U.S. Intelligence involvement with German and Japanese War Criminals after World War II
Encyclopedia
While the United States
was involved in the prosecution of war criminals, principally at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg
and the International Military Tribunal for the Far East
in Tokyo
, the Nuremberg Military Tribunals, and other judicial proceedings, US military and intelligence agencies protected some war criminals in the interest of obtaining technical or intelligence information from them, or taking part in ongoing intelligence or engineering (e.g., Operation Paperclip
). Multiple US intelligence organizations were involved (the Central Intelligence Agency
was not created until 1947 and in control of its clandestine services until 1952). The relationships with German war criminals started immediately after the end of the Second World War, but some of the Japanese relationships were slower to develop.
The concealment was not always deliberate, but simply because the records were scattered among a huge volume of government records. In some cases, prosecutors actively developed cases against individuals, yet were unaware the US had detailed records on them. The US Congress required an interagency working group (IWG
), under the auspices of the National Archives and Records Administration
to report on the big picture. Since the CIA was formed in 1947, and did not have full control of its clandestine HUMINT
functions until the formation of the "Directorate of Plans" (DD/P) in 1952, where relationships were formed with individuals suspected of war crimes, other intelligence agencies obviously established the relationship. Many of these relationships were formed before the creation of the CIA in 1947, but the CIA, in some cases, took over the relationships and concealed them for nearly 60 years. Most often, when these were established before the formation of the CIA, they were done by United States Army Military Intelligence, or by its traditional name of the Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC). In General of the Army
Douglas MacArthur
's commands, the intelligence service was called G-2. Under the direction of Major General
Charles A. Willoughby, it was fairly autonomous of Washington, DC.
Others might have been formed by the Second World War Office of Strategic Services (OSS)
, or various interim groups that existed between 1945 and 1952, such as the Strategic Services Unit
or Office of Policy Coordination
. Some of these relationships were dropped when the CIA established its authority, others were continued under the CIA, and yet others moved from US control to their home nations.
That picture features substantial sufficient differences between the European and Pacific areas of operations, such that only some broad principles of US postwar policy were shared. As an example of a key difference, US intelligence in Europe worked closely with their British
counterparts. OSS needed good relations with SIS
and SOE
, and it was reasonably obvious that the working relationship would need to be preserved in the postwar period. OSS had a much lower presence in the Pacific, so there was relatively little pressure from allies to hide information not necessarily for reasons of benefit to the US, but to the ally with whom the OSS' successor, the CIA, needed to work.
is a facet of retrospective reviews of decisions: were the decisions reasonably moral by the standards prevailing at the time they were made, rather than by the standards of the present. These ideas are not abstractions, but guided real-world choices that decision makers often, especially in the Cold War
, thought were the least of an assortment of evils.
Even at the time, ethicists can recognize that there is no ideal choice. Thomas Aquinas
' principle of double effect
is a classic way of choosing between difficult alternatives. In the context of war criminals, both suspected and established, several factors arise:
IWG member Elizabeth Holtzman
s argued that, in the European context, the declassified war crimes documents "force us to confront not only the moral harm but the practical harm" of relying on intelligence from ex-Nazis. What conclusions do you draw about using tainted sources to gather intelligence?" Timothy Naftali
observed that the moral argument was well established, but a common counterargument was "Well these people are useful, and sometimes you have to make moral compromises."
, general anti-Communism
, and McCarthyism
were generally accepted.
Containment, as a concept in US foreign policy after World War II, was intellectually founded by George F. Kennan
, first in an internal document called "the long telegram" and then the "X article
" in Foreign Affairs, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" published under the pseudonym "X". While Kennan advocated a nuanced implementation of limiting Soviet options, US policy became increasingly absolutist: that which was bad for communism was good, and preventing modifications of capitalism was considered important enough to justify co-work with war criminals.
The actions of Senator
Joe McCarthy, however, were even more reflexively anti-communist. The mere accusation of communism was often sufficient grounds to act against individuals or organizations.
asserted in fall 1951, “is to obtain the type of German nation which . . . will not again cause the United States to be plunged into war, but will instead freely cooperate with the West
.” The newly established German Federal Republic
had so far resisted “extreme Right” and “extreme Left” belligerence. But protracted Allied control now risked German “irritation.” This unproductive emotion, Byroade warned, could foster “extremist nationalism
” in Germany
. Byroade recommended that the Western powers accord “full control over foreign and domestic affairs” to Germans themselves.
According to Kisatsky, Byroade's comment, "Only by “[convincing] the Germans that they are equals” could the United States “retain . . . power” and achieve its global objectives." showed that U.S.-German policy, in a broader policy of Atlantic politics, had multiple dimensions and multiple time periods. A subtle but important point is not that the US was concerned both with right-wing nationalism, which might or might not be a Nazi resurgence, and Communism. Right-wing nationalism could be present anywhere in the world, and possibly provide a haven for Nazis.
She suggested US leaders, in the period following the Second World War and through the Cold War, followed a "moral pragmatism" that led to authoritarian governments who supported the economic order desired by the United States, as well as directly countering perceived Soviet and sometimes Chinese influence. While the purpose of this article is not to examine worldwide US policy toward authoritarian governments, it is relevant to consider situations where a government might provide sanctuary to Nazi war criminals.
Internal to the US government, and by its critics, is a constant debate between absolute morality and the perceived needs of realpolitik
with respect to communists and allies. "Elizabeth Holtzman, a former US Congresswoman from New York
and member of the panel, the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group
, said the documents showed that the CIA "failed to lift a finger" to hunt Eichmann and "force us to confront not only the moral harm but the practical harm" of relying on intelligence from ex-Nazis.
The United States government, preoccupied with the cold war, had no policy at the time of pursuing Nazi war criminals. The records also show that US intelligence officials protected many former Nazis for their perceived value in combating the Soviet threat. But Holtzman, speaking at a news briefing at the National Archives on Tuesday, said information from the former Nazis was often tainted both by their "personal agendas" and their vulnerability to blackmail. "Using bad people can have very bad consequences," Holtzman said. She and other group members suggested that the findings should be a cautionary tale for intelligence agencies today."
