 and was important enough to be placed on a Gehlen emergency evacuation list in 1959. Friedrich Frank had been with the Gestapo in Cracow and later with Harster in the Netherlands. [43]

It is impossible to know without access to intelligence materials from the Federal Republic of Germany whether and in which cases Gehlen himself was aware of the backgrounds of the men his subordinates had hired. Hermann Baun had established a decentralized recruitment system at the start of Rusty, which Gehlen did not change. The files of personnel, including their real and assumed names and a biography, were kept at the field station that hired them. They were not sent to Gehlen's headquarters; this material was also not collated at the Dienststelle level. Gehlen later explained that the system would prevent Soviets from rolling up all of his networks in the event they captured his headquarters. [44]

What's more, Gehlen's headquarters may not have known about some of the worst recruitments because a number of these war criminals attempted to conceal their wartime pasts. Fiebig, for example, was retired by the BND in 1962 for having falsified the autobiography that he submitted when he was hired. [45] But there can be little doubt that Gehlen knew the background of the man he chose to be the head of his organization's Combined Reports, Translation and Editing Office. Erich Ulich Kayser-Eichberg was a psychologist who had spent his professional career until 1945 deploying his scientific training on behalf of the SS. [46] While professor of psychology at the University of Danzig, Kayser-Eichberg was seconded as an SS-Sturmbannfuhrer to the Race and Settlement unit in the Waffen-SS Alpenland in 1942-43, and then to the Race and Settlement department of the Higher SS and Police Leader's office in Bohemia in 1944. Besides Kayser-Eichberg, Gehlen certainly knew the truth about Emil Augsburg, whom he promoted to a very high position as an advisor on Soviet intelligence because of his experience on the eastern front. And he must have known the backgrounds of Erich Deppner and Otto von Bolschwing, who ran two of his key operational units in the Soviet Bloc. [47] Years later, once the BND was established, Gehlen would demonstrate the consistency of his lack of concern for hiring war criminals by making a section leader out of the notorious Franz Six, who had overseen Einsatzkommando work on the eastern front before directing an anti-Semitic SS think tank. [48]

Gehlen's comfortable relationship with the U.S. Army lasted two years. By the end of 1947, new constraints emerged that threatened to impose limits not only on Gehlen's ability to recruit whomever he wished, but also on his ability to recruit in general. The first constraint came in the person of Colonel Willard K. Liebl, whom the U.S. Army named in the fall of 1947 to supervise the Rusty operation. Unlike his predecessor, Liebl was determined to force Gehlen to turn over the names of his hires. In his memoirs, written after he retired, Gehlen explained his disagreement with Liebl as a struggle to defend West German sovereignty: "The disputes with Colonel L -- finally culminated in my flatly refusing to obey an order he issued in March 1948, since it would have cost the organization its hard-won independence." [49] Gehlen later recounted that he did not feel bound to accept any orders or suggestions from his U.S. supervisor unless "they would serve the mutual interests of Germany and the United States." [50]

Gehlen easily won this battle. Liebl's message was much stronger than the messenger himself. Liebl's wife and some of his associates were implicated in black market dealings, evidence of which Gehlen used to force Liebl to return to the United States. [51] Gehlen got a new U.S. commander. [52] It was his old friend Colonel Philp.

The other constraint involved was money. Liebl's arrival had coincided with the German currency reform arranged by the three Western powers. The effect of this reform was to sharply reduce the purchasing power of Gehlen's U.S. subsidies. Rusty was funded in U.S. dollars, and Gehlen saw the street value of this money plummet over 40 percent within one year without an increase in the U.S. Army's appropriations.

Despite winning the battle over giving his officers' real names to the U.S. Army, the money issue and lingering suspicions about the competence of U.S. military intelligence provoked Gehlen to seek a new U.S. sponsor. He was aware of changes in the U.S. national security community. Of special interest to him was the development of a new centralized intelligence service in Washington in 1947. The CIA, Gehlen felt, would be a much better patron for his organization. He hoped that the CIA would not only understand the needs of his organization better than the U.S. Army had, but that it would also be willing to pay for it. [53]

CIA: The Reluctant Patron

Given the rising costs of Rusty, as early as 1946 the U.S. Army was looking for a way to push these expenditures onto another organization without losing access to the tactical intelligence Gehlen produced. The Gehlen Organization cost the U.S. Army $42,367 in cash and the equivalent of $5,000 in rations per month, or about half a million dollars a year. [54] The Germans were asking for much more. They believed that short of receiving $2.5 million a year, they could not reach their potential for intelligence collection in Europe. [55] In the fall of 1946, the Army suggested a cost-sharing arrangement to the newly formed Central Intelligence Group (CIG), which had acquired the assets of what was left of the OSS. [56]

The Army's offer of Rusty stirred a debate within the fledgling CIG. Veterans of the counterintelligence campaign were especially wary of Gehlen and his organization. The sense that the U.S. Army might be offering a Trojan horse extended beyond the CI experts. In a review prepared for CIG director General Hoyt S. Vandenberg, the writers outlined various reasons for leaving the German organization alone. First, there was the concern that, due to the Army's lax attitude toward Gehlen's rapid recruitment and expansion, the entire organization might have been penetrated by the Soviet intelligence services. "It is considered highly undesirable," a CIG reviewer wrote to headquarters, "that any large-scale U.S.-sponsored intelligence unit be permitted to operate under even semi-autonomous conditions." [57] There was also the sense that participation in the Gehlen Organization represented an unnecessary moral compromise. "One of the greatest assets available to U.S. intelligence has always been the extent to which the United States as a nation is trusted and looked up to by democratic-minded people throughout the world," warned the SSU's report on Rusty in October 1946. [58] For those who were prepared to risk moral tarnish for the sake of a good intelligence operation, there was even doubt that Rusty would payoff. "There is no evidence whatsoever," it was argued, "which indicates high-level penetration into any political or economic body in the Russian-occupied zone." [59]

The supporters of acquiring Rusty refused to give up, however. They successfully convinced General Vandenberg to send an officer to do a more in-depth field study of the network. [60] In March 1947, Samuel Bossard, an OSS veteran who had worked in the counterintelligence branch X-2 and had used Ultra materials alongside the British in London, was given the mission of determining which, if any, components of Rusty should be acquired by the CIG and which should be left with the Army or disbanded. This survey represented the first time in the two-year U.S. relationship with Gehlen that anyone with sufficient knowledge of Germany's wartime intelligence networks was given the task of evaluating this effort at reconstituting German military intelligence. [61]

Bossard's message was that the CIG had to take the Gehlen Organization very seriously. "The magnitude of responsibility either to continue or liquidate has not been exaggerated," Bossard cabled to Washington in April 1947 in advance of his report. [62] Unlike the U.S. Army, which emphasized Rusty as a producer of information, the CIG had to be concerned with the political implications of what Gehlen had managed to create under U.S. military sponsorship. "Operation Rusty," Bossard concluded, "has become less a clandestine intelligence operation directed by American authorities than a potential resistance group supported and fed by the U.S. Government." [63] Numbering about three thousand people in the spring of 1947, the organization was loosely organized, secretive, and widespread. Its agents extended from Stockholm and Paris to Prague and Rome and could easily be spread to the Middle East, the Far East, and the Western Hemisphere.

Bossard believed that the Germans were preparing to fight against the Soviet occupation of their country. Nevertheless, he advised Washington not to assume that this secret organization would inevitably act in the interests of the United States. He described the leadership as anti-Communist and anti-Soviet. The alliance with the United States was a matter of convenience, undertaken because "they consider [the United States] their most effective champion." [64] However, if the United States should abandon the Gehlen Organization, "this group could constitute a source of political embarrassment to the U.S. Government and a security menace to American overt as well as coven activities in Germany." Bossard discovered that already the Gehlen people had "plans for camouflage which can provide the personnel with an opportunity to continue their operations independently of American support."

Although Bossard identified the risks of losing control of the Gehlen Organization, he was just as emphatic about the potential rewards in trying to take it over. He accepted the U.S. Army's judgment that the Germans were producing "high-grade tactical intelligence." [65] And though a CIG analysis of the counterintelligence information produced by Gehlen was very negative, Bossard wrote with respect of "the full potentialities of this German intelligence machine." [66]

Bossard believed that the insecurity of the organization had been exaggerated. "There is no evidence to show that any section of the operation has suffered penetration, defection or compromise from a hostile agency," he wrote. [67] He did not explain the reasons for his confidence. Rusty had extensive recruits among the refugees from the Soviet Union. In his report, Bossard noted that there were seven hundred Georgian, Ukrainian, Polish, and White Russian agents in one operational group and another eight hundred White Russians in yet another group under Gehlen's command. Bossard was also not worried about the types of Germans whom Gehlen had hired: "I have been unable thus far to discover anything in the records of any of the German operating personnel or in any German section of the operation which for security reasons would eliminate them from consideration for future employment." [68] Bossard noted that, as Gehlen's chief of operations, Baun had recruited heavily among veterans of German military intelligence, the Abwehr. Bossard also noted that there were people whose files he had not been able to see. He believed the organization had probably recruited "outlaws" from among the anti-Communist refugees and even former SS officers, though Bossard did not note any in leadership positions. He recommended that once the CIG took over Rusty, these "outlaws" should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. He believed that no former member of the Nazi party or the SS should be employed above the level of field agent. "Not only is such a policy a necessary safeguard of the best American interests," Bossard explained, "but it will preserve the unity and idealism of those individuals who have clean political records, high professional qualifications, and the same motives." [69]

The explanation for the fact that Bossard could be both confident of the wisdom of taking Rusty yet aware of its acute dangers lay in his assessment of Reinhard Gehlen. The CIG officer was favorably impressed with Gehlen, whom he found was "in every way the Prussian Staff officer." [70] Gehlen charmed Bossard, and cleverly shifted U.S. suspicions to Baun. Giving him his "word of honor that any responsibility placed in him will not be betrayed," Gehlen confessed a mistrust of Baun to Bossard. He mentioned that, unlike Baun, he intended to make Rusty strictly align with "American interests." As a result, Bossard came to blame Baun for all of the organization's darker characteristics. It was Baun who was behind the plans for a Europe-wide, anti-Communist resistance movement that could operate eventually without U.S. financial support. It was Baun who was the fanatical anti-Soviet with little interest in American values. Although he never said this explicitly, Bossard probably also blamed Baun for the hiring of any outlaws by the organization. In comparison with Baun, Gehlen looked like a reasonable client. "[E]very effort should be made on the part of the American authorities to allow G[ehlen] to dominate the organization at the expense of B[aun]," Bossard concluded. "G is more the statesman, and can become a spokesman for American interests while B, the professional intelligence man, should be reduced to the status of a high-level operator with little, if any, executive power." [71]

In part due to this confidence in Gehlen, Bossard wrote that he believed that the CIG should take the entire organization over and then determine which elements to keep and which to liquidate. Despite the lack of thorough supervision by the U.S. Army, Bossard concluded that Gehlen had run his operation very effectively. "[A]t present the purposes and needs of G-2 [U.S. Army] intelligence are so well comprehended," he wrote, "that the operation can be said to 'conduct itself' to the satisfaction of G-2 Frankfurt with a minimum of direct operational guidance from that headquarters." [72]

Bossard's recommendation that the CIG seriously consider replacing the Army and raking control of Gehlen landed with a thud in Washington. The spring of 1947 had been a busy time for U.S. intelligence. By the provisions of the National Security Act of 1947, the new Central Intelligence Agency replaced CIG. Vandenberg was gone, and the CIA's first director, Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, disliked the idea of taking over Gehlen. [73] Bossard's report had some effect nevertheless. His interpretation of Gehlen's importance planted a seed at CIA headquarters. Bossard's immediate superior, the director of the Central European Desk of the Office of Special Operations, Richard Helms, disagreed with Hillenkoetter's decision to keep Rusty outside the Agency's control. [74]

Image
Reinhard Gehlen's Personnel Record, created when he was interrogated by the U.S. Army as a POW in August 1945 (NA, RG 238, National Archives Collection of World War II War Crimes Records, entry 160, Interrogation Records, microfilm publication M 1270, roll 24, Gehlen, Reinhard, box 26).

Less than a year later, Helms authorized a second assessment of the Gehlen operation, this time by James Critchfield. Critchfield was a celebrated colonel in the U.S. Army who had fought in North Africa and France and was now a new recruit in the Agency. Time was a factor -- the Army was eager to get rid of this responsibility -- so Critchfield was given only a month to visit with Gehlen and survey his operation. As would later become clear, this was not enough time to get a real feel for the nature of Gehlen and his organization. But Critchfield nevertheless produced a long document by mid-December 1948. [75]

In much the same way as Bossard had eighteen months earlier, Critchfield argued that the U.S. government had no choice but to contend with the Gehlen Organization. Critchfield knew how starved the U.S. government was for continuous tactical information from the closed Soviet zone, and he was impressed with Gehlen and with the intelligence potential of his organization. He also saw the political advantages of supporting Gehlen and his organization. Like Bossard, Critchfield was impressed with Gehlen's apparent commitment to American goals. Gehlen, he wrote, was motivated by the "conviction that the time of nationalism is past and [that the] only hope lies in [a] Western European and Atlantic Union." [76] By the fall of 1948, Gehlen had won his bitter struggle with Baun. Baun had been sidelined into strategic planning and was no longer a major factor. Gehlen was master of his own house. [77]

Gehlen allowed the American to visit some of his field stations. Critchfield was then carefully introduced to members of the stations and shown biographical data on them. Critchfield later recalled asking about the recruitment of former SS men and being told that there were none in Rusty. "I was told this in November 1948 by Gehlen, by several of his top associates," Critchfield wrote in 2002, "and by Captain Eric Waldman of the G-2 staff in Pullach." [78]

The newly declassified documents neither confirm nor contradict Critchfield's recollection. Unlike Bossard, who addressed in 1947 the problem of SS men in the Gehlen Organization, Critchfield did not discuss the matter in his long report of December 1948. His investigation, however, had brought him very close to some of Gehlen's SS men. He visited Dienststelle 114, which had four hundred people and eight field stations and was home to quite a few former SS men. [79] The month before Critchfield's visit, Emil Augsburg had been hired by this counterintelligence unir and given the alias Dr. Alberti. In his report on Dienststelle 114, Critchfield said that he was permitted to see the "agent control" or personnel records for the group, but he mentioned nothing about Augsburg or any other former SS men on the payroll. The possibility exists that the Gehlen Organization provided the CIA investigator with a carefully selected group of agent biographies to satisfy his curiosity. [80]

Although Critchfield may not have met with former SS men in Dienststelle 114, he did encounter and would later write about a Gehlen officer with a criminal background. Paul Hodosy-Strobl was chief of the Tschardas (Hungarian group) in Dienststelle 114. Hodosy-Strobl, who had originally been recruited by the CIC from a POW camp in 1947, had been selected by the Nazis as the chief of the Hungarian state police, the Gendarmerie, following the German invasion in March 1944. Although Critchfield noted for Washington that the work of this Hungarian group had come under suspicion within Dienststelle 114, he did not raise a flag about the political or moral problems of the CIA associating with Hodosy-Strobl. Two years later, Critchfield described Hodosy-Strobl, who tried to emigrate to the United States in 1950, as having "a dubious and somewhat odious background." In 1948 he said nothing. [81]

Critchfield did make note of some problem areas. He noticed that Gehlen's operations far exceeded the terms of the operational charter established in October 1948 between the U.S. Army and Rusty. According to that agreement, Gehlen was not to undertake any intelligence operations within the Western zones of Germany. Outside of Germany, Gehlen was to restrict any counterintelligence operations to those specifically designed to protect Gehlen's ongoing spying. Inside or outside the country, Gehlen was also not supposed to mount any penetrations of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) lest lines get crossed with the U.S. Army's Counterintelligence Corps, which had the KPD as one of its principal targets. Critchfield discovered that in one way or another Dienststelle 114 managed to violate all three of these prohibitions. Gehlen had instructed his men to spy on the activities of the West German Communist Party and to keep an index of all "known Communists" at his headquarters in Pullach. [82] Despite the breach of trust that these violations implied, Critchfield recommended that Washington consider how the CIA might benefit from these operations anyway.

There was more skepticism about Gehlen in Washington, even among advocates of a takeover by the CIA. Richard Helms wrote that Rusty was "at best a controversial intelligence package" about which the CIA did not know a lot. [83] Helms overruled Critchfield's request that assessments of Gehlen's operations be made in the field by a future CIA liaison unit with Rusty. Helms wanted Washington, with its access to better information, to be making the call about which of Gehlen's operations would be kept. [84] Helms and his own boss, Assistant Director for Special Operations Donald N. Galloway, insisted that the CIA would first have to discover "detailed characteristics of the organization for which it is assuming responsibility ... Without being able to run traces on the personnel and examine specific details of the operations with Army assistance and personnel, we might well lay [the] CIA open to wholesale penetration by the Rusty organization." [85] Despite this note of caution, Helms at least remained confident that if handled correctly, the Gehlen group "should be a great intelligence producer." [86]

Helms and Critchfield together planned the CIA takeover. The CIA would have to establish its authority over Rusty early on. The organization would be treated as a subordinate unit within the CIA. It would be stripped of all intelligence operations that might conceivably represent a threat to U.S. interests or which might prove more productive under direct CIA control. Gehlen was to be given a fixed budget for his overhead and his operations in the Soviet zone of Germany and such programs as had already proved productive. Although Helms and Critchfield had confidence in Gehlen's ability to produce intelligence in eastern Germany, they agreed that Gehlen should be encouraged to cut back on the number of operations he was running there "while attempting to raise the level of penetration." [87] As for Rusty's operations outside of eastern Germany, they wanted stringent controls to go into effect immediately. The CIA should fund only Gehlen's activities in the Soviet satellite countries, the so-called strategic operations, on a project-by-project basis. Funding decisions would be made in Washington after scrutiny of agent control and other operational materials for each operation. Given that half of the four thousand or so reports that Rusty produced per month for the Army already came from these operations outside eastern Germany, the CIA was intending to scrutinize a significant portion of Gehlen's work. [88] Hopeful that Gehlen would agree, Critchfield expected that this would "give us a degree of control and an insight into their operations which has been non-existent in the past." [89]

Beyond Helms, however, hostility to the idea of assuming responsibility for Gehlen remained in the CIA. Veterans of the counterintelligence war were loud in their belief that the United States would be hurt by this alliance with the discredited German intelligence service. Besides a sense that these Germans were not going to be much help in the Cold War intelligence struggle, the in-house critics reminded the CIA leadership that there was no guarantee that Gehlen and his colleagues represented the "good" Germans. Before Critchfield was sent to Germany, the anti-Gehlen lobby had summarized its argument in this way:

[T]he general consensus is that Rusty represents a tightly knit organization of former German officers, a good number of which formerly belonged to the German general staff. Since they have an effective means of control over their people through extensive funds, facilities, operational supplies, etc., they are in a position to provide safe haven for a good many undesirable elements from the standpoint of a future democratic Germany. [90]


By early 1949, however, the cri tics had clearly lost the debate over assuming responsibility for Gehlen. Two factors served to tip the balance in Gehlen's favor. First, the international situation was very different from what it had been in 1947 when Hillenkoetter had rejected Bossard's recommendation that the CIA take Gehlen over. In 1948, Josef Stalin imposed a blockade on all overland communication to West Berlin, causing the start of what would be an eleven-month air-supply operation by Western air forces. In the first months of the Berlin airlift, the Allies had feared the real possibility of a Soviet attack on Western Europe. In this atmosphere, sources on the East, however imperfect their makeup, were welcome. The second factor was some subtle extortion by the U.S. Army, which in the midst of the Berlin crisis announced plans to cut almost all funding for the Gehlen operation. If the CIA wanted to prevent the untimely collapse of Rusty, it had to act fast. In addition, high-level support existed outside the Agency for the transfer. Both the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Omar Bradley and the Secretary of Defense James Forrestal approved of the idea. [91] Convinced by Helms and Critchfield and reassured by Bradley and Forrestal, Hillenkoetter went along with it.
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Re: U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, by Richard Breitman, No

Postby admin » Tue Jun 26, 2018 7:24 am

Part 2 of 3

The Zipper Problem

The CIA discovered almost immediately after deciding to take the project over from the U.S. Army that Reinhard Gehlen had a sharply different vision for the new relationship. Difficulties with the German chief of the Rusty project -- rebaptized "Zipper" by its new sponsor -- emerged even before the formal handover. The trouble started in June 1949, when Critchfield informed Gehlen that the CIA would not be increasing his budget for the moment. At that time, Critchfield also explained that the Agency expected Gehlen to eliminate his operations in Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia, as well as those in Scandinavia. In order to proceed with a project-by-project review, Washington wanted to see the true names and operational details for all of his remaining and prospective intelligence projects outside the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany. [92]

Gehlen balked. Critchfield's proposals were not news to him. In his months spent flirting with the CIA, Gehlen had vaguely promised to close some of his less productive operations. Now that the CIA was committed, however, Gehlen rejected the budget figure he was given and showed little interest in curtailing his operations as dramatically as the CIA had proposed. Gehlen also performed a dramatic about-face with regard to sharing agent information. While making his field survey in the fall of 1948, Critchfield had been told that the agent control files would be open to the United States. [93] Now that the CIA was asking for them, Gehlen's position changed. In August 1949, he sent a letter to Critchfield explaining that it was impossible for the Germans to hand over the names of their personnel. [94] Gehlen argued that the CIA would have to earn the trust of his employees before they would be willing to take this risk.

The CIA held its ground and achieved some results. When Critchfield insisted that turning over the names was a precondition for CIA support for any of the 120 operations that Gehlen hoped to maintain outside of eastern Germany, the German relented a little. Gehlen handed over a list of 150 individuals on his headquarters staff. [95] He also permitted some sharing of minimal information about operations outside the Soviet zone of Germany.

The relationship only worsened as the CIA began analyzing this operational data. When the CIA subjected Gehlen's strategic operations to scrutiny -- something the U.S. Army had lacked the ability to do -- it found the entire program amateurish and wasteful. The Gehlen Organization was simply incapable of handling serious intelligence penetrations. Despite Critchfield's enthusiastic description in December 1948 of the value of the Gehlen Organization, CIA headquarters concluded in mid-1949 that 90 percent of the 120 projects were quite worthless and recommended their disbandment. [96]

Gehlen refused to accept this verdict and sen t a harsh letter to Critchfield telling off the Americans for assuming they could teach the Europeans how to spy. [97] "It is quite clear to me that a mechanical application of American principles to our work," he explained, "would deprive the organization of its principal source of efficiency, the initiative of the single individuals in all fields," He resented having to wait for Washington to approve his projects, He disliked the intrusiveness of the CIA's request, and he hated, most of all, being second-guessed by intelligence officers whom he did not consider his equals. "Only due to the fact that in the past I had full freedom to set up our organization in accordance with our war experiences, " Gehlen lectured Critchfield, "I was able -- in spite of the known difficulties -- to develop the organization to a very high level of efficiency." He believed that Americans had a very naive view of intelligence. Their history and geography had insulated them from the rough and tumble of international politics, where decisions had to be made quickly on the basis of imperfect information from imperfect sources. By contrast, he crowed, for Germans "the fundamental principal has always been that it is better to act wrongly instead of not acting at all, even if this would result in occasional damage." [98]

Once Critchfield understood that Gehlen would not budge on divulging the names of his agents, he knew of only two ways to solve the problem. He could seek Gehlen's removal, which he was not prepared to do in 1949, or he could begin a program of penetrating Gehlen's organization without the general's permission. Critchfield recruited Tom Lucid, a former CIC officer whom he had met when both were serving in Austria in 1946, to establish a counterintelligence group. [99] When the CIA acquired responsibility for Zipper in July 1949, Critchfield opened the Pullach Operations Base (POB), a liaison operation in the small town south of Munich where Gehlen had his headquarters. POB and Zipper shared a courtyard in a manorial residence that had served as one of Joseph Goebbels' wartime headquarters. To improve his counterintelligence capabilities, Critchfield arranged for a camera to be placed in the CIA's building so that everyone who entered Gehlen's building across the courtyard could be photographed for later identification. [100] The CIA has not declassified any information regarding this operation, making it difficult to determine with precision when the POB identified any particular Gehlen employee. Using the biographical summaries included as a response to trace requests, however, it is possible to see that, starting in 1949, the CIA acquired information about some of the SD and Gestapo officers that were under Gehlen's protection.

The Romanian Operation, known to Gehlen as General Agency 13, was the first cluster of SS men in Zipper to be identified by the CIA. It is possible that this information was not derived from Lucid's counterintelligence operation because in the fall of 1949 Gehlen was handing over some information to Critchfield on his operations outside of Germany. By whatever means, the CIA knew as of late 1949 that the former SS representative in Bucharest, Otto von Bolschwing; the former chief of the Iron Guard, Horia Sima; and lesser SS-types Kurt Auner, Ernst Schlandt, and Joachim Vacarescu were all being paid as part of Zipper. [101]

There was no internal CIA policy against hiring Nazi war criminals. SD or Gestapo candidates for CIA employment were judged on a case-by-case basis, following trace requests and police investigations in their neighborhoods. [102] Once a candidate was found to have access to information deemed important for U.S. national security or was believed to have skills of use to the United States, the key question for the CIA was not what the individual had done during World War II, but whose side he or she was on once the Cold War began. The sole exception was that the Agency was unlikely to hire an individual whose Nazi crimes were well known because of the difficulty involved in maintaining a covert existence for that person. Otherwise, even personal participation in the Holocaust was not an immediate disqualifier for employment. [103]

Nevertheless, the CIA had an interest in holding Gehlen to his word about not hiring SS men. The Agency was concerned that SD or Gestapo personnel hired by Gehlen might open the U.S. government to criticism that it was sponsoring a criminal organization in West Germany. These recruits would also complicate Zipper's absorption into the West German civil service later on, once the Federal Republic was fully sovereign. [104]

Threatened by the CIA's interventionism, Gehlen did not restrict his reaction to stern letters and firm resistance to U.S. efforts to vet his organization. Just as he had done only two years earlier when he found that he disliked the U.S. Army's requirements, Gehlen went looking for new political allies in the fall of 1949. This time he did not turn to a different part of the U.S. government for help, but instead he sought contacts among the emerging West German leadership. In September 1949, seventy-three-year-old Konrad Adenauer had become chancellor of West Germany. Although not yet fully independent, the Federal Republic of Germany was permitted by the French, British, and U.S. authorities to establish its own government. Gehlen was not personally known to Adenauer, a prewar mayor of Cologne with impeccable anti-Nazi credentials, but this did not stop the German spy chief from attempting to establish lines of communication to the new chancellor and his entourage. [105]

Gehlen tried to keep his political lobbying from the CIA. But U.S. sources in the emerging West German political community were reasonably good. By the end of 1949, the Agency was not only well aware of what Gehlen was doing but was actively discouraging him from freelancing. [106] Although the CIA intended that Gehlen should eventually become the chief of West German intelligence, it did not want that to happen before it had thoroughly penetrated his operation. "By official recognition of any individual or element of the [Gehlen] operation before the proper counterintelligence controls were firmly established," the CIA wrote in May 1950, "the Western German government would find itself able to rob us of our intelligence assets and with serious strategic or political consequences turn them against US." [107] Ironically, at this moment of concern about Gehlen's dependability, the CIA assigned Gehlen a special cryptonym: in CIA cables he became the stalwart "Utility." [108]

Gehlen ignored Critchfield's advice about not meddling in German domestic politics. [109] His efforts were much too successful to give them up. Gehlen became the leading candidate to become the first chief of a new domestic intelligence service planned by the Adenauer government. The Bundesamt fur Verfassungsschutz (Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, BfV was to have the same duties as the FBI. Although Gehlen had no background in domestic security or police work, the fact that he had overseen the formation of Dienststelle 114, which did counterintelligence and security work in the Zipper organization, gave him some credibility. From the perspective of the Adenauer government, Gehlen was also attractive because he was one of very few experienced intelligence managers from the war who seemed acceptable to the Americans. The Western occupying powers retained the right to veto any selection to head the BfV.

In early 1950, Adenauer surprised the French, British, and Americans by announcing at a closed-door meeting of the Allied High Commission that Reinhard Gehlen was the leading candidate to lead the BN. [110] The CIA reeled at the news that Gehlen might get the job of domestic spy chief. In conversations with Critchfield before the BN job was a possibility, Gehlen had expressed the view that Germany needed a service that did both foreign and domestic intelligence. [111] Critchfield had debated this point with him, making the argument that this powerful organization might pose a threat to German democracy. News that Gehlen's name was being put forward for the domestic job signaled that Gehlen had not listened to CIA advice and still had the formation of a super-agency in the back of his mind.

