But the anecdotal evidence concerning the significance of these programs is strong. The role of former Nazi collaborators and U.S. intelligence agencies in promoting the penetration of liberationist political thinking into the American body politic may be traced through several clear steps. First, the rhetoric and the detailed strategies for the "liberation" of the USSR and Eastern Europe were originally generated before World War II by pro-Fascist emigre organizations enjoying direct sponsorship from Nazi Germany's intelligence agencies, which were intent on using these groups as pawns in their plans to exterminate European Jewry and to achieve a military victory in the East. The Nazis significantly developed both the liberation strategies and their exile constituencies during the war, despite the Germans' own internal factional fighting over how to make best use of collaborators.' Secondly, after the war U.S. intelligence agencies brought leaders of a number of these pro-Fascist groups-the Ukrainian OUN, the Russian nationalist NTS, the Albanian Balli Kombetar, certain of the Baltic Nazi collaborators, etc.-into the United States through programs the specific purpose of which was, in part, the generation of effective anti-Communist propaganda. Next, these same exile leaders aggressively promoted essentially the same liberation propaganda in the United States that they had advocated under Nazi sponsorship, though now with a new appeal to American values, such as democracy and freedom, rather than the earlier open advocacy of racial politics and fascism. The CIA gave these domestic publicity campaigns multimillion-dollar clandestine backing during the 1950s by providing operating cash, salaries, and logistic and publishing support and-not least-by facilitating endorsements from respected mainstream politicians.

“The government's use of Nazis and collaborators in intelligence programs has also left a mark on life in the United States itself. This impact is what is known in spy jargon as "blowback," meaning unexpected-and negative effects at home that result from covert operations overseas.”

Blowback
America's recruitment of Nazis,
and its disastrous effect on our domestic and foreign policy
by Christopher Simpson
Collier / Macmillan, 1988


p3
The basic rationale U.S. policymakers used after 1945 to justify employment of former Nazis and collaborators was the possibility- no, the imminence-of the outbreak of a new war between the United States and the USSR.
The American anticipation of a cataclysm was reinforced by the East-West geopolitical confrontation in Europe and the Mideast in the first years after World War II; by the shortage of reliable information about actual conditions in the east; and not infrequently by religious doctrine that asserted that the Communists were Satan's army on earth.' Such perceptions varied from individual to individual, of course, but were by no means a fringe phenomenon.
The actual balance of forces in Europe during the decade following 1945, however, meant that neither the United States nor the USSR was capable of unilaterally imposing its will on the other through military force alone. The Soviets' advantage in troop strength and geographical position gave it powerful leverage in Eastern Europe, America's atomic bomb and economic wealth notwithstanding.
Given that situation, President Harry Truman ordered a program of psychological warfare, covert operations, and intelligence gathering aimed at the USSR and its satellites that began as early as 1945 and significantly accelerated in the years that followed. Recently declassified records make clear that by 1948 Truman had approved claimed to have large networks of sympathizers behind Soviet lines. German intelligence specialists like General Reinhard Gehlen, who had run these networks during the war, asserted that a modest infusion of American money and arms could produce secure organizations of espionage agents, saboteurs, and strong-arm specialists inside the East bloc countries and in the teeming refugee camps that then dotted western Germany. The idea, in a nutshell, was secretly to underwrite the work of these groups in much the same way that the Allies had backed resistance forces inside German-occupied territory during the war.
Contrary to the promises once made inside secret U.S. government councils that the use of such persons would be of practical benefit to this country, the truth is that these Nazi utilization programs have frequently been disasters, even when all ethical considerations are laid aside; Their behind-the-lines spy teams are now known to have been largely nonexistent, and those that did exist were laced with Soviet double agents. Instead of building a relatively airtight anti-Communist spy service, the same old boy circles used to recruit former Nazis ended up giving the USSR a relatively easy way to penetrate legitimate U.S. intelligence gathering on Soviet military capabilities and intentions. U.S.-sponsored secret warfare campaigns employing these recruits failed consistently, leading to the arrests, imprisonments, and sometimes executions of thousands of Eastern Europeans.
The government's use of Nazis and collaborators in intelligence programs has also left a mark on life in the United States itself. This impact is what is known in spy jargon as "blowback," meaning unexpected-and negative effects at home that result from covert operations overseas.
Often blowback from CIA clandestine work abroad has been no more (and no less) alarming than, say, a fraudulent news report planted in a European magazine that later shows up in U.S. publications as fact. Sometimes, however, the problem has become far more serious. In a case revealed here for the first time, an organization of former SS and German military intelligence experts provided false information that nearly led to World War III. In another instance Senator Joseph McCarthy employed a secret U.S. espionage squad made up in part of Nazi collaborators to gather slanderous information used to smear political opponents.
Despite these negative consequences, the existence of U.S. operations employing ex-Nazis has remained a carefully kept secret in the West. There has been a certain convergence of powerful interests, rather than the great conspiracy that some critics have alleged, that has kept this story buried. The American government, for example, has not been inclined to publicize the men and women involved in sensitive "national security" missions. Many U.S. documents concerning these programs have been systematically purged from the files and destroyed, and the majority of the records that remain are still classified above "secret." Most of the men who put together the U.S. program-including the CIA's former chief of clandestine operations Frank Wisner and his boss, CIA Director Allen Dulles-are dead. Most of those who are still alive refuse to talk.
Until recently the U.S. media could usually be counted on to maintain a discreet silence about emigre leaders with Nazi backgrounds accused of working for the CIA. According to declassified records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, several mass media organizations in this country-at times working in direct concert with the CIA-became instrumental in promoting cold war myths that transformed certain exiled Nazi collaborators of World War II into "freedom fighters" and heroes of the renewed struggle against communism. The general public, for the most part, has had little reason to suspect that anything was amiss...
p6
America's own initial plan to enlist the brains of Nazi Germany concentrated on scientists, declassified U.S. Army records show. Some American intelligence officials were clearly aware from the very beginning that they were recruiting former Nazis, including SS officers and others alleged to have personally participated in executions of concentration camp inmates. Even so, top Pentagon officers believed that these Germans could be put to work in the then continuing war with Japan and the emerging conflict with the USSR. A highly secret U.S. military intelligence coordinating center advised the U.S. Army to alter its dossiers on those scientists so as to bring them into this country with supposedly clean wartime records. The United States soon stopped "beating a dead Nazi horse", as Bosquet Wev, executive officer of the Pentagon's intelligence coordinating office, put it, and began importing German chemical warfare experts, submarine specialists, and the scientists who had once built Germany's rockets using slave labor from Nazi concentration camps.
