During Cold War, CIA And FBI Hired Over 1,000 Nazis As Spies, Limited Investigations Of Those Nazis
from the minor-war-crimes dept
A new book by Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men, apparently details how the FBI and CIA hired over 1,000 Nazis during the height of the cold war, forgiving them their past sins, so long as they might help spy on the Soviet Union.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.You can argue whether or not this moral cost-benefit analysis was reasonable, but it appears that the CIA further sought to block investigations into those Nazis for some of their war crimes -- which seems to tilt the balance pretty strongly in favor of immoral.
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.Meanwhile, the FBI was carefully hiding those Nazis from the Justice Department (which the FBI is a part of), even though the DOJ had a department trying to find them:
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.Oh, and then there's the fact that Hoover not only protected the Nazis, but he went after journalists who were investigating the US's hiding of those Nazis:
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.
In 1968, Mr. Hoover authorized the F.B.I. to wiretap a left-wing journalist who wrote critical stories about Nazis in America, internal records show. Mr. Hoover declared the journalist, Charles Allen, a potential threat to national security.Kinda thinking that we shouldn't even bother with comments on this article, because the CIA and FBI have already hit Godwin's Law.
John Fox, the bureau’s chief historian, said: “In hindsight, it is clear that Hoover, and by extension the F.B.I., was shortsighted in dismissing evidence of ties between recent German and East European immigrants and Nazi war crimes. It should be remembered, though, that this was at the peak of Cold War tensions.”
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Filed Under: allen dulles, cia, fbi, j. edgar hoover, nazis
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Those damn Commies, worse than the Nazis!
Ahem.
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/s
In 1968, Mr. Hoover authorized the F.B.I. to wiretap a left-wing journalist who wrote critical stories about Nazis in America, internal records show. Mr. Hoover declared the journalist, Charles Allen, a potential threat to national security.
Someone being critical about nazis, and investigating them, being considered a threat to national security. Just... just let that one sink in for a moment. Being critical of nazi made you a threat to US 'national security'. Hell, that almost makes the current claims of national security seem sane and rational in comparison(almost).
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Left-wing. Communist. Devil. Boom, logic thrown out the window.
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Boom, logic thrown out the window as everyone has a panting Pavlovian response to Godwin's law.
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Oh how they would salivate.
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Left Wing Journalist
Left/Right wing journalist
A scumbag who writes stories I don't like.
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You've got to remember though, WWII was over, Nazism/Fascism had lost and was thoroughly discredited, and now there's this big, bad, horrifyingly bad USSR that was threatening to turn everything it touched Communist (domino theory), was armed with as many nukes as the West, and the KGB was making serious inroads in places like Italy, France, Britain, IndoChina, South America, ***Cuba***, ... Communist sympathizers really were everywhere, including in legitimate political parties in many countries.
Subverting the freedom of the Fourth Estate by interfering with leftist journos would've been mosquito pee compared to the prospect of giving even an inch to the Soviets.
Since reading "The Mitrokhin Archive", I don't doubt the CIA was scared !@#$less. The KGB really did have a lot of tenticles burrying deep into the West's governments.
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Nah, just the same old same old. People at certain levels of government remain just as convinced today as they were then that they can do no wrong.
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They got us to the moon as well
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Re: They got us to the moon as well
Still, the joke is humorous in a quite dark way ;)
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They still dismissed Einstein's relativity
And that delayed their version of the atom bomb a bit, potentially enough to have changed history.
Incidentally, Josef Mengele lived a full life and died a free man of old age. We're going to have to come to terms that people who do really evil shit sometimes escape justice.
More importantly, we need to remember that this stuff can and will happen again, and is happening right here in the US. where it is still accepted and appropriate to treat non-whites and impoverished (or even less-affluent) as social undesirables.
We don't have a final solution yet (I believe). But we certainly do have a Jewish question, and we're marching further every day down that trail the Nazis (re-)blazed.
And more people who do despicable things will escape justice because they're evasive, or because they're useful.
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Re: They still dismissed Einstein's relativity
Um, you mean that's wrong? Why do you consider being impoverished as *not* socially undesirable?
I kid. I've seen a lot of this recently. Here, "homeless" is pretty much equivalent to drug adicted, mentally deficient, likely petty (or other) crime oriented, etc.
I like Jews (or those I know), but I have a question about Zionism. There is a difference. I am not a fan of nationalism as practiced by anyone. Shalom.