His response to an interview question of "Is it still important to look at documents about the Nazi era?" was
"It's healthy for a society to have the tools to evaluate the performance of its intelligence community -- even if the performance involves activities that are 50 years old. And I would also hope that the intelligence community itself will take lessons from the past. " In another article, he writes of the experience with Iraq, in using tainted sources.
Did these criteria, at least, help contain communism? Hans-Georg Wieck, head of the German BND
intelligence organization between 1985 and 1990, responded "With the disclosure of documents on the U.S. Army's and the CIA's relationships with Gehlen
, the downside of that cooperation has become known. The upside-the quality of the intelligence project-remains undisclosed. Hence even with righteous, detached hindsight, a cost-benefit analysis of hiring Gehlen and his people remains far more difficult to make, even today, than Naftali thinks. He concedes that contacts with unsavory characters sometimes prove beneficial. This was the case with Gehlen's organization."
Occupiers also acquiesced in the appointment to leading positions in the new West German government of such former aides to Adolf Hitler
as Hans Globke
, who had co-authored the antisemitic Nuremberg Laws
of the 1930s and then went on to become one of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer
’s closest advisors. The motivation here seemed again to be harmony with an ally, in this case West Germany,
approached US Army intelligence shortly after the end of the war, and offered his files and staff on the Eastern Front and Soviet Union. Gehlen himself was not considered to be a war criminal, but some of his staff were far more likely to have been so.
Originally, Gehlen had an excellent reputation in intelligence, but more recent information has brought this into question. At the GHI
symposium, Michael Wala, managing editor of the German publication, Journal of Intelligence History, said Gehlen was assumed to have transformed German intelligence during the war. Wala, however, said it was less that Gehlen was so good as a Soviet analyst, but that his predecessors, prior to his taking over the Fremde Heere Ost (FHO, English "Foreign Armies East") had been so bad. Prior to 1942, according to Wala, Nazi racism caused FHO to deprecate Soviet strength and equipment, such as the T-34
, widely believed to be the best tank of the Second World War. Even though Gehlen was not able to keep Nazi ideology out of estimates, leading to such things as a failure to predict the Soviet resistance at Stalingrad, he remained highly regarded by the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht
(OKW, English: High Command of the Armed Forces).
In his essay reviewing James Critchfield's book Partners at the Creation, Timothy Naftali devalues and disparages the early postwar cooperation between the CIA and what later became West Germany's Bundesnachrichtendienst
(BND, English: federal intelligence service). Naftali said Gehlen's organization and its successor, the BND, was of "questionable" value. Wieck responded, "At no time during my tenure as president of the BND (1985-90) was the significance of its assessments of Soviet bloc developments doubted within NATO. This was true during the time of my predecessors and successors as well. With the disclosure of documents on the U.S. Army's and the CIA's relationships with Gehlen, the downside of that cooperation has become known. The upside-the quality of the intelligence project-remains undisclosed. Hence even with righteous, detached hindsight, a cost-benefit analysis of hiring Gehlen and his people remains far more difficult to make, even today, than Naftali who agreed that "contacts with unsavory characters sometimes prove beneficial."
Rather than accept Wieck's contention that the "upside" of the cost-benefit analysis could not be done, Naftali argues "CIA records show that Gehlen was insubordinate, his organization was insecure, and the entire operation provided intelligence of questionable value. Fifty years later, the German government still refuses to declassify its own records on the subject. Until it does, and unless those documents paint a dramatically new picture of the situation, the account of the Gehlen organization in the early Cold War will remain damning."
"Such assertions, it should be noted, are not simply casual opinions, but scholarly conclusions based on analysis of more than 800 "name files," including a multivolume "Gehlen file," released by the CIA from 1999 to 2004, pursuant to the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998. An extensive interpretation of this material can be found in the study "U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis," issued in May 2004 by the Nazi War Crimes and Imperial Japanese Records Working Group, and co-authored by Richard Breitman, Norman J.W. Goda, Robert Wolfe, and myself."
Naftali said US intelligence underestimated the extent to which Gehlen had hired war criminals, and overestimated the value of Gehlen and his organization. Wieck asked which other Germans could have provided the United States with intelligence in the early Cold War period, to which Naftali said that the correct approach would have been to recruit and train anticommunist Germans, "who could have done a much better job with far fewer tradeoffs." Elsewhere, Norman Goda describes as "catastrophic" the Soviet penetration of the Gehlen Organization, sponsored by CIC and CIA.
Wieck said that the Gehlen Organization "recruited some former SS men (around 100) possibly guilty of war crimes-great weight must be given to the desperate need of the United States in the 1940s and early 1950s for information about the Soviet Union, its forces in Europe, and the communist regimes east of the Elbe
. The United States had almost no agents of its own in the area during those years. Alternatives to Gehlen's group and remnants of other German espionage organizations
from World War II capable of collecting such information simply did not exist." Wieck suggests that Critchfield, the US liaison with Gehlen from 1948 to 1956, "had in mind a good greater than intelligence collection: assuring that the security elite of the new German state would be firmly Atlanticist. This contributed in no small way both to the development of mutual trust between the Federal Republic of Germany and the United States and to the preclusion of a domestic neofascist or nationalist threat to the former."
Schmitz, a member of Critchfield's staff from 1949 to 1954, and his deputy in 1953 and 1954, said "the implication is that these former SS personnel-indeed, all former SS personnel-were unexposed war criminals and, as such, were subject to blackmail by the Soviets. The German Army General Staff, of which Gehlen and many of his subsequent co-workers had been a part, was by no means a haven for war criminals. Indeed, Gehlen did not have a high standing with Hitler, who had him fired after Gehlen produced estimates on Soviet military capabilities that exceeded what Hitler wanted to hear"
, which refers specifically to Italian stay-behind networks.