At about the same time these experts were conscripted, the United States also began a small, extremely secret program to enlist German espionage and covert operations specialists at an American camp for high-ranking Axis POWs near Wiesbaden. There the chief of U.S. Army intelligence in Europe, General Edwin Sibert, gave the go-ahead to a gaunt former Wehrmacht (German army) general named Reinhard Gehlen to construct a new espionage organization made up of German experts on the USSR. Sibert, in what was at the time a clear violation of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's orders concerning denazification of Germany, assumed personal responsibility for the project. Before the 1940s were out, Sibert and Gehlen's small seed had grown into an organization upon which the Americans depended for much of what they knew about Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
With Gehlen's group at its core, former Nazis and collaborators went on to play an important, though largely unnoticed, role in the interlocked evolutions of the cold war and of American intelligence capabilities. Gehlen provided U.S. Army intelligence and later the CIA with many of the dire reports that were used to justify increased U.S. military budgets and intensified U.S./USSR hostilities. He exaggerated the Soviet military threat in Europe, says the CIA's former chief analyst on Soviet military capabilities Victor Marchetti, in order to ensure further protection and funding for his U.S.-financed operation. The German intelligence group, as it turns out, usually received at least part of any new budget appropriations that accompanied escalation of the conflict with the USSR.
At about the time the Gehlen organization was getting on its feet, the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) gradually moved from investigating underground Nazis for war crimes prosecution to using some of these same Nazis and collaborators to track Communists. By 1948 the CIC found itself in a sub rosa bureaucratic battle with both the U.S. Air Force and the then newly founded CIA over funding in the spy war against the Russians. One of the most valuable prizes in this intra-American conflict was control of several thousand former Waffen SS soldiers and officers whom the army had hired and equipped for use in a guerrilla war against the USSR. The army ended up actually integrating these SS troops into U.S. nuclear strategy.
Policy concerning clandestine use of former Nazi collaborators during the early cold war years was shaped by a series of National Security Council directives and intelligence projects sponsored by the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department, then under the leadership of George F. Kennan, according to records discovered recently in U.S. State Department archives. Kennan was at the time assigned the task of internal policy oversight of all U.S. clandestine operations abroad. His initiatives-along with those of Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner, and a number of other latter-day CIA executives- helped convince Truman's NSC to approve a comprehensive program of covert operations that were explicitly modeled on the Vlasov Army, an anti-Communist emigre campaign created by the SS and the Nazi Foreign Office during World War II. Scholars and propagandists who had once collaborated in formulating the Nazis' political warfare program were brought into the United States to provide brains for the new operation.
Wisner, the dynamic director of the CIA's clandestine operations directorate, gradually gathered many of the threads of earlier Nazi utilization efforts into agency hands. Wisner believed in the tremendous espionage potential of the Eastern European emigre organizations, their value as propagandists and agents of influence, and the unique advantages of using soldiers who had no provable ties to the U.S. government for certain particularly sensitive missions, including assassinations. More than that, Wisner was convinced that Communist rule would be soon overthrown in Eastern Europe and possibly in the USSR itself. America was already at war, as he saw it, and there was no time to quibble over the pasts of its new foot soldiers.
Wisner's clandestine campaigns were originally aimed at the USSR and its satellites. Before the decade was out, however, the American people also became an important target for CIA propaganda programs. It is at that point, over the winter of 1951-1952, that the blowback from the CIA's overseas operations reached a new and more dangerous stage. According to National Security Council records, Wisner began large-scale programs designed to bring thousands of anti-Communist exiles to the United States as a means of rewarding them for secret operations overseas and to train others for guerrilla warfare against East bloc countries. The CIA secretly subsidized the work of right-wing refugee relief organizations aiding such immigrants, including some groups with clear ties to extreme nationalist and Fascist organizations in Europe. The agency simultaneously funneled millions of dollars into advertising and staged media events inside the United States during the same period, with support for these overseas "refugee liberation" projects as a primary theme.
Tens of thousands of Eastern European refugees emigrated to the United States throughout the late 1940s and 1950s. Clearly the overwhelming majority of these new immigrants have proved themselves to be valuable citizens, who have made great contributions to science, culture, medicine, sports, and the American work force as well as to the defense of values like democracy and national pride. But just as any large group of humans contains some criminals, so, too, did this emigration. The difference this time was that of the criminals who did come, many were experienced right-wing political activists who were highly organized and blessed with the patronage of the CIA.
Shortly before the presidential election of 1952 the agency sharply expanded its media operations with a multimillion-dollar publicity campaign inside the United States designed to legitimize expanded U.S. cold war operations in Europe.' This program was guided by a theory known as "liberationism," and an important part of that strategy held that certain exiled Fascist leaders left over from World War II should be regarded as democratic "freedom fighters" against the USSR. The CIA's propaganda campaign inside the United States was clearly illegal; but the agency concealed its ties to the effort, and the enterprise prospered.
Right-wing emigre organizations, which had once been little more than instruments of German (and later U.S.) espionage agencies, began to take on a distinct life and authority of their own during the cold war, particularly inside America's large Eastern European immigrant communities. Through organizations such as the CIA-funded Assembly of Captive European Nations (ACEN), certain Ukrainian fraternal groups, and the Latvian Daugavas Vanagi alliance (each of which included in positions of leadership persons whom U.S. investigators have alleged to be Axis war criminals), these extreme-right-wing exiles gradually expanded their reach in American affairs.
Although never the mainstream voices for their particular nationality groups, these organizations and others like them succeeded in creating genuine power bases on the far right of the U.S. political spectrum. Before the decade of the 1950s was out, the activities of extremist European emigre organizations combined with indigenous American anticommunism to produce seriously negative effects on U.S. foreign policy and domestic affairs under both Republican and Democratic administrations. By 1959 these exile groups had articulate defenders inside the staff of the National Security Council and had won a measure of influence on Capitol Hill. Observing their impact on U.S. policy toward the USSR and Eastern Europe had become, as columnist Walter Lippmann wrote, "a morbid experience."
In short, U.S. clandestine operations employing Nazis never did produce the results that were desired when they were initiated, but they did contribute to the influence of some of the most reactionary trends in American political life. This lesson has increased in significance over the years. More recent U.S. interventions abroad have facilitated the entry into America of extremist and even terrorist emigre organizations that have subsequently gained political footholds in ethnic communities in this country, often through the use of violence and intimidation. The influence of Bay of Pigs veterans in Cuban-American enclaves or of the former Saigon police among Southeast Asian refugees comes to mind in this regard. "Blowback" of this type has not been limited to cold war Nazi utilization operations; it is a much more widespread characteristic of the CIA's emigre operations than is generally recognized and one which deserves further study...

