OPERAZIONE GEHLEN:
LA RADICI NAZISTE DELLA CIA E DELLA NATO
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WORST KEPT SECRETS OF THE BUMBLING BEAR
(Part 1 of 2)
by Jared Israel
[Originally Posted 22 May 2001]
[Reposted 2 December 2001]
=======================================
Below is an article from the 'San
Francisco Bay Guardian', entitled, 'The
CIA's Worst-Kept Secret.' It discusses
some recently unclassified CIA files.
These documents, 18,000 pages in all,
confirm that U.S. intelligence
recruited and protected Nazis starting
at the end of World War II.
I am posting and writing about this
article for two reasons. First, it
includes some useful information about
the Nazi-CIA marriage. Second, it
presents that information from a
perspective that I consider at once mistaken
and widespread; hence worth discussing.
The article was written by Martin Lee.
Mr. Lee argues that after World War
II, Nazi spies duped the U.S. into
hiring them, thereby protecting themselves
and their networks from prosecution.
He cites the example of General
Reinhard Gehlen. Gehlen had been chief
of Nazi intelligence in the Soviet Union
and Eastern Europe. According to Mr.
Lee, Gehlen fooled spymaster Allen
Dulles, who later became Director of
the CIA, in the following way:
"Gehlen was quickly spirited off to
Fort Hunt, Va. The image he projected
during 10 months of negotiations at
Fort Hunt was, to use a bit of espionage
parlance, a "legend" --one that hinged
on Gehlen's false claim that he was
never really a Nazi, but was dedicated,
above all, to fighting Communism.
Those who bit the bait included future
CIA director Allen Dulles, who became
Gehlen's biggest supporter among
American policy wonks. " (From the text
below)
There's a bit of a problem here.
Starting more than a decade earlier,
Allen Dulles, a leading diplomat and
spy, and his brother, John Foster, a
Wall Street insider, had created a
financial-intelligence apparatus to
assist the Nazis. So Dulles had
long-standing, friendly relations with
Nazis. That being the case, why would
Dulles be upset if he 'learned' that
Gehlen (a top Nazi spy) was a Nazi? (1)
Moreover, Gehlen had not been some
cloistered spy. His job had not been
simply to coordinate the gathering of
information. He had been a key leader
of the work of fascist groups in the
occupied East, such as the Iron Guard
in Romania, the Latvian Vanagis and the
Croatian Ustashe. These groups committed
the most unimaginably brutal atrocities
against 'Untermenschen', Jews,
'gypsies', Serbs and other Slavs and
Orthodox Christians, as well as against
anti-Nazis, both Communist and
non-Communist, including various
Nationalist groups, which resisted the Nazis.
Gehlen was a leading war criminal.
Did Allen Dulles know all this? Of
course he knew all this. He was a U.S.
spymaster with almost three decades
experience and he had worked with the
Nazi leadership for two decades. Dulles
arranged to have Gehlen secretly
brought to the U.S. precisely so that
the Russians wouldn't get hold of him
and put him on trial for war crimes and
hang him.
Once they had Gehlen safely in the
U.S., Allen Dulles and other top U.S.
Intelligence operatives met with Gehlen
and planned a nightmare creation: a
vast European spying-and-subversion
apparatus, controlled by Washington but
staffed by hundreds and then thousands
of Nazi war criminals. The Nazis may
have lost the war but Nazism had found
new life. (6)
Since Allen Dulles knew that Gehlen
commanded an army of monstrous war
criminals in Eastern Europe and Russia,
what is the significance of Dulles'
supposed (though frankly unbelievable)
belief that Gehlen was not a Nazi?
Mr. Lee's suggestion that Dulles'
rescue and empowerment of Gehlen was
somehow less monstrous because he was
'fooled' about Gehlen's Nazi beliefs is
typical of the way the mass media has
been whitewashing American foreign
policy since 1945.
According to this reasoning, it is a
crime if Nazis (or Islamist terrorists)
go out and commit atrocities on their
own. But if they commit atrocities at
the behest of American leaders who are
a) naive about who these Nazis (or
Islamist terrorists) are and b) are
only using these Nazis or terrorists in
pursuit of good American values, then
it is OK. This treats the American
foreign policy establishment as if it
were some perpetual teenager who may
have fallen in with a bad crowd, but
heck, he'll grow out of it.
Very few of us will ever read the
declassified Nazi-CIA documents. Articles
like Mr. Lee's from the 'San Francisco
Bay Guardian', a left-leaning
newspaper, must inform our view.
Throughout the article, Mr. Lee portrays
Washington as naive, trapped by a Cold
War mentality into recruiting Nazis
(or, as he suggests at the end of his
article, by recruiting too many of
them...you know, Nazis are OK, but only
if taken in moderation...)
Can it be that a smart guy like Mr. Lee
really believes that the very
sophisticated men who shaped US foreign
policy over the past 50 years
unknowingly blundered into bed with the
worst butchers of the century? I
cannot say; but by making this absurd
idea the theme of his article, Mr. Lee,
the critic, makes himself an apologist
for the thing he is seemingly attacking.
DID THE NAZI-CIA MARRIAGE TAKE PLACE
BECAUSE WASHINGTON WAS IN A "COLD WAR
MENTALITY"?
