63 Documents the Government Doesn't Want You to Read
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13 & 14 & 15
NAZI WAR CRIMES
More on U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis
Not long after the Justice Department’s 2006 report came out, along came another from the National Archives. This is based on 1.3 million Army files and another 1,110 CIA files. The New York Times had this to say about it: “After World War II, American counterintelligence recruited former Gestapo officers, SS veterans and Nazi collaborators to an even greater extent than had been previously disclosed and helped many of them avoid prosecution or looked the other way when they escaped…”
I’m including here the 100-page report’s introduction and conclusion, and sandwiched in between are three documents that caught my eye. One is an interview with a personal secretary to Hitler, who took his last will and testament, and who also related how the armored car carrying Martin Bormann was blown up. The second is about how the Germans supported a number of Arab leaders during the war, apparently based on expecting to later establish pro-German governments in the Middle East. And the third, signed by CIA Director Allen Dulles in 1952, shows the Agency looking to head off a criminal investigation into a Ukrainian nationalist leader that it wanted to keep using.
INTRODUCTION
At the end of World War II, Allied armies recovered a large portion of the written or filmed evidence of the Holocaust and other forms of Nazi persecution. Allied prosecutors used newly found records in numerous war crimes trials. Governments released many related documents regarding war criminals during the second half of the 20th century. A small segment of American-held documents from Nazi Germany or about Nazi officials and Nazi collaborators, however, remained classified into the 21st century because of government restrictions on the release of intelligence-related records.
Approximately 8 million pages of documents declassified in the United States under the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act added significantly to our knowledge of wartime Nazi crimes and the postwar fate of suspected war criminals. A 2004 U.S. Government report by a team of independent historians working with the government’s Nazi War Criminal Records Interagency Working Group (IWG), entitled U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, highlighted some of the new information; it appeared with revisions as a 2005 book.1 Our 2010 report serves as an addendum to U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis; it draws upon additional documents declassified since then.
The latest CIA and Army files have: evidence of war crimes and about the wartime activities of war criminals; postwar documents on the search for or prosecution of war criminals; documents about the escape of war criminals; documents about the Allied protection or use of Nazi war criminals; and documents about the postwar political activities of war criminals. None of the declassified documents conveys a complete story in itself; to make sense of this evidence, we have also drawn on older documents and published works.
The Timing of Declassification
Why did the most recent declassifications take so long? In 2005–07 the Central Intelligence Agency adopted a more liberal interpretation of the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act. As a result, CIA declassified and turned over to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) additional documents from pre-existing files as well as entirely new CIA files, totaling more than 1,100 files in all. Taken together, there were several thousand pages of new CIA records that no one outside the CIA had seen previously.
A much larger collection came from the Army. In the early postwar years, the Army had the largest U.S. intelligence and counterintelligence organizations in Europe; it also led the search for Nazi war criminals. In 1946 Army intelligence (G-2) and the Army Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) had little competition—the CIA was not established until a year later. Even afterwards, the Army remained a critical factor in intelligence work in central Europe.
Years ago the Army facility at Fort Meade, Maryland, turned over to NARA its classified Intelligence and Security Command Records for Europe from the period (approximately) 1945–63. Mostly counterintelligence records from the Army’s Investigative Records Repository (IRR), this collection promised to be a rich source of information about whether the United States maintained an interest in war crimes and Nazi war criminals.
After preserving these records on microfilm, and then on a now obsolete system of optical disks, the Army destroyed many of the paper documents. But the microfilm deteriorated, and NARA could not read or recover about half of the files on the optical disks, let alone declassify and make them available. NARA needed additional resources and technology to solve the technological problems and transfer the IRR files to a special computer server. Declassification of these IRR files only began in 2009, after the IWG had gone out of existence.
This new Army IRR collection comprises 1.3 million files and many millions of pages. It will be years before all of these Army files are available for researchers. For this report we have drawn selectively upon hundreds of these IRR files, amounting to many thousands of pages, which have been declassified and are already available at NARA.
Intelligence Organizations and War Crimes
American intelligence and counterintelligence organizations each had its own raison d’être, its own institutional interests, and its own priorities. Unfortunately, intelligence officials generally did not record their general policies and attitudes toward war crimes and war criminals, so that we hunted for evidence in their handling of individual cases. Despite variations, these specific cases do show a pattern: the issue of capturing and punishing war criminals became less important over time. During the last months of the war and shortly after it, capturing enemies, collecting evidence about them, and punishing them seemed quite consistent. Undoubtedly, the onset of the Cold War gave American intelligence organizations new functions, new priorities, and new foes. Settling scores with Germans or German collaborators seemed less pressing; in some cases, it even appeared counterproductive.