The British -- who knew very little officially about the U.S. arrangement with Zipper but through their own sources understood that there was a strong connection -- mistrusted Gehlen and wanted their own man, Otto John, to get the job heading the BfV. [112] The CIA found it convenient to let the British scuttle Gehlen's plans. In a May 1950 memorandum for the record, a CIA analyst wrote that "from the standpoint of our control of future German intelligence, Utility is too powerful in his own right to be allowed to accept the [BfV] position." [113]

By the summer of 1950, as the U.S. government sat back and watched approvingly, the British vetoed Adenauer's candidate and pushed for Otto John to take the post instead. The BfV episode was but the first in a series of events over the course of 1950 that would gradually tip the balance against Gehlen in the ongoing debate over him in the Agency. [114] An additional problem for the CIA was that Zipper operations were often turning out to be second rate and not really worth U.S. taxpayers' money. Having eclipsed Baun, Gehlen held the reins of his organization so tightly that it was appropriate that he bore the balance of the blame for the many shortcomings of Zipper.

In an effort to shake up Gehlen and give him a chance to satisfy his critics at the CIA, James Critchfield "bluntly" informed him in July 1950 that though Zipper was "a credible tactical collection and military evaluation agency ... it was, with some exceptions, definitely second class in [executing] intelligence activities of a more difficult or sophisticated nature." [115] Critchfield warned that if Gehlen wanted support for anything other than his low-level tactical intelligence teams in East Germany, he "would have to institute radical changes in personnel, procedures, and attitudes." [116]

Outwardly Gehlen took the criticism well. Privately, however, Gehlen stepped up his efforts to use the Adenauer regime to create a separate power base for Zipper. In the summer of 1950, he arranged meetings with Adenauer's most powerful assistant, State Secretary Hans Globke. Globke, described by the CIA as the "eminence grise" of the Adenauer government, was a shrewd choice. [117] Globke and Adenauer were both from the Rhineland, which helped give the younger man the chancellor's ear. Globke was also a severely compromised figure in West German politics. As a civil servant in the Jewish Department of the Interior Ministry he had helped interpret the Nuremberg Laws of the 1930s that eliminated Jewish civil rights. During the war he had repeatedly been in contact with the Gestapo's Adolf Eichmann on Jewish matters in the occupied territories. Gehlen's many compromised employees were less of an issue to Globke than they might have been to a German with a clean past. [118]

By the end of December 1950, Gehlen felt sure enough of his new alliance with the Chancellor's office that he told the CIA what he really thought of their new guidance. In a dramatic three-hour showdown in Critchfield's office on December 28, Gehlen harangued Critchfield. [119] Speaking from prepared notes, he denounced U.S. "interference in Zipper internal affairs." Apparently unconcerned about any U.S. retaliation, he informed Critchfield that he was planning to fire members of his staff who were too pro-American. He also threatened to resign if the CIA continued to tell him how to run his organization.

This outrageous performance by a man who owed his freedom of maneuver in postwar Germany to U.S. goodwill stoked the internal debate within the CIA on the wisdom of the Zipper project. It quickly became apparent that Gehlen had clearly overplayed his hand. A consensus formed at CIA headquarters that Gehlen's declaration of independence was a disaster for the Agency, ensuring that Zipper would never be a secure organization or submit to U.S. control. Washington decided that "we should overlook no opportunity to kick Gehlen upstairs into the service of the Bonn government." [120] The CIA hoped to remove Gehlen without the drama of firing him. The CIA would instead exploit Gehlen's overweening ambition by maneuvering him into a German defense position where "in all probability [he] would not continue to exert an undesirable influence on Zipper." As for Gehlen's replacement, Washington decided that "the best solution would be ... a forthright Army general with no political ambitions." Sentiment shifted against Gehlen also within the small U.S. liaison unit at Pullach. Two of Critchfield's top assistants, Henry Pleasants and Peer de Silva, marched into his office and told him that Gehlen had to be fired. [121]

As is well known, Gehlen was not fired. In face, by the end of 1951, he would be in an unassailable position and Zipper itself would be the closest it had ever come to a position of equality in its relations with the CIA. Two factors contributed to saving the day for the embattled Gehlen. The most important was that the Chancellor's office, especially Hans Globke, wanted Gehlen to stay in his job and hoped that someday Zipper would become the official foreign intelligence service of a sovereign West Germany. In March and May 1951, Gehlen was invited to brief the West German chancellor on the structure of his organization. [122] Larger events had also played a role in Gehlen's political survival in Bonn. Following the surprise North Korean invasion of South Korea in June 1950, there had been a noticeable shift in the West German chancellor's thinking on West German security issues. In the first years after World War II, Adenauer had expected that West Germany would not need to rearm. The Korean War convinced him, however, that the Cold War was too dangerous and West Germany too vulnerable to dispense with having an army. [123] Gehlen was a proven commodity who could be helpful in this national emergency.

The other factor was the will and energy of James Critchfield, who did what he could to help Gehlen make his case in Bonn. The CIA officer obtained a copy of the U.S. National Security Act of 1947 for Gehlen to use in offering Adenauer possible models for the future German foreign intelligence service. [124] Critchfield was equally adept at smoothing over the ruffled feathers in Washington, where he reported that Adenauer and Globke supported Gehlen.

Critchfield made a calculated political decision to rescue Gehlen. Although he was well aware that the General had betrayed the trust of the United States, Critchfield believed that the advantages of working with the troublesome Gehlen outweighed the disadvantages. [125] He viewed the Gehlen matter through the lens of European power politics. [126] The state system on the Continent had been inherently unstable since Chancellor Otto von Bismarck unified the German Reich in the 1860s-70s. The lesson learned from two world wars was that peace hinged on properly managing the Germans, providing them with a role that accommodated their self-respect without undermining the confidence of Germany's neighbors. Critchfield had analyzed the German Army General Staff. He considered the top 130 to have been criminals and was determined not to see these people playa role in rehabilitating the country as a European power. [127] But the next tier of German military leaders included many professionals who accepted the importance of tying Germany's future to the Western alliance. Quite a few of these men were consultants to Gehlen and Zipper. Critchfield believed that though Gehlen himself was unreliable and decidedly weak as an intelligence manager, he was a useful bridge to this next generation of German military leaders. In Critchfield's eyes, Zipper was just as important as a laboratory for nurturing this generation as it had been as a stopgap measure for U.S. Army Intelligence in the early days of the struggle with the Soviet Union. Trying to isolate Gehlen from this emerging German national security elite, therefore, would entail heavy costs, which Critchfield believed unnecessary. "I think it would be politically inept of us," Critchfield wrote in June 1951, "to equivocate in the treatment we give Utility in the United States simply because of our well-documented reservations about him." [128] While others were pulling away from Gehlen, Critchfield became his champion, inviting Gehlen to the United States to raise his stature within the U.S. government and perhaps soften Gehlen's resistance to U.S. advice.

Gehlen's fate as the CIA's liaison partner was sealed in August 1951, when a high-level officer from the CIA traveled to West Germany to determine for himself the extent of Globke and Adenauer's commitment to Gehlen. The CIA was prepared to dump him, but only if the nascent West German government agreed. At a private meeting, the CIA envoy put the delicate question to Globke: "Is Gehlen acceptable to Adenauer?" [129] Globke answered affirmatively, in what was reported to Washington as a "direct and emphatic way." [130] Although doubts remained at the CIA, Gehlen had made too many influential allies in the Federal Republic for the U.S. government to discard him.

The visit by the CIA chieftain paved the way for Gehlen's trip to the United States in the fall of 1951. The chance to see Joe DiMaggio's last game at Yankee Stadium was but one of the cultural stops on a red-carpet tour of the country. Not all was sweetness and light, however. Gehlen received a frosty reception from General Walter Bedell Smith, the Director of Central Intelligence. Smith, who had been Dwight Eisenhower's Chief of Staff at the Supreme Allied Headquarters in Europe, was among those in the CIA who never warmed to the idea of flattering Gehlen's personal and professional ambitions. [131] Nonetheless, symbolic of the Agency's grudging acceptance of Gehlen was the fifteen-minute visit and handshake that Gehlen's boosters arranged with Smith.

After Yankee Stadium

Just as it was for major league baseball, 1951 turned out to be the season for change in the CIA-Gehlen relationship. After Gehlen returned from Washington, the tensions in the relationship noticeably relaxed. The change was not due to anything on Gehlen's part. He would remain as stubbornly committed to keeping the CIA's nose out of his business as ever. But there was a marked change in Washington's handling of the Zipper account. The CIA gradually gave up on its original objective of controlling Gehlen's organization. Over the remainder of 1951 and into 1952, the CIA began to accept Zipper as more of a sovereign organization with which it had a close relationship than as a wholly owned subsidiary. In December 1952, Smith, who only fourteen months earlier had been reluctant to show any favor to Gehlen, wrote the German spy chief of his hope that the West German government would transform Zipper into the official German intelligence service in "the near future." [132] Smith signaled that, in anticipation of that day, Washington was already prepared to expand the relationship into a worldwide partnership of equals. "Believing that our cooperation in intelligence matters can, to our mutual advantage, be extended," he wrote, "I have instructed Mr. Critchfield to explore with you our related interests in a number of activities in areas outside of the framework of our present cooperation in the production of intelligence on the Soviet Bloc." [133]

In this new situation, what might have been a sore point for the two services passed without creating a stir. By the end of 1951, Critchfield's penetration operation was increasingly turning up evidence that, in defiance of his promise not to hire war criminals, Gehlen had been stacking his organization with SS men.

Bolschwing and his Romanians had been found two years before, very early in the process. In 1951, the CIA discovered a much larger cluster of SS men in the counterintelligence section GV-L. As can best be determined from the new documents, the first evidence that GV-L contained SS men arrived at Pullach in the fall of 1951, when the CIA penetration operation picked up information on Henry Paul Opitz and Walter Vollmer. [134] Both men had been in the Gestapo, and Vollmer had been the head of the Gestapo office in Chemnitz. Sometime in 1951, it seems, the CIA also learned about Cornelius Van Der Horst, who operated agent chains in Poland for the GV-L. [135]

As Gehlen drew closer to the regime in Bonn, CIA counterintelligence opportunities increased. It appears that the CIA had better sources in the civilian offices of the West German government than in Zipper. One especially productive operation involved learning the names of Gehlen agents through analysis of Zipper's internal financial records, which apparently neither the U.S. Army nor the CIA had ever been officially permitted to see. [136] In the summer of 1952, Bonn sent two accountants to Pullach to begin checking the books of the Gehlen Organization so that eventually its employees could formally join the West German civil service. Some, perhaps all, of what they discovered was also seen by the CIA. Using travel receipts and salary payments, Critchfield's agents painstakingly pieced together Gehlen's widespread organization. GV-L's roster filled our. The CIA discovered that SD men Heinz Felfe and Carl Schuetz had been hired in 1951. [137] The CIA also learned that Zipper was employing the war criminals Emil Augsburg, Erich Deppner, and Konrad Fiebig. [138] Of the three, Augsburg was the most prominent because it became clear that Gehlen had selected him to be Zipper's chief specialist on the structure and tactics of the Soviet intelligence services. [139]

With the CIA expecting the Adenauer government to legalize Zipper in short order, it was now Agency policy to consider these politically sensitive recruitments as an internal German matter. There is no evidence of any effort by Washington or Critchfield at the CIA station in Pullach to press Gehlen to fire any of these discovered SS men because of their pasts. By the early 1960s, the CIA came to view former SS men as likely targets for Soviet penetration, but this was not the Agency's belief in the early 1950s. Indeed, in the second half of 1951, the CIA was itself hiring former SS men for a paramilitary operation designed by the Office of Policy Coordination. [140] Newly released information identifies at least three former SS men -- Friedrich Carstenn, Karl Otto Jobke, and Eberhard Tellkamp -- who were recruited for this operation. At least two of these men had probably committed crimes against humanity. [141] Besides the fact that Jobke and Carstenn were employed through February 1953 and Tellkamp through November 1954, the precise duration and nature of this paramilitary operation organized by the OPC remains classified. [142]

Consistent with its own view that few risks were involved in hiring former members of the SD and Gestapo, the Agency opted to complain to Gehlen only about those SS veterans on whom it had information of a possible Soviet connection. One of those SS men was Wolfgang Paul Hoeher. In June 1952, the CIA warned Zipper that he might be a Soviet agent. [143]

The 1953 Crisis

Wolfgang Paul Hoeher merits a footnote in the history of the Cold War. Hoeher, the head of GV-L's office in West Berlin, disappeared into East Germany on February 13, 1953. Zipper promptly informed the CIA that Hoeher had been drugged and kidnapped across the border into East Berlin. But Hoeher had not been kidnapped. The CIA had been right to question this man's loyalty. [144] He had defected after serving as an East German mole in the Zipper organization. Hoeher's defection, six months after the warning from the CIA, ushered in a year of setbacks for Zipper that postponed legalization by Bonn for another four years and forced Gehlen to take U.S. concerns about security a little more seriously.

In October 1953, the Gehlen Organization was hit by an even more dramatic defection. Hans Joachim Geyer, who had worked for Gehlen since 1952 as an agent handler in East Berlin, defected to the East Germans when he thought the West Berlin police might arrest him. All along Geyer had been a double agent for the East German Security Service. [145] In the immediate aftermath of Geyer's departure, the East German Security Service arrested what has been described as hundreds ot alleged Gehlen agents throughout the Soviet zone. Geyer then appeared at a press conference organized by the East Germans to denounce Gehlen. Two weeks later, a man linked to Gehlen was arrested as he tried to lay a communications cable along one of the canals that formed the boundary between East and West Berlin. This was followed by another press conference, where the East Germans showed off the cable layer, as well as Geyer and Hoeher.

The defections and the revelations that followed stung Gehlen. He understood that he could not hold out any longer on revealing to the CIA the names in the compromised GV-L. He needed Critchfield's help with the huge counterintelligence task he faced to ensure that there were no more Communist agents in this group. Cooperation in counterintelligence between the CIA and Gehlen had already intensified after Hoeher's defection, and by the end of the year, as the Soviets began their most concentrated propaganda campaign against Gehlen, the CIA was quite convinced that Hoeher and Geyer could not be the only moles in Zipper. In December 1953, Gehlen finally handed Critchfield a list of the officers and agents attached to GV-L. [146] He also promised his American liaison partner that the GV-L would be "dissolved" and its agents reassigned or placed under cover as Dienststelle 150. (It was likely from this list that the CIA learned that Emil Augsburg, the former Nazi expert on the East who had also participated in "special duties" in Poland and Byelorussia, was the man known as "Dr. Alberti" in the GV-L.) [147] Gehlen informed Critchfield that, as a result of the reorganization of the GV-L, Augsburg would be transferred to Gehlen's headquarters in Pullach. The CIA apparently made no effort to encourage Gehlen to fire any of the former members of GV-L -- not even the war criminal Augsburg -- in the wake of the events of 1953. [148]

Even in this moment of shared concern, Gehlen was constitutionally incapable of being forthright with the CIA. Although he permitted one of his counterintelligence specialists to discuss his concerns about additional Soviet penetrations, he did not reveal to the CIA that the GV-L had itself launched a mole hunt. The SS men in the GV-L had formed a social and professional network that inspired suspicion on the part of those in the organization who had never belonged to a criminal organization. The non-SS men initiated an investigation into what they termed "the SD clique." [149]

The U.S. Army vs. Zipper

The U.S. Army's relationship with the Gehlen Organization became more adversarial as Gehlen's relationship improved with the CIA. The Army's Counterintelligence Corps reacted with as much alarm to the events of 1953 as did the CIA and Gehlen himself Like the counterintelligence experts in both the Zipper and the CIA units at Pullach, the CIC was deeply concerned that there were more East German or Soviet sources in the discredited GV-L.

In the fall of 1954, the CIC recruited a source within the GV-L counterintelligence unit in Zipper. Ludwig Albert, a former police officer in the Nazi period, was a security representative in the province of Hesse. Albert claimed that the entire Gehlen Organization counterintelligence network in the Soviet zone was neutralized by the Hoeher case. Albert promised to help the U.S. Army because, as his CIC case officer explained, "[H]e sees in the possibility of American pressure on General Gehlen directly the only chance to save his organization from becoming an impossible quagmire." [150]

Albert was an excellent source for following the mole hunt within the GV-L (now Dienststelle 150). In November 1954, Albert passed to the CIC a list of people in sensitive positions in the Gehlen Organization who "either represent security risks and/or threats, or have backgrounds or records which have not been sufficiently clarified to satisfy minimum security considerations." [151] He also informed the CIC that within the security group in the Gehlen Organization there was the increasing sense that the East Bloc's propaganda campaign of December 1953 was not the product of Hoeher's defection but was a sign of some excellent penetration of the Gehlen Organization by the Soviets. He said that suspicion had fallen on the SS men in the organization, especially on an ambitious officer named Heinz Felfe. "The impression that Heinz Felfe and the SD clique which followed him into the organization are 'enemies' has been growing steadily." [152] Albert noted that Felfe traveled around from Gehlen office to Gehlen office where he "had no grounds for being present ... each time asking for something or other ... only to retreat then, stating he was in the wrong office." [153]

The CIC opted not to tell the CIA what it had learned from Albert about Heinz Felfe and the other members of the SD clique. Indeed, after the 66th CIC, the main CIC group in West Germany, initiated a full-fledged investigation of Felfe and the other GV-L veterans, it instituted a policy of keeping the CIA as far away from its penetration as possible. The CIA had a liaison officer stationed at the 66th CIC, who posed a possible threat to this policy. Writing as if this CIA man represented a foreign power rather than the United States, the CIC commander in charge of the operation laid down the reasons why he had to be contained: "His continuous presence and use of the central registry, albeit through headquarters case sections, represents a possible source of embarrassment should he determine anything more than casual interest on the part of this headquarters in the [Gehlen Organization]. [154]

The CIA, however, did not need any help from the Cle. It learned about the Gehlen Organization's internal security investigation on its own. [155] It also knew that former SS men, in particular Heinz Felfe, were at the center of the controversy. In October 1954, the CIA received information that Heinz Felfe and Karl Schuetz were "the major suspects in the Gehlen Organization security leak." The CIA also discovered that Felfe was considered the "main organizer and central figure of the SD clique. [156] The CIA had known about Felfe since 1952, though this was the first time that there was any hint that he was considered a security risk.

The CIA's initial reaction was to downplay the derogatory information against Felfe. [157] James Critchfield's counterintelligence specialists had been working increasingly closely with Felfe, and, despite the GV-L debacle of 1953, had come to view him as a very dependable ally in the war against Soviet intelligence and intrigue. In 1956, when his file was being reviewed before Felfe took his first liaison trip to the United States, the CIA officer who had "known and dealt closely with [Felfe] for about a year and a half," wrote that Felfe "is a man who apparently ties his personal future to the West and has made the decision to fight Communist ideologies and practice within the best framework available to him, i.e. [Zipper]." [158] Felfe's CIA liaison partner predicted that in the years to come, Felfe would be a key player in the BND. [159] He did not predict that Felfe would be among the most damaging KGB penetrations of the entire Cold War. Although the CIC could be blamed for not coordinating its efforts with the CIA, the CIA had only itself to blame for not looking into Felfe earlier and more closely than it did.

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Allen Dulles

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James Critchfield

Mutual Suspicions and Damage Control

The ever-widening investigation of the security of the Gehlen Organization did nothing to disrupt the CIA's interest in strengthening the relationship. In September 1954, CIA director Allen Dulles visited the future chief of West German intelligence at his headquarters. Behind the symbolism of the meeting there was substance. Dulles raised the possibility of cooperation outside Eastern Europe. In late 1952, Smith had permitted Critchfield to discuss expanding cooperation beyond the Soviet zone (which in 1949 became the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany). Apparently, however, little had come of this overture, and Dulles stressed to Gehlen once more the need for this cooperation. Although the particular region of which Dulles spoke has been redacted in pages released by the CIA, from the historical context it is reasonable to speculate that Dulles discussed activities in the ear East, where in 1952-53 former Nazi military officers had been invited by the Syrian and Egyptian governments to train their military and intelligence establishments. [160]

Later, Gehlen hinted in his memoirs that his operations in the Middle East were both successful and of great importance to Bonn. "This is a region of vast importance for Europe," he wrote. "Both bridge and pivot," he continued, "it confronts the southern flank of NATO and borders on the Mediterranean, the domination of which has always been one of the great Soviet ambitions." [161] As of the mid-1950s, Gehlen's officers had "decided to establish a network of contracts there for the service in order to provide a continuous flow of intelligence reports." [162]

Something else in Gehlen's memoirs suggests that the CIA not only participated in these operations but also knew that they involved some notorious Nazi figures. Gehlen wrote in the early 1970s that he had employed some of "the few former SS members" in Zipper in the Middle East with "the full approval" of the United States. [163] "We found the Arab countries particularly willing to embrace Germans with an ostensibly 'Nazi' past," he wrote. [164] By implication, so, too, was the United States. A former CIA officer in the region, Miles Copeland, then identified former SS-Sturmbannfuhrer Otto Skorzeny as the principal player in this operation. In World War II, Skorzeny had achieved near legendary status by leading a dramatic paratroop operation to spirit former Italian dictator Benito Mussolini out of detainment by the Italian government that had surrendered to the Allies in 1943. In 1944, Skorzeny had trained the guerrilla warriors who infiltrated the Allied lines dressed in U.S. uniforms so as to disrupt communication when Hitler launched his desperate final offensive in the Ardennes. According to Copeland, Gehlen approached Skorzeny with the plan that he would go to Egypt in 1953 to train the Egyptian army. Skorzeny understood that the money for this operation would come from the CIA, and that he and the other SS men he recruited as instructors would be responsible for spying on the Egyptians. [165]

Records released in response to the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act cast doubt on Copeland's story and suggest that the operations Gehlen was writing about did nor involve the CIA. The evidence is quite clear that the CIA and Gehlen did not cooperate regarding Skorzeny or any other of the dozens of aging Nazis who did indeed trek to Cairo in the first years of Nasser's reign to prepare the Arabs for battle with the new Jewish state. [166] If Gehlen was involved with those men, this was kept from the CIA. [167] To the extent that the CIA detected any official West German hand behind these work projects for former Nazis, it seems that it was the embryonic German defense ministry under Heinz Blank, the so-called Arm Blank, which was the sponsor of some of these men. In any case, the CIA was not a sponsor, just an interested onlooker.

One area of joint cooperation, however, was the investigation of the circumstances surrounding the defections and releases of 1953-54. In 1954, a Soviet defector named Petr Deriabin had revealed to the CIA that the KGB ran two agents in the BND. The defector could only provide code names for these men: "Peter" and "Paul." [168] Only in 1957 did the CIA take seriously that Felfe could be either Peter or Paul. From that year until the case was closed with Felfe's arrest in 1961, the CIA and the Gehlen Organization worked on this counterintelligence problem in the cooperative manner that it deserved. [169] Until his arrest, however, Felfe continued his steady rise in West German intelligence. As chief of all counterintelligence operations against the Soviets, his hnal position with the BND, Felfe was able to reveal to Moscow every Gehlen operation in the Soviet Bloc.

During the investigation of the Felfe case, the CIA discovered that there were other high-level Soviet moles in the BND, not all of whom could be identified. Two that could be identified were Hans Clemens and Wilhelm Krichbaum, both of whom had at one time or another recruited other agents for the BND and the Soviets. [170] Clemens and Krichbaum had collaborated in recruiting Felfe for the KGB in 1951. At the very least, Zipper's and later the BND's entire counterintelligence campaign in the 1950s was an open book for Moscow.

In April 1956, the Adenauer government formally legalized the Gehlen Organization as the BND. While the Chancellor had been relying on it as his foreign intelligence service since 1951, the U.S. government continued to pay the salaries of Gehlen's headquarters personnel and much of Zipper's operational costs until Gehlen's staff officially joined the West German civil service. [171]

What must have been a moment of shared glory for the CIA and the new BND was oddly bittersweet. Although they had never been personally close, Critchfield and Gehlen experienced a severe falling out in 1955. The cause of the problem was Gehlen's discovery of the CIC penetration into his organization, for which he blamed Critchfield and the CIA. In July 1955, Gehlen informed Critchfield that two American men had been identified as covering West German government figures and the Gehlen Organization. In The West German police also determined that Ludwig Albert was involved in unauthorized activity. After he was arrested, the West German police uncovered evidence in his apartment that he had been working for CIC. Albert later committed suicide in prison.

Gehlen never accepted that one U.S. intelligence service could act independently of another in occupied Germany. When Critchfield told him that the CIA had no idea that the U.S. Army had targeted Zipper, Gehlen assumed this was one of those polite lies that make diplomatic relations possible. [173] As a result, the Albert case cast a pall over Gehlen's relationship with the Pullach group throughout the remainder of the CIA's sponsorship of Zipper. Critchfield's final days at Pullach before the CIA closed its special liaison office were difficult. Gehlen himself did not bother to visit with the American who had been his most tolerant CIA ally over eight years. Curiously -- for a man who repeatedly broke his word in dealings with Americans -- he refused to forgive Critchfield for the actions of the CIC.

The CIA's relationship with the BND emerged unaffected by the personal tensions between these two men. Although the newly released information does not add much to the literature on West German-U.S. intelligence cooperation after the period of CIA stewardship, there is some evidence in the public domain to suggest that at a certain point after Felfe's arrest the relationship became mutually advantageous. As for the period under U.S. supervision, the judgment cannot be positive. The CIA was never able to renegotiate the open-ended commitment that the U.S. Army had rashly made to Gehlen in 1945-46. By 1951, the CIA recognized that the strong-willed Gehlen would use every instrument at his disposal to deter U.S. control over his activities. Had Gehlen not been a wily political infighter, he would have been fired. But Gehlen had made himself too powerful to replace, even in a country still occupied by the U.S. Army. As a result, for over a decade Reinhard Gehlen was able to use U.S. funds to create a large intelligence bureaucracy that not only undermined the Western critique of the Soviet Union by protecting and promoting war criminals but also was arguably the least effective and secure in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

As many in U.S. intelligence in the late 1940s had feared would happen, the Gehlen Organization proved to be a back door by which the Soviets penetrated the Western alliance. Through Gehlen's careless employment of Nazi war criminals, this organization was also a back door to tranquility and fat pensions for men who had committed -- or at least abetted -- the worst atrocities of the twentieth century. Even though the record of intelligence-sharing remains spotty for the Army period and closed for the period of CIA sponsorship, it is hard to imagine any stream of information whose value could outweigh these two facts. It is equally hard to imagine that the United States could not have found another horse to bet on in the race to build a West German intelligence service if the decision had been made early enough. The U.S. sponsorship of Reinhard Gehlen should be an object lesson in how easily governments can lose control of the institutions they foster in foreign lands and the damaging results that can ensue.
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Re: U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, by Richard Breitman, No

Postby admin » Tue Jun 26, 2018 7:24 am

Part 3 of 3

________________

Notes

1. The first series on Gehlen in major newspapers tan in Britain in March 1952. The articles were written by Sefton Delmer, a journalist with British intelligence connections. First the U.S. Army, then the CIA, had tried to keep their British ally in the dark about the U.S. relationship with Gehlen. Some in the CIA interpreted the newspaper series as an official British attempt to weaken Gehlen, a man whom they did not trust. Gehlen did not trust the British intelligence services, either. He considered them thoroughly penetrated by the Soviet Union. The CIA arranged the first official meeting between Gehlen and MI-6, the British secret intelligence service, after the Conservatives under Winston Churchill were returned to power in 1953. James Critchfield, interview with author, 17 Aug. 2001.

2. Heinz Hohne and Hermann Zolling, Network: The Truth about General Gehlen and His Spy Ring, trans. Richard Barry, (London: Secker and Warburg, 1972); E. H. Cookridge, Gehlen: Spy of the Century (New York: Random House, 1972); Reinhard Gehlen, The Service: The Memoirs of General Reinhard Gehlen, trans. David Irving (NY: World Publishing, 1972).