This notion, which is put forward by
Mr. Lee, is contradicted by two
important facts:
Fact # 1 - No, Because It Started Too Early
Washington began working with
high-placed officials in the Vatican at
the end of the war to set up Nazi escape
routes. Some of the Nazis whom they
cooperated in rescuing were spies.
Others were just Nazi butchers.
The escape routes, appropriately called
'ratlines', started in Eastern Europe
and the Balkans, particularly Croatia,
and terminated in the U.S., Canada,
Australia, Latin America, and so on.
How could it be true that the U.S. got
swept up in organizing the ratlines due
to a Cold War mentality when the Cold
War hadn't yet begun? (2)
Mr. Lee is aware that the U.S. began
rescuing Nazis before the Cold War
began. He points out that this:
"...belies the prevalent Western notion
that aggressive Soviet policies were
primarily to blame for triggering the
Cold War."
Point well taken. But at the same time,
Mr. Lee writes:
"The early courtship of Gehlen by
American intelligence suggests that
Washington was in a Cold War mode
sooner than most people realize." (From
the text below)
What does this mean? If aggressive
Soviet policies were not to blame for
triggering the Cold War, why does Mr.
Lee say that "Washington was [already]
in a Cold War mode" at the end of World
War II? Doesn't a "Cold War" require
two sides?
What Mr. Lee probably means is that at
the end of W.W. II; Washington was in
an "Attack Russia!" mode. Indeed, it
was precisely Washington's belligerent
and criminal actions, such as rescuing
Nazi war criminals, that created the
international climate of hostility and
threat which became known as the "Cold War".
In the decade and a half before World
War II, Washington and Wall Street,
including the the Dulles brothers and
the grandfather and great grandfather
of President Bush, played a dangerous
game. They helped put the Nazis in
power and aided them once they got in
power. With their assistance, the
shattered German war industry was
rebuilt in record time.
Why did Dulles and the Walker/Bush
family and others in the U.S.
Establishment help finance the creation
of a powerful, fascist state in
Germany? They did it in large measure
because they planned to use the Nazis
to attack Soviet Russia.
Alas, as the poet says, the best laid
plans of mice and men often fail.
Instead of settling for their assigned
role, of conquering Russia, the German
Nazi/Corporate state decided to conquer
everyone. Washington and London
responded to this unacceptable ambition
in a measured fashion. First, they
allowed the Nazis to inflict maximum
damage on the Soviet Union. Then they
opened a Second Front (the Normandy
Invasion) in order to prevent the USSR
from liberating all of Europe and to
make sure the Nazis were not completely crushed.
After World War II Washington didn't go
into "Cold War mode." It simply
continued with its plan of using
Germany and the Nazis against the USSR.
Except now the Nazi apparatus existed
all over Eastern and Southern Europe
(including in Russia) and Soviet
influence was far more extensive as well.
Fact # 2 - No, because the U.S. Foreign
Policy Establishment Didn't Use the
Nazis Only to Spy
The Nazi murderers whom the U.S. helped
rescue, in violation of law and
decency, were not simply spies. Many of
them were monstrous war criminals.
And these war criminal/spies were not
simply rescued, dumped in various
countries, and then forgotten.
Instead the U.S. maintained a great
network of the 'escapees' and their
contacts all over Europe with three
purposes:
* to spy;
* to nurture networks of fascists
dedicated to infiltrating, subverting
and sabotaging the socialist and
non-socialist states of Europe, a network
linked to U.S. intelligence (and to Germany);
* and to prepare a force that could be
sent back into the socialist
countries, especially the strategic
Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and
Estonia, and into the Balkans states,
especially Yugoslavia, when the time
was ripe.
The Nazi and pro-Nazi 'refugees' were
maintained at the expense of U.S.
taxpayers through programs such as the
'Assembly of Captive Nations' (3)
In the late 1980s and early 1990s many
of the U.S.-protected Nazi war
criminals (and/or their children) were
shipped back to Eastern Europe and the
Balkans where they helped to launch
secessionist movements, install U.S. and
German puppet governments, assassinate
those who resisted and foster national
hatreds. For example, returning
Fascists helped Franjo Tudjman's neo-Nazi
group, the Croatian Democratic Union,
or HDZ, take over the Croatian Republic
and launch a secessionist war against
Yugoslavia in 1991. (4)
THE BUMBLING BEAR THEORY OF U.S.
FOREIGN POLICY
Why do critics of U.S. foreign policy
so often present Washington as a
passive force? Why are we constantly
told that the U.S. is being 'used by the
Cuban exiles for their own agenda' or
that the U.S. has 'screwed up once
again by backing the Kosovo Liberation
Army' and that 'sooner or later the
Americans will find out what kind of
monsters these Albanian secessionists
are' and so on. (5)
Two explanations come to mind.
First, wittingly or unwittingly, people
tend to censor themselves in
confrontation with reckless power.
When one is criticizing an
Establishment that bombs pill factories because
it doesn't like the government (as the
U.S. did in Sudan), that bombs Bosnia,
Kosovo and Iraq with radioactive
weapons and then sends its own and allied
troops into the contaminated areas,
that refuses to punish submarine
commanders who cause the deaths of
Japanese fishermen while performing
daredevil stunts with nuclear
submarines - in criticizing such an
Establishment one may experience the
temptation to exercise restraint.
If, for example, one argues that
Washington was tricked into working with
Nazis one may feel reasonably secure.