Most of the networks were dismantled in the early 1950s when it was realised what an embarrassment they might prove. Those were the least of their flaws as would-be anti-communist agents. They had not risen in the Nazi ranks because of their respect for facts. They were ideologues with a keen sense of self-preservation. "The files show time and again that these people were more trouble than they were worth," Mr Naftali said. "The unreconstructed Nazis were always out for themselves, and they were using the west's lack of information about the Soviet Union to exploit it."
One example of a network later dismantled was an apparent equivalent to the East German Freie Deutsche Jugend (Free German Youth), the Bund Deutscher Jugend (BDJ, League of German Youth) seemed, at first, to be a youth group that countered Communist movements. Its increasing militancy and secretiveness about its financing, however, brought it to the attention of Georg August Zinn, the Socialist Minister President of Hesse
.
Zinn discovered that BDJ was US-funded, and inside BDJ was a covert operations service, Technischer Dienst ("Technical Service") made up of former German officers, some Nazis and SS men, between 35 and 50 years old. Their mission was to wage guerilla warfare against a Soviet invasion. "The BDJ affair demonstrated that at least some agencies of the U.S. government willingly worked with undemocratic elements in service to American power."
Beyond the direct anti-Soviet activity, according to Zinn, the Technical Service had prepared long lists of West German "unreliables" to be "put on ice" on Invasion Day. Only a handful were Communists; the rest were Socialists, including such prominent anti-Reds as West Germany's No. 1 Socialist Erich Ollenhauer
, the mayors of Hamburg and Bremen, and the Minister President of Lower Saxony.
After Zinn's presentation, the US High Commissioner for Germany (HICOG), Walter J. Donnelly, asked the West German government and Socialist Party to join in a U.S.-German investigation of the whole affair: "Let's get to the bottom of this. Let the chips fall where they may." Donelley and the United States Department of State
were correct in that senior HICOG personnel had refused to meet with BDJ. John J. McCloy
, the previous HICOG, refused to meet with BDJ, but US intelligence organized BDJ after becoming concerned by the invasion of Korea. US intelligence seemed to have been unaware of the BDJ blacklist and tried, too late, to denounce it and avoid Soviet propaganda. The Communists, however, termed it a proof of US-Nazi conspiracy. The independent Frankfurter Rundschau
editorialized: "One would like to assume that the secret American sponsors knew nothing of the assassination plans. However, their support of a fascist underground movement is bound to produce distrust of American officials. We refuse to fight Stalinism with the help of fascism." No one seemed to understand, according to Time, that the U.S. had not been sinister, just silly.
two years before he was captured by Israeli agents, but the agency did not publicize this information, as it did not have a policy of pursuing Nazi war criminals at the time.
Several former Nazi operational agents were recruited as U.S. secret agents, yet formed just a minor portion of the agents at that time; they were induced financially and promised exemption from criminal prosecution and trial for war crimes committed during World War II.
and IWG Director of Historical Research, Nazi name files studied were broken into two categories of criminal. The process here involved analysis of the name file mechanism, not necessarily protection, since some of the criminals did not survive the war or its immediate aftermath.
A CIA document, dated 19 March 1958, from the Munich station chief to headquarters, stated that German intelligence had provided a list of former Nazis and their locations. Eichmann was third on the list. The memo passed on a rumour that he was in Jerusalem "despite the fact that he was responsible for mass extermination of Jews", but also states, matter-of-factly: "He is reported to have lived in Argentina under the alias Clemens since 1952."
There is no record of a follow-up in the CIA to this tip-off. The reason was, according to Timothy Naftali, a US historian who has reviewed the freshly declassified archive, it was no longer the CIA's job to hunt down Nazis. "It just wasn't US policy to go looking for war criminals. It wasn't British policy either for that matter. It was left to the West Germans ... and this is further evidence of the low priority the Germans gave to hunting down war criminals."
It was not just a question of bureaucratic inertia. But it was not just Globke. When Eichmann was captured the CIA combed files it had captured from the Nazis to find information that might be useful to the Israeli prosecution. The results caused near panic among the CIA's leadership because, unknown to the junior staff who had looked through the files, a few of Eichmann's accomplices being investigated had been CIA "assets", and who might be discovered through Soviet knowledge of the Israeli prosecution records.
, to whom Hans Globke was a key advisor.
In particular, the recruitment of Heinz Felfe
, an SS officer who rose through the ranks of West Germany’s Gehlen organization to become its counterintelligence chief in 1955 did not only raise questions of ethics, but produced a major security failure, since, in 1961, Felfe was identified as a Soviet spy. According to Norman Goda of Ohio University, Felfe was "the West German official most knowledgeable about CIA operations in Eastern Europe", which let him sabotage one of the CIA’s most important spy operations, against the KGB base in East Germany. The CIA subsequently estimated that Felfe had compromised 15,000 items. The article cited an unidentified CIA officer as saying, in 1953, "Clear evidence of a war crimes record might also serve as a possible control." Christopher Simpson claims that these agents had a long-term corrosive effect on American intelligence agencies.
Naftali does not understand the level of sensitivity about Globke, who at that point was the subject of a very public dispute with a man named Max Merten, who accused Globke of disposing of Greek Jews. "What could Eichmann have added that would have altered Globke's position? I don't know. I can only report the alarm that is evident in the document."
"It is very difficult to do international history from one side … It's a real shame that the German government refuses to release its information on these topics. Naftali believes the immediate West German fear was what Eichmann would say about Hans Globke
, who had also worked in the Nazis' Jewish affairs department. While Eichmann had gone on the run, Globke stayed behind, and, by 1960 he was Chancellor
Konrad Adenauer
's national security adviser. West Germany, NATO, and the CIA were concerned about "how the East Germans and Soviet bloc in general might make use of what Eichmann would say about Hans Globke." At the request of the West Germans, the CIA even managed to persuade Life magazine to delete any reference to Globke from Eichmann's memoirs, which it had bought from the family.
support system.