3. Mary Ellen Reese, General Reinhard Gehlen: The CIA Connection (Fairfax, VA: George Mason University Press, 1990). Two years earlier, Christopher Simpson had addressed the Gehlen-CIA relationship and added new details in Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and its Effects on the Cold war (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1988). Using fewer new Gehlen-related sources than Reese did, Simpson tended to overstate the OSS' and later the CIA's enthusiasm for Gehlen. Major biographies of Allen Dulles, who was director of central intelligence during the last half of the CIA's sponsorship with Gehlen, also appeared in the 1990s, but Peter Grose, Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994) and James Srodes, Allen Dulles: Master of Spies (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1999) added little to the Gehlen story.

4. James H. Critchfield, Partners at the Creation: The Men Behind Postwar Germany's Defense and Intelligence Establishments (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2003).

5. Simpson, Blowback, 45.

6. This number is an estimate. It is based on the examination of 743 Name Files released by the CIA (RG 263). There are two reasons to believe that the number is higher than a hundred. In its declassification review, the CIA maintained an inconsistent policy on whether to acknowledge that an individual belonged to the Gehlen Organization. Some files released in 2000 and 2001 contain acknowledgements of an operational relationship with Gehlen. But re-reviews of other files later determined that in some cases, the CIA had redacted references to employment by Gehlen. By 2002, the IWG achieved an agreement that the CIA would not excise evidence that an individual worked for the Gehlen Organization during the period of U.S. sponsorship (1945-1956). By 2002, however, hundreds of Name Files had already been released, and the CIA lacked the personnel to re-review all of these released files to reinsert acknowledgements of Gehlen recruitment where they had been excised. The second reason to believe that the number is higher is that, due to Reinhard Gehlen's reluctance to turn over personality information to the CIA, it is doubtful the CIA ever knew about all of the former SS men Gehlen hired.

7. Gehlen's FHO benefited from the results of the German army's cruel program of interrogating Soviet POWs. There is evidence that these POWs were tortured and killed, all in violation of the Geneva Convention. However, Gehlen was not in command of this program.

8. More information on Allied communication intelligence is found in the appendix.

9. These were the Odtro, Kraemer, and the Max or Klatt cases. Of these three spies not under Allied control, two were fabricators/entrepreneurs who were spinning nonsense out of newspaper articles and some contacts in neutral countries, and the third was thought to be a Soviet deception run against Berlin. For the judgment of Allied counterintelligence on these cases, see F. H. Hinsley and C. A. G. Simkins, British Intelligence in the Second World War vol. 4 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Although World War II was a golden age of counterintelligence, there were limits to Allied knowledge of German spying. Most of the successes were scored against the Abwehr. From the start, the communications of Heinrich Himmler's SD and Gestapo were more difficult to crack. The SD and Gestapo did not operate against the United States, and their operations against Great Britain were largely restricted to some meddling in Ireland. Only one member of Britain's network of double agents -- the double-cross system -- was an SD officer. See chapter 4.

10. Analysis of Fremde Heere Ost reports by Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, "Die Prognosen der Abteilung Fremde Heere Odt 1942-1945," in Zwei Legenden aus dem Dritten Reich (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1974), 7-75, cited in Kahn, Hitler's Spies: German Military Intelligence in World War II (New York: Macmillan, 1978), 440-41.

11. The OSS, an agency of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was dissolved by executive order in Sept. 1945. Its successor, the Strategic Services Unit, reported to the War Department but was considered a civilian organization.

12. See Venona: Soviet Espionage and the American Response, 1939-1957, ed. Robert Louis Benson and Michael Warner, (Washington. DC: National Security Agency/Central Intelligence Agency, 1996), xi-xxii.

13. X-2 veterans James R. Murphy, interview with author, 16 Nov. 1983; and Robert Rushin, interview with author, 10 March 1988.

14. John R. Boker, Jr., Report of Initial Contacts with General Gehlen's Organization, 1 May 1952, Forging an Intelligence Partnership: CIA and the Origins of the BND, 1945-1949 [hereafter, CIA and the Origins of the BND], Kevin C. Ruffner, ed., NA, RG 263, vol. 1, document 6. As a member of the CIA history staff, Dr. Ruffner compiled this superb collection of ninety-seven documents to mark the fiftieth year of CIA-West German cooperation. The collection was declassified in 2002 as part of the CIA's IWG effort.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid.

18. The Abwehr operated Walli until 1944. After the collapse of the Abwehr following the July 1944 attempt on Hitler's life, Gehlen took over Baun's networks.

19. "Statement of Lt. Col. Duin on Early Contacts with the Gehlen Organization," [Undated], NA, RG 263, CIA and the Origins of the BND, vol. 1.

20. Crosby Lewis, Chief [X-2 (formerly OSS Counterintelligence) Germany] to [excised] 25 Oct. 1945, ibid.

21. Cable, Critchfield to Crosby Lewis to Richard Helms, Acting Chief of FBM, 8 Oct. 1946, enclosing Lewis to Donald H. Galloway, Assistant Director for Special Operations, Washington, 17 Dec. 1948, NA, RG 263, CIA and the Origins of the BND, vol. 2, document 71.

22. Debriefing of Eric Waldman on the U.S. Army's Trusteeship of the Gehlen Organization During the Years 1945-1949, 30 Sept. 1969, NA, RG 263, CIA and the Origins of the BND, vol. 1; HQ, USFET, MISC, Lt. Col. John Dean, Jr., to Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2, USFET, "Plan for the Inclusion of the Bolero Group in Operation Rusty," 2 July 1946, NA, RG 263, vol. l.

23. The code name probably comes from Col. Philp, whose own longtime nickname was Rusty. Chief of Station, Karlsruhe to Chief, FBM, 4 Dec. 1948, NA, RG 263, CIA and the Origins of the BND, vol. 2. The figure of approximately four thousand at the time of transfer to the CIA comes from Critchfield's analysis of the Gehlen Organization in December 1948. Cable, Karlsruhe [Critchfield] to SD, 17 Dec. 1948, NA, RG 263, CIA and the Origins of the BND, vol. 2.

24. Chief MOB [Critchfield] to Chief, OSO, "Report of Investigation-Rusty," 17 Dec. 1948, NA, RG 263, CIA and the Origins of the BND, vol. 2, document 72.

25. Ibid.

26. Maj. Gen. W.A. Burress, G-2, to Lt. Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg, Director of Central Intelligence, "Operation Rusty -- Use of the Eastern Branch of the Former German Intelligence Service," with attachments, 1 Oct. 1946, NA, RG 263, CIA and the Origins of the BND, vol. 1; Debriefing of Eric Waldman on the U.S. Army's Trusteeship of the Gehlen Organization during the Years, 1945-1949, 30 Sept. 1969, NA, RG 263, CIA and the Origins of the BND, vol. 1, document 9.

27. The U.S. Army said this to an investigator from the Central Intelligence Group in 1947. See Bossard to DCI, "Operation Rusty," 29 May 1947, NA, RG 263, CIA and the Origins of the BND, vol. 2.

28. Ibid. In an effort to sell the SSU on the Rusty Operation, the U.S. Army explained what the group had given them in 1945-46.

29. The Gehlen cryptographic unit was at Oberursel. The CIA reported that this unit was in close contact with the cryptographers at the Army Security Agency. Chief of Station, Karlsruhe to [excised], 18 Nov. 1948, "Rusty," NA, RG 263, CIA and the Origins of the BND, vol. 2. A month later Critchfield would describe this effort in mote detail in his final report. Chief MOB [Critchfield] to Chief, OSO, "Report of Investigation-Rusty," 17 Dec. 1948, ibid., document 72. Confirmation of this contact with the ASA and information as co when the ASA's successor, the National Security Agency, placed its own intercept station in West Germany came from the author's interview with an NSA official who asked to remain anonymous.

30. Chief MOB [Critchfield] to Chief, OSO, "Report of Investigation-Rusty," 17 Dec. 1948, NA, RG 263, CIA and the Origins of the BND, vol. 2, document 72; James Critchfield, interview with author, 17 Aug. 2001. This is how Gehlen himself explained to Critchfield the rapid expansion of his organization.

31. Later CTA background checks on these individuals revealed that they had received ration coupons under assumed names.

32. See the NA, RG 263, Otto von Bolschwing Name File.

33. See NA, RG 263, Name Files on Kurt Auner, Ernst Schlandt, Horia Sima, and Joachim Vacarescu.

34. See NA, RG 263 Name Files on Emil Augsburg, Herbert Boehrsch, Hans Clemens, Heinz Felfe, Kurt Moritz, Walter Otten, Heinrich Josef Reiser, Ernst Schwartzwaller, Carl Schuetz, Otto Somann, and Cornelius Van der Horst. A twelfth person with a criminal background in the GV-L was Paul Hodosy-Strobl, a police general who became the head of the Hungarian State Police during the collaborationist Szalasi regime in 1944-45. See NA, RG 263, Paul Hodosy-Strobl Name File.

35. Richard Bteitman, "Historical Analysis of 20 Name Files from CIA Records," April 2001, http://www.archives.gov/iwg/declassifie ... eport.html

36. NA, RG 263, Erich Deppner Name File. Deppner was head of Abt. I of the Sipo and SD in the Hague. He was commended by Heinrich Himmler in June 1943 for his good work in Holland. See Chief, Munich to Chief, EUR, 5 Dec. 1966. Deppner ultimately served nine months in prison in 1960-61 for having shor Soviet POWs in occupied Holland. In this document, the CIA notes that despite the war crimes conviction, the BND hired him back to do "research" at home "on non-sensitive matters."

37. NA, RG 263, Ernst Makowski Name File.

38. NA, RG 263, Karl Guse and Napoleon Krasnowski Name Files. The so-called Krasnowski file covers the career of Werner Krassowski.

39. NA, RG 263, Konrad Fiebig Name File. Fiebig was acquitted in 1962 for lack of sufficient evidence, but the B D did nor believe he was innocent of all crimes, so retired him.

40. Fiebig was in section GV-H.

41. NA, RG 263, Walter Kurteck Name File.

42. NA, RG 263, Alexander Doloezalek Name File.

43. NA, RG 263, Friedrich Frank Name File.

44. James Critchfield described the recruitment procedures for Dienststelle 114 [later GV-L] after his visit to its field stations in the fall of 1948. Chief, MOB [Critchfield] to Chief, OSO, "Report of Investigation-Rusty," with annexes, 17 Dec. 1948, NA, RG 263, CIA and the Origins of the BND, vol. 2, document 72. In August 1949, Gehlen explained to CIA the rationale behind this system. 34 [Gehlen] to 20 [Critchfield], 22 Aug. 1949, NA, RG 263, CIA and the Origins of the BND, vol. 2, document 97.

45. NA, RG 263, Konrad Fiebig Tame File.

46. NA, RG 263, Erich Ulich Kayser-Eichberg Name File.

47. NA, RG 263, Emil Augsburg Name File.

48. NA, RG 263, Franz Six Name File.

49. Gehlen, Memoirs, 137.

50. Ibid.

51. In June 1948, Gehlen wrote a letter to Liebl's superior to demand that he be sent home. Debriefing of Eric Waldman on the U.S. Army's Trusteeship of the Gehlen Organization During the Years 1945-1949, NA, RG 263, CIA and the Origins of the BND, vol. 1, document 9.

52. Enclosure 2a, Gehlen to General Walsh, [Critchfield] to Chief, FBM, "[Gehlen Organization] General Policy," 7 July 1949, NA, RG 263, CIA and the Origins of the BND, vol. 2, document 94.

53. In August 1948, Gehlen wrote to Samuel Bossard, the CIA officer who had done the first CIA survey of Rusty in 1947, to ask him to return to West Germany to discuss "some dangerous points which have to be handled in the right way to prevent increasing disappointment and perhaps a strike of our employees." This raised concerns at the very top of the Agency. See Rear Admiral R. H. Hillenkoetter, DCI, to Lt. General S.J. Chamberlin, Dir of Intel, U.S. Army, 31 Aug. 1948, NA, RG 263, CIA and the Origins of the BND, vol. 2, document 64.

54. Bossard to DCl, "Operation Rusty," 29 May 1947, ibid., document 42.

55. Maj. Gen. W.A. Burress, G-2, to Lt. Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg, Director of Central Intelligence, "Operation Rusty-Use of the Eastern Branch of the Former German Intelligence Service," with attachments, 1 Oct. 1946, ibid., document 19. Burress explained to Vandenberg that the Germans believed it would take $2.5 million a year to run the intelligence service they were capable of in Europe. The U.S. Army claimed to the SSU in mid-1946 that it had received permission to spend $2.5 million on the project but that it could only afford to do this through the end of the 1947 fiscal year. See Crosby Lewis to Col. Donald Galloway, "Keystone Operation," 22 Sept. 1946, ibid.

56. Ibid.

57. Kevin Ruffner, "American Intelligence and the Gehlen Organization, 1945-1949," CIA Studies in Intelligence (1997),73.

58. Ibid.

59. Ibid.

60. The most important supporter was General Edwin L. Sibert, who as chief of U.S. military intelligence in Germany had been Philp's commander in Europe. When he joined CIG in the fall of 1946, he briefed Vandenberg on the Rusty project and pushed for CIG to consider the Army's offer very seriously. See Report of Interview with General Edwin L. Sibert on the Gehlen Organization [undated], NA, RG 263, CIA and the Origins of the BND, vol. 1, document 8.

61. Bossard to DCI, "Operation Rusty," 29 May 1947, NA, RG 263, CIA and the Origins of the BND, vol. 2.

62. Heidelberg to SD, 8 Apr. 1947, NA, RG 263, CIA and the Origins of the BND, vol. 1.

63. Ibid. Emphasis in original.

64. Bossard to DCI, "Operation Rusty," 29 May 1947, NA, RG 263, CIA and the Origins of the BND, vol. 2.

65. Ibid.

66. CIG German mission to Bossard, I Apr. 1947, "Evaluation of Rusty CI Reports," NA, RG 263, CIA and the Origins of the BND, vol. 1. The CIG mission concluded that "if the Rusty operation aims at the development of a full-fledged CE service, then it must be in the earliest stages of organization." The CIG office rejected "a high percentage of the reports" that Bossard sent for evaluation. The Bossard quotation comes from Bossard to DCI, "Operation Rusty," 29 May 1947, NA, RG 263, CIA and the Origins of the BND, vol. 2.

67. Ibid.

68. Ibid.

69. Ibid.

70. Ibid.

71. Ibid.

72. Ibid.

73. Hillenkoener to Secretaries of State, etc. [never sent], 6 June 1947, ibid.

74. James Critchfield, interview with author, 17 Aug. 2001.

75. Chief MOB [Critchfield] to Chief, OSO, "Report of Investigation-Rusty," 17 Dec. 1948, NA, RG 263, CIA and the Origins o/the BND, vol. 2, document 72.

76. Cable, Critchfield to Special Operations, Washington, 17 Dec. 1948, ibid., document 71.

77. Critchfield hardly mentioned Baun in his report. In his memoirs, he recalls how Gehlen eclipsed this once-powerful spymaster. Critchfield, Partners at the Creation, 116-18.

78. James Critchfield, "The Gehlen Organization," 25 Jan. 2002, NA, IWG Administrative Files.

79. "Organization 114," an annex to Chief MOB [Critchfield] to Chief, OSO, "Report of Investigation-Rusty," 17 Dec. 1948, NA, RG 263, CIA and the Origins of the BND, vol. 2, document 72.

80. Shortly before his death in April 2003, James Critchfield wrote his recollections of the Augsburg case for the historians of the lWG. He recalled meeting Dr. Alberti on a number of occasions after 1953 and mentioned that the CIA, which knew that Alberti was an alias, initiated efforts to determine Alberti's real name beginning in 1949. He did not recall meeting him in 1948. Critchfield, "Case Histories," 7 Mar. 2002, A, IWG Administrative Files.

81. Chief of Station, Karlsruhe to Chief, Foreign Division M, 3 Aug. 1950, NA, RG 263, Paul Hodosy-Strobl Name File. In July 1950, Gehlen asked Critchfield fot the CIA's help in obtaining a visa for Hodosy and two other GV-L Hungarians to emigrate to the U.S. Critchfield suggested to Washington that "each case should be considered separately." Washington determined Hodosy was ineligible for emigration. He was also dropped from Zipper in 1950. See his Name File for the story of this attempted emigration in 1950. Information about Hodosy-Strobl's background and his work for the CIC also comes from his Name File. Hodosy-Strobl later went to Brazil and successfully emigrated to the United States in 1963 and was naturalized in 1970. Critchfield described the "Hungarian Group" and its chief, without naming him, in the annex on Dienststelle 114 in his report of 17 Dec. 1948.

82. Gehlen, Memoirs, 226.

83. Chief, FBM [Richard Helms] to Chief of Station, Karlsruhe "[Gehlen Organization]," 2 Feb. 1949, NA, RG 263, CIA and the Origins of the BND, vol. 2, document 79.

84. Chief, Foreign Branch M [Helms] to Chief, Karlsruhe Station, Ann [Critchfield], 9 Feb. 1949, NA, RG 263, CIA and the Origins of the BND, vol. 2, document 82.

85. Galloway to DCI, "Recommendations in re Operation Rusty," 21 Dec. 1948, NA, RG 263, CIA and the Origins of the BND, vol. 2, document 73. Helms expressed similar sentiments in February 1949. See Chief, FBM [Richard Helms] to Chief of Station, Karlsruhe. "[Gehlen Organization]," 2 Feb. 1949, ibid., document 79.

86. Chief, FBM [Richard Helms] to Chief of Station, Karlsruhe. "[Gehlen Organization]," 2 Feb. 1949, ibid., document 79.

87. Chief, Foreign Branch M [Helms] to Chief, Karlsruhe Station, Attn [Critchfield], 9 Feb. 1949, NA, RG 263, CIA and the Origins of the BND, vol. 2, document 82.

88. The analysis of the breakdown of the reports comes from Critchfield's 17 Dec. 1948 report. The figure for the number of reports in Dec. 1948 comes from a chart prepared by Gehlen. See [Critchfield] to Chief, FBM, "Dr. Schneider's Reply to Recent Policy Guidance Letters," 12 Oct. 1949, ibid., document 94.

89. [Critchfield] to Chief, FBM, "[Gehlen Organization]: Current Situation," 18 Apr. 1949, ibid., document 89.

90. Chief of Station, Karlsruhe to Chief, FBM, "Rusty," 19 Aug. 1948, cited in Kevin Ruffner, "American Intelligence and the Gehlen Organization, 1945-1949, Studies in Intelligence, 76.

91. Helms, Memorandum for the Files, "Operation Rusty," 1 Feb. 1949, NA, RG 263, CIA and the Origins of the BND, vol. 2, document 78.

92. Critchfield to Dr. Schneider [Gehlen], 15 June 1949, NA, RG 263, CIA and the Origins of the BND, vol. 2.

93. Gehlen had also promised in the fall of 1948 that "basic central records on all agent personnel" were being collected. Gehlen blamed Baun for the fact that his headquarters lacked sufficient information on the agents the organization had recruited. See Chief MOB [Critchfield] to Chief, OSO, "Report of Investigation-Rusty," 17 Dec. 1948, NA, RG 263, CIA and the Origins of the BND, vol. 2, document 72. By mid-1949, Gehlen would be explaining to the CIA why the Baun system could not be changed. On this point see 34 [Gehlen] to 20 [Critchfield], "Personal Data," 22 Aug. 1949, NA, RG 263, CIA and the Origins of the BND, vol. 2, enclosure to document 97.

94. 34 [Gehlen] to 20 [Critchfield], "Personal Data," 22 Aug. 1949, NA, RG 263, CIA and the Origins of the BND, vol. 2, enclosure to document 97.

95. In an interview with the author on 12 Nov. 2002, Critchfield explained that on his firsr visit, he had asked Gehlen for a description of his organization and for the aliases and real names of his operatives. Within a week, Gehlen had given him 150 names. On the fragmentary information turned over on the projects outside the Soviet zone, see Critchfield to Dr. Schneider [Gehlen], 20 Sept. 1949, NA, RG 263, CIA and the Origins of the BND, vol. 2.

96. Critchfield to Dr. Schneider [Gehlen], 20 Sept. 1949, ibid., document 96; [Critchfield] to Chief, FBM [Helms], "Dr. Schneider's [Gehlen's] Reply to Recent Policy Guidance Letters," 12 Oct. 1949, ibid., document 97.

97. Ibid.

98. Ibid.

99. Ibid.

100. James Critchfield, interview with author, 17 Aug. 2001.

101. See the NA, RG 263, Name Files for Otto von Bolschwing, Kurt Auner, Ernst Schlandt, Horia Sima, and Joachim Vacarescu.

102. For examples of the background checks the CIA undertook before hiring SS men in the early Cold War, see the NA, RG 263, Name Files for Karl Jobke and Friedrich Carstenn.

103. For more on the CIA's handling of Otto von Bolschwing, see chapter 13.

104. Bossard to DCI, "Operation Rusty," 29 May 1947, NA, RG 263, CIA and the Origins of the BND, vol. 2.

105. [Critchfield] to Chief, FBM, "[Gehlen Organization] -- Dr. Schneider's Negotiations with Third Parties," 22 Sept. 1949, NA, RG 263, CIA and the Origins of the BND, vol. 2.

106. Both Gehlen and Critchfield mention in their memoirs that the CIA discouraged Gehlen's politicking in late 1949.

107. Blind Memo, "Intelligence Estimate," [handwritten date: May 1950], NA, RG 263, Reinhard Gehlen Name File, vol. 1.

108. NA, RG 263, Reinhard Gehlen Name File. 1he new cryptonym came into effect 20 Sept. 1949.

109. James Critchfield writes delicately about this difficult period in the U.S.-Gehlen relationship. See Critchfield, Partners at the Creation, 121-27.

110. [Critchfield] to Chief, Foreign Division "K," 3 Apr. 1950, "Meeting of Allied High Commission with Chancellor," with "verbatim report" attached, NA, RG 263, Reinhard Gehlen Name File, vol. 1.

111. Critchfield, Partners at the Creation, 126.

112. The Anglo-American tension over the emergent West German intelligence community deserves its own treatment. Despire close Anglo-American intelligence cooperation elsewhere in the world, the CIA maintained a strict policy of walling off the Gehlen Organization from the British secret services until after 1951. James Critchfield, interview with author, 17 Aug. 2001.

113. Blind Memo, "Intelligence Estimate," [handwritten date: May 1950], NA, RG 263, Reinhard Gehlen Name File, vol. 1.

114. Although an effort was made to find a reflection of attitudes toward Gehlen in High Commission and National Security Council materials, the only mention of the BfV incident is in CIA documents in the Gehlen Name File.

115. Quoted in a later summary of recent events in the CIA-Zipper relationship, Blind Memo, 4 Jan. 1951, NA, RG 263, Gehlen Name File, vol. 1.

116. Ibid.

117. Chief [excised] Karlsruhe to Chief [excised], 9 May 1950, "Dr. Hans Globke," NA, RG 263, Hans Globke Name File. In April, Globke told an officer from the U.S. High Commission in Germany that though he had not yet met Gehlen, he considered him "a competent and honest person." J. S. Arouet, "Interview with Dr. Hans Globke," 7 Apr. 1950, ibid.

118. The U.S. government was well aware of Globke's role in the implementation of the Nuremberg Laws when Adenauer elevated him to the Chancellor's office. See NA, RG 263, Hans Globke Name File.

119. Pullach to ADSO, 30 Dec. 1950, NA, RG 263, Reinhard Gehlen Name File, vol. 1.

120. Blind Memo, "Summary," [Handwritten Date: 4 Jan. 1951], NA, RC 263, Reinhard Gehlen Name File, vol. 1.

121. Critchfield, Partners at the Creation, 126.

122. Ibid., 156-57.

123. Ibid., 119-30.

124. Ibid., 157.

125. [Critchfield] to Chief, Foreign Division M, 30 Mar. 1951, "Zipper [excised] Complex," NA, RG 263, Reinhard Gehlen Name File, vol. 1.

126. James Critchfield, interview with author, 17 Aug. 2001; Critchfield, Partners at the Creation, 19.

127. Critchfield, "The Gehlen Organization," 25 Jan. 2002, NA, IWG Administrative Files.

128. [Critchfield] to Chief, Foreign Division M, 7 June 1951, "Utility's Visit to the USA," NA, RG 263, Reinhard Gehlen Name File, vol. 1.

129. Extract," [excised] -- Globke Meeting, 9 August '51," 10 Aug. [19]51, NA, RG 263, Reinhard Gehlen Name File, vol. 1. In a conversation with the author on 30 Jan. 2002, James Critchfield confirmed that Adenauer was the German official whose name is redacted from this document as declassified.

130. Ibid.

131. James Critchfield, interview with author, 18 Feb. 2002.

132. Letter, W. B. Smith to Gehlen, [no date, but cover letter is dated 13 Jan. 1953], NA, RG 263, Reinhard Gehlen Name File.

133. Ibid.

134. In November 1951, CIA Karlsruhe sent Pullach background information on these men in response to a trace request. NA, RG 263, Walter Vollmer Name File.

135. See NA, RG 263, Cornelius Van Der Horst Name File.

136. James Critchfield, interview with author, 12 Nov. 2002. See also James Critchfield, "Memorandum for the Record, November 2002," NA, IWC Administrative Files, which concerns the CIA's first vetting of Heinz Felfe in 1952.

137. NA, RG 263, Heinz Felfe Name File. On 19 September 1952, CIA Pullach requested traces from CIA headquarters on Felfe and Schuetz. The CIA discovered Felfe in September 1952, when he made an official request for information from the Ministeriums fur Gesamtdeutsche Fragen on a suspect's automobile registration. The Agency then asked Zipper directly about him. See Felfe Traces, Handwritten Date, 1 Dec. 1953, ibid. When Kurt Moritz sought a U.S. travel visa in mid-1952, the Agency discovered enough to determine that this former SS-man was also in GV-L. See NA, RG 263, Kurt Moritz Name File.

138. It is difficult to determine when the CIA detected a particular individual. However, on 5 July 1951, the POB sent trace requests on Emil Augsburg and in return was sent a report that in 1950 he had been transferred from GV-L in the field to Zipper headquarters to work as chief specialist on the Soviet intelligence services. On 28 January 1953, the CIA opened a new file on Augsburg (alias Althaus), who was described as creating Zipper's handbook on the Soviet intelligence services. The CIA first traced Erich Deppner on 28 Apr. 1950 and 16 Mar. 1953. See Director to CIA Munich, 27 June 1961, NA, RG 263, Erich Deppner Name File. In February 1953, the CIA determined that the Zipper agent living under the alias Konrad Fiedler was Konrad Fiebig, who had been wanted by the CIC in 1946 for mass murder. See "Fiebig, Konrad," trace list, 29 July 1954, NA, RG 263, Konrad Fiebig Name File.

139. CIA Pullach knew his background before it knew Augsburg's Zipper alias. In 1949, the CIA was aware that Augsburg had worked with the CIC as part of the same agent network as Klaus Barbie. In August 1951, James Critchfield was told that this same individual had been with the "SD Einsatzkommando UdSSR." See Chief Karlsruhe to James Critchfield, 1 Aug. 1951, NA, RG 263, Emil Augsburg Name File.

140. Information on this OPC operation is limited to these three Name Files released under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act: NA, RG 263, Friedrich Carstenn, Karl Otto Jobke, and Eberhard Tellkamp Name Files.

141. Jobke, who had been a Gestapo officer in Danzig before the war, later served with the Einsatzkommandos in Poland before joining the SD. Tellkamp was in the Allgemeine SS before joining the Waffen-SS in 1935. During the war he was a Lt. Col. in units known to have participated in atrocities in the Balkans and Poland. The third recruit, Carstenn, had been an expert on Scandinavia and England in the SD before becoming an SS=Sturmbannfuhrer with the SD "culture" section.

142. There is a fourth SS man hired at that time, who may have also been part of the same operation. The newly released Hans Rues Name File indicates that the field received operational clearance from CIA headquarters to run him at about the same time as the others. Given his background, which is similar to Tellkamp's, there is reason to believe he was part of the same OPC operation. Three years after joining the Allgemeine SS in 1936, Hans Rues entered the Waffen-SS. He rose to the rank of Captain in the "Prinz Eugen" division, which committed war crimes in anti-partisan activities on the eastern front.

143. NA, RG 263, Wolfgang Paul Hoeher Name File.

144. There is no indication in the CIA Wolfgang Hoeher Name File of the source of the CIA's concerns in July 1952.

145. The Geyer defection is discussed in Reese, General Reinhard Gehlen, 129-32; and Critchfield, Partners at the Creation, 171-72.

