NYTimes | The
Nazi spies performed a range of tasks for American agencies in the
1950s and 1960s, from the hazardous to the trivial, the documents show.
In
Maryland, Army officials trained several Nazi officers in paramilitary
warfare for a possible invasion of Russia. In Connecticut, the C.I.A.
used an ex-Nazi guard to study Soviet-bloc postage stamps for hidden
meanings.
In
Virginia, a top adviser to Hitler gave classified briefings on Soviet
affairs. And in Germany, SS officers infiltrated Russian-controlled
zones, laying surveillance cables and monitoring trains.
But
many Nazi spies proved inept or worse, declassified security reviews
show. Some were deemed habitual liars, confidence men or embezzlers, and
a few even turned out to be Soviet double agents, the records show.
Mr.
Breitman said the morality of recruiting ex-Nazis was rarely
considered. “This all stemmed from a kind of panic, a fear that the
Communists were terribly powerful and we had so few assets,” he said.
Efforts to conceal those ties spanned decades.
When the Justice Department was preparing in 1994 to prosecute a senior Nazi collaborator in Boston named Aleksandras Lileikis, the C.I.A. tried to intervene.
The
agency’s own files linked Mr. Lileikis to the machine-gun massacres of
60,000 Jews in Lithuania. He worked “under the control of the Gestapo
during the war,” his C.I.A. file noted, and “was possibly connected with
the shooting of Jews in Vilna.”
Even
so, the agency hired him in 1952 as a spy in East Germany — paying him
$1,700 a year, plus two cartons of cigarettes a month — and cleared the
way for him to immigrate to America four years later, records show.
Mr.
Lileikis lived quietly for nearly 40 years, until prosecutors
discovered his Nazi past and prepared to seek his deportation in 1994.
When
C.I.A. officials learned of the plans, a lawyer there called Eli
Rosenbaum at the Justice Department’s Nazi-hunting unit and told him
“you can’t file this case,” Mr. Rosenbaum said in an interview. The
agency did not want to risk divulging classified records about its
ex-spy, he said.
Mr.
Rosenbaum said he and the C.I.A. reached an understanding: If the
agency was forced to turn over objectionable records, prosecutors would
drop the case first. (That did not happen, and Mr. Lileikis was
ultimately deported.)
The C.I.A. also hid what it knew of Mr. Lileikis’s past from lawmakers.
In
a classified memo to the House Intelligence Committee in 1995, the
agency acknowledged using him as a spy but made no mention of the
records linking him to mass murders. “There is no evidence,” the C.I.A.
wrote, “that this Agency was aware of his wartime activities.”