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Re: Re: They still dismissed Einstein's relativity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_question
The implication of any question that phrased as How do we treat subculture X (Or more accurately How do we treat subcultures other than Y, Z and N) is that the subject of the question is not to be treated as every8ne else is.
So yeah, here in the US, we've already started imprisoning or overworking our undesirables. It's only a small step to decide that since they're already treated horribly, it's a humane step to speed them to their graves.
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Re: They got us to the moon as well
--- Ice Station Zebra
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Actual war criminals: helpful assets.
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not to diminish this...
also, they were used for the operation gladio type stuff...
WHICH by itself is one huge steaming pile of eee-vil...
shit, we are 'protecting' NUMEROUS old spooks and such who are KNOWN terrorists/murderers for stuff that has happened MUCH later than that stuff... the cuban who blew up cuban planes, sabotaged their shit, etc, is given complete immunity...
the tables turned, WE would be screaming bloody murder, but since they are *OUR* terrorists, they are -you know- *good* terrorists...
because ANY terrorism in furtherance of Empire is *good* terrorism...
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If there is one thing we can say about ourselves as Americans...
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Lets not pretend that every nazi had a single reason to be a nazi and it was to kill a certain little group, most of them joined up because of the attrocities commited against them.
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Go on, I dare you. It'll be fun to see what you come up with.
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The real difference between the two is that the Nazi's lost their war.
The US is currently working very diligently to eradicate all those that believe differently than they do (or those that won't sell them resources like oil).
They have a real hate on for muslisms and islamics.
How are they any different?
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Uhh, heh heh heh, well uh... Sorry, that question made me braindead for a moment there.
Did you just compare 'Murica to Nazi Germany as if they were morally equivalent? I'm guessing you are a digital person, and analog and scale are beyond your mental capacity...
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Versus roughly 11 million deaths by the NAZI's...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust#Victims_and_death_toll
My analog scale is working just fine
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Your analog scale may be working but it's on the fritz.
WW2 lasted six years, with an estimated 6 million Jews killed. That's a kill ratio of 1 million per year.
Conversely from your sources, since WW2 'Murica has killed 30 million people at the high end during a 69 year period, which is a 403,000 kill ratio per year, give or take an innocent civilian.
So the numbers speak for themselves, and your analog moral equivalency antennas clearly need some attenuation.
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While I don't agree with a lot of the US policies when it comes to military action, they do not seem to be leading a lot of civilians into large holes and then covering them up.
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So your argument is "America is not as immoral as Nazis were, they yearly kill count is only half as big!"
It doesn't really matter if you're going 0.8c or 0.4c when the local speed limit is 50 kph.
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If you can look at Nazi Germany and look at America and say yourself, "damn, those two are the same" then i'm afraid you've lost all sense of proportion. There may be similarities, we may very well be on the road to becoming them, but there's still a long way to go and we are not them.
In the interim let's keep a level head shall we, because you know who didn't have a level head? Hitler!
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"A Long way to go"
We don't scapegoat the Jewish peoples so much (though some still do), as we like to scapegoat the impoverished, non-whites, crazies and anyone who deviates too much from the mainstream (goths, Juggalos, et. al.) we already are in the process of depriving them of liberty and property, and all-too-commonly life.
I think America compares to the Third Reich rather too similarly for my comfort. And that's a road we're speeding along at a good clip.
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Re: "A Long way to go"
"How are they any different?"
That turn of phrase is equating one to the other in my book. But if you don't want to take my book for it, here's Webster's:
"to treat, represent, or regard as equal, equivalent, or comparable"
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And never forget that, prior to WW2, the US loved and admired Hitler -- and that many of the Nazi party's worst practices (such as eugenics) were lifted directly from what the US had already been doing.
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You know, i heard a story once about how the Aborigines always made sure there were never any winners or losers when they played soccer. Could have been made up for all i know, but it does beg the question: where does personal choice fit into all of this?
You'll have to forgive me John, i'm sooo tired right now.
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There's a lot of truth to that. Hitler played corporate leaders like a fiddle, IBM included. Even after they were nationalized, they were enriched while it was going on. Such is fascism. Suckers!
Remember though, they were all worried about filthy communist boogymen.
Mussolini made the trains run on time too. Woohoo!
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Yep. And so, it seems, are many of us...
Communism is just swapping one bad form of governance (corporatism) for another.
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Surely you're not saying people cannot be goverened.
Design a better one.
And engineer a means to get us there without corruption.
