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| Historians suggest that US learn from the Cold War on trying to penetrate al-Qaeda |
| 2006-06-07 |
| The United States could learn from the problems with its Cold War recruitment of ex-Nazis to spy on the Soviet Union as it tries to penetrate al Qaeda, historians said on Tuesday. The historians, who examined newly released CIA documents, told a news conference that America's use of war criminals in Cold War intelligence mainly produced unreliable information, sometimes with disastrous consequences for U.S. interests. "We have not found any evidence that hiring these tainted individuals brought little other than operational problems and moral confusion," said Timothy Naftali, the newly selected director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. Robert Wolfe, former National Archives expert on German war records, drew parallels with a U.S. intelligence efforts to penetrate modern enemies including al Qaeda. Intelligence failures involving the Sept. 11 attacks prompted the Bush administration to dispense with guidelines that had discouraged the CIA's from using informants with unsavory backgrounds. "The alleged 'intelligence' those (Cold War) recruits peddled was mostly hearsay and gossip designed to tell their American interrogators what they wanted to hear," Wolfe said. "Their unreliability was surpassed only by the harm that ensued from recruiting some who turned out to be Communist double agents," he added. Historians cited examples such as former German SS officer Heinz Felfe, a Soviet spy who used his ex-Nazi credentials in 1951 to join the American-sponsored West German intelligence service known as the Gehlen organization. In the end, he exposed 15,000 intelligence "items" to the Soviets, including the names of CIA agents, and compromised most West German counter-intelligence operations against the Soviet Union before his arrest in 1961, according to a CIA estimate. About 8 million pages of documents from agencies that also include the FBI and the Defense Department have been declassified under the disclosure act. The working group established by the disclosure act is also examining federal government affiliations with war criminals from Imperial Japan. The CIA had previously released more than 1.2 million pages of documents relating to former Nazis in compliance with the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #2 You mean that FDR's adminstration playing up good Uncle Joe, who by the way killed more of his own people than Hitler ever did, during WWII wasn't elevating bad people because of operational necessity? |
| Posted by: Uleng Sheth5937 2006-06-07 09:16 |
| #1 blah, blah, blah. But once again making a point that we need to learn from... The right way to go is not to elevate the bad guys to the status of good guys. So the question then becomes...what should we do? I don't know. It's time to make the effort to find out. There always is a way. We just need to find it. |
| Posted by: 2b 2006-06-07 04:08 |