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[05/02/00]

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The CIA, whose records are most eagerly anticipated by researchers and historians, has long promised to turn over its files. In 1992, the agency said it would review and voluntarily provide Nazi-related files, no matter how embarrassing. No disclosures followed. Between 1996 and 1999, Under Secretary of State Stuart Eisenstadt pressed the CIA to release material regarding looted Jewish assets. This was when the topic gained international attention with the disclosures about gold stolen by the Nazis that eventually wound up in Swiss banks. "All we could pry loose were a few files and that was with the State Department leaning on them," recalls one person familiar with the process.

Thus far, the CIA has not turned over a single piece of paper to the National Archives, a record of noncompliance matched only by the National Security Agency.

Ken Levit, special counsel to the CIA and the agency's representative on the disclosure act, says 1 million OSS (the agency that preceded the CIA) files remain classified and are currently under review to determine if they are "relevant" enough to disclose. He predicts the CIA will turn over 6,000 pages of OSS files this week and several thousand more in the weeks to come. "The act is a big priority for us," Levit says.

However, Levit could not guarantee that the CIA will turn over a single page of its own files. "There will likely be other [declassification of material], but there it's hard to predict," he says.

In the past, some disclosures have been extremely humiliating, such as the news that America's most notorious Nazi "asset" was Klaus Barbie, an SS man and Gestapo officer recruited by the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) in 1947. The French, who wanted to try Barbie for such war crimes as sending Jewish children to Auschwitz and ordering the murder of resistance leader Jean Moulin, learned that he was being sheltered by the CIC. When Paris demanded that he be turned over, the U.S. Army helped Barbie flee to South America on a clandestine "ratline." (In 1983, the Bolivian government extradited Barbie to France, where he was convicted of crimes against humanity and died in prison.)

There was also Reinhard Gehlen, the Gestapo general who oversaw military intelligence programs throughout Eastern Europe for Hitler. Gehlen, who got his start by extracting information from Russian POWs who were systematically starved to death following Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, surrendered to U.S. troops in 1945. He offered to provide intelligence on Russia in return for light treatment at the hands of the Allies, and was flown to Washington (disguised as an American general) for interrogation and training. In the summer of 1946 -- when the policy of de-Nazification was already being supplanted by one of anti-communism -- he was sent back to Germany to set up the country's new intelligence agency. In "Blowback," Simpson estimates that the United States spent some $200 million and employed at least 4,000 people to construct the Gehlen Org over the next decade.

Simpson says that among the most important CIA files still classified are ones concerning Otto von Bolschwing, who as an SS officer served on Adolf Eichmann's staff and was one of the chief masterminds behind the plan to exterminate the Jews. In 1941, he was the top SS officer in Bucharest, Romania, and instigated a pogrom in the city during which hundreds of people were murdered. Some of those killed were hung on meat hooks at a meat-packing plant, had their throats cut, and then were branded "kosher meat" with red-hot irons.

Von Bolschwing was recruited by U.S. intelligence at the end of the war and assigned to the Gehlen Org. In 1954, the CIA brought him to the United States. Since as a Nazi criminal he was ineligible to reside here, the agency provided the INS with a letter saying it had conducted a full investigation of him and had found no derogatory information. Von Bolschwing was discovered to be living in California in the 1970s, prompting Justice Department proceedings to deport him. In the end, he was stripped of his citizenship but allowed to remain in the country due to his age and the fact that he was suffering from a degenerative brain disease. He died in a California nursing home.

The CIA has always claimed, quite implausibly, that it didn't know von Bolschwing was a war criminal. But so far it has given no sign that it will turn over his file.

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