146. Critchfield to Chief, EE, "Zipper's CI/CE Agency," Dec. 1953, NA, RG 263, Emil Augsburg Name File.

147. It is clear from the Augsburg Name File that the CIA certainly knew that Emil Augsburg was the true name of Dr. Alberti in Dec. 1953, but it might have learned this earlier.

148. This conclusion is based on an examination of the eleven CIA Name Files for SS men in GV-L.

149. 66th CIC, 24 June 1954, "Felfe, Heinz," NA, RG 319, IRR, entry 149A, box 145A, Reinhard Gehlen, vol. 3.

150. 66th CIC, 22 Nov. 1954, ibid. Albett's recruitment by source X-899-HQ on 29 September 1954 is described in Lt. Col. Ira K. Ewalt to CO, 66th CIC, 29 Oct. 1954, "Gehlen Organization," ibid.

151. Section III, 66th CI group, 22 Nov. 1954, "Gehlen Organization," ibid.

152. 66th CIC, 29 Oct. 1954, ibid.

153. Ibid.

154. Col. Warren S. Leroy to Asst. Chief of Staff, USAEUR, 1 Apt. 1955, NA, RG 319, IRR, entry 149A, box 145A, Reinhard Gehlen, vol. 1.

155. In his memoirs, James Critchfield would make much of this fact. The "U.S. intelligence community never was functional in Germany," he wrote in a section blaming the CIC for the ease with which Heinz Felfe remained a Soviet mole into the early 1960s. See Critchfield, Partners at the Creation, 198. However, the CIA materials released under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act make plain that though the CIA was kept in the dark about the CIC's penetration project, it learned on its own about the allegations against Felfe in 1954 and did little about them until 1957.

156. Trace List, [undated, but last trace is dated 20 ov. 56], NA, RG 263, Heinz Felfe Name File.

157. James Critchfield recalled that Felfe had been put on a list of possible moles in 1954, but this was based on flimsy information. James Critchfield, interview with author, 12 Nov. 2002.

158. Blind Memorandum for the Records, "@Friesen," [undated, but from context 1956; it was an attachment to a 14 July 1959 document on "Heinz Felfe @ Hans Friesen"], NA, RG 263, Heinz Felfe Name File; see also Memo, "Conversation with @Friesen on 28 March 1956," 29 Mar. 1956, NA, RG 263, Heinz Felfe Name File. It seems the latter was written by the same CIA officer as the undated memo cited above. Some of the same phrases appear in both memos to describe Felfe's character and motivation. The "@Friesen" also appears to be an idiosyncratic way to refer to Felfe.

159. Ibid.

160. Dulles meeting with Gehlen, Sept. J 954, NA, RG 263, Reinhard Gehlen Name File.

161. Gehlen, Memoirs, 344.

162. Ibid.

163. Ibid., 203.

164. Ibid.

165. Miles Copeland, The Game of Nations: The Amorality of Power Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), 104.

166. A document in the CIA Eichmann Name File outlines the Agency's lack of knowledge about Gehlen's Mideast operations in 1958. See Chief [excised] Munich to Chief, EE, "[BND] Near East Connections," 19 Mar. 1958, NA, RG 263, Adolf Eichmann Name File. See also the Otto Skorzeny, Karl Radl, Joachim Deumling, Leopold von Mildenstein, Friedrich Beissner, Franz Rademacher, Otto Ernest Remer, Johannes von Leers, Joseph Tiefenbacher, and Friedrich Voss Name Files, NA, RG 263. The Deumling Name File, in particular, shows how unsure the CIA was about the nature of Gehlen's penetration of the Egyptian colony in Cairo in the mid-1950s. The CIA on its own, however, may have had some dealings with Skorzeny. Although the CIA Skotzeny Name File provides no hint of a telationship in the late 1950s, the FBI's Skorzeny file indicates that in 1959 a CIA officer in Madrid requested a visa for Skorzeny to visit the United States, characterizing the visit as being in the interest of the United States. When the State Department balked, CIA headquarters refused to back up its field officer. See NA, RG 65, Records of the FBI, World War II Collection, 98-37716 -- Otto Skorzeny, box 5. IWG requests for additional CIA materials on the possible relationship between the CIA in Madrid and Skorzeny in the late 1950s remained unanswered at the time this book was published.

167. James Critchfield recalled that Gehlen regularly made trips to Switzerland to meet special agents; "Gehlen," he recalled, "had special relations with the Swiss police." Critchfield, who accompanied Gehlen on some but by no means all of these trips, doubts that Skorzeny was one of these special agents. James Critchfield, interview with author, 30 Jan. 2002.

168. David C. Martin, Wilderness of Mirrors (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), 103.

169. In 1959, a CIA agent in Polish intelligence, Michal Goleniewsky, reported that a KGB colleague had bragged that of the six BND officers sent to the United States for training in 1956, two were KGB moles. Felfe visited the United States in 1956. The other mole has not been publicly revealed. See Martin, Wilderness, 103.

170. See NA, RG 263, Hans Clemens and Wilhelm Krichbaum Name Files; see also Paul Brown, "Analysis of the Name File of Wilhelm Krichbaum," htrp://www.archives.gov/ iwg/declassified_records/rg_263_ cia_records/rg_263_krichbaum.html, National Archives, (accessed March 31, 2004).

171. A CIC report from early 1956 suggests that some CIA support for the Gehlen Organization continued after the formal establishment of the BND. Among other items, the CIA offered to share the costs of some operations and would provide logistical support for Gehlen operations in Berlin. Memo, CI Branch, G-2, USAEUR, 13 Feb. 1956, NA, RG 319, IRR, entry 134B, Reinhard Gehlen, vol. 5.

172. Cable, 66th CIC, no date, NA, RG 319, lRR, entry 134B, Reinhard Gehlen, vol. 4.

173. James Critchfield, interview with author, 17 Aug. 2001.
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Re: U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, by Richard Breitman, No

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Part 1 of 2

15. Manhunts: The Official Search for Notorious Nazis
by Norman J.W. Goda

THE SHADOW OF THE NAZI PERIOD is a long one, particularly in terms of the search for notorious Nazi criminals. The 1960 Israeli capture of Adolf Eichmann still fires the public imagination, due to the daring nature of the kidnapping and to the historic importance of Eichmann's trial. [1] Also fervent in the public imagination are those Nazi figures of singular evil who disappeared after the war and who, unlike Eichmann, managed to escape justice entirely -- or at least for a far longer time. Popular books and films -- historical and fictional -- based on figures like Josef Mengele (the infamous Auschwitz doctor) have helped to keep the Nazi past in the public imagination.

Behind public fascination lie untold, less glamorous, and often frustrating episodes in the international hunt for such figures. Newly declassified State Department, FBI, and CIA records provide glimpses into the search by U.S. agencies for vanished figures of the Third Reich. The cases of prominent Gestapo figures Heinrich Muller, Walter Rauff, and Alois Brunner are discussed in chapter six. The cases of Martin Bormann, Klaus Barbie, and Josef Mengele follow.

A scholarly analysis of such manhunts is worthwhile. Aside from the historical meaning that war criminals carry in the context of their wartime careers, such individuals assume meaning beyond their crimes as the years pass. Like mirrors of morality, manhunts cast a poor light on nations that shelter criminals and a more benevolent glow on those that work for their capture. While satisfying an intrinsic need for judicial reckoning, manhunts also have a broader cultural meaning, which reflects their own time as well as a more painful past.

Justice Robert Jackson, the FBI, and the Search for Martin Bormann

No figure has fuelled the popular imagination as much as Martin Bormann: the chief of the Nazi Party Chancellery following Rudolf Hess' flight to Scotland in 1941, Secretary to the Fuhrer himself after April 1943, and perhaps the most powerful member of Hitler's inner circle after that time. "Everything," Joseph Goebbels once lamented, "goes through Bormann." Reich Chancellery chief Hans Heinrich Lammers once complained that Bormann was the true interpreter of Hitler's directives. Bormann was loyal to Hitler to the very end, helping to create Nazi guerrilla organizations toward the end of the war and informing Party leaders on April 1, 1945, that terrible justice awaited anyone "who does not fight to the last breath," helping to trigger arbitrary violence against those who recognized Germany's defeat. [2]

Unlike the bodies of Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Goebbels -- leading Nazis who escaped the Nuremberg trials by taking their own lives -- Bormann's body was not found either before or during the proceedings. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) concluded in August 1945 that Bormann most likely died in the final battle for Berlin on May 2, 1945, but the possibility remained that he would turn up alive. He was included as a defendant in the Nuremberg indictment and a case was prepared against him. Bormann was "served" with a warrant via radio before the trial began in October 1945, tried in absentia, found guilty, and sentenced to death. The file on Bormann was never closed because the intelligence of his whereabouts was never solid. Various reports had it that he was hiding in Germany, Austria, Denmark, and elsewhere. Not until 1972 was the mystery laid to rest. Road construction workers in West Berlin unearthed a skeleton proven to be Bormann's from dental records. DNA testing in 1999 confirmed these results and the veracity of reports that Bormann, along with his doctor Ludwig Stumpfegger, had swallowed poison on May 2, 1945. [3]

Following his success as the chief prosecutor at the international Nuremberg trials, Supreme Court Justice Robert S. Jackson returned to the bench. He brought home with him a permanent mistrust of the Soviet Union based on constant friction with Soviet prosecutors. It was partially on Jackson's recommendation to President Harry Truman that a second international trial, this time of leading German business figures, was shelved. The United States, Jackson said toward the end of the first judicial venture with the Soviets, should hold subsequent trials alone." Truman needed no convincing. Relations with the Soviets had already entered a tense phase that would culminate in the Berlin Blockade of 1948. By the end of the Nuremberg trials, the Soviets had yet to hold promised democratic elections in Poland, and their relationship with the Allies in occupied Germany had developed acrimoniously due partly to the favors the Soviets gave to German Communists in their zone.' The purported laxity of the West on the issue of war crimes trials and punishment of the guilty was a Communist propaganda theme that began in October 1946 with the Nuremberg acquittals of Hjalmar Schacht, Franz von Papen, and Hans Fritzsche and the sentencing of seven other defendants to prison instead of to death. While Western nations looked at the Nuremberg sentences with a certain satisfaction, the Communist-controlled Eastern press expressed outrage that the lives of nearly half the Nazis on trial at Nuremberg had been spared by the Allied judges.

Soviet and East German propaganda efforts drove the subsequent U.S. search for Bormann. It was not undertaken with a high expectation that Bormann would be located. Well-informed intelligence and law enforcement agencies already assumed the most likely solution to the Bormann mystery -- that he was dead. But there were concerns in the highest reaches of the U.S. government that the Soviets would use Bormann's supposed presence in Argentina as a propaganda weapon against the Allies, which could in turn have repercussions in Europe, where the Cold War had entered a pivotal phase.

In early May 1948, Jackson received information from an informant named John F. Griffiths, who reached the Supreme Court Justice through contacts in the State Department. Griffiths, a former employee at the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires, claimed that he knew a local Argentine handyman -- later revealed as Juan Serrino -- who had worked on a German-owned ranch on the South Atlantic coast near La Caleta, close to the River Plate region in southern Argentina. The ranch was owned by a man named Muller and, according to Serrino, a number of Germans lived there. In the middle of 1946, Griffiths said, Muller indiscreetly told Serrino that a certain newcomer to the ranch for whom all the Germans there had shown reverence was Martin Bormann. Serrino had told Griffiths that he had never heard of Bormann before, but that he saw Bormann at the estate nearly every day while working there. Serrino, according to Griffiths, also heard that Bormann had arrived in Argentina by submarine, that Bormann returned to Europe in the spring of 1946 through Spain, and that he returned to Argentina with two large crates of documents that had been hidden in Bavaria. [6]

Jackson was skeptical, but he remembered from Nuremberg a nagging possibility that Bormann might have escaped with the help of the Soviets. When interrogating other prisoners at the U.S. Army's detention facility at Bad Mondorf (code named ''Ashcan''), the Soviets had offered the Americans the chance to interrogate Bormann, but the next day they insisted that the Americans had been mistaken. [7] Now Bormann, if alive, could also have a cache of important documents. Jackson therefore told the president himself about the information, and the president, Jackson said, "was keenly interested in the Griffiths report." Truman asked Jackson to consult the FBI and then to make an informed recommendation to the president on how to proceed. On May 6, Jackson and J. Edgar Hoover spoke, and while Hoover thought the issue should be handled by the CIA, Jackson "thought perhaps it could be worked out as part of a follow-up to the Nurenberg [sic] trials [wherein] he would have the authority to carry out any additional investigations and delegate this matter as he saw fit." [8] Jackson preferred to use his old Justice Department connections. [9]

There was nothing on the face of the Griffiths report to distinguish it from the many other false Bormann sightings. The FBI had received reports that Bormann was in Argentina, Mexico, and even Nevada. [10] FBI Special Agent Francis Crosby, a former legal attache in Buenos Aires, interviewed Griffiths on the evening of May 6, 1948, shortly after Hoover's discussion with Jackson, and said that though Griffiths was truly convinced that Bormann was on the Argentine estate, "the story is certainly on the fantastic side." [11]

Yet this story contained a political element. Griffiths had contacted Jackson through sophisticated channels. He also had a political agenda. Griffiths had been removed from the U.S. Embassy staff in Buenos Aires in mid-1946 because he was a vocal opponent of the Peron regime and friendly with Argentine labor circles and other Peronist political opponents. Soon after, Griffiths was expelled from Argentina, allegedly for trying to trigger a bank strike, and he was now living in Uruguay. [12] Given Griffiths' political sympathies and the fact that he contacted Jackson himself, perhaps the story was part of a Soviet maneuver to discredit the United States further on the war crimes issue. Immediately after the war, the Soviets had accused the British of sheltering Bormann, and on several occasions in 1945, Radio Moscow had claimed that Bormann was in Argentina. After Nuremberg, such disinformation was of additional propaganda value. [13] Jackson understood this. According to Crosby, who met with Jackson in May 1948, Jackson was most impressed "by the propaganda use which the Russians might make of real or apparent American laxity toward looking for a criminal wanted as badly as Bormann." Jackson said that the president's interest, too, focused "particularly on that aspect involving the Russians." [14]

In a long FBI memorandum on Bormann prepared to assist Justice Jackson with his report to the president, the argument was made that Soviet disinformation could have a "considerable and probably very effective" negative impact on the U.S. image in Europe. The memorandum added that there had been earlier reports that the Soviets had helped Bormann escape to Argentina. If they had, it continued, such reports "would make clear the real attitude of the Russians in their relations with the [W]estern powers and would show clearly the designs which the Russians have on the [W]estern [H]emisphere." [15]

In preparing the memorandum on Bormann, the FBI discovered something else. In March 1947, over a year earlier, the FBI had secretly received two British intercepts from an undisclosed source named "Bureau Source Two" that mentioned Bormann. They came to the attention of the FBI only by accident. "It appeared," assistant director D. M. Ladd would explain to Hoover in May 1948, that

the British were intercepting and decoding traffic over a clandestine network, [which had survived] the German defeat ... The existence of this network. .. was said to be a closely guarded secret and traffic intercepted was handled on an "eyes only" basis ... instead of the customary "top secret" basis on which Source Two material is handled. On the day these particular messages, dealing with Bormann, were received, the Army officer handling the "eyes only" traffic was away and the Navy got hold of the two messages. They were published as regular diplomatic traffic by the Navy ... The British were, as usual, horrified at the lack of security [and] rumbling from the incident is still going on in the Army.


"These intercepts," continued Ladd, "unless some very pointless deception was being engaged in, are a very close indication that Bormann is alive." [16]

The two intercepts from February 1947 were suggestive. Both came from traffic between Madrid and Barcelona. The first, from February 14, said, "tell us whether you know Martin Borman [sic] personally and whether he would recognize you. Your collaboration would be necessary in order to save this person. Tell us whether you are prepared to help in this matter." The second intercept, of February 21, commented that, "The matter of Martin has been postponed. I shall tell you about it when we meet ... Affectionate Greetings, Mariano." [17] The U.S. Consul General in Barcelona, Richard Ford, took various steps to "discover the reliability of reports that Martin Bormann had landed or would soon land at this port on his way to South America." [18] Bormann never turned up, and interest in the intercepts waned until Jackson sparked it again the following year. For the moment, even sober minds within the FBI talked about a possible investigation in Argentina. Due to the lack of available photographs that could identify Bormann, the Bureau thought that "Hitler's personal photographer, [Heinrich] Hoffmann might be such a witness ... [It] might become necessary to take [him] to [Argentina] ... to definitely identify [Bormann]. [19]

Hoover communicated all of this to Jackson on May 14. [20] As Jackson studied the available materials, the Bureau tried to get to the bottom of the British intercepts. This was tricky. "Because of the security consideration involved," said Ladd, "it is necessary that the Bureau maintain the posture that it has no information from Source Two on Bormann. However," he suggested to Hoover, "inquiry should be made of the British, and probably could be made with some degree of success on the basis that persistent rumors are being received concerning Bormann." [21] Hoover took up the suggestion and ordered his legal attache in London, J. A. Cimperman, to make a discreet inquiry with British intelligence. "For your exclusive information," Hoover said, "a serious indication has been received that Bormann is still alive and some details concerning this are known to the British. However, because of the manner in which this information was obtained, no indication that the Bureau possesses it may be given them." [22] Cimperman quickly received answers from both MI-5 and MI-6. "This office," replied the former, "is of the opinion that this highly important Nazi character is not alive." [23] "We have no specific information on this point," replied MI-6, "and can say only that all Allied Intelligence agencies have searched for him in vain." [24]

Such reports cooled the Bureau's ardor to investigate further. "It might ... be of assistance to Justice Jackson, in making his recommendation to President Truman," said Ladd, "to intimate to him that the Bureau is of the opinion that running out the leads suggested by [the Griffiths] report ... will not develop any information to disprove the British belief." [25] Soon after, however, Griffiths reported from South America that Serrino had positively identified a photo of Martin Bormann as the same man he had seen repeatedly at the Muller ranch. [26] Jackson was skeptical that Serrino could make a positive identification. But on June 14, he told Special Agent Crosby that, "regardless of [the informant's] accuracy, the possibility that the Russians might make propaganda out of any laxity in running out the report was increased by the alleged identification." He would discuss the matter with the president. [27]

Image
Office Memorandum
UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT

TOP SECRET

TO: The Director

FROM: D.M. Ladd

SUBJECT: MARTIN BORMANN
War Criminal

DATE: May 15, 1948

Further reference is made to my memorandum of May 14, 1948, discussing the two intercepts received from Bureau Source Two in March of 1947, indicating that Martin Bormann is, in fact, still alive. SA S.W. Reynolds made inquiry of the War Department and ascertained the following:

The release of the two messages discussing Martin Bormann, as regular Source Two messages, caused a great flurry of excitement in British circles. It appeared that the British were intercepting and decoding traffic over a clandestine network, a survivor of the German defeat, with ramifications in Europe and Germany. The existence of this network was said to be a closely kept secret and the traffic intercepted was handled on an "eyes only" basis (i.e. for the use only of the officer to whom addressed) instead of the customary "top secret" basis on which Source Two material is handled. On the day these particular messages, dealing with Bormann, were received, the Army office handling the "eyes only" traffic was away and the Navy got hold of the two messages. They were published as regular diplomatic traffic by the Navy. The State Department caused a number of photographs and descriptions of Bormann to be printed up and circulated among various embassies. State got considerable publicity for the allegation that Bormann was still alive. The British were, as usual, horrified at the lack of security. Their circuit apparently was broken up and the rumbling from the incident is still going on in the Army. (T5)


These intercepts, unless some very pointless deception was being engaged in, are a very close indication that Bormann is still alive. The British, apparently, are the only ones who have precise information about the network over which the clandestine traffic was moving. The furor caused by the above-mentioned incident apparently restrained the Army from inquiring into Bormann's whereabouts; CIA was not well set up at the time and the State Department's investigation was probably perfunctory. It would thus seem that the British are the only ones who have any real information about the possible whereabouts of Bormann, as well as about the clandestine traffic concerning him. Because of the security consideration involved, it is necessary that the Bureau assume the posture that it has no information from Source Two on Bormann. However, inquiry should be made of the British, and probably could be made with some degree of success on the basis that persistent rumors are being received concerning Bormann. (T5)

There is attached a proposed memorandum to the Legal Attache of the American Embassy in London, containing a request that he contact available sources for any information which will throw light on the question whether Bormann is still alive, and also specific identifying data including physical description, handwriting, fingerprints and photographs.

RECOMMENDATION: If you approve, it is suggested that the attached memorandum be forwarded to our representative in London.

FEC:pc

[Handwritten note: Yes & follow [illegible] H.]


Memorandum explaining the secret source of (erroneous) information indicating that Martin Bormann was alive in March 1947 [D. M. Ladd to Hoover, 15 May 1948, NA, RG 65, 65-55639- (1-24), box 38].

It was still the propaganda concern that Jackson emphasized on his memorandum to Truman. "Circumstantial evidence," he said,

indicates that Bormann probably is dead. But the uncertainty as to whether he may have escaped was enough so that we considered it wise to indict and convict him in absentia. Many rumors that he has appeared in various parts of the world have proved false.

A complete investigation would be extensive in time and cost. In addition, it would not be possible to apprehend or interrogate suspects or witnesses without the cooperation of the governments involved. Informed opinion of the F.B.I. is to the effect that if Bormann is in the Argentine, it must be with the connivance of the Argentine government. Obviously, the situation requires discreet handling.

On the other hand, to neglect entirely to investigate this lead has two dangers. First, it is possible that Bormann is there. Second, even if he is not, publicity might be given to the fact that this information was laid before United States officials who did nothing and therefore are charged to be, in effect, protecting him. This claim would have propaganda value to Russia, for Bormann in the Eastern countries was one of the most hated of the Nazis.

My suggestion therefore, is that the F.B.I. be authorized to pursue thoroughly discreet inquiries of a preliminary nature in South America and to encourage and cooperate with Griffiths in developing his sources of information, to check those sources as to their probable reliability and accuracy, and to determine on the basis of the preliminary investigation whether a more thorough and full-scale investigation should be undertaken, perhaps after communication with any government affected. [28]


Truman agreed. On June 24, the president wrote to Attorney General Thomas C. Clark, commenting that "I think the suggestions of the Justice are all right and if you and Mr. Hoover think well of them, perhaps we ought to follow through on the suggestions." [29]

With the president's request, Special Agent Crosby, who had served in Argentina and who was most familiar with the case, was ordered "to proceed immediately to Argentina to run down and verify Bormann's presence." [30] He would set up his investigation from the embassy in Montevideo (to avoid problems with the Peron regime in Argentina), interview Serrino at great length, investigate whatever leads necessary "to establish that Bormann is in the River Plate area," or "to set up with sufficient certainty that Bormann is not in the Argentine in order that no criticism be made of the United States Government for any real or supposed laxity in handling the report." He would communicate with Washington through cipher. [31]

Crosby interviewed Serrino in Montevideo on July 10, 1948, in an inconspicuous cafe after Griffiths arranged for him to come by bus. Crosby reported that "Serrino's recital leaves much to be desired." Serrino claimed to have seen Bormann twice in Uruguay, not Argentina, and had only heard reference w the cache of documents but had never seen them. Griffiths, meanwhile, struck Crosby as "somewhat incoherent ... He so badly wants the whole elaborate congeries of charges to be established that he has apparently failed to observe that each of the allegations is so vague that none can be established as a fact." [32] The FBI assessment was that "the story concerning Bormann has been fabricated from its inception and that the Bureau is on a 'wild goose chase."' [33]

Crosby remained in Montevideo trying to get more definite information. In August he reported that "efforts are being made to place [Serrino] in the employ of the group of Germans with whom Martin Bormann is reported to have been hiding." [34] After a number of frustrations though, Crosby returned to Washington on August 23. He had spent two months in Montevideo. [35] Hoover told Jackson that no further investigation was justified at the moment and Jackson agreed. The American government had done due diligence. [36] By this time, the British were following leads that Bormann was in Trieste and Lisbon, and the FBI was noting rumors that Bormann was being used by the Soviets as an adviser. [37] The U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps (CIC), meanwhile, watched the mail of Bormann's eldest son, who was living with a Jesuit order in Ingolstadt, albeit with no result. [38]

By mid-1948, the Cold War had generated an atmosphere of mistrust and uncertainty regarding Soviet policies, and anything seemed possible. For a moment, the notion that the Soviets had somehow protected Martin Bormann was believable to U.S. agencies, and the idea that they would use Bormann's ghost as propaganda against the United States during the crisis over Berlin was entirely believable to the FBI, to Justice Jackson, and to the president himself. In this atmosphere, Bormann had to be chased, even if he could not be found.

Klaus Barbie

Klaus Barbie's extradition from Bolivia in 1983 was potentially a watershed event. A native of Bad Godesberg, Barbie joined the SS and SD in 1935 and reached the rank of Obersrurmfuhrer in 1940. He was best known for his time as the Gestapo chief in Lyon from 1942 to 1944, where he brutally repressed the French resistance and deported Jews to their death. [39] In the spring of 1947, Barbie found employment with the CIC and helped run an extensive net that reported on former SS officers, French intelligence, the French occupation zone, and Soviet activities in the U.S. and Soviet zones of Germany. Barbie was deliberately protected from French arrest for his crimes and even from courtroom testimony in the treason trial of Rene Hardy in 1947 and afterwards, in June 1949, when the French government began to call for his extradition from the U.S. German zone. In fact, Barbie remained a CIC informant throughout 1950, living in an Augsburg safe house, though this fact was deliberately hidden from the Office of the High Commissioner in Germany and thus from the Department of State as well. At the end of 1950, the CIC arranged to have Barbie spirited out of Europe, and Barbie, under the alias Klaus Altmann, ended up in Bolivia in 1951. [40] Recently declassified materials contain nothing new on Barbie himself or on the U.S. intelligence use of Barbie from 1947 to 1950. They do, on the other hand, contain a variety of documents on how the United States chose to deal with the embarrassing legacy of Barbie's employment and escape from Europe. The State Department's top officials, in a recently found document, argued in 1950 that Barbie should be handed over to the French regardless of his ties to the U.S. Army. Secretary of State Dean Acheson warned in June that "Franco-American relations [would] be affected more adversely by refusal to extradite than [would] be [the] case if he is extradited." [41]

The willingness to accept embarrassment had changed somewhat by 1972. On January 28, the French Nazi-hunter Beate Klarsfeld arrived in Bolivia claiming that Klaus Altmann was in fact Barbie. She also soon claimed that the United States had refused to hand over Barbie back in 1950. [42] The French government quickly requested Barbie's extradition from the Bolivian government on February 1, 1972, and the issue rapidly became one of national sovereignty for what the U.S. Ambassador in La Paz described as "the small, proud and sensitive Bolivia ... jealous of its sovereignty," especially under the nationalist dictatorship of Hugo Banzer Suarez. [43] Angry statements in the Parisian and Lyon press by French pressure groups, particularly old resistance fighters, only exacerbated Bolivia's resistance. [44] Beate Klarsfeld quickly wore out her welcome in La Paz with a February press conference in which she attacked the Bolivian government for its "shameful" protection of Barbie and with a March 6 demonstration in the capital. [45] "[It] is strictly a Bolivian matter," snapped the Interior Minister Adet Zamora in La Paz when assured the next day that the "U.S. has no interest in protecting Klaus Altmann aka Klaus Barbie." [46] On March 8, Washington pressed harder. Secretary of State William Rogers cabled La Paz: "While we recognize that Bolivia's disposition in the Altmann case is an internal Bolivian matter, the hope of the U.S. government is that justice will be done in this matter." [47] On the other hand, Rogers would only press so far. Nothing would be done to urge the Bolivians publicly, he said, "in view [of] traditional Bolivian hypersensitivity." [48]

But the issue in 1972 would ultimately be decided by the Department of Defense. French President Georges Pompidou had written Banzer personally about the case, and Banzer replied that Barbie could be extradited to France only through the Bolivian court system, not political pressures. [49] Thus, the matter became one of legal identification, since Barbie and his lawyers maintained that he was not Barbie and that Altmann was his given name. Even Adet Zamora argued that "Altmann is the subject's given legal name." [50] On February 25, the French Ambassador to La Paz asked U.S. authorities there for documentary support. "He believes," said Ambassador Ernest Siracusa, "that Barbie was furnished documentation for a new identity as Klaus Altmann by U.S. forces." [51] On March 9, the French embassy in Washington presented a formal note asking for the same kind of documentary support. [52] Bur the State Department lacked the records to establish proof that Barbie was Altmann; the records on Barbie's false identity were Army records.

