The CIA Used Nazis (and Lots of Them) to Fight Commies

The New York Times has a
reminder today that our federal agencies tend to be largely amoral
when it comes to pursuing whatever it determines to be in its
interests. Fighting a cold war against those evil Communists? You
know who else hates the Russkies? Nazis! So the
CIA employed at least 1,000 known Nazis as spies and informants
during the Cold War. And the agency helped conceal their ties to
protect them from possible prosecution by the Department of Justice
as late as the 1990s. Info had been leaking out for decades, but
now we know a lot more about what happened, and as is typical, what
the government was doing secretly was much more extensive than the
public realized:

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.

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 F.B.I. informants, providing leads on Communist
“sympathizers.” Five of the men were still active informants.

Refusing to turn over the records, a bureau official in a memo
stressed the need for “protecting the confidentiality of such
sources of information to the fullest possible extent.”

The Times tells the tale of Otto von Bolschwing, a
member of the SS and an aide to Adolf Eichmann, the man behind the
“Final Solution.” The CIA hired Bolschwing in the 1950s and
relocated his family to New York City. When Eichmann was captured
in Argentina, the CIA helped protect Bolschwing’s identity and
prevented his ties from being exposed. Prosecutors didn’t figure
out who he was until the 1980s. He surrendered his American
citizenship months before he died.

In retrospect, the Nazis often didn’t prove to be that helpful
(no, really!):

[M]any Nazi spies proved inept or worse, declassified security
reviews show. Some were deemed habitual liars, confidence men or
embezzlers, and a few even turned out to be Soviet double agents,
the records show.

[Holocaust scholar Richard] Breitman said the morality of
recruiting ex-Nazis was rarely considered. “This all stemmed from a
kind of panic, a fear that the Communists were terribly powerful
and we had so few assets,” he said.

Read more
here. The effort appears to be completely disconnected from
Operation
Paperclip, which brought over German scientists and engineers
after the war to employ them and keep them out of the hands of
Germany and Russia.