One is not challenging the basic legitimacy
of the Wall Street-Washington axis. But if one
argues that the nightmares of
U.S. foreign policy have
been, like most large-scale human
activities, planned, then one will be
accused of being conspiratorial, or
extremist, or worse. One may find that
certain doors, previously open, are
now shut tight. Or worse.
Second, American TV and films, viewed
by people all over the world, project
an image of the Innocent American
official: kind hearted, too powerful
for his own good; easily fooled and
manipulated. This plays a big role in
conditioning people to think of the
U.S. government as a bumbling bear.
Since the movies are partly responsible
for this nonsensical image of
American leaders, let me paraphrase a
famous movie speech by way of refutation:
"Don't be too sure we're as naive as
we're supposed to be. That sort of
reputation might be good business,
toning down the critics and making it
easier to deal with the enemy." (With
apologies to Sam Spade in the 'Maltese
Falcon', for which see
http://www.filmsite.org/malt.html )
Was Washington an innocent bystander
during World War II? It was most surely
not. The OSS, predecessor of the CIA,
was engaged all over Europe. OSS
operatives knew - and reported - that
monstrous crimes were being committed
by Nazis, following which Washington
recruited these same Nazis into its
burgeoning covert apparatus, the most
sensitive branch of the U.S. government.
Think about this. The OSS was a small
organization. The Nazi apparatus was
huge and well organized. Absorbing the
Nazis into U.S. intelligence was like
a garter snake eating a rat. What does
this mean? It means the most powerful
forces in the U.S.A. had decided that
the CIA was to be, in essence, a Nazi
organization.
Washington's goal was to break up the
USSR and other Socialist states and
bring them under U.S. domination. The
way Washington planners viewed things,
Nazis had many virtues. They respected
capitalism. They despised a host of
groups (including Serbs and other
Slavs, 'Gypsies', other dark-skinned
people, etc.) who tended to resist U.S.
domination. They were good at playing
on prejudice against these groups.
Moreover, the intensity of their hate gave
an energy of persistence to their work.
They were skilled at demagoguery,
subversion, assassination, and torture.
Numerous virtues; only one fault: a
very bad reputation, regarding which, no
problem unless the truth came out. And
should the truth come out, (as it is
indeed trickling out today) the
important thing from Washington's point
of view was and is to make sure the
inevitable criticism has the proper slant.
Let the critics declare that it was all
a terrible, stupid, unforgivable
mistake and we should learn 'our'
lesson and never never do such bad things again.
Better to be attacked for being
unforgivably stupid than for being
unforgivably evil. To this end,
President Clinton set up an 'Interagency
Working Group' (IWG), made up of
"scholars, public officials, and former
intelligence officers who helped
prepare the CIA records for
declassification." It would appear that
Mr. Lee has accepted the IWG's spin
on the Nazi-CIA connection.
Below is the 'San Francisco Bay
Guardian' article.
Following the article I have posted a
few dissenting remarks.
-- Jared Israel, 21 May 2001
==================================================
The CIA's Worst-Kept Secret
From 'San Francisco Bay Guardian', May 7, 2001
Newly Declassified Files Confirm United
States Collaboration with Nazis
by Martin A. Lee
=============================================
"Honest and idealist ... enjoys good
food and wine ... unprejudiced mind..."
That's how a 1952 Central Intelligence
Agency assessment described Nazi
ideologue Emil Augsburg, an officer at
the infamous Wannsee Institute, the SS
think tank involved in planning the
Final Solution. Augsburg's SS unit
performed "special duties," a euphemism
for exterminating Jews and other
"undesirables" during the Second World War.
Although he was wanted in Poland for
war crimes, Augsburg managed to
ingratiate himself with the U.S. CIA,
which employed him in the late1940s as
an expert on Soviet affairs. Recently
released CIA records indicate that
Augsburg was among a rogue's gallery of
Nazi war criminals recruited by U.S.
intelligence shortly after Germany
surrendered to the Allies..
Pried loose by Congress, which passed
the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act
three years ago, a long-hidden trove of
once-classified CIA documents
confirms one of the worst-kept secrets
of the Cold War-- the CIA's use of an
extensive Nazi spy network to wage a
clandestine campaign against the Soviet
Union.
The CIA reports show that U.S. officials
knew they were subsidizing numerous
Third Reich veterans who had committed
horrible crimes against humanity, but
these atrocities were overlooked as the
anti-Communist crusade acquired its
own momentum. For Nazis who would
otherwise have been charged with war
crimes, signing on with American
intelligence enabled them to avoid a
prison term.
"The real winners of the Cold War were
Nazi war criminals, many of whom were
able to escape justice because the East
and West became so rapidly focused
after the war on challenging each
other," says Eli Rosenbaum, director of
the Justice Department's Office of Special
Investigations and America's chief
Nazi hunter. Rosenbaum serves on a
Clinton-appointed Interagency Working
Group committee of U.S. scholars,
public officials, and former intelligence
officers who helped prepare the CIA
records for declassification.
Many Nazi criminals "received light
punishment, no punishment at all, or
received compensation because Western
spy agencies considered them useful
assets in the Cold War," the IWG team
stated after releasing 18,000 pages of
redacted CIA material. (More
installments are pending.)
These are "not just dry historical
documents," insists former congresswoman
Elizabeth Holtzman, a member of the
panel that examined the CIA files. As
far as Holtzman is concerned, the CIA
papers raise critical questions about
American foreign policy and the origins
of the Cold War.
