The day before yesterday, 6 June 2006, the New York Times reported the following:

“The Central Intelligence Agency took no action after learning the pseudonym and whereabouts of the fugitive Holocaust overseer Adolf Eichmannn in 1958, according to CIA documents that shed new light on the spy agency’s use of former Nazis as informers after World War II.

The CIA was told by West German intelligence that Eichmannn was living in Argentina under the name ‘Clemens’ -- a slight variation on his actual alias, Klement -- but kept the information from Israel...”[1]

For those unfamiliar with the history of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann was the central architect of Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution: the German Nazi program of extermination of the European Jews. What the New York Times is reporting is that the CIA protected Eichmann after he became a fugitive. This is amazing, but the whole truth is even more amazing, and that's what the New York Times fails to report.

When the New York Times says that “[the] CIA...use[d] former Nazis as informers after World War II,” it is leaving most of the truth out. What is true is that the CIA itself was created by absorbing practically the entire Nazi war-criminal infrastructure. This was documented already in 1988 with material obtained from the US government through the Freedom of Information Act by historian Christopher Simpson:

Simpson, Christopher. 1988. Blowback: America's recruitment of Nazis and its effects on the Cold War. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicholson.

The documents Simpson obtained allowed him to establish just the tip of the iceberg, but that is already plenty. In the same year of 1988, when Simpson’s book was published, the Washington Post reviewed it, and said:

“It is no longer necessary -- or possible -- to deny the fact: the U.S. government systematically and deliberately recruited active Nazis by the thousands, rescued them, hired them and relied upon them to serve American interests and purposes in postwar Europe.”[2]

I’ve read Simpson’s book, so I know that the Washington Post was pulling its punches: it was tens of thousands -- not “thousands” -- of Nazi war criminals that the CIA absorbed, and these Nazis did not serve “American interests and purposes,” but the interests and purposes of the US ruling elite, whose values, I would submit, do not coincide with the values of the great majority of ordinary US citizens.

In its own review of Simpson’s book, the Toronto Star explained one of the consequences of bringing a veritable horde of Nazis in secret to US soil, with new identities:

“Many East European Nazi collaborators, leaders of fascist groups and governments in Eastern Europe, and leaders of pro-fascist East European émigré organizations soon became politically active in the [United] States and gained remarkable access to the most powerful intelligence chiefs, politicians, business associations and media moguls in America.”[3]

Now, one of the most important Nazi assets absorbed by the CIA, according to Simpson’s documentation, was Reinhard Gehlen, a major war criminal who during World War II was head of the Nazi German Foreign Armies East (Fremde Heere Ost). According to the released US government documents, “Working immediately after the war with Army Intelligence, the Gehlen Organization became the responsibility of the CIA, which continued the relationship until 1956.”[4] What happened in 1956? “Gehlen’s organization became the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), West Germany’s foreign intelligence agency,” when the CIA handed over the Gehlen Organization to the West Germans.[5]

So, after the world war, the CIA made sure that a major Nazi war criminal, and his organization, became the foreign intelligence agency of West Germany.

It is a good idea to pause, here, until the significance of this has been absorbed. Because it means that the US government, after the war, followed a generalized pro-Nazi policy. Not only did the US ruling elite create the CIA by absorbing tens of thousands of Nazi war criminals, but it made sure that the country whose Nazi government had plunged the entire world into a genocidal war continued to be run by the same Nazis after the war!

Once you have absorbed this, you can understand something else that the New York Times says. I will now complete the sentence that I left hanging at the top, from the same NYT article that got us started:

“The CIA was told by West German intelligence that Eichmann was living in Argentina under the name ‘Clemens’ -- a slight variation on his actual alias, Klement -- but kept the information from Israel because of German concerns about exposure of former Nazis in the Bonn government, according to Timothy Naftali, a historian who examined the documents. Two years later, Israeli agents abducted Eichmann in Argentina and took him to Israel, where he was tried and executed in 1962.”

As you may recall from the first quote at the top, the year that the CIA learned the whereabouts of Adolf Eichman was 1958. This was two years after the CIA had handed over the Gehlen Organization, with Reinhard Gehlen running it, to the West Germans. So the “former Nazis in the Bonn government” included the multitude of Nazis that the CIA had just installed in West Germany to be its foreign intelligence service. Thus, what we learn is that the CIA was protecting not only Adolf Eichmann, chief architect of the Holocaust, but the CIA's own Nazis in West Germany.

By the way, given that the West Germans accepted the Gehlen Organization from the CIA, it follows that the CIA’s pro-Nazi covert operations in Europe, including in Germany, had been successful, and that such forces were in power already in Germany in 1956, when the Gehlen Organization became the West German foreign intelligence agency.[6]

Whitewashing the CIA’s Nazi history
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It is certainly interesting that in this recent article about the CIA protecting Adolf Eichmann, the New York Times never mentions Simpson’s book. But I can establish that the New York Times is aware of it. Here is an excerpt from the New York Times’ review of historian Christopher Simpson’s investigation, the year that the book came out:

“Christopher Simpson’s ‘Blowback’ [documents] ... the recruitment of leftover Nazis and Nazi henchmen after World War II for the incipient cold war. ...Some of these people had tied their lot to Nazi Germany to pursue national and political goals that had little to do with Hitler’s agenda, some had actively collaborated with the Nazis and some, like Klaus Barbie [the ‘Butcher of Lyons,’ head of the Gestapo in that city, and responsible for the deportation of French Jews to the death camps, including many children, and the torture and rape of Jewish women], were certifiable criminals.”[7]

The New York Times is obviously aware of Christopher Simpson’s investigation. So why, in this latest article, does the NYT not mention Christopher Simpson -- not even in passing?