In one known case and possibly a few others, relatively few cases, CIC personnel, may have directly participated in the evacuation of a Nazi that was not to work directly for US engineering or intelligence. It is possible that there was a quid pro quo for such evacuation, such as protecting a more valuable asset by removing a source of denunciation, or protecting an ally from embarrassment and making that joint effort more difficult (see Hans Globke and working with Adenauer).
Erhard Dabringhaus, a U.S. Army (CIC) intelligence officer in post-war Germany from 1946 to 1952 (i.e., the year that the OPC
clandestine service was brought under CIA control), and later a a language professor at Detroit's Wayne State University, was Klaus Barbie
's case officer. Dabringhaus said he was ordered to house and pay Barbie, and did inform his command of Barbie's past actions.
According to Dabringhaus, "They told me to forget it for now. When he was 'no longer useful, they would deal with him." They never did. In 1951 Barbie turned up in Genoa, Italy, before escaping to Bolivia with documents issued by the International Committee of the Red Cross
.
Bill Moyers
quoted Dabringhaus as saying "[Barbie] was wanted by the French as their number one war criminal and somehow we employed a man like that as a very secretive informant." According to Moyers, Barbie worked with ex-Nazi Germans reporting on the Soviets. Once his work was done, the US did not turn him over to the French, but helped him escape, via Italy, to Bolivia. An analysis of Barbie's U.S. Army file, by the IWG, recounted that in May 1949, the French Ministry of Interior pressed the U.S. military government of Germany, HICOG, for Barbie's extradition. The CIC, however, was concerned both that Barbie knew too much about CIC espionage networks, but also about the adverse publicity if it became known he had been recruited. From the HICOG file,
CIC, therefore, arranged for Barbie to reach South America through a "ratline" in Italy. Barbie, using an alias but otherwise living openly in Bolivia, was extradited to France in 1983. While in Bolivia, he was also a security advisor to Alfredo Stroessner
, President
of Paraguay
from 1954 to 1989. Since CIC involvement clearly would become public, the United States Attorney General
ordered the Office of Special Investigations of the United States Department of Justice
to produce an investigative report. Alan Ryan, outgoing head of OSI, detailed the use by U.S. intelligence of Barbie, including his escape using a line that included assistance from a Croatian priest in the Vatican. Ryan concluded that "no other case was found where a suspected Nazi war criminal was placed in the rat line, or where the rat line was used to evacuate a person wanted…" But, he did find, "that officers of the CIC engaged in obstruction of justice… although "prosecution is moot because of the statute of limitations")
A copy of a Guardian
citation quoted Dabringhaus about Barbie. "Barbie was so well in with my superiors that he did not ask me for orders, but just told me what he was going to do. In fact he was so well thought of that I was more like his chauffeur."
Weitzman referred to a 22 May 1999 report, in The Times, which painted a much larger scope. It cited Dabringhaus as personally having recruited hundreds of Nazis, operating at least into the 1960s. Some SS men may have worked for the CIA in Latin America, and may have taught methods of torture.
Douglas MacArthur
essentially banned the OSS from his South West Pacific Area
(SWPA), while OSS simply was less relevant to the naval and "island hopping" operations in Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz
's Pacific Ocean Area (POA; Nimitz was referred to as CINCPAC [Pacific] /CINCPOA) theater. Since there was no postwar alliance to be preserved for US intelligence, there were few reasons to keep matters classified due to the sensitivities of a key ally. While the US did work with Australia and New Zealand, MacArthur had essentially subordinated their commands.
The number and types of Japanese who formed relationships with U.S. intelligence differ from their Nazi counterparts. The Japanese were fewer in number than the Germans who were directly to collect HUMINT from the Soviets or take part in stay-behind networks after invasion. Some of the Japanese were imprisoned for investigation, or actually served prison time for war crimes, perhaps being released early. Far more of the Japanese were later at a much higher level of authority than were the Germans.
Charles A. Willoughby (a confidante of MacArthur).
Japanese ex-officers and nationalists, immediately after the war, created an informal network intended to preserve, as far as possible, the Imperial system and eventually to reestablish the military. Subsequently, the CIA referred to these as "underground" groups, although not in the sense that they were resistance organizations.
Most US contacts with the underground groups were combat rather than intelligence specialists. With the exception of Arisue Seizo and a few key others, most of the links established by U.S. authorities to the Japanese “underground” groups, as the CIA called the Japanese networks, were to highranking officers with operational and combat experience. Another significant intelligence specialist, with an extensive network of contacts among officers, was Lieutenant General
Kawabe Torashiro. Kawabe joined with Arisue in providing the services of former Japanese Army personnel to occupation authorities, particularly G-2. Kawabe’s last headquarters assignment gave him informal authority over many groups and individuals within the army. His network was made up primarily of former high-ranking army general staff members and their subordinates. These individuals were in networks of subordinate organizations, called kikan, that would carry out actual operations.
In one important case, that of Ishii Shiro, the intelligence cooperation was not for shaping the political destiny of postwar Japan or for obtaining future intelligence, but as a trade of immunity for technical data.
Since the relationships often were established after a convicted or investigated Japanese left prison, the working relationships started later than did those with Germans. Some of the Japanese eventually reached Cabinet or Prime Ministerial level. In at least one case, that of Kodama Yoshio with Kishi Nobusuke, the close working relationship grew when they were cellmates.
After his rehabilitation in 1950, Tsuji Matsonubu received U.S. finding through the G-2’s Historical Branch under Willoughby. Through Arisue, G-2 recruited and employed some 200 former Japanese officers to assist historian Gordon Prange’s work on the history of MacArthur’s Pacific campaign. A central figure in this effort was Colonel
Hattori Takushiro. One of the most important members of the Hattori kikan, known in some CIA documents as “Willoughby’s Stable,” was Hattori’s close friend Tsuji Masanobu.
Arisue Seizo, chief of the intelligence department at Imperial General Headquarters at the end of the war. Shortly before the end of the war, Arisue began collecting intelligence documents to use as a bargaining chip with the Occupation.