The decision to recruit Nazi operatives
had a negative impact on U.S.-Soviet
relations and set the stage for
Washington's tolerance of human rights'
abuses and other criminal acts in the
name of anti-Communism. With that
fateful sub-rosa embrace, the die was
cast for a litany of antidemocratic CIA
interventions around the world.
The Gehlen Org
The key figure on the German side of
the CIA-Nazi tryst was General Reinhard
Gehlen, who had served as Adolf
Hitler's top anti-Soviet spy. During
World War II, Gehlen oversaw all German
military-intelligence operations in
Eastern Europe and the USSR.
As the war drew to a close, Gehlen
surmised that the U.S.-Soviet alliance
would soon break down. Realizing that
the United States did not have a viable
cloak-and-dagger apparatus in Eastern
Europe, Gehlen surrendered to the
Americans and pitched himself as
someone who could make a vital contribution
to the forthcoming struggle against the
Communists. In addition to sharing
his vast espionage archive on the USSR,
Gehlen promised that he could
resurrect an underground network of
battle-hardened anti-Communist assets
who were well placed to wreak havoc
throughout the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
Although the Yalta Treaty stipulated
that the United States must give the
Soviets all captured German officers
who had been involved in "eastern area
activities," Gehlen was quickly
spirited off to Fort Hunt, Va. The image
he projected during 10 months of
negotiations at Fort Hunt was, to use a
bit of espionage parlance, a "legend" --
one that hinged on Gehlen's false claim
that he was never really a Nazi, but was
dedicated, above all, to fighting
Communism. Those who bit the bait
included future CIA director Allen Dulles,
who became Gehlen's biggest supporter
among American policy wonks.
Gehlen returned to West Germany in the
summer of 1946 with a mandate to
rebuild his espionage organization and
resume spying on the East at the
behest of American intelligence. The
date is significant as it preceded the
onset of the Cold War, which, according
to standard U.S. historical accounts,
did not begin until a year later. The
early courtship of Gehlen by American
intelligence suggests that Washington
was in a Cold War mode sooner than most
people realize. The Gehlen gambit also
belies the prevalent Western notion
that aggressive Soviet policies were
primarily to blame for triggering the
Cold War.
Based near Munich, Gehlen proceeded to
enlist thousands of Gestapo,
Wehrmacht, and SS veterans. Even the
vilest of the vile -- the senior
bureaucrats who ran the central
administrative apparatus of the
Holocaust --
were welcome in the "Gehlen Org," as it
was called, including Alois Brunner,
Adolf Eichmann's chief deputy. SS major
Emil Augsburg and Gestapo captain
Klaus Barbie, otherwise known as the
"Butcher of Lyon," were among those who
did double duty for Gehlen and U.S.
intelligence. "It seems that in the
Gehlen headquarters one SS man paved
the way for the next and Himmler's elite
were having happy reunion ceremonies,"
the Frankfurter Rundschau reported in
the early1950s.
Bolted lock, stock, and barrel into the
CIA, Gehlen's Nazi-infested spy
apparatus functioned as America's
secret eyes and ears in central Europe.
The Org would go on to play a major role
within NATO, supplying two-thirds of
raw intelligence on the Warsaw Pact
countries. Under CIA auspices, and later as
head of the West German secret service
until he retired in 1968, Gehlen
exerted considerable influence on U.S.
policy toward the Soviet bloc. When
U.S. spy chiefs desired an
off-the-shelf style of nation tampering,
they turned to the readily available Org,
which served as a subcontracting
syndicate for a series of ill-fated
guerrilla air drops behind the Iron
Curtain and other harebrained CIA
rollback schemes.
Sitting ducks for disinformation
...Third Reich veterans often proved
adept at peddling data -- much of it
false -- in return for cash and safety,
the IWG panel concluded. Many Nazis
played a double game, feeding
scuttlebutt to both sides of the East-West
conflict and preying upon the mutual
suspicions that emerged from the rubble
of Hitler's Germany.
General Gehlen frequently exaggerated
the Soviet threat in order to
exacerbate tensions between the
superpowers. At one point he succeeded
in convincing General Lucius Clay,
military governor of the U.S. zone of
occupation in Germany, that a major
Soviet war mobilization had begun in
Eastern Europe. This prompted Clay to
dash off a frantic, top-secret telegram
to Washington in March 1948, warning
that war "may come with dramatic
suddenness."
Gehlen's disinformation strategy was
based on a simple premise: the colder
the Cold War got, the more political
space for Hitler's heirs to maneuver.
The Org could only flourish under Cold
War conditions; as an institution it
was therefore committed to perpetuating
the Soviet-American conflict.
"The agency loved Gehlen because he fed
us what we wanted to hear. We used
his stuff constantly, and we fed it to
everyone else -- the Pentagon, the
White House, the newspapers. They loved
it, too. But it was hyped-up Russian
bogeyman junk, and it did a lot of
damage to this country," a retired CIA
official told author Christopher
Simpson, who also serves on the IWG
review panel and was author of "Blowback:
America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its
Effects on the Cold War."
CONTINUED, PART 2
LA RADICI NAZISTE DELLA CIA E DELLA NATO
(si veda anche:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/crj-mailinglist/message/952)
=*=
URL for this article:
http://emperors-clothes.com/docs/gehlen2.htm
Alternative address is
http://emperor.vwh.net/docs/gehlen2.htm
Join our email list at
http://emperors-clothes.com/f.htm.