Voices in the U.S. State and Justice Departments argued that it was in the "national interest" to support the French while coming clean about Barbie's past employment. Bur the Pentagon refused to cooperate. By mid-May, the Pentagon had received the relevant intelligence documentation from the Army and decided that "the records must retain their classification status." [53] As one senior official at the State Department put it:

We have good reason to believe that Barbie received documentation from U.S. Army Intelligence although this fact apparently was not known to U.S. diplomatic personnel in Germany who were trying to locate him in 1950 ... The French extradition request is now before the Bolivian courts ... It would be extremely helpful to the French case if the U.S. were able to furnish information tending to identify Altmann as Barbie [or] to establish that he was naturalized under a false identity.

In view of the seriousness of the crimes with which Barbie is charged, and the fact that the USG may have inadvertently facilitated his evasion of justice, we believe there is a strong moral responsibility to be responsive to the French request. Conceivably, there could be considerations of national security which would require maintaining the confidentiality of our information, but it is impossible for the State Department to know, as DOD has refused to disclose the material available or to offer any justification for withholding it. [54]


And so for the next eleven years, Barbie would remain free, though as Angel Baldiveso, the Bolivian undersecretary for justice noted privately, "everyone knew that Altmann was Barbie." [55]

The situation in I 983, which included a new Bolivian government and a new overall mood in Washington, was different. In Bolivia, the democratic regime of Hernan Siles Suazo of the MNRI (National Revolutionary Party of the Left) arrested Barbie in January in connection with a tax debt. On February 5, Bolivian officials transferred Barbie to French custody, bypassing the right-wing Bolivian courts that had protected him for the past decade (in fact, Barbie's case was still pending in 1983), and on February 8 Barbie arrived in Paris amid intense French press interest. There was "some evidence" immediately that leading members of President Francois Mirrerand's French Socialist Parry provided cash payments to leaders of the MNRI. [56] To be sure, transparent economic incentives, including aid packages, helped. [57] But heavy U.S. diplomatic pressure on the Bolivian government not to allow Barbie to escape justice this time is evident from the records. [58] In fact, President Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State George Shultz had the U.S. Embassy in La Paz re-endorse the March 1972 French extradition request in August 1982, months before Barbie's arrest. [59]

The Americans were irritated with the West German government for nearly botching the chance to get Barbie out of Bolivia. The West Germans had had their own extradition request pending before the Bolivian Supreme Court, and Helmut Hoff, Bonn's ambassador to La Paz, had made representations to the new Bolivian government, though French officials in La Paz had their doubts about how badly the Germans wanted Barbie. [60] In January 1983, with Barbie under arrest in La Paz, there was still some doubt whether the Bolivians would allow the French to have him. "Frankly," said one CIA analyst, "we would be surprised if the Supreme Court allowed Barbie to be extradited." [61] Yet on January 26, the Bolivian government asked whether the West Germans would like to take Barbie, and Bonn refused. CIA sources said the Germans were caught off guard by the Bolivian offer and did not feel they had a strong case against Barbie since the German witnesses they once had were dead. The Germans, said the CIA, also did not want to deal with Barbie with an election imminent in early March. [62] On learning this, the State Department showed a certain exasperation with the Germans, arguing that their fecklessness might have resulted in Barbie's release and disappearance from Bolivia altogether. The excuse from the German Ministry of Justice was that there existed no aircraft that could move Barbie nonstop from La Paz to German soil, and that the Germans worried that landing in a third country to refuel would trigger legal problems. The American Ambassador to Bonn, Arthur Burns, was visibly unconvinced. [63]

As French and American journalists began to speculate on the full nature of Barbie's connection with U.S. intelligence after the war, American policymakers also had to determine how honest Washington was to be about this particular issue. This was no easy decision. The Barbie affair was choice propaganda material for the Soviets, who had long argued that German war criminals were active in the NATO alliance, and whose state organs now charged that the Americans had raised the concealment of war criminals to "a matter of state policy." [64] At first, Washington was indecisive. [65] The Defense Department remained opposed to making the relationship with Barbie public. [66] Yet the CIA, which had never had a relationship with Barbie, thought differently. CIA General Counsel Stanley Sporkin advised Director of Central Intelligence William Casey that truth was the best policy for pragmatic reasons if no other. "We should not appear," Sporkin said,

to be making a deep commitment to justify what took place with respect to Barbie thirty years ago. If we make such a commitment, we will begin an endeavor from which it will be difficult to extricate ourselves and will create the appearance that somehow the current Administration bears some kind of responsibility for past events. The focus of our effort must be to make clear the distance of the questionable events in time. We must all recognize, too, that it was the documented policy of the United Slates to make pragmatic intelligence collection use of ex-Nazis after World War II, because we were retooling our capabilities to deal with a new enemy, the Soviet Union.[67]


This was an improvement over the advice Casey received from the CIA station in Paris, which had already woven a series of rather implausible lies to explain away Barbie's use by the CIC. [68] The State and Justice departments agreed to undertake an investigation in the interest of full disclosure, with the DOJ Office of Special Investigations (OSI) conducting the investigation. [69] The study that emerged from the OSI in August 1983, Klaus Barbie and the United States Government, provided the full truth based on Army counterintelligence documents. The State Department sent copies of the 1983 report to major embassies along with an apology to the French government. "The United States Government," said the State Department, "expresses its deep regrets to the Government of France for [past] actions." [70] Regrets were indeed in order.

Nevertheless, the Barbie case was a watershed for the United States and Europe. It showed that diplomatic pressure combined with economic and moral incentives could dislodge notorious war criminals from their third-world hiding places. The Barbie case was pivotal for governments in Latin America and the Middle East in more negative ways. The Siles government might have won kudos from the Western world, but at home and elsewhere in the less-developed world it was roundly criticized for giving in to European, U.S., and even Jewish pressure. "Many Bolivians [have concluded]," said a press survey, "that the government acted precipitously in the hope of quick political gains," as would "somebody who turned somebody in for a reward." Bothersome even to Bolivian democrats was "the government's hasty abandonment of [the] extradition case in the Supreme Court." [71] In short, the Barbie extradition would not be so easily repeated elsewhere, especially since the other states concerned were still under military dictatorships that remained prickly under Western pressure.
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Re: U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, by Richard Breitman, No

Postby admin » Wed Jun 27, 2018 3:57 am

Part 2 of 2

Mengele's Ghost: The Secret Manhunt of 1985

Known as the "Angel of Death," Dr. Josef Mengele was responsible for "selections" at Auschwitz-Birkenau, as well as for conducting horrible medical experiments, many on children. On June 6, 1985, in the village of Embu near Sao Paulo, Brazilian police with West German support discovered Mengele's remains in a grave marked for a man named Wolfgang Gerhard. West German authorities located the grave after searching the home of Hans Sedlmeier in the Bavarian town of Gunzberg, West Germany. Sedlmeier had managed the Mengele family business and had served for years as a conduit between Mengele and his family. Letters found in Sedlmeier's home suggested that Mengele had died of a stroke while swimming near Sao Paulo in February 1979. German, American, Israeli, and Brazilian forensic experts examined letters ostensibly written by Mengele, as well as the bones. They were his. [72]

An unknown part of this Mengele story, however, is that just as his body was exhumed, the U.S. government, believing Mengele still alive, was moments from launching a clandestine search for him in Paraguay, the government of which was overtly hostile to international hunts for German war criminals on its soil. Once Mengele was caught, he would presumably be kidnapped and sent to West Germany for trial. That the U.S. government would run such diplomatic risks in Latin America over an aging war criminal was a testament to the power of Holocaust memory in the United States in the mid-1980s and the U.S. government's responsiveness to it following its handling of Barbie and Rauff. [73]

It had long been known that Mengele was in South America, though until 1985, evidence was murky as to exactly where. [74] According to the 1992 report by the OSI, In the Matter of Josef Mengele, he arrived in Argentina in 1949 under the name Helmut Gregor and began using his real name in 1956. In 1959, he left Argentina and became a naturalized Paraguayan citizen. After the Israeli capture of Adolf Eichmann in May 1960, Mengele moved to Brazil. [75] Legal authorities were always a step behind. In 1959 and 1960, the West German government issued a warrant for Mengele's arrest and demanded his extradition from Argentina. [76] In August 1962, the West German government again demanded Mengele's extradition, but from Paraguay. A Paraguayan judge ordered his detention, but to no avail. [77] Israeli intelligence meanwhile looked for Mengele in Paraguay until 1963, when they concluded that he had left for Brazil. [78]

In June 1979, in the wake of the elimination of the West German statute of limitations on murder, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's government insisted that Paraguay revoke Mengele's citizenship so that he could be deported should he surface there. Paraguayan authorities claimed that they did not know of Mengele's whereabouts -- in fact he had drowned in Brazil that February -- but, in a move grudgingly calculated to appease Western democracies, they revoked his citizenship on August 12, 1979, based on the constitutional provision that he had forfeited it by unexplained absence from the country for over two years. [79] Even with this minor step, the proto-fascist, right-wing dictator Alfredo Stroessner saw a crypto-Jewish conspiracy. In what U.S. Ambassador Edward White described as a "rambling 20-minute monologue," Stroessner complained that Mengele was no longer in Paraguay and that the entire issue was an "international scandal ... raised by [a] communist conspiracy out to blacken the reputation of Paraguay." [80] Stroessner's protests notwithstanding, it was true that Mengele was not there, and other leads were emerging. The West German police at one point thought that Mengele was living in Argentina and that he was scheduled to fly from Asuncion to Miami on August 29, 1979. The FBI, after checking the lead thoroughly, found the tip to be false. [81]

The Mengele issue came to a head in the United States in late 1984 and early 1985. In November 1984, Brooklyn District Attorney Elizabeth Holtzman led an unofficial delegation to Asuncion to urge the Paraguayan government to act. Though unable to meet with Stroessner, the Holtzman group received promises of a new Paraguayan search. The search amounted to little, but the visit kept the issue of Mengele in the American public eye. [82] The Mengele issue became more urgent after the release of two sets of documents in January 1985. The first set, from U.S. Army records, became public after a request from the Simon Wiesenthal Center based on the Freedom of Information Act. It contained a 1947 letter from Benjamin Gorby of the 430th CIC Detachment in Vienna suggesting that the U.S. Army had arrested and detained Mengele the previous year, only to release him. [83] As a result of more public pressure, the CIA released twenty-eight pages of sanitized documents suggesting that Mengele might have been involved in drug trafficking in Paraguay in 1972. Though this information was scanty and based on unconfirmed leads, the documents were a sensation, especially in the wake of the OSI Barbie report of 1983. Rabbi Marvin Hier, Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said that the Gorby letter alone "create[s] reasonable doubts as to whether or not the U.S. had a role in the case of Joseph [sic] Mengele, and the only way the truth will surface is an official investigation." [84] Hier went on to suggest that "[Mengele] might have been aided by U.S. officials in his postwar escape from Germany." [85] Senators Alphonse D'Amato (R-NY) and Arlen Specter (R-PA) charged in a press conference that the government had failed to follow leads, and they demanded a worldwide search for Mengele. Forgetting momentarily that Nazism had been an episode in German history and that the Nuremberg trials had been an American initiative, Specter charged that "Nazi atrocities are a chapter in history that the United States wants to sweep under the rug ... Nobody really gives a damn about Nazi war criminals." [86] D'Amato claimed on television that Mengele was in Portugal in 1980 (the year after he had died), and that he had even sent out Christmas cards. [87] More stories exploded onto the scene. Mengele was in Chile. Mengele was in Houston. Mengele had been an auto mechanic. Mengele had been a beekeeper. Mengele had even lived with Martin Bormann. [88]

Just as Ambassador James Theberge had warned from Santiago not to pressure Augusto Pinochet on the issue of Walter Rauff, Arthur Davis, the U.S. ambassador to Asuncion, warned against pressuring Stroessner. "We should not underestimate the strength which the Mengele issue will have in the Congress," Davis had told the State Department. But Congress also had to appreciate how little was known about Mengele. "[We] do not know of any hard evidence to indicate that Mengele is in Paraguay," cautioned Davis, "and it would appear that those of our colleagues who would best be in a position to know [the Israeli and West German Embassies in Asuncion] have none either." [89] And unlike the Barbie cases, in which the subject's address was known, Mengele's whereabouts had long been the stuff of rumor and legend. [90] Any demarche from the State Department would bring the well-worn answers that Mengele's location was unknown, with the additional irritation that would come from the U.S. inference that Stroessner's government was lying.

But the documents released in January 1985 were too explosive. On February 6, 1985, Attorney General William French Smith ordered the OSI to collect all available evidence on Mengele's postwar activities and, if possible, his present whereabouts so that he could be brought to justice. [91] OSI Chief Neil Sher oversaw this investigation, which resulted in the 1992 Department of Justice report In the Matter of Josef Mengele. More drastic, though, was the interagency search for Mengele, which quickly developed as a result of the Attorney General's order. Mengele was to be caught regardless of the diplomatic consequences, which anyone who remembered the Eichmann kidnapping of 1960 knew would be substantial. [92]

The intelligence agencies that knew Latin America best were unenthused. In response to a directive of March 2, 1985, which tasked CIA stations in South America "to acquire any information on Mengele, his activities and contacts," [93] one CIA station, probably in Asuncion, critiqued what it considered a poor use of human resources. ''As HQ is aware," the CIA station reported,

thousands of articles, accusations, and speculation -- much of it nonsense -- have been written about Josef Mengele and his whereabouts ... [This] is but the latest manifestation. If a serious, concerted and systematic effort is made to localize him ... [the CIA] will have to track him down on a world-wide basis and many hours will be expended in the process.

To begin with, the nation which theoretically has prime interest in Mengele is Israel ... From a Paraguayan perspective, it is quite clear that if Mengele [is] in Paraguay he is extremely well protected either by the Government or by Nazi sympathizers ... It follows that overt demands will get us nowhere. [The CIA] has already ... asked all of its assets about Mengele and the answer is that Mengele did indeed live in Paraguay -- but no longer ... Suffice it to say that we have not a clue as to [Mengele's] whereabouts or if he is even alive. [94]



A document dated March 27, 1985, however, provided the necessary marching orders. "The [U.S. government]," said a memo from Secretary of State Shultz, "has decided to mount a major effort, drawing on all available intelligence resources, to locate Nazi War Criminal Josef Mengele -- if he is still alive -- and have him brought to trial, most likely in the Federal Republic of Germany." The U.S. Marshals Service (USMS) was charged with gathering the necessary intelligence. They were to receive the full cooperation of the American embassies and their CIA components and legal attaches. The focus of the search would be Paraguay or any country into which Mengele might have slipped. The CIA forwarded these orders, which it labeled the "Get Mengele" program, to its stations abroad. [95]

The Marshals' lack of background on Nazi issues was palpable, but the CIA would help. On April 3, William Casey met with the marshal in charge of the case, Director of Operations Howard Safir (the future New York Police Chief), and commented that it was "readily apparent that the Marshals are ... dealing with a vast amount of rumors, unsourced reports, and unsubstantiated information of probably dubious value ... If we can cut through this chaff by concentrating on the clandestine collection of hard intelligence which may lead to Mengele's arrest ... we will have made a worthwhile contribution." Casey ordered CIA stations in South America and Europe to report which assets were available and the potential for recruiting new ones. The protection of agency sources, Casey said, would not be a problem because they would not have to testify if Mengele were tried in West Germany. [96]

The USMS needed help from West German authorities, too. During the first week of April 1985, they visited the Frankfurt Prosecuting Attorney's office, where the Chief Prosecuting Attorney, Hans Eberhard Klein, welcomed them. According to the Marshals, the Germans were extremely cooperative (as they had been with the CIA's search for Heinrich Muller fifteen years earlier), having turned over six thousand documents connected with the Mengele case. [97] The Marshals never visited Israel, where there was useful information as well. The CIA therefore tasked its station there to ask -- on behalf of the U.S. government -- what the Israelis knew. "We are not trying to broker contact between the Marshals service and [Israel]," noted the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), "although that may come later." [98]

Plans to catch Mengele in Paraguay were proceeding. On May 21, 1985, a Mengele Task Force met in the U.S. embassy in Asuncion, chaired by Charge d'Affaires Daniel Claire, which included the embassy's political officers; the three Marshals then leading the hunt; Stanley Morris, the director of the USMS itself; and the CIA contingent to the Embassy. [99] Though nothing could be decided without Ambassador Davis present, the Marshals were the meeting's driving force. Having reviewed all materials they had on Mengele, they were convinced that he was still alive and in Paraguay. The Marshals "began with the assumption that they could not expect cooperation from the Paraguayan government, and [that] their effort would have to be entirely covert." They claimed to have "a stable of assets which the USMS intends to run in its operations against Mengele." When the Marshals asked what the CIA could provide, the CIA contact at the meeting pledged that "if existing resources were not sufficient ... we were fully prepared to seek new sources in support of this important endeavor." Only Claire seemed worried by the possibility that U.S.-Paraguayan relations could explode if the local authorities discovered what the USMS and the CIA were up to. It was "important for all concerned," he said,

to understand the risks involved in an operation such as described by the Marshals. While the Paraguayan police and intelligence service are not omniscient they have during the years of the Stroessner regime been generally successful in discovering any kind of unusual activity within the country ... [There] is a good chance that the Paraguayan authorities would soon become aware of at least some of the covert operations to be conducted here ....

[They] would certainly consider such activities to be a violation of their sovereignty. Beyond that ... they might put an even darker interpretation on them. The Paraguayan Government, from the President on down, has repeatedly insisted that it has searched for Mengele and that he is nor here. Government officials might conclude that the [U.S.] effort represented an attempt to discredit or even destabilize the Srroessner regime, by revealing embarrassing facts about Mengele's connections in Paraguay.


Hence, there would be ground rules imposed by the U.S. embassy. The Marshals would not undertake anything without consulting the embassy first, and they would seek embassy approval for the employment of all local agents. It was especially important, said Claire, "to avoid the use of persons who are political opponents of the Stroessner regime as covert agents. This would arouse the worst fears of the [Stroessner] Government." [100] Yet the hunt was to go forward, which belied Morris's comments to the New York Times toward the end of May: "The Marshals," Morris said, "are not out in some foreign country running an investigation." [101] In fact, the USMS had already met with officials in the State Department and decided that the headquarters for the Marshals' covert search would be Buenos Aires, since the smaller embassy at Asuncion carried too high a risk of discovery. Two Marshals would arrive at the U.S. embassy there and would remain for six months "to develop and run informants on a wide basis to locate Mengele." [102[ CIA suggestions that the Marshals operate under cover and that they operate from Sao Paulo rather that Buenos Aires (the former was closer to where the operation would be) were not taken, but the CIA would nevertheless cooperate closely, particularly in the evaluation of informants. Two days before the discovery of Mengele's remains in Brazil, the CIA had already expressed disapproval of one such source of information, noting that this potential agent was too well known as a Stroessner opponent and that his cover story would not withstand close scrutiny if he were caught and interrogated by Paraguayan police. [103]

The two Marshals charged with running the operation from the U.S. embassy in Buenos Aires, John Pasacucci and Rafael Fonseca, were to leave Washington on June 6 and arrive the next day. On the day they left, Mengele's grave was exhumed in Brazil. The two Marshals were therefore rerouted to Sao Paulo. [104] The remainder of the Mengele saga consisted only of identifying the remains and piecing together his postwar travels and activities, none of which were as exciting as the legends. [105]

The remaining mystery involved why the West German authorities did not inform the United States that they were close to finding Mengele. It is possible that the U.S. government's effort to distance itself from the Bitburg affair of May 5, 1985 -- when President Reagan and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl visited a German cemetery containing the tombs of forty-eight Waffen-SS members -- played a part. West German opinion was angry over what it felt to be American sanctimony and the president's uneasiness during the visit. How these issues affected the Mengele search is hard to say, but the earlier spirit of cooperation had surely ended. "[The] BKA [German Federal Police Office] expressed some bewilderment and annoyance," read a report to FBI Director William Webster in late May 1985,

at the revived interest in the Mengele Case, particularly on the part of the U.S. Government ... The BKA and other German authorities were recently "inundated" with U.S. officials visiting Frankfurt and Wiesbaden ... [A BKA] official made the comment that they ... [are asking] themselves why they should be reporting any information to the U.S. Government in the first place [since] there is no warrant outstanding for Mengele in the U.S., and, in fact, the only warrant ... is the German warrant.

Although not specifically stated, the Germans perceive this whole matter as a political ploy on the part of [the United States] to make it appear that they are "doing something" about Nazi war criminals, and that the German government is perhaps less interested in finding Mengele, an insinuation deeply resented by the Germans ... which could very easily damage some excellent relations with agencies such as the BKA.
[106]


The West Germans therefore opted not to tell the U.S. Marshals about the May 31 search of Hans Sedlmeier's home until after Mengele's body was discovered in Brazil on June 6. There had been no time, said German police officials in Sao Paulo, to inform the American authorities, even though a week had intervened between the search of the home and the exhumation of the grave. "If we were the ones who had made the breakthrough," said OSI chief Neil Sher later, "we would have shared it with the other countries before going public." [107] The release of additional records in the years ahead may shed light on the issue from the West German perspective. For the moment, one can say that the search for notorious international criminals since the war has been about something more than justice, while at the same time, it has been about something less.

If one were to argue that the official search for Martin Bormann and Heinrich Muller were pointless exercises; that Klaus Barbie's trial came too late to claim its rightful meaning; or that the government's efforts to capture Walter Rauff, Alois Brunner, and Josef Mengele were too little and too late; one would perhaps be correct. Yet such an argument misses a vital point. The official hunts, their timing, the reasons behind them, and the level of political risk that they assumed all have something to teach us. In the cases of men already dead, such as Bormann and Muller, the U.S. hunts show the value in confirming the facts, especially when the ghosts of such men remain politically charged.

Klaus Barbie's long-delayed justice demonstrates that the postponement of a trial matters not only politically but judicially as well -- and not only because key witnesses might have died in the interim. In his 1987 trial, Barbie's grandstanding lawyers prepared a grotesque post-modernist defense that compared Barbie's Nazi crimes to French behavior in Vietnam and Algeria and to Western imperialism and racism in general. Barbie was found guilty despite their effort to put "the West" on trial, but the Butcher of Lyon would have received a far more poignant trial had it been conducted in the 1950s or even in the 1970s. [108] However, a thorny trial was better than none at all. And the dialogue within Washington on whether to come clean about Barbie brought the recognition by no less a figure than the DCI that the intelligence mistakes of the past could be admitted without the slightest danger to national security.

As for the searches of the 1980s, one can offer many cynical explanations. Serious hunts for Rauff, Brunner, and Mengele were pursued too late to apprehend any of them or, had these old men been arrested, to punish them with more than token prison terms. Figures in Washington surely understood that the pursuit of these notorious Nazis promised easy political benefits. Everyone understood by the spring of 1985 that the arrest of a man like Mengele would wash away the unfortunate stain of Bitburg. Even for West Germany, a trial of such men would have allowed a society obsessed with the question of its own historical responsibility to focus more easily on the most well-known monsters of the Hitler years.

Yet the searches of the 1980s were also about something more than form and public relations. The State Department and other agencies could have made a far smaller effort than they did and at far less political risk in the field. Against the advice of its agents in Santiago, Asuncion, and Damascus, the U.S. government ran political risks over issues that were four decades old and over which Syria, Chile, and Paraguay could only be angered. Too late or not, the episodes show that despite the failures in judgment by U.S. intelligence officials in the early Cold War, it was the lessons of the Nuremberg trials rather than the lessons of cooperation with soulless men that were ultimately internalized in official circles -- even if those lessons took four decades to sink in.

_______________

Notes:

1. On the capture of Eichmann, see Moshe Pearlman, The Capture of Adolf Eichmann (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1961); Zvi Aluroni and Wilhelf Dietl, Operation Eichmann: The Truth about the Pursuit, Capture, and Trial (New York: John Wiley, 1997); Isser Harel, The House on Garibaldi Street (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1997); Peter Z. Malkin and Harry Stein, Eichmann in My Hands (New York: Warner, 1990). On the significance of the trial, see Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 1964); and Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust trans. Haim Watzman (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993).

2. Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1936-1945: Nemesis (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), 572n60, 774, 790-1.

3. The above is summarized from Richard Overy, Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945 (New York: Viking, 2001), 111-14. On the suicide, see Jochen von Lang, Der Sekretar-Martin Bormann: der Mann, der Hitler beherrschte (Sruttgart: Deutsche Verlags- Anstalt, 1987), 436ff.

4. Robert H. Jackson to President Harry Truman, 7 Oct. 1946, NA, RG 238, Office of Chief of Counsel for War Crimes, box 46.

5. See Norman M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).

6. DM Ladd to Hoover, 6 May 1948, NA, RG 65, 65-55639-1-20, box 38. The FBI was aware that two German submarines indeed surrendered in Argentina in June 1945 after destroying their engines. Rumors were widespread thereafter that prominent Nazis had been on the subs and escaped into Argentina, but U.S. Naval authorities noted that only the subs' crews were on these vessels.

7. Overy, Interrogations, 111.

8. Hoover to Tolson, Ladd, and Tamm, 6 May 1948, NA, RG 65, 65-55639-1-18, box 38; Ladd to Hoover, 10 May 1948, ibid., no serial; Ladd to Hoover, 1 June 1948, NA, RG 65, 65-55639-1-29, box 38.

9. See Ladd to Hoover, 10 May 1948, NA, RG 65, 65-55639-1, box 38.

10. Edward J. Martin, Legal Attache, Montevideo to Legal Attache, 8 Feb. 1946, Buenos Aires, NA, RG 65, 65-55639-1-2x, box 38; American Legation, Stockholm to Department of State, A-441, 26 Dec. 1946, NA, RG 65, 65-55639-1-8, box 38. Other such reports are scattered throughout the same file.

11. Ladd to Hoover, May 6,1948, NA, RG 65, 65-55639-1-20, box 38.

12. Ibid.

13. See FBI memo, Martin Bormann, War Criminal, 14 May 1948, NA, RG 65, 65-55639-1-22, box 38.

14. Ladd to Hoover, 10 May 1948, NA, RG 65, 65-55639-1-31, box 38.

15. Hoover to Jackson, 14 May 1947, NA, RG 65, 65-55639-1-22, box 38.

16. D.M. Ladd to Hoover, 15 May 1948, NA, RG 65, 65-55639-1-24, box 38.

17. Quoted in C. H. Carson to D. M. Ladd, 27 Mar. 1947, NA, RG 65, 65-55639-1-9, box 38.

18. Richard Ford to Secretary of State, 14 Apr. 1947, NA, RG 65, 65-55639-1-10, box 38.

19. See FBI memo, Martin Bormann, War Criminal, May 14, 1948, NA, RG 65, 65-55639-1-22, box 38.

20. Hoover to Jackson, 14 May 1948, ibid.

21. D. M. Ladd to Hoover, 15 May 1948, NA, RG 65, 65-55639-1-24, box 38.

22. Hoover to Legal Attache, London, 15 May 1948, D. M. Ladd to Hoover, 15 May 1948, A, RG 65, 65-55639-1-23, box 38.

23. J.A. Cimperman to Hoover by Air Pouch, 14 June 1948, NA, RG 65, 65-55639-1-32, box 38.

24. Cimperman to Hoover, 15 June 1948, NA, RG 65, 65-55639-1-33, box 38.

25. Ladd to Hoover, 1 June 1948, NA, RG 65, 65-55639-1-29, box 38.

26. Ladd to Hoover, 12 June 1948, NA, RG 65, 65-55639-1-35, box 38.

27. Ladd to Hoover, 16June 1948, NA, RG 65, 65-55639-1-34, box 38.

28. Jackson to Truman, 16 June 1948, NA, RG 65, 65-55639-1-38, box 38.

29. Truman to Attorney General, NA, RG 65, 65-55639-41, box 37.

30. Ladd to Truman, 28 June 1948, NA, RG 65, 65-55639-42, box 37.

31. Ladd to Hoover, 29 June 1948, NA, RG 65, 65-55639-43, box 39.

32. See Crosby's memo, Re: Martin Bormann, War Criminal, 14 July 1948, NA, RG 65, 65-55639-1-47, box 37.

33. V P. Keay to Ladd, 23 July 1948, ibid.

34. Memo, Re: Martin Bormann, War Criminal, 5 Aug. 1948, NA, RG 65, 65-55639-1-55, box 37.

35. Ladd to Hoover, Martin Bormann, War Criminal, 8 Sept. 1948, NA, RG 65, 65-55639-2-67, box 38.

36. Jackson to Hoover, 13 Sept. 1948, Memo, NA, RG 65, 65-55639-2-68, box 38.

37. For these and other rumors, see NA, RG 65, 65-55639-2-(2-3), box 38.

38. Robert A. Schow, Assistant Director, CIA, to Hoover, 9 Dec. 1949, NA, RG 65, 65-55639- 2-91, box 38.

39. Allan A. Ryan, Jr., Klaus Barbie and the United States Government: The Report, with Documentary Appendix, to the Attorney General of the United States (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1984), 4-6.