SCAP sentiment toward Arisue was mixed, and officers outside G-2 considered indicting Arisue as a Class A war criminal. Willoughby, however, had met and liked Lieutenant General
Kawabe Torashiro who had been head of intelligence for the Kwantung Army, military attaché to Berlin, deputy chief of staff for Imperial GHQ, and the leader of the surrender delegation to Manila.
Willoughby asked Arisue, in September 1945, to set up a domestic intelligence network to warn of a potential Communist coup. Ironically, Willoughby was unaware that Arisue and some of his associates, at various times, considered right-wing coups against the Japanese government.
According to an AP article, the plot was developed after the U.S. postwar occupation of Japan ended in April 1952, by which time the US was no longer funding Hattori. Two CIA documents said the plot reportedly had the support of 500,000 people in Japan, and that the group planned to use a contact who controlled a faction inside the National Safety Agency - a precursor to the Defense Ministry - to help launch the coup. The article reinforces the lack of cooperation and common policy between SCAP G-2 and the CIA.
"Since the beginning of July 1952, plans for a coup d'etat have been initiated among a group of ex-purgees including former military officers. The leader of the group is ex-Colonel Hattori Takushiro," said an Oct. 31, 1952, report, which claimed "this report is the first to mention a definite rightist plan involving violence." "The original plan of the group was to engineer a coup d'etat, including the assassination of Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru on account of his hostile attitude toward depurgees and nationalists," the CIA document said. "The group is considering the possibility of some minor assassination attempt in lieu of a coup d'etat," the Oct. 31, 1952, document said.
Shiro Ishii
, head of the Japanese biological warfare program based at Unit 731
in Pingfan, China. Ishii, who had presided over human experimentation perhaps on a greater extent than the Nazis, and waged biological warfare against the Chinese, was given protection by CIC in exchange for data.
Tsuneini Keiichi, a professor at Kanagawa University
, found two significant documents from Willoughby, dealing with the Japanese biological warfare research and operations by Unit 731
. One, titled "report on bacteriological warfare" was for the chief of staff of the Far Eastern Commission and was dated July 17, 1947. The other, dated July 22, went to Major General SJ Chamberlin, director of intelligence of the US War Department General Staff, to illustrate the need for continued use of confidential funds without restrictions to obtain such intelligence.
Willoughby described the achievements of his unit's investigations, saying the "information procured will have the greatest value in future development of the US BW (bacteriological warfare) program". Citing a US War Department specialist in charge of the investigation, Brig Gen Willoughby wrote in the report that "data on human experiments may prove invaluable" and said the information was "only obtainable through the skilful, psychological approach to top-flight pathologists" involved in Unit 731 experiments.
Tsuneishi said it had been thought that the US had gathered the information high-handedly by making unit members choose between cooperating or facing war crime charges, "but it has become clear that this was done by winning (unit members') hearts with money and rewards". In 1947, SCAP G-2 tried to obtain the experimental data but "because war crime charges against the Unit 731 officers had been waived by then, the GHQ was apparently forced to offer monetary rewards to access the information."
Kaya started to work for the CIA around the time of his election to the Diet
in 1958. After his recruitment, he wanted to travel to the United States and meet Allen Dulles in person. Kaya came to visit Dulles at CIA headquarters in 1959, and asked the director to enter into a formal agreement to share intelligence with his internal security committee. "Everyone agreed that cooperation between CIA and the Japanese regarding countersubversion was most desirable and that the subject was one of major interest to CIA", say the minutes of their talk. Dulles regarded Kaya as his agent, and six months later he wrote him to say: "I am most interested in learning your views both in international affairs affecting relations between our countries and on the situation within Japan".
Kaya's on-and-off relationship with the CIA reached a peak in 1968, when he was the leading political adviser to Prime Minister Eisaku Sato. Kaya was instrumental in a CIA action intended to swing the Okinawan election to the LDP, an action that failed. Okinawa was a key U.S. base, both for Vietnam operations and nuclear basing. Kaya played a key role in the CIA's covert actions aimed to swing the elections for the LDP, which narrowly failed. Okinawa itself returned to Japanese administration in 1972, but the American military remains there to this day.
While the Occupation originally had bold goals to restructure and democratize Japanese society, ambitions became more modest as the Cold War chilled. Kennan's containment doctrine was the priority of the Truman Administration. United States Secretary of Defense
James Forrestal
said that real security against communism required the "restoration of commerce, trade and business" worldwide. This meant putting "Japan, Germany and other affiliates of the Axis back to work."
Before the war, Kishi had been a friend of U.S. Ambassador
Joseph C. Grew. Grew, along with journalists, diplomats and lawyers, all of whom had had prewar ties with the Japanese elite. They opposed the SCAP
policies calling for the renunciation of military capability.
After the end of the Korean War
, and economic repercussions for Japan, the Yoshida government fell. The U.S. Ambassador in 1954, not intelligence officials, urged the conservative parties to name Kishi as Prime Minister. Another official who had been purged after the war, Hatoyama Ichiro, was selected. Hatoyama was reluctant to rearm, and wanted peaceful relations with China and the Soviets. These positions infuriated John Foster Dulles
, United States Secretary of State
in the Eisenhower
Administration, whose brother Allen was Director of Central Intelligence
. The Eisenhower Administration's support of Kishi became more and more obvious, when he made a state visit in 1957, addressing Congress and played golf with Eisenhower,
While detailed documentation has not been declassified, if it esists, indicates that early in 1958, Shaller states that Eisenhower, making what he and his aides earlier called a "big bet," authorized the CIA to provide secret campaign funds to Kishi and other members of the Liberal Democratic Party
. The Administration agreed to renegotiate the 1951 security treaty and end the Occupation. In return for the right to use Okinawa as a base for nuclear forces, the U.S. renegotiated the treaty. While the Kennedy
administration continued the secret payments, Although the Kennedy administration in 1961 continued secret payments to the LDP and other parties, "it viewed trade expansion as a better way to stabilize Japan and bind it to the United States."
Saito Makoto
, for which Kodama was sentenced to 3.5 years of imprisonment.