In the months after the war in Europe ended Allied forces struggled to comprehend the welter of Nazi organizations. Allied intelligence agencies initially scrutinized their German intelligence counterparts for signs of participation in underground organizations, resistance, or sabotage. Assessing threats to the Allied occupation of Germany, they thought first of Nazi fanatics and German intelligence officials. Nazi officials in the concentration camps had obviously committed terrible crimes, but the evidence about the Gestapo was not as striking. The Allies started by trying to find out who had been responsible for what.
NOTES
1 Richard Breitman, Norman J.W. Goda, Timothy Naftali, and Robert Wolfe, U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Gertrude (Traudl) Junge, one of Hitler’s personal secretaries, stayed in the Reichschancellery bunker to take Hitler’s last will and testament before his suicide. Junge describes the perils in working her way through the Russian lines surrounding Berlin. She relates meeting Hitler’s chauffeur Kemka and of the deaths of Martin Bormann, Stumpfegger, and Naumann, when their armored car was blown up. RG 319, Records of the Army Staff.
German financial support of Arab leaders during the entire war was astonishing. The Grand Mufti Amin el Husseini and Raschid Ali El Gailani financed their operations with funding from the German Foreign Ministry from 1941–45. German intention in the Arab countries was based on an expectation of establishing pro-German governments in the Middle East. RG 319, Records of the Army Staff.
The CIA moved to protect Ukranian nationalist leader Mykola Lebed from criminal investigation by the Immigration and Naturalization Service in 1952. RG 263, Records of the Central Intelligence Agency.
CONCLUSION
This report discusses only a sample of newly released records, hinting at their overall richness. The 1.3 million Army files include thousands of titles of many more issues regarding wartime criminals, their pursuit, their arrest, their escape, and occasionally, their use by Allied and Soviet intelligence agencies. These include files on German war criminals, but also collaborators from the Baltic S
tates, Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Croatia, and elsewhere. These files also include information on Allied and non-aligned states that had an interest in Axis personalities, including Great Britain, France, Italy, Argentina, and Israel.
The 1,110 re-released or newly released CIA name files are in most cases far more detailed than the files of the initial CIA release in 2001 and after. They contain a trove of information on Nazis who eventually worked for the Gehlen Organization or as Soviet spies after the war. They hold information about important Nazi officials who escaped and became figures of security interest in other countries spanning the globe from the Middle East to South America. Together, the Army and CIA records will keep scholars of World War II and the Cold War busy for many years.
The new files also have postwar intelligence on other subjects. The CIC kept close watch on other suspect groups, such as German communists, and kept thousands of files on them. They kept watch on politically active Jewish refugees in displaced persons camps. Indeed, there are many hundreds of newly released files concerning the remnant of European Jews who searched for a new life in Palestine or the United States. Thus the new records are of great interest to those researching a very broad range of topics from international Communism to the Jewish diaspora to the history of mass migration.
The declassification of intelligence-related material is a controversial subject, involving as it does the release of records formerly of national security interest. The current releases show, however, that the passage of years lessens the information’s sensitivity while providing researchers access to raw information that is simply not available elsewhere. By their very nature, intelligence agencies attain and record information that other government or non-government organizations cannot. None of the chapters in this report could have been written without declassified intelligence records, nor could the many articles and books that will emerge as a result of the current release. The funding for declassification and the assurance that intelligence records are opened to the public thus preserve key aspects of world history. In the interest of understanding our past Congress should, in our view, ensure that such openness continues.
16
WARREN COMMISSION
CIA “Propaganda Notes” on the Kennedy Assassination
This CIA memo of “Propaganda Notes” from 1964 is self-explanatory. They were going to make sure the Warren Report that concluded President Kennedy was assassinated by a lone nut named Lee Harvey Oswald got disseminated far and wide. The intention was to bury suspicions of conspiracy, part of a systematic government-promoted distribution of—they said it, not me—propaganda.
A great deal of the CIA’s job seems to be to “spin” whatever happens in the best light they can. And for the most part, spinning is done to cover up the truth: If we’ve done it, then it has to be right.
17
NORIEGA AND THE U.S.
Running Drugs with Dictators
The Reagan years are remembered, of course, for the Iran-Contra scandal that made a notorious celebrity (and future political hero to many) of Colonel Oliver North. He claimed that John Kerry’s 1988 Senateto Foreign Relations subcommittee report on the interplay between U.S. support for the Nicaraguan Contras and the drug trade was all wrong. “The fact is nobody in the government of the United States…ever had anything to do with running drugs to support the Nicaraguan resistance…I will stand on with running drugs to support the Nicaraguan resistance. . . I will stand on that to my grave.”
Well, North may still be standing but his credibility sure isn’t. His diary entries actually had numerous reports of drug smuggling among the Contras, none of which North alerted the DEA or other law enforcement agencies about. One mentions $14 million in drug money being funneled into an operation.
