At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, law enforcement and intelligence leaders like J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI and Allen Dulles at the CIA aggressively recruited onetime Nazis of all ranks as secret, anti-Soviet ‘assets,’ declassified records show.
They believed the ex-Nazis’ intelligence value against the Russians outweighed what one official called ‘moral lapses’ in their service to the third Reich. The agency hired one former SS officer as a spy in the 1950s, for instance, even after concluding he was probably guilty of ‘minor war crimes.’ And in 1994, a lawyer with the CIA pressured prosecutors to drop an investigation of an ex-spy outside Boston implicated in the Nazis’ massacre of tens of thousands of Jews in Lithuania. Evidence of the government’s links to Nazi spies began emerging publicly in the 1970s.
But thousands of records from declassified files, Freedom of Information Act requests and other sources, together with interviews with scores of current and former government officials, show that the government’s recruitment of Nazis ran far deeper than previously known and that officials sought to conceal those ties for at least a half-century after the war. In 1980, FBI officials refused to tell even the Justice Department’s own Nazi hunters what they knew about 16 suspected Nazis living in the United States.
The bureau balked at a request from prosecutors for internal records on the Nazi suspects, memos show, because the 16 men had all worked as FBI informants, providing leads on Communist ‘sympathizers.’ Five of the men were still active informants.
They believed the ex-Nazis’ intelligence value against the Russians outweighed what one official called ‘moral lapses’ in their service to the third Reich. The agency hired one former SS officer as a spy in the 1950s, for instance, even after concluding he was probably guilty of ‘minor war crimes.’ And in 1994, a lawyer with the CIA pressured prosecutors to drop an investigation of an ex-spy outside Boston implicated in the Nazis’ massacre of tens of thousands of Jews in Lithuania. Evidence of the government’s links to Nazi spies began emerging publicly in the 1970s.
But thousands of records from declassified files, Freedom of Information Act requests and other sources, together with interviews with scores of current and former government officials, show that the government’s recruitment of Nazis ran far deeper than previously known and that officials sought to conceal those ties for at least a half-century after the war. In 1980, FBI officials refused to tell even the Justice Department’s own Nazi hunters what they knew about 16 suspected Nazis living in the United States.
The bureau balked at a request from prosecutors for internal records on the Nazi suspects, memos show, because the 16 men had all worked as FBI informants, providing leads on Communist ‘sympathizers.’ Five of the men were still active informants.