By the 1930s, he had been rehabilitated by the Japanese and formed both an intelligence network in Manchuria
and an extensive system for purchasing strategic materials, such as cobalt, copper, nickel and radium, sometimes bartering drugs for materials. Kodama called it "an organization with no thought of profit," but, by the end of the war, it was worth $175 million and the Japanese government made the former prisoner a rear admiral
. . After the war, Kodama began to pour part of his fortune into the careers of Japan's most conservative politicians, and he became a key member of a CIA operation that helped bring them to power. He worked with American businessmen, OSS veterans, and ex-diplomats to pull off an audacious covert operation, bankrolled by the CIA, during the Korean War. This operation obtained tungsten needed for U.S. munitions, for which the United States Department of Defense
paid $10 million, with underwriting of $2.8 million from the CIA.
According to Weiner, the operation left Kodama in bad odor with the CIA's Tokyo station. "He is a professional liar, gangster, charlatan, and outright thief", the station reported on 10 September 1953. "Kodama is completely incapable of intelligence operations, and has no interest in anything but the profits". The relationship was severed, and the CIA turned its attention to the care and feeding of up-and-coming Japanese politicians - including Kishi - who won seats in the Diet, Japan's parliament, in the first elections after the end of the American occupation."
Tsuji Matsunobu into clandestine U.S. service. Tsuji, claiming the authority of Imperial General Headquarters, ordered a wide range of atrocities including the Bataan Death March
.
"U.S. officials also investigated the possibility that, late in the war, the Japanese Army expropriated three tons of gold from French Indochina with the idea that it would be used at a later
date to finance the resurgence of the Japanese military establishment. Reports indicated
that Tsuji, who spent a great deal of time in Southeast Asia, had distributed part of this
haul to his officers and told them to hide it away from Allied hands.
CIA documents releaseed through the IWG explained the puzzlement of many Japanese, who wondered why Tsuji was never charged for crimes sometimes worse that led to the gallows for others. Even after his release, he remained a "person of interest", but was not found to be interrogated. "He avoided capture first by hiding in Southeast Asia, later sheltered by Chang Kai-shek on mainland China, then secretly in Japan, including as a guest of Kodama. When the United States dropped its war crimes charges against him in 1950, he returned to the public scene, publishing two books about his wartime and postwar experiences that quickly became best sellers."
Before his rehabilitation, he was involved in G-2 planning of covert activities to assist the Chinese Nationalists against the Peoples Republic of China. Note that direct confrontation with China, even through Chiang Kai-Shek as a proxy, was against Truman Administration policy, a conflict that led to MacArthur's (and Willoughby's) dismisal.
By 1950, when there were no charges outstanding against Tsuji, Arisue asked him to expand Japanese intelligence operations into Southeast Asia. Tsuji had met many of the former Imperial Japanese Army officers associated with this operation while he was in Singapore.
Many of the other officers would not work with Tsuji and lobbied successfully to have Arisue replace him with former Shanghai kenpeitai Chief Tomita Bunichi.
Through Hattori, Tsuji became involved in planning one of Willoughby’s most ambitious operations, a Chinese Nationalist invasion of mainland China. In January 1951, G-2 began toying with the notion of encouraging Chang Kai-shek’s forces to invade south China and establish contact with Chinese anti-communist resistance forces.
Willoughby’s subordinates approached Hattori and requested that he and Tsuji prepare the operational details of such a plan. Hattori, whom the CIA believed was a key figure in getting the war crimes charges against Tsuji dropped, now sought to put Tsuji’s military expertise to work for G-2. Planning proceeded through early March, with Tsuji taking the lead.
From the CIA’s perspective, Willoughby put undue trust in both Hattori and Tsuji. Tsuji, who had himself become enmeshed in rearmament plans, purportedly stated in 1951 that it was necessary to “deceive the ally prior to the enemy.” The agency’s analysts also saw “a serious danger that American military personnel in G-2, GHQ will be taken in by [Hattori’s group].” In any event, the planning came to very little, as Willoughby learned in March 1951 that news of the preparations leaked to the Communist Chinese, and the idea was shelved.
By 1952, Tsuji and Hattori decided that cooperation with the Americans was the best way to rapidly rearm Japan, a position unpopular with many other ex-officers. Backed by Kodama and others, they disagreed with Prime Minister
Yoshida Shigeru’s policy of exclusively relying on U.S. military protection instead of rebuilding Japan’s own army. ...In July 1952, Hattori hatched a plot to conduct a coup by murdering Yoshida and replacing him either with the more sympathetic Hatoyama Ichiro or Ogata Taketora. While Tsuji initially supported a coup, Tsuji convinced Hattori to hold off his coup d’etat as long as the conservatives (of the ironically named Liberal Party) were in power. In other words, SCAP's staunchest political ally in Japan was protected by one of Japan’s most well-known alleged war criminals. Nevertheless, the group did consider murdering other government figures to send a message to Yoshida . Hatoyama succeeded in deposing Yoshida in 1954, but it is unclear what role, if any, Hattori and Tsuji played in this. In 1952, Tsuji was elected to the Diet and began a flamboyant career in politics, until his mysterious disappearance in 1961 during travel in Southeast Asia.
and Kodama Yoshio, etc.. Ryuzo Sejima worked with them after World War II
.
Kodama Yoshio and Ryuzo Sejima became intimate with Park Chung-hee
and the Korea Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA)
of South Korea
in 1960's. Especially, because Ryuzo Sejima and Park Chung-hee
were the relations of the senior and the junior at the Imperial Japanese Army Academy, Ryuzo Sejima became intimate with Park Chung-hee
. By the way, Hisayuki Machii
was also intimate with them. Hisayuki Machii
cooperated in kidnapping of Kim Dae-jung. Ryuzo Sejima was able to become intimate with Chun Doo-hwan
from the relations of Ryuzo Sejima and Park Chung-hee
in 1980 because Chun Doo-hwan
had been worshiping Park Chung-hee
.
When Yoshio Kodama
died on January 17, 1984, Ryuzo Sejima was also intimate with U.S. Government and CIA as if Ryuzo Sejima succeeded the work of Yoshio Kodama
.