Receive one article/day, or fewer.
Please feel free to reprint and re-post
any Emperor's Clothes article. Also,
please include the article's Web
address and author(s).
www.tenc.net * [Emperor's Clothes]
=======================================
WORST KEPT SECRETS OF THE BUMBLING BEAR
(Part 1 of 2)
by Jared Israel
[Originally Posted 22 May 2001]
[Reposted 2 December 2001]
=======================================
Below is an article from the 'San
Francisco Bay Guardian', entitled, 'The
CIA's Worst-Kept Secret.' It discusses
some recently unclassified CIA files.
These documents, 18,000 pages in all,
confirm that U.S. intelligence
recruited and protected Nazis starting
at the end of World War II.
I am posting and writing about this
article for two reasons. First, it
includes some useful information about
the Nazi-CIA marriage. Second, it
presents that information from a
perspective that I consider at once mistaken
and widespread; hence worth discussing.
The article was written by Martin Lee.
Mr. Lee argues that after World War
II, Nazi spies duped the U.S. into
hiring them, thereby protecting themselves
and their networks from prosecution.
He cites the example of General
Reinhard Gehlen. Gehlen had been chief
of Nazi intelligence in the Soviet Union
and Eastern Europe. According to Mr.
Lee, Gehlen fooled spymaster Allen
Dulles, who later became Director of
the CIA, in the following way:
"Gehlen was quickly spirited off to
Fort Hunt, Va. The image he projected
during 10 months of negotiations at
Fort Hunt was, to use a bit of espionage
parlance, a "legend" --one that hinged
on Gehlen's false claim that he was
never really a Nazi, but was dedicated,
above all, to fighting Communism.
Those who bit the bait included future
CIA director Allen Dulles, who became
Gehlen's biggest supporter among
American policy wonks. " (From the text
below)
There's a bit of a problem here.
Starting more than a decade earlier,
Allen Dulles, a leading diplomat and
spy, and his brother, John Foster, a
Wall Street insider, had created a
financial-intelligence apparatus to
assist the Nazis. So Dulles had
long-standing, friendly relations with
Nazis. That being the case, why would
Dulles be upset if he 'learned' that
Gehlen (a top Nazi spy) was a Nazi? (1)
Moreover, Gehlen had not been some
cloistered spy. His job had not been
simply to coordinate the gathering of
information. He had been a key leader
of the work of fascist groups in the
occupied East, such as the Iron Guard
in Romania, the Latvian Vanagis and the
Croatian Ustashe. These groups committed
the most unimaginably brutal atrocities
against 'Untermenschen', Jews,
'gypsies', Serbs and other Slavs and
Orthodox Christians, as well as against
anti-Nazis, both Communist and
non-Communist, including various
Nationalist groups, which resisted the Nazis.
Gehlen was a leading war criminal.
Did Allen Dulles know all this? Of
course he knew all this. He was a U.S.
spymaster with almost three decades
experience and he had worked with the
Nazi leadership for two decades. Dulles
arranged to have Gehlen secretly
brought to the U.S. precisely so that
the Russians wouldn't get hold of him
and put him on trial for war crimes and
hang him.
Once they had Gehlen safely in the
U.S., Allen Dulles and other top U.S.
Intelligence operatives met with Gehlen
and planned a nightmare creation: a
vast European spying-and-subversion
apparatus, controlled by Washington but
staffed by hundreds and then thousands
of Nazi war criminals. The Nazis may
have lost the war but Nazism had found
new life. (6)
Since Allen Dulles knew that Gehlen
commanded an army of monstrous war
criminals in Eastern Europe and Russia,
what is the significance of Dulles'
supposed (though frankly unbelievable)
belief that Gehlen was not a Nazi?
Mr. Lee's suggestion that Dulles'
rescue and empowerment of Gehlen was
somehow less monstrous because he was
'fooled' about Gehlen's Nazi beliefs is
typical of the way the mass media has
been whitewashing American foreign
policy since 1945.
According to this reasoning, it is a
crime if Nazis (or Islamist terrorists)
go out and commit atrocities on their
own. But if they commit atrocities at
the behest of American leaders who are
a) naive about who these Nazis (or
Islamist terrorists) are and b) are
only using these Nazis or terrorists in
pursuit of good American values, then
it is OK. This treats the American
foreign policy establishment as if it
were some perpetual teenager who may
have fallen in with a bad crowd, but
heck, he'll grow out of it.
Very few of us will ever read the
declassified Nazi-CIA documents. Articles
like Mr. Lee's from the 'San Francisco
Bay Guardian', a left-leaning
newspaper, must inform our view.
Throughout the article, Mr. Lee portrays
Washington as naive, trapped by a Cold
War mentality into recruiting Nazis
(or, as he suggests at the end of his
article, by recruiting too many of
them...you know, Nazis are OK, but only
if taken in moderation...)
Can it be that a smart guy like Mr. Lee
really believes that the very
sophisticated men who shaped US foreign
policy over the past 50 years
unknowingly blundered into bed with the
worst butchers of the century? I
cannot say; but by making this absurd
idea the theme of his article, Mr. Lee,
the critic, makes himself an apologist
for the thing he is seemingly attacking.
