Winston Churchill once said that “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else.” By ‘everything else’ apparently he also meant hiring thousands of Nazis as Cold War spies and informants and, according to the NYT, “as recently as the 1990s, concealing the government’s ties to some still living in America.”
Because remember when merely associating with Nazi war criminals was enough to get you thrown out of polite society in perpetuity and likely thrown in a US prison, or worse? Well, when the one doing the association is that creature of utmost “fluidity” when it comes to matters of morality, the US government, apparently preaching moral superiority while invading and targeting for extermination world “dictators” whose only crime is being “evil” according to the US government’s pristine moral compass, then everything is forgiven. But before the truth is revealed there will be years of denying, misrepresenting the facts, and outright lying.
So here, according to the NYT, are the facts about Uncle Sam’s employment of Nazis for decades. “At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, law enforcement and intelligence leaders like J. Edgar Hoover at the F.B.I. and Allen Dulles at the C.I.A. aggressively recruited onetime Nazis of all ranks as secret, anti-Soviet “assets,” declassified records show.”
And while Germans justified their actions during World War II by merely following orders, how did the US seek to validate its grotesque actions? Here is the NYT with the winning phrase of the day, if not year:
They believed the ex-Nazis’ intelligence value against the Russians outweighed what one official called “moral lapses” in their service to the Third Reich.
And there it is: moral lapses. When the market crashes, and the US economy’s long-deferred collapse is now a fact, prepare to hear much more about the so-called moral lapses of bankers, Federal Reserve officials, and tenured economist during the upcoming public tribunals.
But back to America’s double standard in purshing vs retaining Nazi criminals:
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 C.I.A. pressured prosecutors to drop an investigation into an ex-spy outside Boston implicated in the Nazis’ massacre of tens of thousands of Jews in Lithuania, according to a government official.
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, F.B.I. officials refused to tell even the Justice Department’s own Nazi hunters what they knew about 16 suspected Nazis living in the United States.
And here’s why the US did everything in its power to keep the awful truth hidden: “Some spies for the United States had worked at the highest levels for the Nazis.”
One
SS officer, Otto von Bolschwing, was a mentor and top aide to Adolf
Eichmann, architect of the “Final Solution,” and wrote policy papers on
how to terrorize Jews.
Yet after the war, the C.I.A. not only hired him as a spy in Europe, but relocated him and his family to New York City in 1954, records show. The move was seen as a “a reward for his loyal postwar service and in view of the innocuousness of his [Nazi] party activities,” the agency wrote.
Anyone reading this with nothing but disgust would be delighted to know that Bolschwing’s own son was stunned by the two-faced nature of the US government:
His son, Gus von Bolschwing, who learned many years later of his father’s ties to the Nazis, sees the relationship between the spy agency and his father as one of mutual convenience forged by the Cold War.
“They used him, and he used them,” Gus von Bolschwing, now 75, said in an interview. “It shouldn’t have happened. He never should have been admitted to the United States. It wasn’t consistent with our values as a country.”
It went so far that America would do everything in its power to hide its pathological moral failure from even its closest of allies, the Israeli:
Agency officials were worried as well that Mr. von Bolschwing might be named as Eichmann’s “collaborator and fellow conspirator and that the resulting publicity may prove embarrassing to the U.S.” a C.I.A. official wrote.
After two agents met with Mr. von Bolschwing in 1961, the agency assured him it would not disclose his ties to Eichmann, records show. He lived freely for another 20 years before prosecutors discovered his wartime role and prosecuted him. He agreed to give up his citizenship in 1981, dying months later.
The shocking bottom line:
In all, the American military, the C.I.A., the F.B.I. and other agencies used at least 1,000 ex-Nazis and collaborators as spies and informants after the war, according to Richard Breitman, a Holocaust scholar at American University who was on a government-appointed team that declassified war-crime records.
The full tally of Nazis-turned-spies is probably much higher, said Norman Goda, a University of Florida historian on the declassification team, but many records remain classified even today, making a complete count impossible.
One can only speculate: by now most are either dead or “suicided” just like the Deutsche Bankers: “None of the spies are known to be alive today.”
And while none of this comes as a surprise, especially in the aftermath of the Snowden revelations, one wonders if the world have to wait another 50 or so years before it is declassified that the CIA has been the primary and instigator of every current conflict around the globe, from the Ukraine civil war to ISIS?
via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1xxBfdw Tyler Durden