Ryuzo Sejima became the honorary post to govern NTT
in June, 1986. Ryuzo Sejima managed the telephone records etc. of users of NTT and offered those information to the United States
side.
Brent Scowcroft
etc. had come in contact with Ryuzo Sejima.
The Japan Forum For Strategic Studiesscandal was established on March 1, 1999. Ryuzo Sejima became the chairman of the Japan Forum For Strategic Studiesscandal.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
was involved in the prosecution of war criminals, principally at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg
Nuremberg
Nuremberg[p] is a city in the German state of Bavaria, in the administrative region of Middle Franconia. Situated on the Pegnitz river and the Rhine–Main–Danube Canal, it is located about north of Munich and is Franconia's largest city. The population is 505,664...
and the International Military Tribunal for the Far East
International Military Tribunal for the Far East
The International Military Tribunal for the Far East , also known as the Tokyo Trials, the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, or simply the Tribunal, was convened on April 29, 1946, to try the leaders of the Empire of Japan for three types of crimes: "Class A" crimes were reserved for those who...
in Tokyo
Tokyo
, ; officially , is one of the 47 prefectures of Japan. Tokyo is the capital of Japan, the center of the Greater Tokyo Area, and the largest metropolitan area of Japan. It is the seat of the Japanese government and the Imperial Palace, and the home of the Japanese Imperial Family...
, the Nuremberg Military Tribunals, and other judicial proceedings, US military and intelligence agencies protected some war criminals in the interest of obtaining technical or intelligence information from them, or taking part in ongoing intelligence or engineering (e.g., Operation Paperclip
Operation Paperclip
Operation Paperclip was the Office of Strategic Services program used to recruit the scientists of Nazi Germany for employment by the United States in the aftermath of World War II...
). Multiple US intelligence organizations were involved (the Central Intelligence Agency
Central Intelligence Agency
The Central Intelligence Agency is a civilian intelligence agency of the United States government. It is an executive agency and reports directly to the Director of National Intelligence, responsible for providing national security intelligence assessment to senior United States policymakers...
was not created until 1947 and in control of its clandestine services until 1952). The relationships with German war criminals started immediately after the end of the Second World War, but some of the Japanese relationships were slower to develop.
The concealment was not always deliberate, but simply because the records were scattered among a huge volume of government records. In some cases, prosecutors actively developed cases against individuals, yet were unaware the US had detailed records on them. The US Congress required an interagency working group (IWG
Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group
The Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group is a United States government interagency group, which tasked with locating, identifying, inventorying, and recommending for declassification classified U.S. records relating to Nazi and Japanese war crimes.The...
), under the auspices of the National Archives and Records Administration
National Archives and Records Administration
The National Archives and Records Administration is an independent agency of the United States government charged with preserving and documenting government and historical records and with increasing public access to those documents, which comprise the National Archives...
to report on the big picture. Since the CIA was formed in 1947, and did not have full control of its clandestine HUMINT
Clandestine HUMINT
Clandestine HUMINT includes a wide range of espionage sources. This includes the classic spy who collects intelligence, but also couriers and other personnel, who handle their secure communications...
functions until the formation of the "Directorate of Plans" (DD/P) in 1952, where relationships were formed with individuals suspected of war crimes, other intelligence agencies obviously established the relationship. Many of these relationships were formed before the creation of the CIA in 1947, but the CIA, in some cases, took over the relationships and concealed them for nearly 60 years. Most often, when these were established before the formation of the CIA, they were done by United States Army Military Intelligence, or by its traditional name of the Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC). In General of the Army
General of the Army
General of the Army is a military rank used in some countries to denote a senior military leader, usually a General in command of a nation's Army. It may also be the title given to a General who commands an Army in the field....
Douglas MacArthur
Douglas MacArthur
General of the Army Douglas MacArthur was an American general and field marshal of the Philippine Army. He was a Chief of Staff of the United States Army during the 1930s and played a prominent role in the Pacific theater during World War II. He received the Medal of Honor for his service in the...
's commands, the intelligence service was called G-2. Under the direction of Major General
Major General
Major general or major-general is a military rank used in many countries. It is derived from the older rank of sergeant major general. A major general is a high-ranking officer, normally subordinate to the rank of lieutenant general and senior to the ranks of brigadier and brigadier general...
Charles A. Willoughby, it was fairly autonomous of Washington, DC.
Others might have been formed by the Second World War Office of Strategic Services (OSS)
Office of Strategic Services
The Office of Strategic Services was a United States intelligence agency formed during World War II. It was the wartime intelligence agency, and it was a predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency...
, or various interim groups that existed between 1945 and 1952, such as the Strategic Services Unit
Strategic Services Unit
The Strategic Services Unit was an intelligence agency of the United States government which existed in the immediate post-World War II period. It was created from the Secret Intelligence and Counter-Espionage branches of the wartime Office of Strategic Services.Assistant Secretary of War John J...
or Office of Policy Coordination
Office of Policy Coordination
The Office of Policy Coordination was a United States covert psychological operations and paramilitary action organization. Created as an independent office in 1948, it was merged with the Central Intelligence Agency in 1951....
. Some of these relationships were dropped when the CIA established its authority, others were continued under the CIA, and yet others moved from US control to their home nations.
That picture features substantial sufficient differences between the European and Pacific areas of operations, such that only some broad principles of US postwar policy were shared. As an example of a key difference, US intelligence in Europe worked closely with their British
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
counterparts. OSS needed good relations with SIS
Secret Intelligence Service
The Secret Intelligence Service is responsible for supplying the British Government with foreign intelligence. Alongside the internal Security Service , the Government Communications Headquarters and the Defence Intelligence , it operates under the formal direction of the Joint Intelligence...
and SOE
Special Operations Executive
The Special Operations Executive was a World War II organisation of the United Kingdom. It was officially formed by Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Minister of Economic Warfare Hugh Dalton on 22 July 1940, to conduct guerrilla warfare against the Axis powers and to instruct and aid local...