I have to laugh and, in the immortal words of Nancy Reagan, “just say no” to drugs. The hypocrisy of the double standard is ludicrous. All you can do is laugh, or cry. I guess it’s okay to deal drugs if it’s for the cause of war.
I’m including here an exchange between North and his boss, Admiral John Poindexter, about Manuel Noriega, the Panamian dictator who our government later overthrew. Noriega is still doing time for drug-running, and it turns out that he and North had “a fairly good relationship.” Poindexter said he had “nothing against him other than his illegal activities.” (He misspells “assassination.”)
For more details on all this, check out National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 113 on-line (February 26, 2004).
18 & 19
RWANDA ATROCITIES
America’s Blind Eye to Genocide
The callousness of our government—and how we’ll only put something on the line when our own self-interest is involved (think oil in Iraq)—is shockingly clear when you look back at the Clinton administration’s position on the genocide that took place in Rwanda in 1994. For a three-month period starting in April that year, Hutu death squads slaughtered an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate members of their own tribe.
A few years later, when Clinton visited the Rwandan capital of Kigali, the president said: “It may seem strange to you here, especially the many of you who lost members of your family, but all over the world there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day after day, who did not fully appreciate the depth and speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror.”
I visited Clinton in the White House after I was elected governor of Minnesota, and we played golf together and enjoyed each other’s company. But I’ve got to be blunt: that statement he made in Rwanda was a bald-faced lie. The CIA’s national intelligence daily, a secret briefing that went to Clinton and Vice President Gore and hundreds of senior officials, had almost daily reports on what was happening in Rwanda. But let’s face it, this was a small country in central Africa with no minerals or strategic value.
Clearly, there was nothing in Rwanda for corporate America to profit from, and it seems today that’s the only time we get involved. If there’s no oil or lithium or what-have-you, we really don’t have time. Humanitarian reasons aren’t good enough, there’s got to be financial gain. So we turned our backs on one of the worst mass murders in history. Even our support for the United Nations’ initiatives was less than lukewarm.
In 2004, again thanks to a FOIA lawsuit by the National Security Archive, the government released a set of documents related to our Rwanda policy ten years earlier. These are highly educational, as to how things work in D.C., beginning with some talking points by the State Department for a dinner engagement with Henry Kissinger! This spells out, early on, how not-far we were willing to go—even though it was likely that “a massive (hundreds of thousands of deaths) bloodbath will ensue.” But be sure not to mention genocide, or we might be committed to “actually ‘do something.’”
The second memo takes up the subject of “Has Genocide Occurred in Rwanda?” (you bet!) and how best to keep our international credibility while doing zip.
20
SOLDIERS AS GUINEA PIGS
Military Experiments on Our Own Troops
As a veteran who served his country for six years (1969–75), I think I’ve earned the right to be outraged at how my fellow servicemen have been treated by our government. But I can’t say this surprises me. Our patriotism toward our veterans is appalling and actually laughable. I mean, we honor them at sports events, say the Pledge, thank them up and down for their service. But those thank-you’s ring pretty hollow when, behind the scenes, nothing much is done for the veteran who’s put his life on the line.
It’s been that way for every war in my lifetime. When we’re done using the soldier, we give him lip service but everything else is hastily forgotten—the injuries, the diseases, all of that we want to bury and pretend that it doesn’t exist. If you end up doing something for veterans, it costs money—and then we’d have to realize that there’s more to war than just dying. There’s a huge amount of collateral damage—of living death—that takes place after a
war. Benefits, hospitalization, true care: all the things that should happen after a veteran is done serving, forget it! So all the praise for their service is, to me, utterly phony.
Take a look at the excerpt from a staff report prepared for the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs on December 8, 1994. I hope this turns your stomach, as it did mine. (You can access the full Senate 103-97 report at www.gulfwarvets.com/senate.htm.)
103d Congress, 2d Session - COMMITTEE PRINT - S. Prt. 103-97
IS MILITARY RESEARCH HAZARDOUS TO VETERANS’
HEALTH? LESSONS SPANNING HALF A CENTURY
A STAFF REPORT PREPARED FOR THE COMMITTEE ON VETERANS’
AFFAIRS
UNITED STATES SENATE
DECEMBER 8, 1994
JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER IV, West Virginia, Chairman
DENNIS DeCONCINI, Arizona
FRANK H. MURKOWSKI, Alaska
GEORGE J. MITCHELL, Maine
STROM THURMOND, South Carolina
BOB GRAHAM, Florida
ALAN K. SIMPSON, Wyoming
DANIEL K. AKAKA, Hawaii
ARLEN SPECTER, Pennsylvania
THOMAS A. DASCHLE, South Dakota
JAMES M. JEFFORDS, Vermont