• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

FBI Studies

  • Home
  • Ray Batvinis
    • Speaking
    • Research
  • Blog
    • Videos
  • Hoover’s Secret War against Axis Spies
    • Praise
    • Chapter 1
    • Book Reviews
    • Book Lecture Video
  • Origins of FBI Counterintelligence
    • Praise
    • Book Review
    • Introduction
    • Chapter One
    • CSPAN Video
  • Resources
    • Videos
    • History News
    • Store
  • Contact
You are here: Home / Blog / In Cold War, U.S. Spy Agencies Used 1,000 Nazis

October 29, 2014 By Raymond J. Batvinis, PhD

In Cold War, U.S. Spy Agencies Used 1,000 Nazis

(New York Times) In the decades after World War II, the C.I.A. and other United States agencies employed at least a thousand Nazis as Cold War spies and informants and, as recently as the 1990s, concealed the government’s ties to some still living in America, newly disclosed records and interviews show.

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.

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 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.

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.” . . .(read the rest)

New Book:

Share this:

  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)

Related

Filed Under: Blog, History News

Primary Sidebar

Follow Ray

Facebooktwitterlinkedinrssyoutube

Books by Dr. Ray Batvinis

Origins of FBI Counterintelligence

Hoovers Secret War Against Axis Spies book cover

Recent Posts

  • CODENAME: WALLFLOWER — The Guy Liddell Diaries
  • Message from FBI Director Wray re Bob Levinson
  • COVID 19 Message from the FBI
  • A Morning to Remember
  • The First Victory
  • The spies among us: More Chinese agents digging up secrets in Florida
  • IG Report and Message from Director Wray
  • Arne Treholt Espionage Case
  • Facts and the new “Wall of Spies” re Koval and Weisband
  • Senate Caucus Room
  • American Citizen Arrested for Acting as an Illegal Foreign Agent of the People’s Republic of China
  • North American Society for Intelligence History 2019 Conference
  • What Was He Thinking?
  • The FBI’s Role in D-Day
  • VENONA: The Opening Moments

Watch Videos

videopixCheck out all the videos on FBI Studies related to FBI history and espionage. Video Page

FBI Studies Tweets

My Tweets

Footer

About

Historical FBI Studies by Raymond J. Batvinis, PhD, author of "The Origins of FBI Counterintelligence" and "Hoover's Secret War Against Axis Spies: FBI Counterintelligence During World War II." About Ray Batvinis

Contact Ray

Contact Form
Facebooktwitterlinkedinrssyoutube

Watch Videos

videopixCheck out all the videos on FBI Studies related to FBI history and espionage. Video Page

Recent Posts

  • CODENAME: WALLFLOWER — The Guy Liddell Diaries
  • Message from FBI Director Wray re Bob Levinson
  • COVID 19 Message from the FBI
  • A Morning to Remember
  • The First Victory
  • The spies among us: More Chinese agents digging up secrets in Florida
  • IG Report and Message from Director Wray
  • Arne Treholt Espionage Case
  • Facts and the new “Wall of Spies” re Koval and Weisband

Copyright 2020 Raymond J. Batvinis, PhD | Website by CJKCREATIVE.COM