That's what the constitutional framers were doing. That's what we gotta do.
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I should add...
You can make a deductive argument that communism is a poor form of government, but as of now, you can't make an inductive argument to that effect.
Here in the US, I was spoon fed as a child in public school that communism is bad and evil and wrong and eats babies. I was not at all taught to follow the data and logic as to why.
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Gaah! Pre-coffee posting again!
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To be fair, most of the west, and maybe the world, had long been infatuated with eugenics (not to mention lots of other silly Nazi-ish stuff). The Nazis just went with it (took it to the extreme). Lots of supposed "civilized countries" thought nothing of forced sterilization or wiping out native aboriginal culture world-wide.
Personally, I think the history books should be updated. Their definition of when the "Dark Ages" ended needs to be extended by at least a thousand years. "The Enlightenment", my ass. We're not there yet.
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Pedantic point re: Dark Ages
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Re: Pedantic point re: Dark Ages
Yes, and there was also a lot of re-writing of the record going on. There's lots of disfigured statues out there (Paganism!), art works painted over are still being discovered (ibid.), and great texts of antiquity were over-written by religious scribes re-using parchment, etc.
Still, I don't believe we've reached the enlightenment yet. Maybe when we get flying cars, phasers, and those things that do, "Tea, Earl Grey, hot."
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Nazis
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Re: Nazis
- Federale
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How convenient
Oh, naturally that is a good excuse.
Likewise, the Nazis really had good reason to kill all those jews since Germany was strapped for cash after WWI reparations and the total distribution of wealth among jews made a genocide reasonably profitable.
It would be a shame to let scrupleless killers and sadists go waste when you have them readily available, whether you are FBI (like here), CIA (torture reports anybody?), SA or SS.
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Oscar Schidler was a nazi.
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The Japanese had decided that the Chinese were Untermensche (if you will) and were in the process of slaughtering them.
Lesson learned: Nazi is as nazi does and there were far too few John Rabes and Oskar Schindlers.
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"Minor war crimes"
Um.... I kinda thought war crimes, by definition, were not minor. But perhaps it's my reliance on the actual legal definition -- rather than the CIA's creative interpretation -- that's confusing me.
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Aint freedom grande!
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"our little secret"
Federal agencies such as the FBI, CIA, and DEA have always worked with criminals of all sorts, as those are the very people with the knowledge, technical skills, and insider connections that enable the agency to accomplish its goals. That these people have done --or are still doing-- something illegal or immoral is rarely more than a minor consideration. In reality, its a huge benefit, since "our little secret between us" helps ensure continued loyalty and obedience.
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Like that CI they sent into a mosque to root out the secret terrorists... he was so pushy they asked him to leave and reported HIM to the FBI as a possible threat.
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A fascist government agency stealing!! Whooda thunk it?
Operation Paper-Clip was run specifically to get as many Nazis out of Germany and into America through Canada as possible.
NASA owes it origins to these men and women from Germany.
Before the war got into full gear, a group of US companies including Alcoa and Ford were caught trying to overthrow the US government for Hitler.
They simply told the feds that if charged, they'd supply the Germans only and close down their US operations.
After the War ended, these same companies received millions of US taxpayer's dollars in reparation for their factories in Germany that were destroyed by Allied bombing.
American Industry - like any Capitalist industry anywhere - loves the idea of Fascism. Free slave labor. Cheap Child labor. Secret Government For Profit, Blackmail, Coercion, massive surveillance programs.... These are the things that make them need to change the sheets at night.
Read the Elkhorn Manifesto. Learn about your own history.
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Nazi Rockets.
But space launch vehicles are big, sophisticated contraptions. We used some German ideas in our rockets. We had to invent most of the parts here. Vehicles that would carry a payload beyond the Earth's gravity and into orbit or outer space or to the moon we had to invent here.
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A small correction...
Not quite.
"Godwin's law applies especially to inappropriate, inordinate, or hyperbolic comparisons of other situations (or one's opponent) with Nazis – often referred to as "playing the Hitler card". The law and its corollaries would not apply to discussions covering known mainstays of Nazi Germany such as genocide, eugenics, or racial superiority, nor, more debatably, to a discussion of other totalitarian regimes or ideologies[citation needed], if that was the explicit topic of conversation, because a Nazi comparison in those circumstances may be appropriate, in effect committing the fallacist's fallacy."
To paraphrase:
If yer actually talking bout NAZIs, then Godwin's Law does not apply.
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