One hypothesis is that the New York Times is protecting the CIA.

In other words, if the NYT were to mention Christopher Simpson’s meticulously documented investigation, some readers might go look for this book in a library (they will not find it in bookstores because it was taken out of print...), and then they would learn that the CIA did not merely recruit some Nazis, as the latest NYT article on Eichmann appears to imply, but that the CIA was created essentially as a Nazi agency. They would also learn how this CIA immediately set about corrupting the US press, the most important component of which is, of course, the New York Times.[7a]

In support of my hypothesis that the New York Times is protecting its boss, the CIA, I will point out that when the NYT reviewed Christopher Simpson’s book in 1988, it likewise tried to apologize for the CIA, and dramatically. That 1988 review began with the following inoculation for any reader who might be tempted to conclude, on the basis of Simpson’s documentation, that the ruling elite of the US is composed of people with objectionable values:

“The Central Intelligence Agency is a perennial object of fascination and revulsion, and many a Marcos or Somoza has been recruited for the great struggle with the devil Communism only to find himself discarded and reviled for corrupting American ideals. But confusing as this ambivalent behavior may seem, it is likely to continue as long as America remains an insular and idealistic superpower intimately engaged in every corner of the globe but separated from much of it by vast oceans.”

Notice: the CIA, the intelligence service of an “idealistic superpower” was opposing “the devil.” Sometimes bad people, such as Anastasio Somoza, were “recruited for the great struggle,” but they were “discarded and reviled for corrupting American ideals.” The slant is very clear.

The New York Times concludes its review of Christopher Simpson’s investigation with an attack on Simpson for criticizing the US government, claiming that Simpson “damages his own case by blurring the distinction between the means and the end.” In other words, the idealistic and well-meaning CIA recruited tens of thousands of Nazi war criminals to do good, and so Simpson should hardly be frowning on this effort.

This defense of the CIA requires that the New York Times completely contradict the historical facts, and this should be enough to make us skeptical of the NYT’s interpretation of the CIA as propelled by lofty values. If such a case could honestly be made, after all, it would be idiotic for the NYT to lie in order to defend it.

Let us take the very example that the NYT invokes: US support for the Somoza regime in Nicaragua.

The US backed the brutal right-wing Somoza regime (which it installed in power[8]) until the very end. And beyond. The Somoza regime was deposed by the Sandinista movement in 1979 and the CIA immediately began training Somoza’s right-wing thugs, turning them into the Contra terrorists. To get a sense for what the Contras were like, consider this description:

“The Contras have ambushed religious-aid workers, beheading a nun and riddling her body with bullets. They have also eviscerated a pregnant woman, shot campesinos (peasants) and slaughtered their animals, cut down Red Cross workers and bombed towns with their schools and hospitals.”[9]

This was a continuation of the same terror that the US-backed Somoza regime had directed against the same Nicaraguan peasants when Somoza was in power. So the New York Times has simply lied: it is false that Somoza’s repression contradicted the goals of the US ruling elite, and it is false that the US government “discarded and reviled [Somoza] for corrupting American ideals.” On the contrary, many sources report that Franklin Delano Roosevelt once remarked about the first Somoza: “Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”[10] Whether he said it or not, one thing is for certain: Somoza was indeed the US ruling elite’s son of a bitch, and so was his son (who succeeded him, and who ruled Nicaragua until the Sandinista movement threw the Somoza regime out).

So why does the New York Times pretend that the US ruling elite suddenly discovered Somoza contradicting their supposed values and discarded him, when the US ruling elite did no such thing? Because the New York Times can. Most people do not have the time, motivation, or energy to check whether the New York Times is baldly lying to them, and it does not occur to them to check in the first place because most people assume that what the New York Times says must be the truth. This is why Historical and Investigative Research exists.

And the New York Times lies because it must. Along with the rest of the Western mainstream media, the NYT has been parading the terrorist in charge of creating the Contras, and in charge of training the Contras in various techniques for slaughtering civilians, Vincent Cannistraro, as a supposed counter-terrorism expert. The man is a media darling, these days. Should the New York Times speak frankly about US support for the Contras, somebody might notice the New York Times applauding the man who created this terrorist force.

To learn more about Vincent Cannistraro, creator of the terrorist Contra force, consult the following three HIR investigations:

To learn more about the consequences of the creation of the CIA, in the 1947 National Security Act, for freedom of the press, consult:

To learn more about the CIA absorption of the Nazi war criminal infrastructure, in its historical context, consult: