U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis (review)

Like any government agency, the U.S. intelligence community, comprised today of fifteen agencies, has had its ups and downs. When the intelligence agencies err, however, the consequences can be far-reaching. Examples of mistakes by the intelligence agencies since the emergence of the United States as a world power include, most notably, the failure to anticipate the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the Bay of Pigs covert-action fiasco in 1961, the domestic spy scandal revealed in 1974 (Operation Chaos), the Iran-contra affair of 1987, the 9/11 terrorist attacks of 2001, and the faulty estimate about the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in 2002.¹ These events represent large stains on the record of American intelligence. But the agencies have also had successes, such as the destruction of Colombia's Cali drug cartel and a close monitoring of the declining Soviet economy in the final years of the Cold War.²

The subject of U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis falls squarely into the category of U.S. intelligence blunders—arguably one of the most wrong-minded and embarrassing. The four co-authors have devoted an enormous amount of time and effort studying recently declassified U.S. government records in compliance with the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998. The fifteen essays in this book cover significant topics illuminated by the archival research, including examinations of what U.S. intelligence knew about the holocaust in its early stages, the degree to which the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) monitored Nazi collaborators in the United States, and the association of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with former Nazi spymasters in an attempt to enlist allies in a new Cold War against the Soviet Union.

With respect to the holocaust, the book concludes that America's key intelligence agency during World War II, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), "does not seem to have taken much detailed interest in German camps as they concerned the extermination of Jews . . . The OSS seems to have undertaken no general study concerning the German extermination of its Jewish prisoners" (37). Such was the terrible failure of U.S. intelligence to come to grips with one of the most monstrous events in history. It was also a failure of policy, since the Roosevelt Administration displayed little interest in knowing more about the death camps in Germany, Poland, and Austria. In response to the lack of pressing concern in the White House, the OSS and other U.S. intelligence agencies never placed much of a priority on collecting intelligence related to holocaust rumors.

As for ties to former Nazi war criminals, the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies forged relationships with some of the most sordid characters of the Third Reich, such as Otto Albrecht von Bolschwing and Erich Rajakowitsch. In a fine essay, Tim Naftali notes that "the CIA and its representatives consciously chose to fight the Cold War in an amoral environment where recruitment decisions rested primarily on the perceived operational utility of an agent" (341). Past records were whitewashed to secure the assistance of erstwhile Nazi experts on Soviet intelligence operations. The results of this Faustian bargain? According to Naftali, "the CIA got very little" (365). In return, it gave away America's good reputation and the moral high ground.

From the point of view of interdisciplinary methodology, this outstanding archival research done for this book might have been supplemented by interviews with key intelligence, military, and political figures from the era to place the findings into a broader context. Attention might also have been paid to related articles published by scholars in the top intelligence journals, Intelligence and National Security and the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence. The four co-authors, nevertheless, have performed great service with their laborious examination of 8 million pages of government documents and their insights into a sad...