40. Ryan, Klaus Barbie, 13-57.

41. Acheson to McCloy, 1 July 1950, NA, RG 59, Barbie Materials, DD-098.

42. U.S. Embassy La Paz to Secretary of State, No. 587, 31 Jan. 1972, NA, RG 59, DE-44 and NR-015. The roles of Nazi-hunters Beate Klarsfeld and Serge Klarsfeld in the Barbie case is recounted, rather heroically, in Beate Klarsfeld, Partout ou ils seront (Paris: Edition speciale, 1972), chapters 14-17.

43. Siracusa to Secretary of State, No. 1056,25 Feb. 1972, NA, RG 59, NR-015. On the speedy French request, U.S. Embassy to Secretary of State, No. 617, 1 Feb. 1972, NA, RG 59, DE-45.

44. Siracusa to Secretary of State, No. 1047, 25 Feb. 1972, NA, RG 59, NR-016.

45. On Klarsfeld's press conference of 28 Feb. 1972, see Siracusa to Secretary of State, No. 1129, 29 Feb. 1972, NA, RG 59, DE-22. On the demonstration, Siracusa to Secretary of Stare, No. 1211, 7 Mar. 1972, NA, RG 59, DE-27.

46. U.S. Embassy La Paz (Siracusa) to Secretary of State, No. 1268, 7 Mar. 1972, NA, RG 59, NR-011.

47. Secretary of State to U.S. Embassy La Paz, 0.040181, 8 Mar. 1972, NA, RG 59, NR-012.

48. Rogers to U.S. Embassy La Paz, No. 033512, 10 Mar. 1972, NA, RG 59, NR-010.

49. Siracusa to Secretary of State. No. 1056, 25 Feb. 1972, NA, RG 59, NR-O 15; Siracusa to Secretary of State, No. 1129, 29 Feb. 1972, NA, RG 59, DE 22; Siracusa to Secretary of State, No. 1269, 7 Mar. 1972, NA, RG 59, DE-27.

50. Siracusa to Secretary of State, No. 1047,25 Feb. 1972, NA. RG 59, R-016. By Feb. 1973, the Bolivian Supreme Court returned the case to the La Paz District Court for legal determination of Barbie's identity. See Siracusa to Secretary of State, 0.6863, 5 Dec. 1972, NA, RG 59, DD-76; Siracusa to Secretary of State, No. 0839, 15 Feb. 15, 1973, NA, RG 59, NR-I77.

51. Siracusa to Secretary of State, No. 1056, 25 Feb. 1972, NA, RG 59, NR-015.

52. French Embassy to Department of State, translated version, No. 58, 9 Mar. 1972, NA, RG 59, NR-005E.

53. Armistead I. Selden, Jr. Acting Assisrant Secretary of Defense, to John Crimmins, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs, 16 May 1972, NA, RG 59, NR-007.

54. ARA Charles A. Meyer and EUR (Acting) George S. Springsteen tp the Under Secretary dared 15 June 1972, NA, RG 59, NR-003. Since Barbie claimed that he was not Barbie, bur rather Klaus Altmann, his identification before the Bolivian courts was paramount. The Department of Stare's records on Barbie were incomplete, so Army records were key for identifying him. Compare with John N. Irwin II (Under Secretary of State) to Kenneth Rush (the Deputy Secretary of Defense) undated, NA, RG 59, NR-004.

55. Siracusa to Secretary of State, No. 5657, 6 Oct.1972, NA, RG 59, NR-018.

56. Corr to Secretary of State, No. 00881, 10 Feb. 1983, NA, RG 59, N-62.

57. Shultz to all Diplomatic Posts, No. 132640, 25 Feb. 1983, NA, RG 59, DE-94.

58. Secretary of State to Bonn and La Paz, No. 033840, 5 Feb. 1983, NA, RG 59, Barbie Materials, NO-59.

59. Shultz to U.S. Embassy La Paz, No. 076376, 26 Aug. 1982, NA, RG 59, DD-48.

60. U.S. Embassy La Paz (Corr) to Secretary of State, No. 7441, 8 Dec. 1982, NA, RG 59, N-56.

61. [CIA/LA] to [ClA/EUR], 31 Jan. 1983, NA, RG 263, Klaus Barbie Name File, vol. 2.

62. Ibid. The March 6 election of that year would give Kohl's CDU/FDP coalition a parliamentary majority.

63. Secretary of State to U.S. Embassies Bonn and La Paz, No. 033840, 5 Feb. 1983, NA, RG 59, DZ-6 J; U.S. Embassy Bonn (Burns) to Slate, No. 03244, 7 Feb. 1983, NA, RG 59, DZ-63

64. U.S. Embassy Moscow (Hartman) to Secretary of State, No. 03410, 22 Mar. 1983, NA, RG 59, N-66.

65. Vice President George Bush, who visited Paris three days after Barbie's arrival, received only vague talking points from the State Department and CIA. The United States, Bush said, supported the prosecution of all war criminals. Concerning Barbie's past employment, however, the Vice President had not been able to keep up, owing to his recent busy travel schedule. Shultz to Paris, No. 035718. 8 Feb. 1983, NA, RG 59, Barbie Materials, DD-039; [excised] to [excised], 11 Feb. 1983, NA, RG 263, Klaus Barbie Name File, vol. 2.

66. Memorandum for the General Counsel from [CIA Associate General Counsel), 16 Feb. 1983, NA, RG 263, Klaus Barbie Name File, vol. 2.

67. Stanley Sporkin to William Casey, 16 Feb. 1983, ibid.

68. Barbie, the French press would be told, was used only to catch other war criminals, who would not have been caught otherwise. Any connection with Barbie having to do with intelligence on Communists would be denied. [CIA/EUR] to DCl, 17 Feb. 1983, ibid.

69. Secretary of State Washington to U.S. Mission Berlin, No. 053765, 8 Mar. 1983, NA, RG 59, Barbie Materials, 00-033. Secretary of State Washington to AMEMB Berlin, o. 071299, 15 Mar. 1983, NA, RG 59, Barbie Materials, 00-035.

70. Secretary of State Washington to AMEMB Paris, No. 231254, 11 Aug. 1983, NA, RG 59, Barbie Materials, DZ-071.

71. Shultz to all Diplomatic Posts, No. 132640, 25 Feb. 1983, NA, RG 59, DE-94.

72. Summarized from the U.S. Department of Justice, Criminal Division, Office of Special Investigations, In the Matter of Josef Mengele: A Report to the Attorney General of the United States (Washington, DC: Department of Justice, 1992), 146-52. On the forensics, see Gerald L. Posner and John Ware, Mengele: The Complete Story (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986)

73. See chapter 6 on the search for Rauff.

74. The legends are described in Posner and Ware, Mengele.

75. U.S. Dept. of Justice, In the Matter of Josef Mengele, 127-30.

76. U.S. Embassy Buenos Aires to State Department, Desp. 1837, 24 June 1960, NA, RG 65, 105-98306-1-1, box 72-75.

77. Memorandum of 18 July 1962, NA, RG 263, Josef Mengele Name File, vol. 2. Mutual recriminations between Israeli intelligence and Wiesenthal are in Hella Pick, Simon Wiesenthal: A Lift in Search of Justice (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996), 186-89.

78. Memorandum of 18 July 1962, NA, RG 263, Josef Mengele Name File, vol. 2.

79. U.S. Embassy Asuncion to Secretary of State, 79-2918864, 12 Aug. 1979, ibid.

80. U.S. Embassy Asuncion to Secretary of State, 79-2894138, 7 Aug. 1979, ibid.

81. German Embassy (Washington) to Department of State, 28 Aug. 1979, NA, RG 65, 105- 98306-1-7, box 72-75.

82. Secretary of State to U.S. Embassy Asuncion, 84-5657266, 8 Nov. 1982; U.S. Embassy Asuncion to Secretary of State, 84-5864658, 4 Dec. 1984; U.S. Embassy Asuncion to Secretary of State, 23 Feb. 1985, all in NA, RG 263, Josef Mengele Name File, vol. 2. Beate Klarsfeid had already visited Asuncion in February 1984 and had a tense meeting with Paraguayan Interior Minister Dr. Sabino Augusto Montanero, who chided her for going to the Paraguayan press before asking the government what it knew of Mengele's whereabouts. At that time as well, Montanero told the press that the Mengele issue was a plot by the regime's enemies to discredit Paraguay in the world's eyes. See U.S. Embassy, Asuncion, to Secretary of State, 19840223, 22 Feb. 1984, RG 263, Josef Mengele Name File.

83. For the Gorby letter see the appendix to Matter of Josef Mengele, 86. The issue of the Gorby letter is covered in ibid., 70-82. OSI concluded that the information was flawed and that this arrest never rook place.

84. Ralph Blumenthal, "Papers Indicate Mengele May Have Been Held and Freed after War," New York Times, January 23, 1985.

85. Jay Mathews, "'82 Nazi Sighting Aired: Hill Panel to Hear Testimony on Mengele," The Washington Post, February 19, 1985.

86. Bill Peterson, "Nazi Fugitive Linked to Drug Trafficking: Two Senators Release CIA Documents," The Washington Post, February 27, 1985. The CIA documents had been released upon a personal request from D'Amato to DCI William Casey. See D'Amato to Casey, 21 Jan. 1985, NA, RG 263, Josef Mengele Name File, vol. 2.

87. CIA memorandum, 22 Feb. 1985, NA, RG 263, Josef Mengele Name File, vol. 2. CIA turned up no information that Mengele or any of his aliases had been to Portugal; [excised] to [excised], 25 Feb. 1985, ibid.

88. The so-called "Mengele Trial" in Jerusalem, which ended in February 1985, also played a role in moving the Mengele search to the top of the global agenda. Here, before Wiesenthal, Nuremberg prosecutor Telford Taylor, and Eichmann prosecutor Gideon Hausner, Mengele's living victims offered their testimonials as to his war crimes.

89. Davis to Shultz, 2196, 11 Apr. 1984, NA, RG 263, Nazis in South America Subject File, vol. 1.

90. See the various stories in Posner and Ware, Mengele.

91. Stephen S. Trott, Assistant Attorney General, Criminal Division, to FBI Director William Webster, 19 Feb. 1985, NA, RG 65, 105-98306-1-18, box 72-75; Trott to Webster, 12 Mar. 1985, NA, RG 65, 105-98306-1, box 72-75.

92. Sec the records concerning the Eichmann kidnapping and the U.N. Security Council in NA, RC 59, Lot file 62, D305. box 88.

93. DCl to [CIA/LA], 2 Mar. 1985, NA, RG 263, Josef Mengele Name File, vol. 2.

94. [CIA/LA] to DCI, 5 Mar. 1985, ibid.

95. Secretary of State to U.S. Embassies Buenos Aires, Asuncion, Santiago, Brasilia, La Paz, 27 Mar. 1985, ibid.

96. DCI to [CIA/LA], [CIA/EUR], 5 Apr. 1985; and Memo to DCI, 22 May 1985; ibid.

97. DCI to [CIA/EUR], 9 Apr. 1985, ibid.

98. DCI to [CIA/NE], 5 Apr. 1985, ibid.

99. The meeting is described in Secretary of State to CIA, 25 May 1985, NA, RG 263, Josef Mengele Name File, vol. 1; Memo to DCI, 22 May 1985, ibid.

100. Secretary of State to [CIA], 25 May 1985, ibid.

101. Leslie Maitland Werner, "The Mengele File: U.S. Marshals Join the Hunt," The New York Times, 28 May 1985.

102. DCI to [CIA/LA] 31 May 1985, NA, RG 263, Josef Mengele Name File, vol. 1.

103. DCI to [CIA/LA], 4 June 1985, ibid.

104. DCI to [CIA/LA], 6 June 1985, ibid.

105. OSI, In the Matter of Josef Mengele, 136-92.

106. FM Bonn to William Webster, 29 May 1985, NA, RG 65, 105-98306-4-76x2, box 72- 75. The CIA has a source within the West German government involved in the Mengele search who had described West German police efforts as "unsystematic and without any real focus." Since the West Germans would soon raid the Sedlmeier home, the source was either ill informed or willfully deceiving the CIA; [C1A/EUR] to DCI, 15 Apr. 1985, NA, RG 263, Josef Mengele Name File, vol. 2.

107. Quoted in Posner and Ware, Mengele, 317.

108. Alain Finkielkraut, Remembering in Vain: The Klaus Barbie Trial and Crimes against Humanity, trans. Roxanne Lapidus with Sima Godfrey (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); Erna Paris, Unhealed Wounds: France and the Klaus Barbie Affair (New York: Grove Press, 1986).
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Re: U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, by Richard Breitman, No

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Conclusion
by Norman J. W. Goda with Richard Breitman

THE NAZI WAR CRIMES DISCLOSURE ACT OF 1998 has triggered the release of some 8 million pages of documents on a breathtaking range of wartime and postwar topics -- everything from the Greek resistance to Vichy French funds in the United States to Vatican policies. The preceding chapters show, through a sampling of these records, how the new files add to what scholars have known while offering some signposts for future research.

One subject not covered in our volume is the postwar U.S. war crimes trial program. Records of these proceedings and nearly all documents about preparations for the trials had been declassified previously; new information adds little to our understanding of them. Still, a contrast between American prosecution and American intelligence activities is instructive.

The United States rook the lead in the first grand experiment with postwar justice beginning with the International Trial of the Major War Criminals at Nuremberg in 1945 and 1946. [1] Following this landmark trial, the United States held twelve more trials in Nuremberg, which involved 144 high-level defendants from the German High Command, the medical profession, big business, the judiciary, government ministries, SS economic officials, and most notably, the Einsatzgruppen. More military trials were held of German camp personnel and others so that by 1949, the United States had tried more than 1,800 German suspects. [2] The U.S. war criminal prison in Landsberg had roughly one thousand inmates and bore the official name War Criminal Prison Number 1 on the assumption that there would be a War Criminal Prison Number 2. The worst SS criminals were hanged as late as July 1951, despite the virtual sovereignty of the Federal Republic of Germany, despite mass West German protests at Landsberg prison, and despite the intercession of high-ranking West Germans who would be instrumental for the rearmament of West Germany and its military alignment with NATO. [3]

Only the Soviet Union tried more German personnel. But Soviet proceedings were often for violations of Soviet criminal codes and contained a strong air of show trials. [4] Other continental European states, including West European ones, generally tried Germans only for crimes committed against their own nationals. Thus the United States' judicial record was unique, innovative, and substantial. It was not the policy of a state sympathetic with Nazism, indifferent to the Holocaust, or soft on war criminals.

Intelligence operations represented a different facet of American policy -- a cold world where Realpolitik trumped idealism, where the primary aim was the acquisition of raw information, and where secrets often served the most practical of ends. The sensitive nature of how information is gathered and the utterly pragmatic ways in which such information is used -- or not -- lie at the heart of why intelligence records are held classified for so long in the first place.

Just as democratic societies must examine past successes and failures in diplomacy, military operations, and the like so that mistakes are understood, so must intelligence operations, particularly those riddled with errors, be examined publicly. Intelligence shortcomings contributed to Pearl Harbor and, more recently, to the al-Qaeda attacks of 2001. Although World War II in Europe saw spectacular Allied intelligence successes, from the breaking of the ENIGMA codes to the deception campaign that made D-Day possible, this book has revealed mistakes in either the gathering or the use of information about the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes, which cast a long shadow.

The first major theme of this work concerns what U.S. and other Allied intelligence sources knew about the nature of Hitler's Final Solution, when they knew it, and what sorts of reactions this information triggered during the war. It has been known for many years that the Allies were not in the dark when it came to German atrocities. [5] Yet in the face of the mounting evidence of the modern world's greatest atrocity, the Allies took no bold initiatives. While rescue attempts such as the bombing of Auschwitz or the trading of Jewish lives for trucks (both in 1944) might well have been difficult or impractical from a logistical or political standpoint, explicit public statements or warnings to Jewish populations, Axis satellites, or neutral countries were never beyond the realm of possibility. [6]

Many of the newly released intelligence records, particularly from the ass, show that Allied intelligence agencies were aware of even more detail concerning the eradication of Europe's Jews than was previously understood by historians. But they also suggest more powerfully than before that some senior intelligence officers grasped that Nazi measures amounted to a state policy of full-blown extermination. Joseph Goldschmied's long report to the OSS Oral Intelligence unit in July 1942, which argued that German policies in Prague aimed at the depletion of Europe's Jews, was deemed entirely credible by OSS officials thanks its high level of derail. The "Dear A" letters from observers stationed in Europe -- letters Allen Dulles solicited before he left for Bern in November 1942 -- contained a notable three-part serial letter titled "Nazi Extermination of Jews," based partly on British information from Warsaw itself and eyewitness accounts from the Baltic killing fields. "Germany no longer persecutes the Jews," Dulles's source said in June 1942. "It is systematically exterminating them."

Once in Switzerland, Dulles also had a broad and reliable window to the bloody policies of Hitler's allies, particularly in Croatia, from no less a source than the Archbishop of Zagreb himself. "Jasenovac," the OSS learned repeatedly, "is a real slaughterhouse." The British-pilfered despatches from 1941 and 1942 of the Chilean Consul in Prague, Gonzalo Montt Rivas-despatches routinely shared with the Americans -- were especially damning. Montt was no Jewish leader or refugee who could be said to have an axe to grind. He was an ideological ally of the Nazis who thought he was communicating with his government in complete secrecy. By March 1942 at the latest, American intelligence agencies learned from Montt's reports to Santiago that the Nazis wanted a Europe "freed of Semites" and that German victory in the war would serve that end. Montt was considered reliable enough that translated copies of some of his reports found their way to senior officials in the State Department, the FBI, and the OSS itself. [7]

U.S. intelligence agencies never undertook active study of the Final Solution or any of its components, from shooting operations to extermination camps. There was a war on. Military information and analysis that could help to shorten the war always took priority. British studies on Nazi concentration and death camps contain conspicuous mistakes, showing that those writing the studies had limited access to information available in the British intelligence community. But there were British studies. [8] The Soviets, stretched though their own information-gathering agencies were, actively compiled enormous mounds of evidence concerning the crimes that took place on their soil. Despite Moscow's proclivity to see Nazi crimes in Marxist terms and their insistence that bloody Soviet crimes, such as the massacre and burial of Polish officers at Katyn, either never took place or were committed by the Germans, the Soviets still compiled immense amounts of testimony and evidence on bona fide Nazi crimes from witnesses and survivors. [9] Despite the primacy of military operations, it was always possible to learn more and to analyze more.

Old and new OSS documents suggest that at least some high OSS officials comprehended the range of Nazi crimes, but the organization did not venture deeply into this area. Was it because too much attention to Nazi killings of Jews might jeopardize American consensus for the war itself? Dulles, who was as well informed as anyone, was complicit in this practice. After his arrival in Bern, he continued to receive intelligence on crimes from German mass shootings to the roundup of the Berlin Jews. Yet Dulles understood that the State Department wanted no public reckoning with German crimes against Jews, lest pressures from groups such as the World Jewish Congress for rescue operations or relaxed immigration quotas become irresistible. It is in this context that Dulles's March 1943 comment to Willem Visser t'Hooft, that OSS information on specific German roundups of Jews was not confirmed and that Allied measures to hinder German atrocities were not practical, must be understood. The political problem presented by the Holocaust may also explain the decision not to route Montt's information on the Final Solution to Henry Morgenthau, Jr. -- Roosevelt's vocal Secretary of the Treasury -- even though Morgenthau, who was Jewish, received some copies of Monu's economic reports. [10]

Most ironically, the OSS's understanding of the Final Solution's scope helped to preclude more cooperation with Jewish groups whose interest in Nazi Germany's defeat was greater than anyone else's. On the one hand, U.S. intelligence officials had a right to be skeptical of some initiatives, such as Joel Brand's mission to Istanbul in May 1944 to negotiate a deal for Jewish lives in Hungary in return for trucks. Brand's companion Bandi Grosz was a double agent working for the Nazis, and partly through his efforts the Nazis had penetrated the American-supported Dogwood intelligence chain in Istanbul. It is not surprising that neither the British nor the Americans took Brand's mission seriously as a rescue effort, or that they interrogated Brand and Grosz rather than send them back to Budapest with a promise for Allied trucks.

On the other hand, there does not seem to have been much interest by Allied intelligence in working with Jewish groups anyway, most notably the Jewish Agency for Palestine. Though always willing to accept and use intelligence supplied by Jewish Agency sources, neither British nor American intelligence officials showed any enthusiasm for joint operations such as the dropping of Jewish commandos behind enemy lines or the use of Jewish camp inmates for anti-German activities. As one OSS official put it, Jews would fight for Jewish interests such as saving Jews (even if this meant bargaining with the Germans) or the creation of an independent Jewish state after the war. The use of Jewish agents was a dangerous policy. [11] Yet the Allied war against Nazism was full of competing agendas ranging from those of French Communists to the territorial aims of Poland's government-in-exile, all of which represented suffering national groups. The Allied principle of working the least with those suffering the most seems incongruous, especially since this coolness was still apparent late in the war when cooperation meant little more than the identification of Germans to be arrested. At the very least, such a backwards policy might have diminished the importance of the Final Solution in the eyes of U.S. intelligence officials and agencies, many of whom, like Dulles, held key posts in the postwar years.

During the war U.S. intelligence officials also misread the close relationship between Nazi intelligence and Nazi racial policies. U.S. intelligence and counterintelligence officials, perhaps using themselves as a frame of reference, seem to have understood Nazi intelligence agencies in traditional terms. Newly released FBI records are loaded with reports on German police methods, Abwehr spies and saboteurs in the United States, and SD Foreign Intelligence agents in South America, all based on the partly accurate assumption that pure information-gathering was at the heart of German intelligence. But even when the FBI began its investigation of Chase Bank in 1939, the Bureau was dtiven primarily by the concern that seized Jewish assets were being used to fund German intelligence operations on American soil. The fact that the assets were stolen as part of a broader process to implement Nazi racial ideology was not considered especially relevant. [12]

Gestapo counterintelligence and SD Foreign Intelligence officers, all of whom were Nazi Party members and SS officers serving within the RSHA, were not traditional intelligence men (or in rare cases, women). The conflation of Nazi racial ideology and police terror with intelligence functions in these services meant that there were very few thoughtful agents or analysts in either. Apart from the anti-Nazi elements in the Abwehr, most who dealt with the Allies were little more than ideologues, dilettantes, thugs, or thieves. The destruction of the Berlin branch of the Red Orchestra by the likes of Gestapo official Horst Kopkow was triggered more by the amateurish nature of Soviet spies in Germany and by Gestapo torture than by Gestapo intelligence acumen. Gestapo officers, moreover, botched counterintelligence operations against Soviet agents in France. The Gestapo learned only in 1942 that the Polish underground, thought to have been smashed three years before, was sending vital information to London. They seem to have known little about British or U.S. intelligence operations in occupied Europe. Those SS/SD officers who attempted "covert" actions late in the war, namely peace feelers targeted at OSS officials in Istanbul and Switzerland, aimed, based on their own ideological assumptions, to split the Western-Soviet alliance while saving their skins. New records do not at all support the notion, made prevalent after the war, that German police intelligence agencies were either especially good at intelligence or opposed to Nazi crimes or the continuation of the conflict past the point of diminishing returns.

SD Foreign Intelligence Chief Walter Schellenberg, mentioned prominently in newly declassified files, exemplifies the effort by substantial numbers of Nazi intelligence and police officials to recast their reputations late in the war or immediately afterwards. After the German defeat, Schellenberg built a reputation through extensive British interrogations and through his memoirs as a man who woke to his country's crimes and tried to engineer an early end to the conflict, while saving the lives of concentration camp inmates where he could. Sadly for him, he was blocked by the ideologues within the government such as RSHA chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner, on trial in 1945 as a major war criminal, and Gestapo Chief Heinrich Muller, who was (as we argued earlier) most likely dead. [13] But the new records show Schellenberg as a cold, calculating SS official who did not become Himmler's favorite intelligence officer for nothing. Far from being appalled by the Nazi camp system, he used it to garner information and to carry out his covert foreign policy. He made extensive use of counterfeit money produced by Operation Bernhard in Sachsenhausen (despite later calling Friedrich Schwend, the distributor of the money, a swindler). He advocated and facilitated the purchase of concentration camp barracks in Switzerland in order to cultivate intelligence connections in that country -- and one of the chief beneficiaries might have been Dr. Heinrich Rothmund, who helped engineer Switzerland's restrictive policy toward Jewish refugees from 1938 to the end of the war. [14]

Schellenberg also approved the Brand mission to Istanbul in May 1944, but not as a deal to end or even to delay the destruction of Hungary's Jews. For Schellenberg, Brand was a means by which to use the supposed connections of world Jewry to open a rift in the anti-German coalition by inducing the Allies to spare Jews by supplying equipment to be used on the eastern front. Schellenberg also tried to atrange contacts with Allen Dulles after January 1945. Yet these were hardly peace feelers. Schellenberg hoped to convince the Americans of Soviet perfidy so that the Germans could continue to fight in the East unabated by a front in the West. Despite his failure with Dulles, Schellenberg continued on Himmler's behalf the famous contacts with former Swiss president Jean-Marie Musy in Switzerland and Swedish rescuer Count Folke Bernadotte. These negotiations involved swapping the lives of camp inmates for a halt in the fighting in the West or at least very lenient justice for SS camp guards. Schellenberg was not saving lives; he was bargaining with them. His effort was not very different from the more successful and more openly extortionist channel applied by another Himmler deputy, Kurt Becher in Hungary, who openly traded Jewish lives for cash. [15]

Other German intelligence professionals and amateurs in contact with Allen Dulles in 1945 saw their efforts payoff. SS-General Karl Wolff's group helped to atrange the early German surrender in Italy, only days before the German surrender, through what Dulles named Operation Sunrise. No promises were made, but Wolff was rewarded during a U.S. military tribunal two years later with an unprecedented private meeting with the U.S. judges who declined to prosecute him thanks to his covert contacts with Dulles at the very end of the war. Evidence that Wolff had facilitated Jewish transports to Treblinka was ignored, and OSS-held evidence that he had been involved in SS reprisals against Italian resistors was seemingly not available. Wolff did not receive jail time until 1962, and then only because of West German authorities. Eugen Dollmann, Wolff's SS subordinate in Operation Sunrise, was demanded by Italian authorities in 1947 in connection with the bloody Ardeatine Caves massacre of March 1944. U.S. intelligence officials provided him with a false identity and shipped him from Rome to the U.S. occupation zone in Germany. To do otherwise, they said, would cause other agents to doubt American protection. [16]

SS Major Wilhelm Hottl, a top SD Foreign Intelligence operative who had served in Austria and Hungary, had also been in contact with the Americans in Bern on Kaltenbrunner's behalf after February 1945, spinning a web of promises for the immediate future and lies about his recent past. Dulles knew that Hottl had been in Hungary during the mass deportations of Jews from that country and that he was Kaltenbrunner's subordinate, but it was Hottl's supposed skill as an intelligence operative from the feared Alpine Redoubt by which the OSS judged him. Had the war not ended when it did, Hottl surely would have been used on the assumption that he was a highly trained, professional operative, rather than an agent of Jewish destruction. As Edgeworth Leslie said, "Hottl is ... dangerous [but] I feel that we should make full use of his Nachrichtendienst [intelligence service], ... of the propaganda services which he is setting up, and of the material that he can supply for this propaganda." Hottl was not put on trial. He could claim to have known Dulles (though they never met), to have worked for an early peace against Hider's wishes, and to have been a quality intelligence operative who could be rehired later. [17]

The piles of new CIC, FBI, and CIA files reveal no overarching policy by which American intelligence agencies targeted known SS or Gestapo officers for hiring. Hiring happened on a case-by-case basis via different U.S. intelligence offices and detachments. But the records also reveal that this unfortunate practice was hardly limited to the infamous Klaus Barbie (whose hiring by CIC in 1947 became public knowledge in 1983) or a few other bad apples. How can one explain it all?

