Berlin to Baghdad: The Pitfalls of Hiring Enemy Intelligence

To his credit, Critchfield assisted the Interagency Working Group (IWG) supervising these declassifications and made himself available to the historians (including this reviewer) tasked with providing initial assessments of what the newly public documents revealed. But he did not live to see the IWG's interim report, which paints a significantly less flattering picture of the bargain he and the Germans struck.

A ONE-SIDED AFFAIR

Although Partners at the Creation hints at how difficult Gehlen could be, the book sanitizes what was essentially a one-sided relationship in favor of the Germans. Gehlen was insubordinate, deceptive, and incompetent, yet he continued to receive rations for his employees and a large monthly stipend of $175,000. In 1950-51, the CIA seriously considered firing him, and it was only support from the incoming German government of Konrad Adenauer that got him off the hook. After 1951, there was less controversy -- but only because the CIA stopped asking for background information on the West German intelligence agents it was funding.

The consequence of this "don't ask, don't tell" policy was that for eleven years U.S. taxpayers subsidized a foreign organization that employed war criminals. Among the dozens of murderers and thugs working for Gehlen was Konrad Fiebig, hired in 1948, who had served with Einsatzgruppe B (a mobile killing unit) in Belorussia and was later charged with shooting 11,000 Jews. Erich Deppner, who ran Gehlen's operations out of West Berlin, had been deputy to Wilhelm Harster, an SS brigadier general who was Heinrich Himmler's representative in the occupied Netherlands. Deppner helped his boss supervise the deportation of 100,000 Dutch Jews to the death camps and was personally responsible for executing Soviet prisoners of war interned there. And Gehlen's chief Soviet expert, Emil Augsburg, had been detailed in 1939-40 to the special SS units that executed Jews and communists in Poland and later did the same thing in the western Soviet Union.

The CIA turned a blind eye to Gehlen's protection of these people because it was doing something similar itself. In its drive to acquire human intelligence on the Soviet Union, the agency allowed its field officers to recruit former members of Hitler's SS and excluded war criminals only if their war crimes were a matter of public record. As a result, it relied on men such as Otto von Bolschwing, who in the 1930s had helped design the system for expropriating Jewish property in Austria and then, as Himmler's representative in Bucharest, had instigated the brutal 1941 pogrom there. In 1953, the CIA rewarded Bolschwing for his help by pressuring the Immigration and Naturalization Service into allowing him into the United States, and he subsequently became a U.S. citizen.

These same policies led the CIA in 1959 to try to recruit Erich Rajakowitsch, a resident of Italy then engaged in East-West trade. During the war Rajakowitsch had served as Adolf Eichmann's representative in The Hague and personally supervised the deportation of Dutch Jews from France to the death camps in 1942. The only reason Rajakowitsch did not become a U.S. asset was because he refused the CIA's offer.

WHO WILL GUARD THE GUARDS

In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks, there has been a lot of talk about the importance of "unleashing" the CIA. As one former national security "principal" put it to me, Americans should be prepared "to recruit people they would not want to have dinner with."

It is true that the intelligence community needs a more energetic and sustained recruitment campaign. And it is equally true that contacts with unsavory characters sometimes prove beneficial. From the late 1960s through 1978, for example, the CIA had an apparently useful relationship with Ali Hassan Salameh, Yasir Arafat's intelligence chief -- and the mastermind of the attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

But abandoning one's principles in the quest for better intelligence can be an expensive proposition. In occupied Germany, the unregulated recruitment of former enemies brought dishonor to the country and operational failures to the intelligence community. For those seeking to reconstruct the Iraqi national security system and to expand the CIA's stable of useful Middle Eastern contacts, the West German case ought to be a cautionary tale.

One problem was the absence of real checks and balances. On paper, Washington had to approve all recruitments, but there is no evidence that Richard Helms, who supervised the agency's activities in Austria and West Germany throughout the early Cold War, ever turned down an operative because of his past. CIA headquarters established a climate that discouraged field officers from digging too hard. Not until Israel captured Eichmann in 1960, in fact, would the CIA bother to look at the records of captured Gestapo members to see how many of these killers it had recruited.

The motivations of individual CIA recruiters appear to have been generally honorable. They feared the Soviets and believed that all measures were permissible in learning about this new enemy. The problem was that no one at headquarters or in the field had time to do a cost-benefit analysis of hiring the worst elements of Hitler's regime. If they had, they might well have paused.

Initially, former Nazi intelligence officers were employed as "bird dogs" -- pointing out their former colleagues for arrest by U.S. authorities. For the most part, the Nazis did this very well, and had the relationship ended there, the United States would have gotten the better end of the deal. But U.S. field officers found it hard to let their agents go, and the agents had an interest in keeping their case officers happy.