DID THE NAZI-CIA MARRIAGE TAKE PLACE
BECAUSE WASHINGTON WAS IN A "COLD WAR
MENTALITY"?
This notion, which is put forward by
Mr. Lee, is contradicted by two
important facts:
Fact # 1 - No, Because It Started Too Early
Washington began working with
high-placed officials in the Vatican at
the end of the war to set up Nazi escape
routes. Some of the Nazis whom they
cooperated in rescuing were spies.
Others were just Nazi butchers.
The escape routes, appropriately called
'ratlines', started in Eastern Europe
and the Balkans, particularly Croatia,
and terminated in the U.S., Canada,
Australia, Latin America, and so on.
How could it be true that the U.S. got
swept up in organizing the ratlines due
to a Cold War mentality when the Cold
War hadn't yet begun? (2)
Mr. Lee is aware that the U.S. began
rescuing Nazis before the Cold War
began. He points out that this:
"...belies the prevalent Western notion
that aggressive Soviet policies were
primarily to blame for triggering the
Cold War."
Point well taken. But at the same time,
Mr. Lee writes:
"The early courtship of Gehlen by
American intelligence suggests that
Washington was in a Cold War mode
sooner than most people realize." (From
the text below)
What does this mean? If aggressive
Soviet policies were not to blame for
triggering the Cold War, why does Mr.
Lee say that "Washington was [already]
in a Cold War mode" at the end of World
War II? Doesn't a "Cold War" require
two sides?
What Mr. Lee probably means is that at
the end of W.W. II; Washington was in
an "Attack Russia!" mode. Indeed, it
was precisely Washington's belligerent
and criminal actions, such as rescuing
Nazi war criminals, that created the
international climate of hostility and
threat which became known as the "Cold War".
In the decade and a half before World
War II, Washington and Wall Street,
including the the Dulles brothers and
the grandfather and great grandfather
of President Bush, played a dangerous
game. They helped put the Nazis in
power and aided them once they got in
power. With their assistance, the
shattered German war industry was
rebuilt in record time.
Why did Dulles and the Walker/Bush
family and others in the U.S.
Establishment help finance the creation
of a powerful, fascist state in
Germany? They did it in large measure
because they planned to use the Nazis
to attack Soviet Russia.
Alas, as the poet says, the best laid
plans of mice and men often fail.
Instead of settling for their assigned
role, of conquering Russia, the German
Nazi/Corporate state decided to conquer
everyone. Washington and London
responded to this unacceptable ambition
in a measured fashion. First, they
allowed the Nazis to inflict maximum
damage on the Soviet Union. Then they
opened a Second Front (the Normandy
Invasion) in order to prevent the USSR
from liberating all of Europe and to
make sure the Nazis were not completely crushed.
After World War II Washington didn't go
into "Cold War mode." It simply
continued with its plan of using
Germany and the Nazis against the USSR.
Except now the Nazi apparatus existed
all over Eastern and Southern Europe
(including in Russia) and Soviet
influence was far more extensive as well.
Fact # 2 - No, because the U.S. Foreign
Policy Establishment Didn't Use the
Nazis Only to Spy
The Nazi murderers whom the U.S. helped
rescue, in violation of law and
decency, were not simply spies. Many of
them were monstrous war criminals.
And these war criminal/spies were not
simply rescued, dumped in various
countries, and then forgotten.
Instead the U.S. maintained a great
network of the 'escapees' and their
contacts all over Europe with three
purposes:
* to spy;
* to nurture networks of fascists
dedicated to infiltrating, subverting
and sabotaging the socialist and
non-socialist states of Europe, a network
linked to U.S. intelligence (and to Germany);
* and to prepare a force that could be
sent back into the socialist
countries, especially the strategic
Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and
Estonia, and into the Balkans states,
especially Yugoslavia, when the time
was ripe.
The Nazi and pro-Nazi 'refugees' were
maintained at the expense of U.S.
taxpayers through programs such as the
'Assembly of Captive Nations' (3)
In the late 1980s and early 1990s many
of the U.S.-protected Nazi war
criminals (and/or their children) were
shipped back to Eastern Europe and the
Balkans where they helped to launch
secessionist movements, install U.S. and
German puppet governments, assassinate
those who resisted and foster national
hatreds. For example, returning
Fascists helped Franjo Tudjman's neo-Nazi
group, the Croatian Democratic Union,
or HDZ, take over the Croatian Republic
and launch a secessionist war against
Yugoslavia in 1991. (4)
THE BUMBLING BEAR THEORY OF U.S.
FOREIGN POLICY
Why do critics of U.S. foreign policy
so often present Washington as a
passive force? Why are we constantly
told that the U.S. is being 'used by the
Cuban exiles for their own agenda' or
that the U.S. has 'screwed up once
again by backing the Kosovo Liberation
Army' and that 'sooner or later the
Americans will find out what kind of
monsters these Albanian secessionists
are' and so on. (5)
Two explanations come to mind.
First, wittingly or unwittingly, people
tend to censor themselves in
confrontation with reckless power.
When one is criticizing an
Establishment that bombs pill factories because
it doesn't like the government (as the
U.S. did in Sudan), that bombs Bosnia,
Kosovo and Iraq with radioactive
weapons and then sends its own and allied
troops into the contaminated areas,
that refuses to punish submarine
commanders who cause the deaths of
Japanese fishermen while performing
daredevil stunts with nuclear
submarines - in criticizing such an
Establishment one may experience the
temptation to exercise restraint.
