General Discussion

CIA at 50: Still Hiding Its 'Original' Nazi Sin

By Martin A. Lee

For U.S. policy-makers, the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Central Intelligence Agency on Sept. 8 provides yet another opportunity for congratulatory pronouncements about "winning the Cold War." But the American public would be better served if U.S. officials marked the occasion by owning up to the CIA's "original sin," which dates back to the spy agency's earliest days: its covert use of a Nazi spy network brimming with war criminals.

U.S. spy chiefs protected this cast of killers so they ostensibly could help counter the Soviet threat. But for the next five decades, this decision -- the ultimate practice of situational ethics -- loosened up Washington's tolerance for human rights abuses and a variety of other crimes in the name of anti-communism. The consequences continue to this day, with a resurgent neo-fascist movement in Europe that can trace its ideological lineage back to Adolf Hitler's Third Reich, through some of the men who served the CIA.

The key player on the German side of this unholy alliance was Gen. Reinhard Gehlen, a thin, bespectacled espionage prodigy who was Hitler's top anti-Soviet spy. Gehlen oversaw all of Germany's military-intelligence capabilities throughout Eastern Europe and the U.S.S.R.

As the war drew to a close, the crafty Gehlen surmised that the grand anti-fascist coalition -- led by the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union -- would not survive the peace. Gehlen also recognized that U.S. intelligence operations, largely an anti-Nazi improvisation, would be ill-prepared to wage a sustained shadow struggle against the U.S.S.R.

So, at war's end, Gehlen opted to surrender to the Americans. He offered to turn over the vast espionage archive on the U.S.S.R. that he had accumulated for Hitler. Plus, he said he could activate an underground army of battle-hardened anti-communists in Eastern Europe for Cold War duty.

Although the ink had barely dried on the Yalta agreements, which required the United States to give the Soviets any captured German officers who had been involved in "eastern area activities," Gehlen was soon transferred to Fort Hunt, Virginia. There, he dined with U.S. officials whose appetite for Cold War scuttlebutt was growing voracious. The flop-eared German general played their psyches like piano keys, with a seductive anti-Soviet pitch that left competing elements of the U.S. espionage establishment vying for his services.

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"The Agency loved Gehlen because he fed us what we wanted to hear," an ex-CIA officer told writer Christopher Simpson. "We used his stuff constantly, and we fed it to everybody 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."

Continues…

https://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/story41.html