US: The CIA knew the whereabouts of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann during the 1950s but failed to act on the information in case it compromised a network of former Nazis recruited to spy for the West during the Cold War, according to newly released documents.
A total of 27,000 pages of official records released by the US National Archives this week show how the CIA and West German intelligence agencies protected former Nazi war criminals who agreed to spy on the Soviet Union.
"It was not US policy to track Nazi war criminals once the Cold War began," said University of Virginia historian Timothy Naftali, who has studied the new documents. "The CIA based its decisions about using former SS men or unreconstructed Nazis solely on operational considerations."
In March 1958 the West German foreign intelligence services wrote to the CIA that Eichmann "is reported to have lived in Argentina under the alias Clemens since 1952". Eichmann was indeed living in Argentina under the alias Ricardo Klement but neither the CIA nor the West Germans acted on the information about his whereabouts.
As chief of the Jewish Office of the Gestapo during the second World War, Eichmann implemented the "Final Solution" that aimed to eliminate all of the Jews of Europe. He oversaw the creation of death camps, the development of gassing techniques and the transportation of Jews from all over Europe to their deaths.
Eichmann, who claimed to have nothing "personally" against Jews, nonetheless pursued the task of murdering them with bureaucratic zeal, reporting in August 1944 that approximately four million Jews had died in the camps and a further two million had been killed by mobile extermination units.
Captured by the Americans at the end of the war, he escaped in 1946 and fled to Argentina, where Israeli secret agents eventually captured him in 1960. He was abducted to Israel, stood trial and was hanged for crimes against the Jewish people and crimes against humanity on May 31st, 1962.
The new documents show that West German officials were reluctant to expose Eichmann because of what he might reveal about figures such as Hans Globke, a former Nazi who was Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's national security adviser. In 1960, the CIA persuaded Life magazine to delete a reference to Globke in a memoir by Eichmann which the magazine had acquired.
"Entire material has been read. One obscure mention of Globke which Life omitting at our request," CIA director Allen Dulles wrote in an internal memo on September 20th, 1960.
The policy of recruiting former Nazis to spy against the Soviets appears to have been a failure, not least because the KGB was also aggressively recruiting former Nazi intelligence officers.
The Soviets successfully penetrated the Gehlen Organisation, a post-war West German intelligence service run by the US army and the CIA.
The new documents record that Heinz Felfe, a former SS officer who became head of counter-intelligence in the Gehlen Organisation, exposed more than 100 CIA staff agents before he was unmasked as a Soviet double-agent in 1961.
"We have not found any evidence that hiring these tainted individuals brought little other than operational problems and moral confusion," Dr Naftali said.
Robert Wolfe, an archivist who specialises in German war records, said the post-war experience of using former Nazis as spies represented a warning to today's US intelligence agencies, which have relaxed rules about using tainted sources in the fight against al-Qaeda.