If, for example, one argues that
Washington was tricked into working with
Nazis one may feel reasonably secure.
One is not challenging the basic legitimacy
of the Wall Street-Washington axis. But if one
argues that the nightmares of
U.S. foreign policy have
been, like most large-scale human
activities, planned, then one will be
accused of being conspiratorial, or
extremist, or worse. One may find that
certain doors, previously open, are
now shut tight. Or worse.
Second, American TV and films, viewed
by people all over the world, project
an image of the Innocent American
official: kind hearted, too powerful
for his own good; easily fooled and
manipulated. This plays a big role in
conditioning people to think of the
U.S. government as a bumbling bear.
Since the movies are partly responsible
for this nonsensical image of
American leaders, let me paraphrase a
famous movie speech by way of refutation:
"Don't be too sure we're as naive as
we're supposed to be. That sort of
reputation might be good business,
toning down the critics and making it
easier to deal with the enemy." (With
apologies to Sam Spade in the 'Maltese
Falcon', for which see
http://www.filmsite.org/malt.html )
Was Washington an innocent bystander
during World War II? It was most surely
not. The OSS, predecessor of the CIA,
was engaged all over Europe. OSS
operatives knew - and reported - that
monstrous crimes were being committed
by Nazis, following which Washington
recruited these same Nazis into its
burgeoning covert apparatus, the most
sensitive branch of the U.S. government.
Think about this. The OSS was a small
organization. The Nazi apparatus was
huge and well organized. Absorbing the
Nazis into U.S. intelligence was like
a garter snake eating a rat. What does
this mean? It means the most powerful
forces in the U.S.A. had decided that
the CIA was to be, in essence, a Nazi
organization.
Washington's goal was to break up the
USSR and other Socialist states and
bring them under U.S. domination. The
way Washington planners viewed things,
Nazis had many virtues. They respected
capitalism. They despised a host of
groups (including Serbs and other
Slavs, 'Gypsies', other dark-skinned
people, etc.) who tended to resist U.S.
domination. They were good at playing
on prejudice against these groups.
Moreover, the intensity of their hate gave
an energy of persistence to their work.
They were skilled at demagoguery,
subversion, assassination, and torture.
Numerous virtues; only one fault: a
very bad reputation, regarding which, no
problem unless the truth came out. And
should the truth come out, (as it is
indeed trickling out today) the
important thing from Washington's point
of view was and is to make sure the
inevitable criticism has the proper slant.
Let the critics declare that it was all
a terrible, stupid, unforgivable
mistake and we should learn 'our'
lesson and never never do such bad things again.
Better to be attacked for being
unforgivably stupid than for being
unforgivably evil. To this end,
President Clinton set up an 'Interagency
Working Group' (IWG), made up of
"scholars, public officials, and former
intelligence officers who helped
prepare the CIA records for
declassification." It would appear that
Mr. Lee has accepted the IWG's spin
on the Nazi-CIA connection.
Below is the 'San Francisco Bay
Guardian' article.
Following the article I have posted a
few dissenting remarks.
-- Jared Israel, 21 May 2001
==================================================
The CIA's Worst-Kept Secret
From 'San Francisco Bay Guardian', May 7, 2001
Newly Declassified Files Confirm United
States Collaboration with Nazis
by Martin A. Lee
=============================================
"Honest and idealist ... enjoys good
food and wine ... unprejudiced mind..."
That's how a 1952 Central Intelligence
Agency assessment described Nazi
ideologue Emil Augsburg, an officer at
the infamous Wannsee Institute, the SS
think tank involved in planning the
Final Solution. Augsburg's SS unit
performed "special duties," a euphemism
for exterminating Jews and other
"undesirables" during the Second World War.
Although he was wanted in Poland for
war crimes, Augsburg managed to
ingratiate himself with the U.S. CIA,
which employed him in the late1940s as
an expert on Soviet affairs. Recently
released CIA records indicate that
Augsburg was among a rogue's gallery of
Nazi war criminals recruited by U.S.
intelligence shortly after Germany
surrendered to the Allies..
Pried loose by Congress, which passed
the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act
three years ago, a long-hidden trove of
once-classified CIA documents
confirms one of the worst-kept secrets
of the Cold War-- the CIA's use of an
extensive Nazi spy network to wage a
clandestine campaign against the Soviet
Union.
The CIA reports show that U.S. officials
knew they were subsidizing numerous
Third Reich veterans who had committed
horrible crimes against humanity, but
these atrocities were overlooked as the
anti-Communist crusade acquired its
own momentum. For Nazis who would
otherwise have been charged with war
crimes, signing on with American
intelligence enabled them to avoid a
prison term.
"The real winners of the Cold War were
Nazi war criminals, many of whom were
able to escape justice because the East
and West became so rapidly focused
after the war on challenging each
other," says Eli Rosenbaum, director of
the Justice Department's Office of Special
Investigations and America's chief
Nazi hunter. Rosenbaum serves on a
Clinton-appointed Interagency Working
Group committee of U.S. scholars,
public officials, and former intelligence
officers who helped prepare the CIA
records for declassification.
Many Nazi criminals "received light
punishment, no punishment at all, or
received compensation because Western
spy agencies considered them useful
assets in the Cold War," the IWG team
stated after releasing 18,000 pages of
redacted CIA material. (More
installments are pending.)