What the CIA's Nazi Files Can Tell Us About Iraq
The Poisoned Well
By WERTHER*
http://www.counterpunch.org/werther02232005.html

"The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past."
--William Faulkner

Since the attacks of 11 September 2001, the American public has endured an astounding avalanche of official lies, half truths, pseudo-events [1] and sheer balderdash that will surely enter the Guinness Book of Records. Among the most persistent and infuriating lies of government, to those who have imbibed their knowledge of the past from the crystalline springs of Gibbon and von Ranke, is the misleading historical analogy. Its purpose is twofold: to relativize whatever current disaster the governing class has waltzed the hapless populace into; and to kill any usable past. The technique also has the added benefit of making government placemen sound learned � at least in the estimation of an audience which gains its knowledge of the world through Fox News and other State media.

Iraq is a fruitful field for detecting such historical fables. It was during the summer of 2003, as it first became evident that the natives of Mesopotamia were less than entirely enthusiastic about their liberation, that the American apparat swung into action with historical comparisons between Iraq and the occupation of Germany.

Then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice took to the hustings to tell the Veterans of Foreign Wars, in her characteristic school-marmish fashion, that occupied Iraq was no more of a problem than occupied Nazi Germany � and look what a rousing success that turned out to be: "There is an understandable tendency to look back on America's experience in postwar Germany and see only the successes, but as some of you here today surely remember, the road we traveled was very difficult. 1945 through 1947 was an especially challenging period. Germany was not immediately stable or prosperous. SS officers-called 'werewolves'-engaged in sabotage and attacked both coalition forces and those locals cooperating with them-much like today's Baathist and Fedayeen remnants." [2]

Whereupon the irrepressible Secretary Rumsfeld immediately chimed in with his own historical tour d'horizon: "One group of those dead-enders was known as 'werewolves.' They and other Nazi regime remnants targeted Allied soldiers, and they targeted Germans who cooperated with the Allied forces. Mayors were assassinated including the American-appointed mayor of Aachen, the first major German city to be liberated. Children as young as 10 were used as snipers, radio broadcasts, and leaflets warned Germans not to collaborate with the Allies. They plotted sabotage of factories, power plants, rail lines. They blew up police stations and government buildings, and they destroyed stocks of art and antiques that were stored by the Berlin Museum. Does this sound familiar?" [3]


Frankfurt Was Not Fallujah

One wonders which community college-educated speech writer activated the larynxes of our senior government officials. As history, this was bunk, although it sounded plausible to the half-educated mind. American forces took Aachen in October 1944 � well before the largest battle ever fought by the U.S. Army, the Battle of the Bulge, and fully six months before the 8 May 1945 "end of major conflict" in the European Theater. The assassination of Aachen's mayor and the capers of the Werewolves were distinctly small beer, because they occurred in the midst of the bloodiest land battles in world history. The Werewolves, Rumsfeld's proto-Baathists, only existed as a viable force as an adjunct to a still-functioning German government holding territory between the Rhine and the Oder-Neisse; a government that could put, even at that late date, 8 million men into the field. At the time, 4th Generation Warfare operations were distinctly subsidiary to conventional military campaigns. [4]

Once hostilities ended, the situation was otherwise than described by Professor Doktor Rice and Kriegsminister Rumsfeld. Compared to the 1,484 dead and 10,487 wounded in Iraq, the few post-VE Day GI homicides principally occurred from black market deals gone wrong or quarrels over a Fr�ulein. The dynamic of post-war Western Germany, where the population was uniformly terrified of a vengeful Red Army and accordingly seeking protection of the Amis, is a dynamic absent from present-day Iraq.

There are, however, profound lessons to be derived from the occupation of Germany and its integration into the post-World War II American world system. Principal among the institutions which America absorbed into its national security state was German Intelligence, specifically the Gehlen Organization.


A Viper Enters the Nest

The story of General Reinhard Gehlen has been endlessly rehashed in books, articles, History Channel reprises, and Gehlen's own self-serving memoirs, so we do not intend to recapitulate the full historical record. But this precis will suffice for our purposes:

During mid- and late World War II, Gehlen was head of Foreign Armies East, a Wehrmacht organization tasked with gaining order-of-battle estimations of the Red Army. As the self-flattering retrospectives would have it, Foreign Armies East's estimations were more accurate than those of the ever-optimistic Hitler and his sycophantic retinue. Consequently, Gehlen's favor fell as the Russian steamroller inexorably crunched towards the Reich.

By early 1945, Gehlen and his associates saw the inevitable, and, having no desire to join their F�hrer on a Wagnerian funeral pyre, resolved to make a deal with the Western allies. They microfilmed choice extracts from their files and buried them in containers somewhere in the Alps.

At war's end, Gehlen surrendered to the Americans and made a startling proposition. He would provide the Americans with what they lacked: intelligence about their erstwhile ally, the Soviet Union. To newly-minted intelligence officers from Topeka and Paducah, this sounded like an arresting offer. By August 1945, the Americans were sufficiently intrigued to fly Gehlen, in the uniform of a U.S. Army general, to Washington in General Walter Bedell Smith's transport aircraft. He met with such "present at the creation" panjandrums as Allen Dulles and William Donavan.

The outlines of the deal are these: Gehlen would transfer his organization and its information into the American intelligence network. As indubitable anticommunists, their zeal to serve their new masters was self-evident. All Gehlen demanded in return was the following:

o Gehlen must have complete control over his organization's activities;

o He retained the right to approve U.S. liaison officers to the Organization;

o The Organization would only be used against the USSR and its client states;

o The Organization would become the official intelligence agency of a future West German state;

o The Organization would never be required to do anything Gehlen considered against German interests. [5]

As the reader can surely guess, the American authorities snapped at the bait like a starving barracuda. And the rest is history: Since the Gehlen Organization's sole claim to legitimacy was its purported knowledge of the Soviet Union, the Red Army perforce became 20 feet tall.


Threat Inflation: A German Import?


Elementary knowledge of human psychology suggests that once the United States Government ceased to be terrified by the Soviet military, the Organization would no longer have a privileged and well-paid function; its flunkies would accordingly be obliged to scratch a living through honest toil. That alternative being abhorrent, the U.S. Government received and disseminated the most baroque exaggerations of Soviet power � only a few years after the European USSR had been nearly leveled, with up to 27 million military and civilian deaths. Despite the fundamental weakness of the post-war Soviet Union (which Stalin attempted to conceal) Congress and the America public obtained a steady diet of scare stories:

o In 1948, U.S. intelligence purported to believe the Red Army could mobilize "320 line divisions" in 30 days. This at a time when millions of Soviets were living in holes in the soil of Western Russia, there being nothing better to house them.

o The same year, the Secretary of the Navy told Congress that Soviet submarine were "sighted off our coasts" � although the Office of Naval intelligence could offer no evidence of such sub sightings. Its own estimates said that the Soviet Navy would be unable to mount continuing, overseas operations until 1957.

o Air Force Secretary Stuart Symington claimed in Congressional hearings that the Soviet Air Force was superior to that of the U.S.

o The military governor of Germany in 1948, General Lucius Clay, wrote a letter that conveniently found its way to Congress, stating that it was his "feeling" that the Soviets were planning war. [6]

Where did these estimates come from? Did the Gehlen Organization, which was essentially the executive agent of U.S. intelligence in Eastern Europe, have anything to do with it? The CIA's reticence, right up to February of this year, to declassify its files regarding interaction with Nazi personages is telling. [7]

The historical rehashes belabor the obvious: not only did the Gehlen Organization have a motive to exaggerate the Soviet threat, but the potential interest of war crimes courts in its members made them prime candidates for KGB blackmail. And, predictably, the Gehlen Organization was thoroughly penetrated by Soviet intelligence, to the detriment of both American intelligence operations and the German government � whose chancellor, Willy Brandt, fell in a spy scandal.

So far, so bad. Conventional history has correctly perceived the corrupted intelligence provided by the Gehlen Organization during the cold war. But it does not answer the question, why did the Americans tumble so readily in 1945 when they had abundant adverse information available to them about the effectiveness of German Intelligence?


Dulles and Other Dullards


In 1945, when Walter Bedell Smith, Alan Dulles, and their coat holders fell for Gehlen's pitch, they were in possession of a priceless insight into the spying abilities of their wartime foe � the Ultra secret.

Beginning in 1940, the British were able to read the ciphers transmitted by what the Germans believed to be their unbreakable Enigma code machine. Intermittently at first, the British (with their American allies looking over their shoulder) succeeded with increasing speed and accuracy to crack first the sloppy Luftwaffe code, then the Army's, and finally the Kriegsmarine's. The allies not only knew what the Germans knew and planned, but perhaps more critically what they did not know about allied operations.

And in fact, strategic intelligence about the allies was a blank spot for Germany. Tactically and operationally very proficient (perhaps the best in the world), the Germans were amateurish in divining what B.H. Liddel Hart would have called what was happening "on the other side of the hill." What else would explain the fact that MI 5 turned or executed every single agent the Germans attempted to insert into Britain? What else would explain the Germans' falling for the elementary ruse of the fake "Army Group Patton" in the buildup to D-Day? What else would explain the Germans' horrendous failure at Kursk, in contrast to the Russians' accurate divination of the Wehrmacht's plans to attack the Kursk salient?