Pragmatism is part of the answer for the use and protection of war criminals. It sutely explains Britain's protection of Kopkow, who escaped justice because he knew something about the Red Orchestra, justifiably a major British concern in 1945 since the Soviets had clearly spied on the British before the war. But the repeated U.S. use of Nazi criminals is not simply a case of the Cold War shifting U.S. intelligence priorities to the point where the hiring of SS and Gestapo officers became seemingly appropriate.

Avoidance of, or lack of attention to, the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes by the U.S. intelligence establishment surely played some role. Serious active study of the Final Solution as it took place might have led to more serious postwar consideration of the men who had been involved in it. Many former Nazis and collaborators were remarkably successful and even entrepreneurial in casting themselves as highly knowledgeable intelligence men with caches of vital information rather than as thugs, killers, and incompetents. Emil Augsburg, an SS "expert" on Slavic peoples who had taken part in massacres in the USSR in 1941, was hired by CIC in 1947, in part thanks to his claim to have eight [never recovered] trunks of files on the Comintern. General Reinhard Gehlen, the Chief of the German Army Staff's Foreign Armies East office, a man who had been wrong on every major prediction he made concerning the Red Army, was hired and feted by the U.S. Army immediately after the war thanks to his collection of buried intelligence files. As late as 1952, former Nazi prosecutor Manfred Roeder dazzled CIC officials with his tales of hidden intelligence records. Only in 1955 did the CIA catch on, declining an offer by former SS-Gruppenfuhrer Otto Skorzeny to sell them a trove of what he claimed were secret Red Orchestra decodes. Skorzeny, it turned out, had already fooled the CIA once with made-up information. [18]

The biggest culprit in U.S. intelligence misjudgments in Europe may be the CIC. In the immediate postwar years the CIC was the largest U.S. intelligence organization in Germany and Western Europe. Responsible for the apprehension of Germans in automatic arrest categories and for larger issues of denazification in public German institutions such as universities, some CIC agents acquired the reputation of being "hard" on former Nazis. [19] CIC agents ran daring operations from time to time, such as the attempted penetration of Father Krunoslav Draganovic's College of San Girolamo and the attempted arrest of Ante Pavelic. Other CIC agents, however, were responsible for extraordinary errors of judgment, believing that former SS and Gestapo officers could offer useful information on the new Soviet foe. Astonishing sluggishness in performing serious background checks on captured German records contributed to these errors.

CIC blunders surprised contemporaries who knew of them. U.S. Army prosecutors were stunned at the use of known criminals like Manfred Roeder and Walter Huppenkothen. CIA officials pointed to the low quality of intelligence from the likes of Hottl and Draganovic, together with the security risks these men represented. And Army counterintelligence records not seen by the authors of this work may contain more cases of this kind, because the CIC seemed not to learn much over time -- an indication that confusion or inexperience in the immediate postwar period was not the root of its problem. In 1947 the CIC hired SS-Gruppenfuhrer Heinz Reinefarth, destroyer of Warsaw during the Polish rising of August 1944, thanks to his knowledge of Soviet infantry tactics. The CIC ignored repeated Polish extradition requests even though U.S. Army prosecutor Telford Taylor pressed for Reinefarth's extradition from 1947 on. [20] Even the British were surprised by U.S. stubbornness. "Much of the detail in the Polish note," said British occupation authorities in 1951, "is correct ... [there is] a considerable amount of evidence to support the accusation that [Reinefarth] is guilty of the mass murder of Polish civilians in Warsaw in 1944." [21] But by now the State Department supported the CIC, partly because extraditing Reinefarth was in itself a security risk: "In the course of [Reinefarth's] work," a recently declassified State memorandum argued,

... he is believed to have acquired too great a familiarity with American military information to make it safe to allow him to go to any area subject to Soviet domination. It may also be observed that the extradition of this man to Poland would make any further consultation with him impossible and would have the additional consequence of disturbing similar work now being conducted with other German officers who would be made apprehensive about being deported in the same way. [22]


Earlier misjudgments, in other words, had now taken on a life of their own. And as the CIC proclaimed in 1952 in connection with the missing Adolf Eichmann, they were no longer in the business of searching for war criminals anyway.

Perhaps the most extreme CIC misjudgment of a key Holocaust perpetrator came in the 1950s. Hermann Julius Hofle, a major Nazi war criminal, served the CIC briefly in 1954 as a paid informant. Hofle had served on the front lines in the Nazi war against political and racial enemies as early as 1939 as an officer with murderous police auxiliaries (Selbschutzfuhrer) in the Cracow district, as the head of a forced labor camp for Jews near what would later become the Belzec extermination camp, and especially in the Lublin district, where he worked under SS and Police Leader Odilo Globocnik. Hofle held the title Head of the Main Section of Aktion Reinhard -- the code name for the murder of Jews in the General Government, denoting most of Nazi-occupied Poland. He was Globocnik's most important subordinate, giving basic instructions to the personnel assigned to Aktion Reinhard and requiring subordinates to sign a declaration of secrecy. He helped clear the Warsaw Ghetto and later served as an officer at Sachsenhausen concentration camp and as a senior SS officer in Greece. [23]

Hofle later told U.S. army officials that he was arrested by British authorities in Austria in 1945 and held until 1947. In 1948 Hofle learned that the Polish government was seeking his extradition for war crimes, so he escaped to Italy, using a network of former SS associates, where he lived under an assumed name. In March 1951 he tried to enter West Germany from Austria but was arrested for unauthorized crossing of the border. Admitting his real name, Hofle told a Munich court that Poland was seeking to prosecute him and that he feared kidnapping. In April 1951 he was given West German identification documents and allowed to live there legally. After taking up contact with his old SS comrades in Bavaria, Hofle came to the attention of CIC officials as a potential source of information about far-right-wing circles and their possible infiltration by Communist elements. A CIC assessment of Hofle's character in February 1954 did not penetrate past the surface:

Subject is punctual, militant in action, truthful and trusting in a person only after his trustworthiness has been proven. Subject has been found to be most appreciative and courteous .... Based on information received from subject, he can be evaluated as fairly reliable at this time. Subject is considered "usually reliable" insofar as past activity of the SS and Gestapo is concerned. It is pointed out, however, in the majority of cases that subject must be asked specific questions during meetings because he is prone to minimize an occurrence or event rather than to magnify it. [24]


Hofle had told CIC officials that during the war he had served in the Waffen-SS, that he was affiliated with the organization of partisan groups in fighting the Russians, and that he had taken part in security work in Poland in regard to German personnel. "Security work" involved the murder of some 2 million Polish Jews.

Although it was not known at the time, even among American intelligence officials, Hofle had actually reported the statistics of Aktion Reinhard to Adolf Eichmann during the war. In at least one case, Hofle's report was sent by coded radio message in abbreviated form and intercepted by British intelligence. This message is the most reliable source scholars have for the number of Jews killed at Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Maidanek through 1942. (1he United Kingdom declassified this information only in the late 1990s. [25]) Even if the depth of Hofle's involvement in genocide was hidden, anyone with some knowledge about Nazi Germany and with access to his SS file in the Berlin Document Center could have exposed his falsehoods and evasions.

After giving the CIC information deemed of value in February 1954, Hofle received the cover name Hans Hartman and was placed on the rolls for a monthly stipend of DM 100. In June 1954, however, he was dropped without prejudice for undisclosed reasons. He thus worked for the CIC for only five months.

Hofle's newly declassified file is remarkable for what it does not contain. Although the CIC was aware that Poland wanted to prosecute him for war crimes and although there apparently was a cursory check of Berlin Document Center records about him, no one seems to have been concerned about what Hofle might have done as an SS officer in Poland. Army officials seemed content to accept Hofle's sanitized version of what can only be described as a consistent record of monstrous and barbaric crimes.

Like the CIC, the CIA flubbed some background checks and even sanitized some incriminating records. Newly declassified CIA records so far reveal direct relationships between that agency and at least thirty former Axis war criminals. Otto von Bolschwing's SD "intelligence" role in the January 1941 Bucharest pogrom and in the protection of Romanian Iron Guard leaders was common knowledge among everyone who dealt with him. The CIA did not try to understand what sort of "intelligence" von Bolschwing had performed in Romania or to learn more about van Bolschwing's work for the SD's Jewish Department. Thus van Bolschwing's self-proclaimed intelligence contacts in Austria were thought valuable, and the CIA sanitized his records of what were thought to be simple embarrassments. As James Critchfield, the CIA's head of the Pullach Operations Base, reported in 1950, "[I] feel we should go [to] any length to help [von Bolschwing]."

SD officer Theodor Saevecke was silent about his extensive record against Italian and North African Jews under the tutelage of the infamous Gestapo officer Walter Rauff, but he boasted about his bloody measures against Italian "Communists," to the point where his CIA handlers fully understood his continued devotion to Nazism. His past was sanitized as well. The CIA performed similar favors for Ukrainian nationalist Mikola Lebed, whose collaboration with the Gestapo in 1941 had led to wholesale murders in the Ukraine, and whose postwar work for the CIA with the Ukrainian underground was deemed "of inestimable value." In 1952, Allen Dulles, then Assistant Director of the CIA, denied all criminal accusations against Lebed -- even the ones Lebed had admitted.

Clearly aware of the Holocaust during the war, Dulles failed to grasp what it meant morally, politically, and even in terms of postwar intelligence. Those implicated in the crimes of Nazi Germany and its allies were most unlikely to be effective sources or agents, and if used by the United States, became security risks simply by virtue of their hidden pasts. Whatever credit certain Nazi officials earned with the United States at the end of the war did not change the basic problem. Dulles had to deal with the consequences of some of his own previous mistakes. When the Israeli capture of Adolf Eichmann in 1960 refocused the world's attention on the Nazi past, Dulles -- then Director of Central Intelligence -- expressed operational concerns about possible Soviet blackmail of the CIA's former Nazi agents. [26]

The CIA's largest problem came in its takeover of the Gehlen Organization from the U.S. Army in 1949. Army and CIG studies as early as 1947 lamented that Reinhard Gehlen had never revealed the backgrounds of the thousands of agents and administrators in his employ and supported by the U.S. government, especially since former SS officers were clearly in top positions. Yet by December 1948, the year of the Communist coup in Prague and the Berlin Blockade, the CIA had stopped asking the tough questions. Those in the CIA who argued that the Gehlen Organization did not represent "good Germans" were overruled. Not only was the Organization "definitely second class" in the CIA's own words; Gehlen still would not reveal the names of his subordinates. The old SD network from Romania was discovered in the first year of CIA sponsorship and by 1951 Gehlen's counterintelligence group was discovered to be packed with former SS men, including notorious figures such Emil Augsburg, Erich Deppner, and Konrad Fiebig. Given Gehlen's resistance to any CIA interference, his proclivity to find support in the new West German government, and the need for basic tactical intelligence on the Red Army thanks to the war in Korea, the presence of war criminals in the Gehlen Organization was regarded as an internal German matter. [27]

New FBI records show for the first time that J. Edgar Hoover also took the narrowest possible view of Eastern European collaborators in the United States after World War II. All were useful, he thought, in the global struggle against Communism and could at the very least hold their own emigre communities in the United States to an anti-Communist line while reporting subversion from within those same communities. Thus Hoover protected Liszlo Agh, a Hungarian camp officer who had lied repeatedly to U.S. immigration and even FBI officials about his past since entering the United States in 1949, by withholding information that could have resulted in his deportation. Agh's staunch anti-Communist work with Hungarian emigres, Hoover thought, was more important than his crimes during the war. Viorel Trifa, a Romanian Iron Guard Leader and instigator of the bloody Bucharest pogrom in January 1941, was also protected by Hoover after Trifa entered the United States in 1950 despite the overwhelming evidence of his criminality. As the Romanian Orthodox Archbishop in the United States, Trifa played a critical role in the battle for the political soul of Romanian emigres whose country was now under Communist rule. Even the CIA, which by this time had used a number of war criminals, was surprised by the degree to which Hoover was willing to soft-pedal Trifa's nauseating past. The FBI used Vladimir Sokolov, once a collaborator in Nazi propaganda in German-occupied Russia, to spy on the Russian emigre community in the United States despite the mountain of testimony from those who knew him, including prominent scholars of the USSR. If the CIA had not used Mikola Lebed in Cold War Ukrainian politics, the FBI would have done so. At the very least, Hoover never shared the FBI's evidence on Lebed, which came from captured German Army staff records, with the INS. [28]

Such relationships are often described as Faustian bargains, but in dealing with the Devil, Faust received the earthly delights he had been promised. Did any U.S. intelligence agencies benefit from their own moral compromises? The new records suggest they did not. Research thus far indicates that the CIC learned next to nothing from the stable of bad actors that it hired. Hottl's networks in Austria provided the CIC with information from newspapers and by dabbling in Austrian politics and with German, French, and Soviet intelligence, Hottl was a security risk besides. Roeder's polemical comments on the Red Orchestra uncovered not a single Soviet spy. Draganovic provided sheaves of useless and false material while never revealing his sources to his handlers, who paid him generously.

FBI and CIA hires were no better. Sokolov was hired to provide information on Russian emigres in the United Stares, and for the most part he never did so. The separatism in the Ukraine that Lebed promised finally occurred in 1991, but it had nothing to do with Lebed. Immediately after hiring von Bolschwing, CIA officials in West Germany discovered what every other intelligence agency, even the Gehlen Organization, already knew: von Bolschwing was useless. As for Gehlen himself, as far as can be determined from what has been declassified, the postwar German spymaster never provided anything more than low-grade tactical intelligence to the United States, and his counterintelligence group was thoroughly penetrated by the Soviets.

The thousands of pages of intelligence records seen by the writers of this volume contain but a very few pages that indicate important information garnered through direct relationship between a U.S. intelligence agency and a former Nazi intelligence figure. Karl Theodor Hass, for example, was used by the CIC in 1951 to provide information on Hottl's activities with West German intelligence. Former Einsatzgruppe member Friedrich Panzinger might have been of some use in sending phony intelligence to the Soviets. Heinz Pannwitz provided some interesting historical information on topics ranging from Reinhard Heydrich's murder to Gestapo playback operations from France during the war. [29] The bloodstained Theo Saevecke and Heinz Reinefarth might have provided something of use, but if they did, it is not in the CIA or CIC files. In all, former Nazis were of very little value in relation to the headaches and security breaches they created.

On the contrary, such men applied American support and American money entirely to their own agendas. The best example is Gehlen himself, whose marriage to the U.S. Army from the very start was one of convenience. In return for a half million dollars a year during the occupation, the U.S. Army received no operational control and no sense of whom Gehlen had hired. When pressed by Army or CIA officials to cooperate more while overextending himself less, Gehlen growled at his handlers until they backed off. His main concern was his budget and his place in the West German establishment; it was never to provide intelligence for the Americans. Draganovic never hid the fact that his priority lay in Croatian independence from Tito, and he was constantly irritated that the United States did not back his various schemes, one of which involved a Croatian "Bay of Pigs" invasion. Hottl, meanwhile, embezzled American funds and sold false reports to the U.S. Army while trying to find a place for himself in the West German intelligence establishment. The hiring of foreign assets by intelligence agencies always carries such risk -- realism generally trumps altruism as a motive for spies. Rarely, however, is so little gained in return.

The shadow of these bargains far outlived the bargains themselves, for the potential embarrassment and security risks continued long after the intelligence relationships had officially ended. The CIC discovered this problem with every Nazi criminal with whom they dealt. Thus, Barbie had to be shipped to South America; Hottl had to be arrested and publicly neutralized on the hope that he had no records pertaining to his service for the CIC; everyone was relieved when Draganovic was kidnapped by Tito's government, never to be heard from in the West again. The CIA was not so lucky. Von Bolschwing and Lebed had to be rewarded for their work with U.S. citizenship, and their embarrassing relationships had to be hidden as long as possible -- not indefinitely as it turned out.

All the while, relationships between the U.S. government and known war criminals provided grist for active Communist propaganda mills while obviating much of the moral high ground that had been won by U.S. leadership in prosecuting Nazis. Trifa and Agh, for instance, were constant themes in Romanian and Hungarian government statements; and once the FBI had decided to protect such men, the Bureau became complicit in their odious statements that the evidence against them was cooked up by Communists and Jews. Soviet and East German propaganda harped repeatedly on the Gehlen problem, especially after the revelations in the wake of the Heinz Felfe affair that the Organization had been loaded with war criminals. Though the Soviets used former Gestapo and SS officers, such as Friedrich Panzinger and Heinz Felfe, for espionage as well the United States gave Moscow the ability to claim publicly as late as 1983 that the United States had raised the concealment of war criminals to "a matter of state policy." It was not the moral position that anyone had envisioned in 1945.

The United States was not the only state in this position. Though the new records come from American agencies, they reveal a not inconsiderable amount of material concerning the use and protection of war criminals by other governments and organizations in the early Cold War years. Future historians with greater access to closed foreign records will hopefully follow up on these problems. Chief among them is the Federal Republic of Germany's intelligence policy. In trying to resist CIA control, Gehlen looked for and found influential allies in Bonn. Adenauer and Globke clearly discussed the issue at length before Globke informed the CIA "in a direct and emphatic way" that Gehlen had the Chancellor's support. The Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz Amt employed Hottl throughout 1952 despite his SD record and then circulated his reports within the Chancellery itself. Because the reports earned Heinz a commendation from Adenauer, it took extensive CIA pressure to get Heinz to drop Hottl. Ultimately, it was the moral argument that worked. Hottl's past, they said, "would in the end discredit the entire West German intelligence establishment."

The Freie Mitarbeiter system of the 1950s, through which former SS and Gestapo personnel worked for the Federal German Police while being paid off the books, epitomized by Theo Saevecke, needs further investigation. German police and intelligence records, if ever opened, will provide a far better sense of how many SS officers were employed in these ways and what sorts of intelligence they provided. Yet what the West German government understood about West German intelligence would also help historians to fill out the relationship of the Bonn government with the Nazi past.

 OSS and CIC records continue to spark questions about the Vatican that can only be answered by greater access to Vatican archives. Why did Herbert Kappler, the SS officer who executed Kaltenbrunner's orders to deport Rome's Jews to Auschwitz in October 1943, see the Vatican as an obstacle to the logistics of roundup and deportation? Were Vatican officials providing clandestine help and warnings to the Jews of Rome? Or was Kappler simply imagining problems where none existed? [30] The degree to which Vatican officials helped Nazi and Ustase criminals after the war has also never been fully established, but CIC records make the questions all the more poignant. British intelligence, after all, knew Ante Pavelic's exact location in the Vatican in 1947, and the CIA was sure he was at the Pope's summer residence the following year. U.S. intelligence knew that Draganovic's activities in the College of San Girolamo -- activities that included the hiding of Ustase officials -- were receiving at least tacit Vatican support after the war, and that only the death of Pius XII in 1958 brought Draganovic's removal from the College.

The use and protection of some of the very worst Nazi war criminals by Middle Eastern and South American governments also turns up in the new records in ways that can only be supplemented with full access to the records of those states. When studying the policies of Arab states in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the CIA discovered that the Syrians actively recruited SS officers for intelligence work, perhaps hiring as many as fifty of them, including Walter Rauff, one of the most notorious Gestapo criminals. How Alois Brunner artived in Syria remains a mystery, but CIA records place him there as early as 1957, and NSA intercepts mention his death in Damascus in 1992. Brunner and his associate Franz Rademacher, according to CIA records, advised Syrian police forces at least until the early 1960s, and the Syrian government doggedly protected him until his death. The Egyptians under Gamel Abdel Nasser were no better, having hired a virtual colony of Nazis to help train their forces, including the ubiquitous Skorzeny. Since neither Gehlen nor the CIA could do much to penetrate the Nazi group in Cairo, the truth must await the opening of records there.

Recent work on Argentina shed light on the Peronist sympathy for ex-Nazi and Ustase officials who made homes there after 1945. [31] Chilean records mayor may not illuminate Rauff's activities in that country from his arrival in 1958 until his death in 1984. At the very least, they will clarify the thinking of the Augusto Pinochet government after 1973 when the decision was made over and over again to protect him from extradition and justice. Was it a case of Latin American prickliness at repeated Western pressure, as seems to have been the case when the Bolivian government refused to hand Barbie over to the French in 1972? Or did the Chilean dictator have some sympathy for the aging Nazi criminal as did Paraguay's Alfredo Stroessner in the case of Josef Mengele?

Between the Mossad's capture of Adolf Eichmann in 1960 and the U.S. government's revelations of 1983 concerning its relationship with Klaus Barbie, Western countries gradually moved to the moral side of the war criminal issue. They tried to find and bring to justice former SS perpetrators, regardless of past mistakes in apprehending them. Gestapo Chief Heinrich Muller was never found after the war. But the West German search for him months after the Eichmann capture showed that the Federal Republic's police forces had outgrown the days of the Freie Mitarbeiter. Stories from the end of the war were reexamined, graves were exhumed, and family members were watched -- if Muller was alive, then he would be found. In the following years and decades, the West German government continued to track down the most notorious war criminals of the Nazi period in an effort to bring them to justice. Bonn issued repeated watrants for Mengele's arrest and pressed the governments of Argentina and Paraguay to hand him over. Bonn also demanded that successive Chilean governments hand over Walter Rauff to the point in 1984 where Hermann Holtzheimer, the West German ambassador to Chile, had sharp words indeed for Pinochet's diplomats. Hans Dietrich Genscher, perhaps West Germany's greatest foreign minister, shocked Syrian President Hafez al-Assad in Damascus in 1988 when he raised the desire of his government to arrest Brunner. Assad was stunned to the point where his ambassador in Bonn made a formal protest. Whatever the determination of Chancellor Helmut Kohl to move West Germans beyond the shadow of the Nazi past in the 1980s, Bonn tried until the end to capture and try the worst of the worst.

Meanwhile, the Americans also tried to make up belatedly for the moral lapses involved in earlier intelligence gaffes. Though the Pentagon kept the Army's 1947 relationship with Barbie secret in 1972, thus precluding his extradition to France, the CIA in 1983 realized that it was time to make amends for past errors (especially since the error with Barbie was the CIC's fault anyway). Though couching its reasoning in the context of the exigencies of the early Cold War years, the CIA was nevertheless moved by the realization that the use of Nazi criminals contained a moral component, and that revealing intelligence blunders of four decades previous would not harm contemporary intelligence operation in the least. The government of a liberal democracy would look better in the public eye if it tried to remedy or apologize for past mistakes.

White House and State Department efforts to dislodge the final monsters of the Nazi regime in the mid-1980s should be seen in this context. Thanks to growing scholarship on the Holocaust, media representations of that terrible event, generations' worth of war crimes trials, and recent legal measures to deport Nazi collaborators from the United States, the U.S. used diplomatic pressure and even covert operations aimed at righting past wrongs.

The wretched, disheveled bones of Josef Mengele, unearthed in Brazil four decades after his crimes, showed that it was indeed too late to correct every mistake. Yet some criminals will always escape justice and some elements of global tragedies will always be misunderstood. Such is the nature of mankind. It is not through the attempted correction of the past, but rather through the reckoning with the past, that our nature and our mistakes are best understood. And the truest reckoning with the official past can never be complete without the full release of government records, including those concerned with intelligence. Just as intelligence successes should be celebrated, intelligence failures must be studied. Such is ultimately the point of this book and of the disclosure law that made it possible.

______________

Notes:

1. On U.S. policy, Bradley F. Smith, The Road to Nuremberg (New York: Basic, 1981); idem., The American Road to Nuremberg: The Documentary Record (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1982). On international pressures, Arieh J. Kochavi, Prelude to Nuremberg: Allied War Crimes Policy and the Question of Punishment (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

2. Albrecht Gotz, Bilanz der Verfolgung von NS-Straftaten (Koln: Bundesanzeiger, 1986), pp. 9-29; Frank M. Buscher, The US war Crimes Trial Program in Germany, 1946-1955 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989).

3. "John McCloy and the Landsberg Cases," in American Policy and the Reconstruction of West Germany, 1945-1955, eds. Jeffry M. Diefendorf, Axel Frohn, and Hermann-Josef Rupieper (New York: Cambridge University Press, Publications of the German Historical Institute, 1933), pp. 433-54.

4. In general George Ginsburgs, Moscow's Road to Nuremberg: The Soviet Background to the Trial (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1996); Manfred Zeidler, "Der Minsker Kriegsverbrecherprozess von Januar 1946: Kritische Anmerkungen zu einem sowjetishchen Schauprozess gegen deutsche Kriegsgefangene," Vierteljahrshefte fur Zeitgeschichte 52 (April 2004): 211-44.

5. Walter Laqueur and Richard Breitman, Breaking the Silence: The German Who Exposed the Final Solution (Hanover: The University Press of New England); Richard Breitman, Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998).

6. For the former arguments see Michael Neufeld and Michael Berenbaum, eds., The Bombing of Auschwitz: Should the Allies Have Attempted It? (New York: St. Martin's, 2000); Yehuda Bauer, Jews for Sale: Nazi-Jewish Negotiations, 1933-1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 120ff.

7. Chapters 1, 2, and 8.

8. Chapter 1.

9. Ginsburgs, Moscow's Road to Nuremberg, pp. 37-40.

10. Chapter 1.

11. Chapter 2.

12. Chapter 7.

13. See most recently Reinhard Doerries, ed., Hitler's Last Chief of Foreign Intelligence: Allied Interrogations of Walter Schellenberg (London: Frank Cass, 2003).

14. Chapter 5.

15. Chapter 4. On Becher, see most recently Ronald Zweig, The Gold Train: The Destruction of the Jews and the Looting of Hungary (New York: Morrow, 2002), appendix.

16. Chapters 3 and 12.

17. Chapter 10, pp. 268-69.

18. NA, RG 263, Emil Augsburg Name File; Chapters 11 and 14. On Skorzeny, NA, RG 65, File 100-344753, Section 14.

19. Steven P. Remy, The Heidelberg Myth: The Nazification and Denazification of a German University (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 146ff.


20. HQ 7708 War Crimes Group, European Command to HQ 970th CIC Detachment, 12 September 1947, NA, RG 319, IRR Personal Files (Optical Disc), File Heinz Reinefarth.

21. British Embassy Memorandum of 20 February 1951, 1661/4/51G, NA, RG 59, West European Affairs 41-54, Box 8.

22. Department of State Memorandum, 13 March 1951, NA, RG 59, West European Affairs 41-54, Box 8. For Reinefarth's work for the CIC, see NARA, RG 319, IRR Personal Files (Optical Disc): Heinz Reinefarth.

23. Biographical information on Hofle is available in his SS Personnel File, United States National Archives ( A), Record Group 242, Berlin Document Center, Microfilm A-3343, SSO 102A. See also Joseph Wulf, Das Dritte Reich und seine Vollstrecker (Frankfurt: Arani Verlag, 1984), 275-87; Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 19, 44-5, 54,61.

24. IRR Files Hermann Julius Hofle, NA RG 319 AE 544 848WJ and XE 000631.

25. See Peter Wine and Stephen Tyas, "A New Document on the Deportation and Murder of Jews during 'Einsatz Reinhardt' 1942," Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 15, no. 3 (2001): 468-86.

26. Chapters 9, 11, and 13.

27. Chapter 14.

28. Chapter 9.

29. NA, RG 263, Friedrich Panzinger Name File; Ibid., Heinz Pannwitz Name File.

30. Chapter 3.

31. Uki Goni, The Real Odessa: How Peron Brought the Nazi War Criminals to Argentina (London: Granta Books, 2002).
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Re: U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, by Richard Breitman, No

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Appendix: Western Communications Intelligence Systems and the Holocaust
by Robert J. Hanyok

ONE OF THE GREATEST ADVANTAGES that the United States and Great Britain had in their struggle against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan during the Second World War was their ability to decode or decipher the secret military and diplomatic messages of the Axis powers. [1] Although this ability was limited in many ways, it provided important intelligence about Axis military operations, Axis appreciation of the Allied strategy, and international relations during the war.

The Allied exploitation of Germany's Enigma cipher machine, referred to popularly as "Ultra," was finally revealed with the publication of F.W. Winterbotham's The Ultra Secret in 1974. [2] This book provided information about an aspect of the war that had only been hinted at over the thirty years since the war ended, though there had been a partial revelation years before about America's prewar exploitation of Japan's diplomatic cipher machine, code named "Purple." Many memoirs and histories followed that revealed more of the Allied code-breaking success.