These are "not just dry historical
documents," insists former congresswoman
Elizabeth Holtzman, a member of the
panel that examined the CIA files. As
far as Holtzman is concerned, the CIA
papers raise critical questions about
American foreign policy and the origins
of the Cold War.
The decision to recruit Nazi operatives
had a negative impact on U.S.-Soviet
relations and set the stage for
Washington's tolerance of human rights'
abuses and other criminal acts in the
name of anti-Communism. With that
fateful sub-rosa embrace, the die was
cast for a litany of antidemocratic CIA
interventions around the world.
The Gehlen Org
The key figure on the German side of
the CIA-Nazi tryst was General Reinhard
Gehlen, who had served as Adolf
Hitler's top anti-Soviet spy. During
World War II, Gehlen oversaw all German
military-intelligence operations in
Eastern Europe and the USSR.
As the war drew to a close, Gehlen
surmised that the U.S.-Soviet alliance
would soon break down. Realizing that
the United States did not have a viable
cloak-and-dagger apparatus in Eastern
Europe, Gehlen surrendered to the
Americans and pitched himself as
someone who could make a vital contribution
to the forthcoming struggle against the
Communists. In addition to sharing
his vast espionage archive on the USSR,
Gehlen promised that he could
resurrect an underground network of
battle-hardened anti-Communist assets
who were well placed to wreak havoc
throughout the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
Although the Yalta Treaty stipulated
that the United States must give the
Soviets all captured German officers
who had been involved in "eastern area
activities," Gehlen was quickly
spirited off to Fort Hunt, Va. The image
he projected during 10 months of
negotiations at Fort Hunt was, to use a
bit of espionage parlance, a "legend" --
one that hinged on Gehlen's false claim
that he was never really a Nazi, but was
dedicated, above all, to fighting
Communism. Those who bit the bait
included future CIA director Allen Dulles,
who became Gehlen's biggest supporter
among American policy wonks.
Gehlen returned to West Germany in the
summer of 1946 with a mandate to
rebuild his espionage organization and
resume spying on the East at the
behest of American intelligence. The
date is significant as it preceded the
onset of the Cold War, which, according
to standard U.S. historical accounts,
did not begin until a year later. The
early courtship of Gehlen by American
intelligence suggests that Washington
was in a Cold War mode sooner than most
people realize. The Gehlen gambit also
belies the prevalent Western notion
that aggressive Soviet policies were
primarily to blame for triggering the
Cold War.
Based near Munich, Gehlen proceeded to
enlist thousands of Gestapo,
Wehrmacht, and SS veterans. Even the
vilest of the vile -- the senior
bureaucrats who ran the central
administrative apparatus of the
Holocaust --
were welcome in the "Gehlen Org," as it
was called, including Alois Brunner,
Adolf Eichmann's chief deputy. SS major
Emil Augsburg and Gestapo captain
Klaus Barbie, otherwise known as the
"Butcher of Lyon," were among those who
did double duty for Gehlen and U.S.
intelligence. "It seems that in the
Gehlen headquarters one SS man paved
the way for the next and Himmler's elite
were having happy reunion ceremonies,"
the Frankfurter Rundschau reported in
the early1950s.
Bolted lock, stock, and barrel into the
CIA, Gehlen's Nazi-infested spy
apparatus functioned as America's
secret eyes and ears in central Europe.
The Org would go on to play a major role
within NATO, supplying two-thirds of
raw intelligence on the Warsaw Pact
countries. Under CIA auspices, and later as
head of the West German secret service
until he retired in 1968, Gehlen
exerted considerable influence on U.S.
policy toward the Soviet bloc. When
U.S. spy chiefs desired an
off-the-shelf style of nation tampering,
they turned to the readily available Org,
which served as a subcontracting
syndicate for a series of ill-fated
guerrilla air drops behind the Iron
Curtain and other harebrained CIA
rollback schemes.
Sitting ducks for disinformation
...Third Reich veterans often proved
adept at peddling data -- much of it
false -- in return for cash and safety,
the IWG panel concluded. Many Nazis
played a double game, feeding
scuttlebutt to both sides of the East-West
conflict and preying upon the mutual
suspicions that emerged from the rubble
of Hitler's Germany.
General Gehlen frequently exaggerated
the Soviet threat in order to
exacerbate tensions between the
superpowers. At one point he succeeded
in convincing General Lucius Clay,
military governor of the U.S. zone of
occupation in Germany, that a major
Soviet war mobilization had begun in
Eastern Europe. This prompted Clay to
dash off a frantic, top-secret telegram
to Washington in March 1948, warning
that war "may come with dramatic
suddenness."
Gehlen's disinformation strategy was
based on a simple premise: the colder
the Cold War got, the more political
space for Hitler's heirs to maneuver.
The Org could only flourish under Cold
War conditions; as an institution it
was therefore committed to perpetuating
the Soviet-American conflict.
"The agency loved Gehlen because he fed
us what we wanted to hear. We used
his stuff constantly, and we fed it to
everyone else -- the Pentagon, the
White House, the newspapers. They loved
it, too. But it was hyped-up Russian
bogeyman junk, and it did a lot of
damage to this country," a retired CIA
official told author Christopher
Simpson, who also serves on the IWG
review panel and was author of "Blowback:
America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its
Effects on the Cold War."
CONTINUED, PART 2