Given their access to this information, why did the American authorities nevertheless assume that Reinhard Gehlen had something valuable to offer them � at extortionate terms? Foreign Armies East may have been more or less accurate in providing rough order-of-battle estimates of Red Army strength, as long as there was a copious supply of Red Army POWs, but why did the Americans assume, against all evidence, that Gehlen had the slightest clue about strategic matters: what Stalin was planning, the general thrust of Soviet policy?

Ordinary human experience suggests that the wish was father to the thought: American intelligence believed because it wanted to believe. Far from being righteous and wise pillars of the American Century, Allen Dulles and his comperes were merely corrupt and incompetent scions of rich establishment families; in Dulles's case, he elbowed his way into intelligence work in order to provide hot tips to his investment banking friends.

Dulles's post-World War II partiality towards Nazi war criminals was essentially a continuation of his pre-war activities as a partner of Sullivan and Cromwell, a firm which facilitated transnational business agreements with the German cartels. Dulles's performance in the Bay of Pigs invasion does not suggest a penetrating strategic mind. His primitive thinking more likely went along the following lines: If Meyer Lansky could replace Castro as the ruler of Cuba it would signify a victory for private investment, just as Gehlen or Alfred Krupp was preferable to some German Social Democrat who had spent the war in Buchenwald.


Chalabi: Bastard Child of Gehlen?


But the U.S. Government's gullibility, and culpability in these matters, does not end with its danse macabre with National Socialism. From the abortive invasion of Cuba, through Dallas, Watergate, Iran-Contra, to the present imbecility of economic sanctions, Cuban "exiles" have distorted and debilitated American politics for more than four decades. All our knowledge of Cuba is what "exiles" comfortably ensconced in Coral Gables want us to think, just as our appreciation of the USSR was distorted by exiles from the Greater Germany Project. Exiles like General Gehlen.

Does this begin to sound familiar? Why is everything we are supposed to know about "the Greater Middle East" funneled through a foreign power? Do Ahmed Chalabi's alarming pronouncements about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction circa 2003 sound oddly similar to Reinhard Gehlen's ominous estimation of Soviet capabilities circa 1948? Will we soon hear alarming news of Iran's nuclear capabilities from Iranian exile organizations like the Mujahedeen e Kalq?

Gehlen's malignant ghost is laughing.


* Werther is the pen name of a Northern Virginia-based defense analyst.

[1] The concept of the pseudo-event, i.e., a contrived incident intended to be disseminated for propaganda purposes through the mass media, was fully delineated more than four decades ago: The Image: A Guide to Pseudo Events in America, by Daniel J. Boorstin, 1961, Atheneum.

[2] "Condi's Phony History," by Daniel Benjamin, Slate, 29 August 2003.

[3} Ibid.

[4] Werther Report: 4GW and the Riddles of Culture.

[5] The Yankee and Cowboy War, by Carl Oglesby, Sheed Andrews and McMeel, 1976.

[6] Examples of early post-war threat inflation are found in Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948, by Frank Kofsky, Palgrave Macmillan, 1995.

[7] "Congress, CIA Resolve Dispute Over Nazi Files," Voice of America, 9 February 2005

The CIA and Nazi War Criminals
National Security Archive Posts Secret CIA History
Released Under Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 146

Edited by Tamara Feinstein
National Security Archive
February 4, 2005

Gen. Reinhard Gehlen persuaded the U.S. Army and then the CIA to sponsor his intelligence network even though he employed numerous former Nazis and known war criminals.
Washington D.C., February 4, 2005 - Today the National Security Archive posted the CIA's secret documentary history of the U.S government's relationship with General Reinhard Gehlen, the German army's intelligence chief for the Eastern Front during World War II. At the end of the war, Gehlen established a close relationship with the U.S. and successfully maintained his intelligence network (it ultimately became the West German BND) even though he employed numerous former Nazis and known war criminals. The use of Gehlen's group, according to the CIA history, Forging an Intelligence Partnership: CIA and the Origins of the BND, 1945-49, was a "double edged sword" that "boosted the Warsaw Pact's propaganda efforts" and "suffered devastating penetrations by the KGB." [See Volume 1: Introduction, p. xxix]

The declassified "SECRET RelGER" two-volume history was compiled by CIA historian Kevin Ruffner and presented in 1999 by CIA Deputy Director for Operations Jack Downing to the German intelligence service (Bundesnachrichtendienst) in remembrance of "the new and close ties" formed during post-war Germany to mark the fiftieth year of CIA-West German cooperation. This history was declassified in 2002 as a result of the work of The Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group (IWG) and contains 97 key documents from various agencies.

This posting comes in the wake of public grievances lodged by members of the IWG that the CIA has not fully complied with the mandate of the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act and is continuing to withhold hundreds of thousands of pages of documentation related to their work. (Note 1) In interviews with the New York Times, three public members of the IWG said:

"I think that the CIA has defied the law, and in so doing has also trivialized the Holocaust, thumbed its nose at the survivors of the Holocaust and also at the Americans who gave their lives in the effort to defeat the Nazis in World War II." - Former congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman
"I can only say that the posture the CIA has taken differs from all the other agencies that have been involved, and that's not a position we can accept." - Washington lawyer Richard Ben-Veniste
"Too much has been secret for too long. The CIA has not complied with the statute." - Former federal prosecutor Thomas H. Baer
The IWG was established in January 11, 1999 and has overseen the declassification of about eight million pages of documents from multiple government agencies. Its mandate expires at the end of March 2005.

The documentation unearthed by the IWG reveals extensive relationships between former Nazi war criminals and American intelligence organizations, including the CIA. For example, current records show that at least five associates of the notorious Nazi Adolf Eichmann worked for the CIA, 23 other Nazis were approached by the CIA for recruitment, and at least 100 officers within the Gehlen organization were former SD or Gestapo officers. (Note 2)

The IWG enlisted the help of key academic scholars to consult during the declassification process, and these historians released their own interpretation of the declassified material last May (2004) in a publication called US Intelligence and the Nazis. The introduction to this book emphasizes the dilemma of using former Nazis as assets:

"The notion that they [CIA, Army Counterintelligence Corp, Gehlen organization] employed only a few bad apples will not stand up to the new documentation. Some American intelligence officials could not or did not want to see how many German intelligence officials, SS officers, police, or non-German collaborators with the Nazis were compromised or incriminated by their past service� Hindsight allows us to see that American use of actual or alleged war criminals was a blunder in several respects�there was no compelling reason to begin the postwar era with the assistance of some of those associated with the worst crimes of the war. Lack of sufficient attention to history-and, on a personal level, to character and morality-established a bad precedent, especially for new intelligence agencies. It also brought into intelligence organizations men and women previously incapable of distinguishing between their political/ideological beliefs and reality. As a result, such individuals could not and did not deliver good intelligence. Finally, because their new, professed 'democratic convictions' were at best insecure and their pasts could be used against them (some could be blackmailed), these recruits represented a potential security problem." (Note 3)

The Gehlen organization profiled in the newly posted CIA history represents one of the most telling examples of these pitfalls. Timothy Naftali, a University of Virginia professor and consulting historian to the IWG who focused heavily on the declassified CIA material, highlighted the problems posed by our relationship with Gehlen: "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 the back door by which the Soviets penetrated the Western alliance." (Note 4)

The documents annexed in the CIA history posted today by the Archive echo the observations of Professor Naftali. While placing much of the blame on the Army Counterintelligence Corps' initial approach to Gehlen, this history emphasizes the CIA's own reluctance to adopt responsibility for Gehlen's organization, yet the documents show the CIA ultimately embracing Gehlen.

