US Agencies Used Over 1K Nazi Spies in Cold War; Assured Ex-Nazis' Intel Value Surpassed Morality

Newly declassified records show that in the decades after World War II, the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) and other U.S. agencies employed over 1,000 Nazis as Cold War spies and informants and -- as recently as the 1990s -- concealed the government's ties to some still living in America, the NY Times website reports today (October 27, 2014).

At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, law enforcement and intelligence leaders -- including J. Edgar Hoover of 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 Adolf Hitler's Third Reich.

For instance, in 1994, a lawyer with the CIA 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.

Also, thousands of records from the declassified files, the Freedom of Information Act requests, and other sources -- together with interviews with scores of current and former government officials -- confirm 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 World War II.