Most informed Americans know that the United States got very cozy with ex-Nazis after WWII especially former Nazis like Werner Von Braun or Arthur Rudolph [photo right] who could offer the government technogical and scientific advances (See 'Operation Paperclip'). But the extent of Nazi collaboration including collaboration with known war criminals by US intelligence services has never been fully revealed. Newly disclosed records show that the CIA and other agencies employed at least one thousand Nazis as spies and informants. According to experts that number is an understatement of the scope (See 'Operation Bloodstone'). As recently as the 1990s some former Nazis were still living in America. The declassified records show that the American spymasters considered their intelligence value during a cold war against the Russians outweighed any "moral lapses" during their service to the Third Reich. The recruitment of Nazis runs far deeper than previously known and US officials sought to cover up their collaborations for a half-century after the war to defeat fascism.
One striking example of the moral rot is Baron Otto von Bolschwing [photo right], a former SS officer who was a top aide to Adolf Eichmann, the head of the 'Final Solution' policy of Jewish extermination. Allegedly he was a key 'high priest' of the Nights of the Black Sun, an elite SS society. During the thirties he wrote policy papers on Jewish persecution. One month after the war ended the black baron was serving in the Army's Counter Intelligence Corp (CIC). Not only was he hired as a European spy but he and his family was relocated to New York in 1954 as a "reward for his loyal postwar service". His Nazi party activities were deemed "innocuous". When Israel succeeded in kidnapping and trying Eichmann in 1960, Bolschwing went to his agency in fear he would be next. The CIA reassured him he woiuld be protected and he lived freely in the US for another twenty years. He gave up his citizenship in 1981 after he was discovered by Nazi hunters, but he died before being prosecuted for his war crimes.
When the Justice Department tried to prosecute another top Nazi official, Aleksandras Lileikis [photo right], implicated in the deaths of 60,000 Jews in Lithuania, the CIA tried to intervene. The 'company' had hired him in 1952 to spy in East Germany for $1700 a year plus two cartons of cigarettes a month. He was allowed to immigrate four years later. He lived undetected for nearly forty years before his Nazi past was discovered. Lileikis was deported, but only after the Justice Department agreed to drop the case if the CIA were to be asked for sensitive records. The company also hid Lileikis war crimes from Congress, telling the House Intelligence Committee in 1995 that "there is no evidence that this Agency was aware of his wartime activities", a flat-out lie. In 1980 the FBI also lied to the Justice Department about its knowledge of 16 suspected Nazis living in the US because the men had worked as informants providing leads on suspected Communist sympathizers.