Some of the highlights from this secret CIA documentary history include:

A May 1, 1952 report detailing how Gehlen and his network were initially approached by U.S. army intelligence. (Document 6)
Two evaluations of the Gehlen operation from October 16 and 17, 1946, advising against the transfer of Gehlen's organization to CIG hands and questioning the value of the operation as a whole. (Documents 21 and 22)
A March 19, 1948 memorandum from Richard Helms, noting Army pressure for the CIA to assume sponsorship of the Gehlen organization, and continued concern over the security problems inherent in the operation. (Document 59)
A December 17, 1948 report outlining the problems with the Gehlen organization, but ultimately recommending CIA assumption of the project. (Document 72)
In answer to the question "Can we learn from history?", the IWG's consulting historians noted "The real question is not whether we will make use of our past to deal with the present, but rather how well we will do so. To do it well, we need these documents." (Note 5)

"This secret CIA history is full of documents we never would have seen under the Freedom of Information Act, because Congress in 1984 gave the CIA an exemption for its 'operational' files, on the grounds that such files were too sensitive ever to be released," commented Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive. "The Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act has proven this assumption false. Release of these files has done no damage to national security, has provided information of enormous public interest and historical importance, and however belatedly, has brought a measure of accountability to government operations at variance with mainstream American values."

Documents Shed Light on CIA's Use of Ex-Nazis
By Scott Shane
The New York Times
Tuesday 06 June 2006
truthout.org

Washington - The Central Intelligence Agency took no action after learning the pseudonym and whereabouts of the fugitive Holocaust overseer Adolf Eichmann in 1958, according to CIA documents that shed new light on the spy agency's use of former Nazis as informers after World War II.

The CIA was told by West German intelligence that Eichmann was living in Argentina under the name "Clemens" - a slight variation on his actual alias, Klement - but kept the information from Israel because of German concerns about exposure of former Nazis in the Bonn government, according to Timothy Naftali, a historian who examined the documents. Two years later, Israeli agents abducted Eichmann in Argentina and took him to Israel, where he was tried and executed in 1962.

The Eichmann papers are among 27,000 newly declassified pages released by the CIA to the National Archives under Congressional pressure to make public files about former officials of Hitler's regime later used as American agents. The material reinforces the view that most former Nazis gave American intelligence little of value and in some cases proved to be damaging double agents for the Soviet KGB, according to historians and members of the government panel that has worked to open the long-secret files.

Elizabeth Holtzman, a former congresswoman from New York and member of the panel, the Interagency Working Group on records concerning Nazi and Japanese war crimes, said at a press briefing at the National Archives today that the documents show the CIA "failed to lift a finger" to hunt Eichmann and "forced us to confront not only the moral harm but the practical harm" of relying on intelligence from ex-Nazis.

She said information from the former Nazis was often tainted both by their "personal agendas" and their vulnerability to blackmail. "Using bad people can have very bad consequences," Ms. Holtzman said. She and other group members suggested that the findings should be a cautionary tale for intelligence agencies today.

As head of the Gestapo's Jewish affairs office during the war, Eichmann implemented the policy of extermination of European Jewry, promoting the use of gas chambers and having a hand in the murder of millions of Jews. Captured by the United States Army at the end of the war, he gave a false name and went unrecognized, hiding in Germany and Italy before fleeing to Argentina in 1950.

Israeli agents hunting for Eichmann came to suspect in the 1950's that he was in Argentina but they did not know his alias. They temporarily abandoned their search at about the time, in March 1958, that West German intelligence told the CIA that Eichmann had been living in Argentina as "Clemens," said Mr. Naftali, who is now at the University of Virginia but will become director of the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library in October.

The United States government, preoccupied with the cold war, had no policy at the time of pursuing Nazi war criminals. The West German government was wary of exposing Eichmann because officials feared what he might reveal about such figures as Hans Globke, a former Nazi then serving as a key national security adviser to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, Mr. Naftali said.

In 1960, also at the request of West Germany, the CIA persuaded Life magazine, which had purchased Eichmann's memoir from his family, to delete a reference to Globke before publication, the documents show.

Since Congress passed the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act in 1998, the Interagency Working Group has persuaded the government to declassify more than 8 million pages of documents. But the group ran into resistance starting in 2002 from the CIA, which sought to withhold operational files from the 1940's and 50's.

After Congress extended the working group's term to 2007, and after the intervention of Senator Mike DeWine, Republican of Ohio; Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California; and Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York, Porter J. Goss, who was the CIA director, ordered the release of the records with very few deletions.

Stanley Moskowitz, a CIA official who assisted the working group for the last year, said the delicate question of releasing operational files has long been a "nettlesome problem" but that "the passage of time has shifted the balance" toward release. He said the new CIA director, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, has agreed to continue releasing the records.

Norman J.W. Goda, an Ohio University historian who reviewed the CIA material, said it showed in greater detail than previously known how the KGB aggressively targeted former Nazi intelligence officers for recruitment after the war. In particular, he said, the documents fill in the story of the "catastrophic" Soviet penetration of the Gehlen Organization, the post-war West German intelligence service sponsored by the United States Army and then the CIA.

Mr. Goda described the case of Heinz Felfe, a former SS officer who was bitter over the Allied firebombing of his native city, Dresden, and secretly worked for the KGB Felfe rose in the Gehlen Organization to oversee counterintelligence - placing a Soviet agent in charge of combating Soviet espionage in West Germany.

The CIA shared much sensitive information with Felfe, who visited the agency in 1956 to lobby for West German involvement in CIA operations, Mr. Goda found. A newly released 1963 CIA damage assessment, written after Felfe was arrested as a Soviet agent in 1961, found that he had exposed "over 100 CIA staffers" and seen that many eavesdropping operations ended with "complete failure or a worthless product."

The documents show that the CIA ignored "clear evidence of a war crimes record" in recruiting another former SS officer, Tscherim Soobzokov, said another historian at the briefing, Richard Breitman of American University. Because it valued Soobzokov for his language skills and ties to fellow ethnic Circassians living in the Soviet Caucasus region, the CIA deliberately hid his Nazi record from the Immigration and Naturalization Service after he moved to the United States in 1955, Mr. Breitman said.

But Soobzokov would not ultimately escape his past. He died in 1985 of injuries suffered three weeks earlier when a pipe bomb exploded outside his house in Paterson, NJ. The murder case has never been solved.

Declassified archives document ties between CIA and Nazis
By Andre Damon
27 July 2006
wsws.org

On June 6, the US national archives released some 27,000 pages of secret records documenting the CIA’s Cold War relations with former German Nazi Party members and officials.

The files reveal numerous cases of German Nazis, some clearly guilty of war crimes, receiving funds, weapons and employment from the CIA. They also demonstrate that US intelligence agencies deliberately refrained from disclosing information about the whereabouts of Adolf Eichmann in order to protect Washington’s allies in the post-war West German government headed by Christian Democratic leader Konrad Adenauer.

Eichmann, who had sent millions to their deaths while coordinating the Nazis’ “final solution” campaign to exterminate European Jewry, went into hiding in Buenos Aires after the fall of the Third Reich. Utilizing friendly contacts in the Catholic Church and the Peron government in Argentina, Eichmann was able to reside in the South American country for 10 years under the alias of Ricardo Klement. He was abducted in 1960 by Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, put on trial in Israel and executed in 1962.

The documents show that the CIA was in possession of Eichmann’s pseudonym two years before the Mossad raid. The CIA received this information in 1958 from the West German government, which learned of Eichmann’s alias in 1952. Both the CIA and the Bonn government chose not to disclose this information to Israel because they were concerned that Eichmann might reveal the identities of Nazi war criminals holding high office in the West German government, particularly Adenauer’s national security adviser Hans Globke.