Not long after these revelations, scholars began to ask what Allied code-breaking efforts revealed about the Nazi plans to eliminate Jews and others considered inferior by the Third Reich. In the early 1980s, the first histories were published that contained information about the Holocaust obtained from code breaking. These few histories were quite limited and cited no archival records, which remained classified and unavailable to the public. [3] It was not until 1996 that the National Security Agency (NSA) released to the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration its incomplete set of decrypts of German police units that had operated in the USSR. Along with the police decrypts, NSA released almost 250,000 translations of multinational diplomatic decrypts that contained further information about the Holocaust. In May 1997, the British Public Record Office (PRO) finally released the complete set of several thousand German police decrypts. [4]

Scholars found that the number of decrypts or translations of Axis or neutral radio messages related to the Holocaust held in the National Archives and the PRO was not particularly large. In the National Archives, there were about five hundred such records, while in the PRO, the number of German police decrypts containing information about police massacres in Russia or about the concentration camps represented a small percentage of the thousands that were available.

Considering the scale of the Holocaust -- which involved, to a degree, all countries of Europe -- and the fact that the eradication of Europe's Jews was a prime Nazi goal, the number of decrypts and translations of intercepted messages seemed meager in comparison. [5] It could be construed from this apparent shortage that a large body of classified records had not been released, or that many undecrypted messages were still held by the code-breaking agencies. However, these suggestions were disproved by the continued release of both World War II era records by intelligence agencies and other records processed for release under the aegis of the Interagency Working Group. The fact that there were relatively few decrypts and translations was due to the way Allied code-breaking agencies operated during the war.

The Allied system for obtaining intelligence from Axis communications was known as communications intelligence or CO MINT. The United States and Great Britain were the major Allied COMINT powers. The cryptologic agencies were heart of these operations: the U.S. Army Signal Intelligence Service (SIS), the U.S. Navy OP-20-G, and Britain's Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS). [6] The United States also utilized the Coast Guard, the Office of Strategic Services, the Federal Communications Commission, and the Office of Censorship (for cable traffic), and the British used its Radio Security Service, the General Post Office, and Secret Intelligence Service (MI-6). In addition, the Commonwealth countries of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and Britain's colony of India provided substantial numbers of personnel, especially in the Middle East, Pacific, and Asian theaters of operation. There also were detachments from Poland, France, the Netherlands, and China. By war's end, COMINT had developed into a worldwide, interconnected system of intercept sites, processing centers, associated analysts, and linguists, with a dissemination system that delivered COMINT to the Allied leadership. [7]

Nevertheless, COMINT was unable to exploit all or even a major part of Axis and neutral communications. There were two main reasons. The first was the disparity between the size and breadth of the Axis communications networks and the Allied COMINT structure. The second reason was that there were several technical shortcomings within the COMINT system. While, on occasion, the Allies were able to completely exploit a particular Axis radio network or cipher system, the overall result was uneven.

The Allied COMINT system during World War II included four major steps: (1) determining Axis targets, (2) intercepting targeted communications, (3) analyzing and translating the decrypt, and (4) disseminating the intelligence to the Allied leadership. The steps of the system were interrelated; a significant change to one step affected all the others.

Step 1: Setting Priorities

For the Allies, the most difficult step in the COMINT system was to decide what Axis or neutral communications to target for intercept and processing. There were thousands of Axis radio terminals in hundreds of radio networks around the world supporting military, naval, diplomatic, intelligence, security, and commercial entities. They utilized hundreds of cryptographic systems, from simple hand ciphers to extensive codes and intricate machines such as Enigma, Purple, Jade, and Tunny. [8] Added to this electronic horde were hundreds of additional neutral networks and cryptographic systems.

COMINT simply could not target all Axis communications networks. The British, and later the Americans, lacked the personnel, facilities, and the technology to monitor and analyze adequately all Axis and neutral communications. This disparity between Axis communications output and COMINT capabilities meant that intelligence chiefs in Washington and London had to set priorities that they hoped would produce the intelligence that most met current and critical Allied needs. Military requirements were the highest priority for the COMINT agencies throughout the war.

In the various combat theaters, cryptologic assignments among the Allies followed de facto theater preeminence. In Europe, the GC&CS was considered the principal Allied cryptologic agency. The Atlantic was shared by the GC&CS and OP-20-G. In the Pacific, the U.S. SIS and OP-20-G supervised intercept and cryptanalytic operations. In the theater comprising India and Burma, the British dominated activities.

In July 1943, the United States and Great Britain reached an accord that divided COMINT tasks and responsibilities. Known as the BRUSA Agreement, the two countries agreed to a complete exchange of finished military intelligence. [9] Except for U-boat traffic, unprocessed or "raw" intercept was not exchanged. Diplomatic traffic was not covered by this agreement, though a separate sharing mechanism was set up in August. Theater atrangements remained in place, though integrated Allied operations were established. The British continued to collect and process all German intelligence and security-related radio traffic in Europe, including German police, SS, and SD messages that related to the Holocaust. In accordance with the BRUSA Agreement, this material was shared with the United States, specifically through the War Department's Special Branch and the OSS liaison staffs in England.

Target priorities could change during the war as the situation watranted. A good example was Switzerland. Because of Bern's historic role as a neutral, early in the war, both Allied COMINT organizations targeted Swiss diplomatic communications. However, they produced little intelligence. There were some technical reasons for this. For one, much of Switzerland's communications with Europe went by cable, which could not be intercepted. Also, Switzerland used twenty-two diplomatic manual ciphers plus a version of the Enigma. Even after the Allies broke the Swiss Enigma, they found there was little intelligence of interest. [10] So the mission languished into 1944.

The situation changed in mid-1944, when it was discovered that Swiss diplomats were reporting on conditions in Eastern Europe as the Red Army drove out German forces. Of particular interest was Hungary, which, in the late summer, had secretly approached the Allies about surrender. The government in Budapest was seized during a German-engineered coup in October. During this period, the Allies stepped up collection of Swiss messages from Budapest. These intercepts, meant to cover the political situation, provided unexpected intelligence on the Nazi roundup of Hungarian Jews supervised by Adolf Eichmann. Supplemented by reports from the U.S. Ambassador in Switzerland, the Allies received a detailed picture of the removal of about half a million Hungarian Jews and the desperate efforts by neutral diplomats in Budapest, led by Raoul Wallenberg, to save some of the victims.

In a similar fashion earlier in 1941, British cryptologists had unexpectedly obtained intelligence about massacres by German police units in the western USSR. From 1939, the British had been intercepting and decrypting police messages as a supplementary source of intelligence on administrative matters and the order of battle of the German military, as well as information about domestic conditions in Germany and occupied Europe. From a cryptanalytic aspect, German police manual ciphers also provided insight into similar German armed forces systems. The British intercepted and decrypted SS Enigma radio messages for much the same reasons. Later, it was discovered that the SS radio messages carried information about the concentration camps. [11]

This information from the police and SS decrypts was passed to, among others, the British Foreign Office, which was accumulating evidence for later possible war crimes proceedings. There is no evidence that the decrypts were used in the War Crimes Tribunals. [12] Evidence from captured documents and debriefs of SS and police personnel was often enough for conviction. Throughout the war, German police and SS radio nets that carried such information remained a lower priority target than the communications of Axis military and selected diplomatic targets. [13]

Step 2: Intercepting Enemy Messages

By the end of the war, the Allies had established about a hundred sites worldwide that performed radio intercept and related activities, such as frequency research and direction finding. In addition to targeting the radio communications of Axis and neutral radio nets, the United States and Great Britain censored all incoming and outgoing cable traffic. This effort, managed by the British General Post Office and the U.S. Office of Censorship, obtained copies of all cable telegrams, including those of foreign diplomatic stations located in both countries.

While the Allied intercept effort was extensive, it also was hampered by a number of limitations that reduced the number of Axis messages that could be collected. For example, censorship worked only if the cables passed through a terminal controlled by the United States or Great Britain. Many countries were aware of this and took measures to reduce the vulnerability of their messages. [14]

When it came to intercepting radio messages, the disparity between the number of Allied intercept facilities and the number of Axis radio stations was a major factor that affected the degree of coverage. Even the nearly one hundred intercept and direction-finding sites were not enough; the Allies had to consider every Axis military unit, plane, ship, security unit, and diplomatic facility a potential target. Precise numbers of Axis daily message levels are not available; however, some estimates from the Pacific campaign suggest that a single Japanese area army command could send as many as fourteen hundred messages a day. [15]

Other factors, such as local weather conditions or the presence of sunspots, the distance between a monitoring station and the target transmitter, terrain, and even the time of day affected the quality of intercepts. These and other environmental conditions were critical when the Allies considered locations for intercept sites.

One monitoring station, Poste de Commandement Cadix, merits a short mention because of its unique contribution to the intercept of German police messages from 1941 to the end of 1942. PC Cadix was a covert Allied intercept site located in the southeastern part of unoccupied France. It had been formed in 1939 by the head of the French Army's radio intelligence organization, Colonel Gustave Bertrand. The site was staffed by a polyglot team of Poles, exiled Spanish Loyalists, and French.

Due to peculiarities of the nighttime propagation of radio signals, PC Cadix was able to monitor German military and police radio traffic from western USSR. Among the traffic collected by Bertrand's team were over three thousand German police messages, which were eventually decrypted. The decrypts were transmitted to Bletchley Park, having first been encrypted, ironically, with a German Enigma device. PC Cadix continued to operate until early November 1942, when the German occupation of southern France forced the team to flee. [16]

Step 3: Processing Intercepts

Once messages had been intercepted, they were forwarded to a theater or national center for processing; that is, analysis and translation. In the beginning of the war, intercepts from overseas sites were sent by courier. By 1944, worldwide secure radio and cable communications linked all of the Allied stations. Intercepts encrypted in high-level systems such as Enigma and Purple were sent to the main analytic centers at Arlington Hall, Virginia; OP-20-G Headquarters in Washington, D.C., and to Bletchley Park, England. These sites were the heart of the analytic effort, staffed with thousands of people who worked many steps of the analytic process.

After an intercepted message had been received, it was reviewed by analysts who extracted intelligence from its addresses, radio frequency, message priority, and cryptographic system. Next, if the encrypted text was "clean copy," without substantial missing cipher groups, it was decrypted. This was a formidable task. Allied cryptanalysts worked against over 200 diplomatic codes and ciphers and several hundred military systems. The more a system was used, the better the chance it would be decrypted. However, despite the image of overall success created by the exploits against Enigma and Purple, many Axis and neutral systems were only partly exploited or never broken at all. The Gestapo version of the Enigma and even a Vatican cipher completely resisted Allied cryptanalytic efforts. [17]

How effective overall was Allied decryption? It is a difficult to evaluate just how much intercept was exploited by the cryptanalysts. Certainly, for some campaigns, such as the one against the U-boats, the cryptanalytic success rate may have been quite high. For one period, however, from about February to November 1942, the Allies could not exploit messages sent with new model Enigmas that were used by the U-boats. [18] Where there are statistics, the picture is one of very limited success. For example, in a July 1945 OP-20-G report, it was noted that only 10 percent of all intercepted Japanese naval messages were processed fully and disseminated. [19] In another case, in 1944, Arlington Hall noted that of 576,000 diplomatic intercepts, about 89,000, or roughly 15 percent, were solved by the cryptanalysts. [20]

Once solved by the code breakers, the revealed message texts were passed to linguists. They would produce a formal translation for use in intelligence staff reports. The Allies faced serious problems when it came to translating intercepted messages. For one, they had to account for over three-dozen languages, ranging from French to Amharic. In addition, the cryptologists had to vie for scarce linguists with other services, such as the Allied Translator and Interpreter Section (ATIS).

The few statistics available indicate that the rate of translation was not high. The Arlington Hall statistics from 1944 show that of the 89,000 decrypts, about 50,000 were translated. This is about 56 percent of the decrypts, but only 8.6 percent of the total intercepts. [21] In 1940, the Diplomatic and Commercial Section of GC&CS intercepted about 100,000 messages from cable and radio. The Section read about 70,000, but only circulated 8,000 translations, or 8 percent of the total intercepts. [22]

The difficulties enumerated above greatly affected the time it took to process an intercept, which, in turn, affected the value of the intelligence for Allied leaders. A good example involves two translations concerning the roundup of the Hungarian Jews in June 1944. Both messages were intercepted by the army site at Asmara, Ethiopia, and were received at Arlington Hall one day later. The first, a Vichy diplomatic message from Budapest to Ankara, Turkey, was intercepted on June 13 and was published as a formal translation on June 24. The second, a Hungarian diplomatic report from Budapest also to Ankara, took from June 27 to December 16 to be completely processed and published as a translation.

Any number of reasons can be found for the difference, principally that Vichy diplomatic cryptography had been exploited by Arlington Hall for almost two years prior, while Hungarian systems were still being recovered; furthermore, French was easier than Magyar to translate. The long delay does not exclude the possibility that the information in the Hungarian intercept may have been passed informally to a recipient, such as the U.S. State Department. However, the months it took to process the Hungarian intercept illustrates the difficulty the Allies faced in getting intelligence from source to user in a timely manner.

Finally, Allied cryptologists did not always know what to make of certain intelligence. To give just one example, in early January 1943, the British intercepted an SS message from Lublin (in occupied Poland) to Berlin that reported the outcome of Operation Reinhardt. In the decrypted text was a series of letters followed by numbers. This decrypt went unreported by intelligence officials probably because the significance of the numbers and the reference to Operation Reinhardt were not understood. Only recently have scholars determined that this message reported the number of victims in the death camps located in Poland -- some 1,274,166 killed at Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and Lublin during 1942, the first year of Operation Reinhardt, the cover name for the extermination of the Jews at these camps. [23]

Step 4: Dissemination

Once a translation was completed, the intelligence had to be given to those who needed it. It was recognized early in the war that COMINT was both the best source of intelligence about Axis plans and operations and was also the most vulnerable to compromise. To lose the ability to trust intelligence gathered via COMINT -- what Churchill on one occasion called his "golden eggs" -- could have seriously hampered an Allied victory. [24]

Britain and the U.S. created special staffs to securely distribute intelligence. There were the British Joint Intelligence Committee and the U.S. War Department's Special Branch. Both received intelligence from all sources: COMINT, prisoner interrogation, captured documents, diplomatic reports, and photographic intelligence. This material either was transmitted overseas to special liaison and security personnel for further distribution, or was combined into special all-intelligence reports that were disseminated within the Allied governments. COMINT easily was the most prevalent source in these reports.

Within the departments of the Allied governments, COMINT intelligence was circulated by a combination of summary-type reports and personal briefings. In the United States this first method was accomplished primarily with the "Magic" diplomatic summary. Drawn up by the Special Branch, this summary contained digests of translations based mostly on diplomatic sources. President Roosevelt also received personal daily briefings based on selected diplomatic and military translations received from the Special Branch. [25] A review of both the "Magic" summary and the translations selected for the White House indicates that very little COMINT intelligence about the Holocaust reached the White House and the rest of the U.S. government. The "Magic" summary contained less than twenty citations about the Holocaust. [26] However, FDR received much information from other sources, such as the State Department, private individuals, and the Office of Strategic Services. [27]

Churchill, because of the British exploitation of German police messages, received briefings about their atrocities in the western Soviet Union during the early phase of Operation Barbarosa, the Nazi invasion of the USSR. On August 24, 1941, Prime Minister Churchill gave a radio address that alluded to atrocities committed against the Russian civilian population by German police units. While no mention was made of Jewish victims of the police actions, the mention of the German police possibly compromised the source of Churchill's information.

On September 12, 1941, Kurt Daluege, the commander of the German police, sent a message to his units ordering the cessation of radio reports concerning the executions of Jews. Three weeks had passed since Churchill's speech, and it is probable that the German police hierarchy spent that time evaluating it. Daluege's order refers to the "danger of enemy decipherment of wireless messages." [28] Whatever the reason, while the reports did not stop right away or completely, the level of information eventually dropped off. In November 1941, the German police changed their cipher system. Ironically, the Germans adopted a system that was easier to exploit. Still, the British believed that Daluege's order and the cryptographic change were inspired, at least in part, by Churchill's speech. [29]

_______________

Notes:

1. A code is a set of arbitrary groups of letters, numbers, or other symbols used to replace words, phrases, letters, or numbers for the purposes of concealment or brevity. A cipher is a method of concealing plaintext by transposing letters or numbers or by substituting other letters or numbers according to a key. Communications intelligence (COMINT) is defined as all activities, including code breaking or cryptanalysis, used to exploit the communications of Axis and neutral countries. Cryptology is the science of making and breaking codes or cipher systems.

2. F.W. Winterbotham, The Ultra Secret (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).

3. Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth About Hitler's ''Final Solution" (New York: Owl Books, 1998 edition) 84-86; British Intelligence in the Second World War, F.H. Hinsley et al., vol. 2 (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1981) appendix 5, 669-73.

4. The police decrypts are located in NA, RG 457, Historical Cryptographic Collection (HCC), box 1386, and in the Public Record Office, HW/16, "GC&CS: German Police Decrypts." The diplomatic translations are located in RG 457, boxes 286-523. In 2003 the PRO was renamed the National Archives.

5. Gerhard Weinberg demonstrated the high priority of this Nazi intention in A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 95-96, 191-92.

6. The Signal Intelligence Service underwent several ride changes during the war. From 1929 to 1942, it was the SIS. In June 1942, it was briefly renamed the Signal Intelligence Service Division. One month later it was renamed the Signal Security Division (SSD). In 1943, the SSO became the Signal Security Service. In late summer 1943, the SSS became the Signal Security Agency (SSA). It remained the SSA until September 15, 1945, when the SSA became the Army Security Agency.

7. Eunan O'Halpin, "Small States and Big Secrets: Understanding SIGINT Cooperation between Unequal Powers during the Second World War," intelligence and National Security 17, no. 3, Autumn 2002), 1-16.

8. The Enigma and Purple cipher machines are well known from the literature of World War II. Less famous Axis cipher machines were also exploited for intelligence. Tunny was the cover name applied to the Lorenz Company's on-line enciphered teleprinter known to the Germans as Schluesselzusatz 40 or SZ-40. GC&CS first broke into it in late 1942.

9. BRUSA is an acronym for Britain-United States of America. For more on the BRUSA Agreement and its background see Robert L. Benson, A History of U.S. Communications Intelligence during World war II: Policy and Administration (Fort George G. Meade, MD: National Security Agency, Center for Cryptologic History, 1997), 97-133; and Bradley F. Smith, The Ultra-Magic Deals and the Most Secret Special Relationship, 1940-1946 (Novato, CA: Presidio, 1993), 105-70.

10. David H. Hamer, Geoff Sullivan, and Frode Weierud, "Enigma Variations: An Extended Family of Machines." Cryptologia 23, no. 3 (July 1988); SSA "Effort against the Swiss Cipher Machine (SZD)"; NA, RG 457, HCC, box 1284.

11. Hinsley et al., British Intelligence, 669-71.

12. GC&CS "Accumulating Evidence for War Crimes," PRO HW 14/55, Oct. 1942; Stephen Budiansky, Battle of Wits: The Complete Story of Code breaking in World War II (New York: Free Press, 2000), 202; Richard Breitman, Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), 191, 212-15.

13. Memorandum, Priorities for Operation of the Signal security Service, 8 Mar. 1943. SRH-145, "Collection of Memoranda on Operations of SIS Intercept Activities and Dissemination, 1942-1945" (Fort George G. Meade, MD, 1983) 92.

14. For example, see Lisbon (Foreign Minister) to Washington, 22 June 1944, MC-916, in which the Washington Embassy is reminded to paraphrase public text, such as speeches, so as to avoid the use of them as plaintext cribs; also, Washington (Hopenot/Baudet) to Algiers, 13 May 1944, MC-806, in which the French Committee for National Liberation is reminded that all cables can be obtained by the "enemy" and exploited because the cables were encoded with Vichy codes, NA, RG 457, HCC, box 879, "Code Instructions"; finally, Berlin (Oshima) to Tokyo, 5 Mar. 1944, CI-1813, in which the Japanese diplomats in Germany discreetly instruct Tokyo to keep new communications routes secret from the British "telegraph office." NA, RG 457, HCC, box 954, folder 2863 -- Japanese Message Translations Categorized as CI (Code Instructions) for Diplomats, 1943-45.

15. Edward J. Drea, MacArthur's ULTRA: Codebreaking and the War against Japan, 1942-1945 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992), 52-53.

16. Gustave Bertrand, Enigma: Ou la Plus Grande Enigme de la Guerre, 1939-1945 (Paris: Plon, 1973) 118, 129-30.

17. For a complete listing of GC&CS success against the various Enigma keys, see Hinsley et al., appendix 4, 656-668; David Alvarez, Secret Messages: Codebreaking and American Diplomacy, 1930-1945 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 176; "History of the Solution of Vatican Systems in SSA and GCCS, 1943-44" (Washington: Sept. 1944) NA, RG 457 HCC, box 1284.

18. In February 1942, U-boats replaced the three-wheel Enigma with a new four-wheel Enigma, which exponentially increased the work factor for decryption.

19. Memorandum, Naval Inspector General to Secretary of the Navy, Serial 001971, "Survey of OP-20-G Section of Naval Communications Division of the Bureau of Naval Personnel which Procures Uniformed Naval Personnel," 13 July 1945, NA, RG 457, HCC, box 1286, Item 23 (d).

20. Frank B. Rowlett, The Story of Magic: Memoirs of an American Cryptologic Pioneer (Laguna Hills, CA: Aegean Park Press, 1998), 253-54.

21. Ibid.

22. Non-notated and unsigned memorandum on diplomatic cryptanalysis for 1940, 13 Jan. 1941, HW 14/11, "Government Code and Cypher School: Directorate, Second World War Policy Papers," as cited in John Ferris, "The Road to Bletchley Park: The British Experience with Signals Intelligence, 1892-1945," Intelligence and National Security 17, no. 1, (Spring 2002), 53-84.

23. Peter Witte and Stephen Tyas, "A New Document on the Deportation and Murder of Jews during 'Einsatz Reinhardt 1942,''' Holocaust and Genocide Studies 15, no. 3, (Winter 2001), 468-86.

24. According to Ronald Lewin, Ultra Goes to War: The First Account of World War II's Greatest Secret Based on Official Documents (New York: Pocket Books, 1978), 210.

25. David Kahn, "Roosevelt, Magic, and Ultra," Cryptologia 16, no. 4, (October 1992), 289-319; SRH-III "Magic Reports for the Attention of the President, 1943-1944" (Fort George G. Meade, MD: National Security Agency, 1980).

26. Alexander S. Cochran Jr., The MAGIC Diplomatic Summaries: A Chronological Finding Aid (New York: Garland, 1982).

27 Joseph E. Persico, Roosevelt's Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage (New York: Random House, 2001), 315-20; Laqueur, Terrible Secret, 94-6; Breitman, Official Secrets, 150-52.

28. 13 Sept. 1941, NA, RG 457, HCC, box 1386, item 12.

29. Breitman, Official Secrets, 92-96; Budiansky, Battle of Wits, 199-201.
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Re: U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, by Richard Breitman, No

Postby admin » Wed Jun 27, 2018 5:56 am

Terms and Acronyms

Anschluss: Germany's annexation of Austria (March 1938)
ATIS: Allied Translator and Interpreter Section
BfV: Bundesamt fur Verfassungsschutz, Federal Republic of Germany
Office for the Protection of the Constitution
BKA: German Federal Police Office
BND: Bundesnachrichrendienst, German Secret Service
CIC: U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps
CIG: Central Intelligence Group
COI: Coordinator of Information
DCI: Director of Central Intelligence
Devisenbewirtschaftung: Reich Office for Foreign Exchange Control
EUCOM: U.S. European Command
FGI: foreign government information
FHO: Fremde Heere Ost, Foreign Armies-East,
Forschungsamt: Research Office, a German intelligence organization
GAO: General Accounting Office
Generalmajor: Rank comparable to U.S. Army Brigadier General
GIS: German Intelligence Service
GRU: Glavonoye Rasvodyvatelnoye Upravalenie, Red Army Intelligence
HAP: Historical Advisory Panel
ICRC: International Committee of the Red Cross
ILO: International Labor Office
IMT: International Military Tribunal
INS: Immigration and Naturalization Service
IWG: Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group
JCS: Joint Chiefs of Staff
JIOA: Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency
KPD: Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, Communist Party of Germany
Kripo: Kriminalpolizei, Third Reich criminal police
MHBK: Magyar Harcosok Bajtarsi Kozossege, Hungarian Warriors Comradeship Association
MID: Military Intelligence Division
MNRI: Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario de Izquierda, National Revolutionary Party of the Left
NKVD: Narodnyi Kommissariat Vnutrennikh Del, Soviet Secret Police
NSDAP: Nationalsozialistische deutsche Arbeiterpartei, Nazi party
NTS: Narodno-Trudovio Soiuz, National Alliance of Russian Solidarist
Oberstleutnant: Rank comparable to U.S. Army Lt. Colonel
OKW: Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, High Command of the German Armed Forces
OMGUS: Office of Military Government United States
OSI: Office of Special Investigations (Department of Justice)
 OSS: Office of Strategic Services
OUN: Organization of Ukranian Nationalists
PWE: Political Warfare Executive
RSHA: Reichssicherheitshauptamt, Reich Security Main Office
RSI: Republica Sociale Italiana, Italian Social Republic
RWM: Reichswirtschaftsministerium, Reich Ministry of Economics
Schutzpolizei: municipal police
SD: Sicherheitsdienst, SS intelligence organization
SHAEF: Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force
SIM: Servizio Informazioni Militare, Italian military intelligence service
Sipo: Sicherheitspolizei, security police, a branch of the RSHA
SS: Schutzstaffeln, Protective Corps
SS-Brigadefuhrer: Rank comparable to U.S. Army Brigadier General
SS-Gruppenfuhrer: Rank comparable to U.S. Army Maj. General
SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer: Rank comparable to U.S. Army Captain
SS-Obergruppenfuhrer: Rank comparable to U.S. Army Lt. General
SS-Oberscharfuhrer: Rank comparable to U.S. Army Staff Sergeant
SS-Obersrgruppenfuhrer: Rank comparable to U.S. Army General
SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer: Rank comparable to U.S. Army Lt. Colonel
SS-Obersturmfuhrer: Rank comparable to U.S. Army 1st Lt.
SS-Standartenfuhrer: Rank comparable to U.S. Army Colonel
SS-Sturmbannfuhrer: Rank comparable to U.S. Army Major
SS-Untersturmfuhrer: Rank comparable to U.S. Army 2nd Lt.
UHVR: Ukrainska Holovna Vyzvolna Rada, Supreme Ukrainian Liberation Council
UPA: Ukrainska povstanska armiia, Ukranian Insurgent Army
USFET: U.S. Forces European Theater
USMS: U.S. Marshals Service
WASt: Wehrmachtsauskunftsstelle, Third Reich Armed Forces Information Office
ZfH: Zentrale fur Heimatdienst, a postwar German government information and education office
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Re: U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, by Richard Breitman, No

Postby admin » Wed Jun 27, 2018 6:16 am

Selected Bibliography

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---. Death in Rome. New York: Macmillan, 1967.

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Re: U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, by Richard Breitman, No

Postby admin » Wed Jun 27, 2018 6:22 am

Record Groups Cited

RG 38: Records of the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations
RG 59: General Records of the Department of State
RG 65: Records of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
RG 84: Records of the Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State
RG 85: Records of the Immigrations and Naturalization Service (INS)
RG 131: Records of the Office of Alien Property
RG 165: Records of the War Department General and Special Staffs
RG 200: National Archives Collection of Donated Materials (formerly RG 200)
RG 226: Records of the Office of Strategic Services
RG 238: National Archives Collection of World War II War Crimes Records
RG 239: Records of the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas
RG 242: National Archives Collection of Foreign Records Seized
RG 260: Records of the Office of Military Government United States (OMGUS)
RG 263: Records of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
RG 316: Records of the Japan-United States Friendship Commission
RG 319: Records of the Army Staff
RG 330: Records of the Office of the Secretary of Defense
RG 332: Records of U.S. Theaters of War, World War II
RG 338: Records of the U.S. Army Commands, 1942-
RG 457: Records of the National Security Agency/Central Security Service
RG 466: Records of the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany
RG 493: S.S. Army China-Burma-India Theaters
RG 498: Records of U.S. Theaters of War
RG 549: Records of United States Army, Europe
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