When Eichmann was finally brought to trial, the US government used all available means to protect its West German allies from what he might reveal. According to the declassified documents, the CIA pressured Life magazine into deleting references to Globke in portions of Eichmann’s memoirs that it chose to publish.

In addition to the revelations regarding Eichmann, the documents chronicle the CIA’s creation of “stay-behind” intelligence networks in southwestern Germany and Berlin, labeled “Kibitz” and “Pastime,” respectively. The Kibitz ring involved several former SS members. In the early 1950s, the CIA provided these groups with money, communications equipment and ammunition so that they could serve as intelligence assets in the event of a Soviet invasion of West Germany.

The CIA documents were reviewed by Timothy Naftali, a historian with the National Archives Interagency Working Group, the government body that oversaw their declassification and release. According to an article published by Naftali, the stay-behind program was dissolved “in the wake of public concerns in West Germany about the resurgence of Neo-Nazi Groups.” Specifically, the Kibitz-15 group, led by an “unreconstructed Nazi,” became a potential source of public embarrassment for the US, as its members were broadly involved in Neo-Nazi activity. [1]

The CIA terminated the program by 1955 and arranged for many of its contacts to be resettled in Canada and Australia. According to the documents, Australia provided funds for relocation while the CIA provided its ex-assets with a “resettlement bonus.”

The CIA employed Gustav Hilger, a former adviser to Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. As an employee of the German foreign office, Hilger was present at the negotiation of the Stalin-Hitler pact in 1939. The CIA deemed his experience with the USSR sufficiently valuable to free him from incarceration at Fort Meade in Maryland and employ him as an intelligence evaluator in West Germany.

In 1948, Hilger moved to the United States and obtained a position at the CIA’s K Street building in Washington as a researcher and expert on the USSR. Hilger eventually left the CIA to work for the West German foreign office.

According to a paper analyzing the CIA documents published by Robert Wolfe, a former senior archivist at the US National Archives, “it is beyond dispute that Hilger criminally assisted in the genocide of Italy’s Jews.... During the roundup of Italian Jews in late 1943, a note signed ‘Hilger’ recorded Ribbentrop’s concurrence that the Italians be asked to intern the Jews in concentration camps in Northern Italy, in lieu of immediate deportation. The SS intended thereby that the Italian Jews and their potential Italian protectors should believe that internment in Italy was the final destination, rather than eventual deportation to the murder mills in Poland to be immediately murdered or gradually worked to death. The stated purpose of this ruse was to minimize the number of Italian Jews who would go into hiding to avoid deportation to Poland” [2]

In another instance, the CIA employed Tscherim Soobzokov, a former Nazi gendarme and Waffen SS lieutenant, who, according to a paper published by Interagency Working Group Director of Historical Research Richard Breitman, “participated in an execution commando [combat group detailed to executing Jews and Communists en masse] and had searched North Caucasian villages for Jews.”

Soobzokov was employed by the CIA for seven years. Over this period, he repeatedly used his intelligence contacts to avoid investigation by the FBI and the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) in regard to his complicity in war crimes.

According to Breitman’s paper, CIA examiners noted that Soobzokov was an “incorrigible fabricator” who repeatedly lied about his past in order to conceal his participation in criminal activity. Nevertheless, the CIA shielded him against investigation, at one point sending the INS a document asserting that Soobzokov had never worked for the Nazis. [3]

Prior to the outbreak of war, a significant section of the American ruling elite had favored cooperation with the Nazis as a European hedge against the spread of Bolshevism. Henry Ford was notorious for his anti-Semitism and his political affinity for German Fascism, and a number of major American companies retained their business ties with the Third Reich. Notably, IBM sold Germany the punch cards that were used to catalog the “final solution.” (See: “How IBM helped the Nazis IBM and the Holocaust”)

However, as one European nation after another fell before Hitler’s onslaught, the threat of German imperialist dominance in Europe spurred the American ruling class to enter the European theater.

US imperialism mobilized popular support in its war against the Nazi regime by appealing to the democratic and anti-fascist sentiments of the American people. After the defeat of Germany, it organized, together with its World War II allies—Britain, the Soviet Union and France—the Nuremburg trials to prosecute top Nazi officials for their complicity in war crimes.

However, with the start of the Cold War, the United States reversed its policy of identifying, trying and executing prominent Nazi war criminals. As is starkly demonstrated in the case of Eichmann, the knowledge possessed by many of these individuals made trying them inconvenient.

Regardless of its limited persecution of upper-echelon Nazis, the United States had no qualms about recruiting Nazi Party members and war criminals into its military research apparatus. Prominent German military developers such as Werner Von Braun and Bernhard Tessmann were assimilated into the US rocketry program, while Kurt Blome, a Nazi scientist who experimented on concentration camp prisoners, was employed by the US to develop chemical weapons.

Likewise, the early stages of the Cold War saw high-level Nazi cadres drafted into the US intelligence machine and deployed in Europe, the Middle East and the Americas. According to the Department of Justice Office of Special Investigations (OSI), the bureau assigned to investigate German war criminals living within the US, at least 10,000 Nazis entered the US between 1948 and 1952. Of the thousands of German Nazis who fled—or were brought—to the United States, only some 100 have been prosecuted by the OSI.

Notes:
1. Timothy Naftali, “New Information on Cold War CIA Stay-Behind Operations in Germany and on the Adolf Eichmann Case” http://www.fas.org/sgp/eprint/naftali.pdf
2. Robert Wolfe, “Gustav Hilger: From Hitler’s Foreign Office to CIA Consultant” http://www.fas.org/sgp/eprint/wolfe.pdf
3. Richard Breitman, “Tscherim Soobzokov” http://www.fas.org/sgp/eprint/breitman.pdf

Ratlines:The CIA &The Nazis

The mention of the CIA commonly brings to mind images of James Bond spy trillers and images of cold war warriors fighting the evils of communism. But more times than not the reality of CIA plots are images of the gang that couldn't shoot straight. Examples abound of the absurd actions of the CIA and its forerunner the OSS. During WWII the OSS became wrongly convinced that the Japanese were deathly terrified of bats. Thus to help the war effort Donovan of the OSS decided to test dropping bats out of aircraft over the southwestern deserts before risking planes over Japan. The only fly in this ointment was that the poor little critters froze almost instantly upon release in the stratosphere and shattered like fine china upon hitting the ground. After offing a few million bats over the skies of the southwestern desert the plan was dropped.1

Harvey's hole in Berlin is another example of some rather shortsighted thinking by our intelligence agencies. In 1954 under the direction of Bill Harvey a 1476-foot tunnel into East Berlin was dug to install a phone tap on a Russian communication center. After almost a year the Russians discovered the tap allegedly while repairing a cable. What was not mentioned was the American spies had became too accustomed to their comforts that they turned off the air conditioning to the tunnel during the chilly midseason. Thus the tunnel was marked on the surface by a telltale strip of bare ground over its entire length through an otherwise snow-covered landscape.2

One final example of the CIA bungling will suffice before moving on. On March 11, 1961 Kennedy held a meeting with his assorted advisors concerning what has became known as the Bay of Pigs fiasco. (The CIA has recently announced that the CIA was entirely responsible for the mistakes made.) 9 Here is a glimpse at only one of the many mistakes made. The original invasion was set some 100 miles east of the Bay of Pigs. After Kennedy demanded a site that would be more conductive to a quite nighttime landing the CIA turned to the Bay of Pigs. The original landing site picked for what was supposed to be a secret night landing was the equivalent of downtown Los Angles. Over flights of the area had revealed dark forms just under the surface in the shallows of the bay. CIA experts determined those dark forms to be seaweed.8 Call it rotten luck, a bad guess, a freak of nature or just damn stupidity unfortunately those dark forms turned out to be coral reefs. Reefs that could rip the bottom out of small landing craft or leave it high and dry for any gunners on shore like a sitting duck.

As this was being written another bungling episode in the history of the CIA took place. The incident came during the bombing of Serbia over the Kosovo crisis. The mistake came in the targeting of the Chinese Embassy. President Clinton was quick to apologize to the Chinese and in the effort to find the cause of the error; the CIA stepped forward and admitted the error was theirs. The problem was the maps had never been updated in four years. Maybe we should just rely on the Rand McNally Road Atlas, huh. Later we found out that there was much more to this than just the lack of an updated map. A lower CIA employee had warned repeatedly of the possible misidentification of that target site but was ignored. But this brings us to another question. Does the CIA at times seek to embarrass a president not to their liking? The reader should be aware of the CIA policy of passing on to higher policy making officials documents that are less than credible. During a November 1995 Senate Select Committee it was revealed that CIA officials had passed on more than 35 reports without disclosing the information had come from known Soviet double agents. Between 1986 and 1994 the CIA had passed on at least 95 reports based on information from double agents without revealing the source or the accuracy of the information.136

To understand how the CIA has evolved into a menace to freedom worldwide one needs to look at the very beginnings of the intelligence service in this country starting in the period following WWI and the cast of characters. Where and when did the CIA evolve into a monster diametrically opposed to the ideals of a democracy and who were involved? The simple answer is Allen Dulles; evidence abounds that he was a traitor. But as with all simple answers there is a much more that lays hidden. In the following pages the role of Wall Street bankers and big oil along with their servant Dulles will be shown to have been behind the subversion of many countries and the importation of Nazi war criminals. Dulles and the U.S. intelligence community were actively involved in helping Nazi war criminals escape from Europe; they were assisted with help from both Britain and the Vatican.

Obviously Dulles needed help in carrying out a continuing cover up and could not have acted alone. During the war several individuals from the State Department subverted the wishes and orders from FDR. Elbridge Durbrow and R. Borden Reams were two people from FDR's State Department who deliberately mislead FDR and withheld information from him. Reams withheld the first reports from a spy inside of Germany and occupied Poland of the atrocities being committed against the Jewish people.14 As this was being written a report surfaced that the first notification of high government officials of the Nazi euthanasia was a cable from Vice Counsel Paul H. Dutko dated October 16, 1940.102 It is uncertain if this cable ever reached FDR just as the later information was kept from him. It is doubtful that even if it had reached Roosevelt that he could have done anymore than condemn the actions with the rampant isolationists and the anti-Jewish senitment that was prevalent throughout the country and in congress. Their actions and the actions of others mainly inside the State Department went beyond a simple disagreement over policy into acts of subversion.

Recent evidence confirmed by Clark Clifford has shown that Truman was unaware of the CIA importation of the Nazis war criminals.3 Generally the cover up during the Truman administration was the work of James Forrestal, the Secretary of the Navy at the time. The reader should note here that Forrestal, a conservative Democrat could barely cover up for his Jewish bigotry and worked behind Truman's back to block the creation of the state of Israel and had strong ties to the oil business. Before coming to Washington Forrestal was a vice president of the Wall Street firm of Dillon, a firm that invested heavily in Nazi Germany during the 1930s.113 Another who was certainly involved and well aware of the status of the various war criminals that were allowed to emigrate was J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover protected himself in several ways, one he removed all damning files from FBI headquarters to the New York and Washington field offices, likewise he removed the FBI from the background checks.15

Others were involved in the cover up at the time as well. In 1945 the navy captured documents from the Nazi oil cartel, Kontinentale Ol A. G. Konti headed by former Reichsbank officer Karl Blessing. A young naval officer was assigned to review those Konti documents. Allen Dulles had personally vouched for Blessing's as an anti-Nazi. If Blessing would have went down as a war criminal and a Nazi, Dulles and his clients would go down as traitors. Dulles personally asked the young naval officer to keep quiet about those documents in exchange for financing the young man's first congressional race, thus was launched the political career of Richard Nixon.4

Prescott Bush is largely credited with helping Nixon getting started in politics as an early backer and in his selection for vice presidential candidate in 1952. This is the same Prescott Bush that ran a corporation that was seized by the United States government during WWII as being nothing more than a den of Nazi spies. Nor could Prescott Bush plead innocence of the Nazis in the business as he sought out help from the Dulles brothers in concealing the Nazi involvement in this business from the U.S. government. The astute reader should recall that during Watergate, Nixon threaten to fire everyone at the CIA except George Bush after the CIA refused to cover up for him. Did Nixon make the exception of Bush as a payback to Prescott or was Nixon fearful that Bush could expose his past? That leaves a neat little package with immense implications for the reader or another investigative reporter to explore.

This was far from the end of Nixon's aiding former Nazis. The example of Nicolae Malaxa will serve as an example here. Malaxa was the supplier of arms to the Iron Guard in Rumania and a business partner of Goring. He was later convicted of war crimes in Rumania immediately following the war. In 1948 he formally applied for permanent US residency. He then faced a blizzard of legal challenges over his admission. In 1951 Nixon introduced a bill in the senate that would have granted him resident status. The bill failed. Later in 1951 Malaxa formed a shell corporation named Western Tube in Nixon's home town, in the same location that shared a mailing address for Nixon's former law firm. The firm applied for a certificate of necessity to get top wartime priority for its material and personnel. Nixon personally supported granting residency to Malaxa on the grounds that he was indispensable to Western Tube. Yet Western Tube never produce a single product in its history. Others that aided Malaxa in his legal battles include John Foster Dulles, and former undersecretary of State Adolph Berle.44 In a later chapter we will once again turn to how Nixon was instrumental in setting up Ethnic Heritage groups within the Republican Party that were controlled by ex Nazis to use in elections. Over the years following WWII many others have been involved in the Nazi cover up including John and Allen Dulles, J. Edgar Hoover, William Casey, George Bush and Ronald Reagan.

A large number of Nazis were admitted under Operation Paperclip in an effort to recruit German rocket scientists. But some like Walter Dornberger first had to have their records sanitized. Dornberger was a major general at Peenemunde and had been sentenced to death by hanging for war crimes before being admitted to the US. England warned the US not to admit him as he was already conniving to start another war.5 He later rose to a vice president of Bell Helicopters. A visible spot in the nation to be sure but even more visible after Bell announced their V22 helicopter surprising close nomenclature for someone who had been involved in the V2 program.

But first we need to take a look at the beginnings of the US intelligence services and the men that developed it before looking at the many atrocities that the CIA has committed over the years. In addition we need a firm background into the geopolitical scene following WWI particularly the role of the British intelligence community and its close association even today with its American counterpart. Further we must keep in mind that all we know about covert actions has been censored. Even Loftus's book had to be submitted to the CIA/NSA for censorship.6 Secondly unless that information is painstaking backed by government documents that are still classified some of it could indeed be disinformation rather than factual. Thus we have to rely only on information that is approved by the very agencies that we are trying to expose.

There is a wealth of good information available on the CIA-Nazi connection both in the library and on the Internet. Unfortunately there is also a lot of disinformation and the just plain nutty. In a web search one cannot help but run across Nazi-CIA-UFOs or a Nazi link in the JFK assassination. This writer has deliberately refrained from using the loosely linked or tenuous connection of Nazis involved in the assassination and of other loosely linked connections and dismissed the nutty outright. Rather this writer has stayed with reputable sources and facts that are widely acknowledged and beyond dispute. This writer feels much of this material is deliberate disinformation and is part of an ongoing effort to discredit anyone reporting on the connection. Nor should the reader dismiss all reports or articles that the CIA or the intelligence community has labeled inaccurate. Many of these have been labeled inaccurate only after they can find some factual discrepancy often of some obscure point. Then in a logical fallacy they claim the entire work to be inaccurate. An excellent example of that would be in the Dark Alliance story appearing in the San Jose Mercury followed by the mad dog attack from CIA assets in the mainstream media. The reader should be aware that the CIA has admitted that it was aware of the drug smuggling drugs in the Iran/Contra/Cocaine scandal. The report was released on Ocotober 8, the same day that the House voted to impeach President Clinton. Such timing of the release insured that the report would not be widely covered by the media.

The remainder of this chapter will first not only develop the connections between the CIA and the Nazis already alluded to but to the connections between the CIA and Wall Street as the CIA has evolved into a tool of corporate America more than a tool to protect American democracy. Since the theme of this book concerns fascism the focus will emphasize the Nazi connections. An emphasis will be placed on how the CIA/Nazi connections have affected not only foreign policy but domestic policy as well. Including a brief look at how the CIA has subverted democracy in America using illegal wiretaps, censorship and campaigns to stomp out any group that may be to the left side of the political spectrum. Following that a brief survey into past CIA interventions and the corporate American connections will be presented.

Loftus divides this century and its relationships to the Jews into three phases; the first phase begins with the end of WWI and ends with the start of WWII. He characterizes the motivating factor of Jewish relations as bigotry. But nether the less this was the time period in which our intelligence agencies were born out of. Loftus attributes this phase as being dominated by three men Jack Philby, a British spy, Allen Dulles and Ibn Saud. All three were known to harbor an intense hatred for Jews. Philby is perhaps better known as an oil explorer and the man behind the scenes that placed Ibn Saud on the throne of Saudi Arabia. Ibn Saud was the leader of the extremist Wahhabi sect of the Moslems and the Arab leader who united the Arabian Peninsula.7

The following quote from a CIA report to President Truman in 1948 removes any doubt of the hatred or anti-Semitic feelings of the CIA towards the Jews.

"Formation of a Jewish state in Palestine will enable the USSR to intensify its efforts to expand Soviet influence in the Near East. And to perpetuate a chaotic condition there.

In any event, the flow of men and munitions to Palestine from the Soviet bloc can be expected to increase substantially." 53

Labeling a group as communist or susceptible to communism was used as a major means to discredit that group or to otherwise demonize the group. This is one of the many records that have been just recently declassified and reflect the CIA concern of Soviet influence over the newly created state of Israel. The flow of arms reflects the ban of arm shipments to the Jewish guerillas imposed by the western bloc. In his memoirs Truman wrote he overruled the State Department's Middle East experts and the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the issue.

Philby and Saud both betrayed Britain to the economic masters of the region even today, the American oil companies. Dulles was the American who helped them when he was stationed in Turkey during the 1920s while he was coordinating intelligence on the Mideast. These three men are responsible for laying down the foundations of the region, the common historic myths of the region and instigators of war. Philby and Saud both were allied with the Nazis. Philby functioned to get contracts awarded to American oil companies. His first success was with Standard Oil of California. In many ways Philby can be regard as the godfather of Aramco. One trait he shared with a number of oil executives particularly from Standard Oil of New Jersey and Texaco was an ardent support for fascism and racism. Remnants of the anti-Semitic views of Texaco has surfaced as late as the 1990s. Although most of the media focused on the black racism present at Texaco, there was also additional anti-Semitic behavior at Texaco.10

The relationship between Phibly and Allen Dulles was unique; in essence Philby was rehabbing Dulles for the British. Dullles first attempt at spying came in Bern during WWI. After it became apparent to the British that someone had passed the codes to the Central Powers in WWI the British tracked it to Dulles's mistress. He had given her the codes for sexual favors. The British grabbed both Dulles and his mistress and in an effort to save his miserable skin and his career Dulles agreed to help the British. Some attribute him with torpedoing Wilson's peace proposals at Versailles. There is no question about Dulles toeing the British line in the Mideast and Central Europe.

John Foster Dulles likewise had troubles following him from WWI. Foster fought a desperate battle in order that Kaiser Wilhelm II assets would not be seized by the Alien Property Custodian board. German bribes ran all the way to the attorney general, Harry Daugherty. In the defense of Daugherty his counsel pointed out that there was an even bigger crook behind him, that being John Foster Dulles, who was known to seek out bribes during the negotiations.21

In Washington as the chief of the State Department's Near East desk, Dulles wrote to the Bristol America's ambassador to Turkey over the genocide of Armenians during WWI.

"Confidentially the State Department is in a bind. Our task would be simple if the reports of the atrocities could be declared untrue or even exaggerated but the evidence is irrefutable. The Secretary of State wants to avoid giving the impression that while the United States is willing to intervene actively to protect its commercial interests, it is not willing to move on behalf of the Christian minorities."12

Here is perhaps the first direct proof in this century that the US foreign policy was based solely on economic issues benefiting corporate America.

In 1923 at the request of J.P. Morgan, John Foster Dulles worked out a scheme as legal counsel to the Dawes committee in which U.S. banks would lend Germany the money to pay France and Britain and they in turn would pay their war loans from the U.S. bank. This financial merry go round was not much more than a shell game but it kept the money circulating. The 20s were inviting times for the wealthy. With the emerging auto market and the accompanying oil industry great pools of capital were available for investment. Many of the investments that were offered up were more on the seedy side rather than sound. In 1926 Dulles resigned his position with the State Department and went into private practice at Sullivan & Chromwell law firm where his brother John Foster also worked.

The following quote from Newsweek.Com illustrates the relationship of the Dulles brothers to the Nazis and their treasonous behavior towards the US.

The fresh look at wartime culpability may extend to other American icons. In 1940 one of the nation's most prestigious law firms, Sullivan & Cromwell, joined together with the Wallenberg family of Sweden--famed for producing Raoul, a Holocaust martyr who saved Jews in Budapest--to represent Nazi German interests, says Abe Weissbrodt, a former Treasury Department lawyer who prosecuted the case in 1946. The scam? Sullivan & Cromwell drafted a voting trust agreement making the Wallenbergs' Enskilda Bank a dummy owner of the U.S. subsidiary of Bosch, a German engine-parts maker, so the Nazis could retain control. The papers were drawn up by John Foster Dulles, a Germanophile who later became secretary of State and whose name today graces Washington's international airport. (The scheme worked during the war, but in 1948 Bosch was finally auctioned to a U.S. buyer.) "t;The record is compelling in terms of warranting questions about Dulles's motives and his own allegiances," says historian Masurovsky. "One might say about him what Treasury said about Chase and J.P. Morgan, that they had allegiance to their own corporate interests and not to their country."68

Dulles derived much of his profits and his clients' profits from investments in Nazi Germany. In the 1930s Dulles set about creating an incredible interlocking financial network between Nazi corporations, American Oil and Saudi Arabia. Here Allen had help from his brother Foster. Perhaps the best-known deal arranged by Dulles was between I.G. Farben and Standard Oil of New Jersey. What is generally not known Farben was the second largest shareholder in standard Oil of New Jersey, second to only John D. Rockefeller himself.11 Another Rockefeller controlled corporation that Dulles worked to protect was the Rockefeller corporation United Fruit, both United Fruit and Standard Oil of New Jersey continued to trade with the Nazis after the out break of war.

[continue article here]