, and it was reasonably obvious that the working relationship would need to be preserved in the postwar period. OSS had a much lower presence in the Pacific, so there was relatively little pressure from allies to hide information not necessarily for reasons of benefit to the US, but to the ally with whom the OSS' successor, the CIA, needed to work.
Morality versus utility in international relationships
Ethicists have long debated the proper balance between conceptual standards and apparently practical decisions. This debate becomes even more complex when "presentism"Presentism (literary and historical analysis)
Presentism is a mode of literary or historical analysis in which present-day ideas and perspectives are anachronistically introduced into depictions or interpretations of the past...
is a facet of retrospective reviews of decisions: were the decisions reasonably moral by the standards prevailing at the time they were made, rather than by the standards of the present. These ideas are not abstractions, but guided real-world choices that decision makers often, especially in the Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
, thought were the least of an assortment of evils.
Even at the time, ethicists can recognize that there is no ideal choice. Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas, O.P. , also Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, was an Italian Dominican priest of the Catholic Church, and an immensely influential philosopher and theologian in the tradition of scholasticism, known as Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Communis, or Doctor Universalis...
' principle of double effect
Principle of double effect
The principle of double effect; also known as the rule of double effect; the doctrine of double effect, often abbreviated as DDE or PDE; double-effect reasoning; or simply double effect, is a set of ethical criteria for evaluating the permissibility of acting when one's otherwise legitimate act...
is a classic way of choosing between difficult alternatives. In the context of war criminals, both suspected and established, several factors arise:
-
- Would exposure of the individual damage a relationship that does recognized good (e.g., cooperation between nations)?
- Does the individual have information that is of significant independent value and that is available through no other means?
- Can the individual blackmail the nation involved, such that he might release even more damaging information?
- Is there information to be learned or precedents to be set by prosecution?
IWG member Elizabeth Holtzman
Elizabeth Holtzman
Elizabeth Holtzman is an American lawyer and former Democratic politician, pioneer woman officeholder, four term U.S. Representative , two term District Attorney of Kings County , and New York City Comptroller .Her role on the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate scandal drew national...
s argued that, in the European context, the declassified war crimes documents "force us to confront not only the moral harm but the practical harm" of relying on intelligence from ex-Nazis. What conclusions do you draw about using tainted sources to gather intelligence?" Timothy Naftali
Timothy Naftali
Timothy Naftali is the director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, a post he assumed in 2007 when control of the library was transferred from the Richard Nixon Foundation to the National Archives and Records Administration...
observed that the moral argument was well established, but a common counterargument was "Well these people are useful, and sometimes you have to make moral compromises."
Containment and anticommunism
Several doctrines affected the postwar policy under which these relationships were formed, although not all historians agree that all applied. ContainmentContainment
Containment was a United States policy using military, economic, and diplomatic strategies to stall the spread of communism, enhance America’s security and influence abroad, and prevent a "domino effect". A component of the Cold War, this policy was a response to a series of moves by the Soviet...
, general anti-Communism
Anti-communism
Anti-communism is opposition to communism. Organized anti-communism developed in reaction to the rise of communism, especially after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and the beginning of the Cold War in 1947.-Objections to communist theory:...
, and McCarthyism
McCarthyism
McCarthyism is the practice of making accusations of disloyalty, subversion, or treason without proper regard for evidence. The term has its origins in the period in the United States known as the Second Red Scare, lasting roughly from the late 1940s to the late 1950s and characterized by...
were generally accepted.
Containment, as a concept in US foreign policy after World War II, was intellectually founded by George F. Kennan
George F. Kennan
George Frost Kennan was an American adviser, diplomat, political scientist and historian, best known as "the father of containment" and as a key figure in the emergence of the Cold War...
, first in an internal document called "the long telegram" and then the "X article
X Article
The X Article, formally titled The Sources of Soviet Conduct, was published in Foreign Affairs magazine in July 1947. The article was written by George F. Kennan, the Deputy Chief of Mission of the United States to the USSR, from 1944 to 1946, under ambassador W. Averell Harriman.-Background:G. F....
" in Foreign Affairs, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" published under the pseudonym "X". While Kennan advocated a nuanced implementation of limiting Soviet options, US policy became increasingly absolutist: that which was bad for communism was good, and preventing modifications of capitalism was considered important enough to justify co-work with war criminals.
The actions of Senator
United States Senate
The United States Senate is the upper house of the bicameral legislature of the United States, and together with the United States House of Representatives comprises the United States Congress. The composition and powers of the Senate are established in Article One of the U.S. Constitution. Each...
Joe McCarthy, however, were even more reflexively anti-communist. The mere accusation of communism was often sufficient grounds to act against individuals or organizations.
Searching for order or opportunities?
"Our goal,” the US State Department’s Henry A. ByroadeHenry A. Byroade
Brigadier General Henry Alfred Byroade, United States Army of Indiana was a career diplomat who served as Ambassador to Egypt in 1955 and 1956 and later to five other countries, including United States Ambassador to Burma from September 1963 to June 1968, and served as Assistant Secretary of State...
asserted in fall 1951, “is to obtain the type of German nation which . . . will not again cause the United States to be plunged into war, but will instead freely cooperate with the West
Western world
The Western world, also known as the West and the Occident , is a term referring to the countries of Western Europe , the countries of the Americas, as well all countries of Northern and Central Europe, Australia and New Zealand...
.” The newly established German Federal Republic
German Federal Republic
"German Federal Republic" was one of the derogatory terms used by the communist German Democratic Republic to refer to the Federal Republic of Germany from the 1950s until 1968, when they started using the propaganda term "BRD"....
had so far resisted “extreme Right” and “extreme Left” belligerence. But protracted Allied control now risked German “irritation.” This unproductive emotion, Byroade warned, could foster “extremist nationalism
Nationalism
Nationalism is a political ideology that involves a strong identification of a group of individuals with a political entity defined in national terms, i.e. a nation. In the 'modernist' image of the nation, it is nationalism that creates national identity. There are various definitions for what...
” in Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
. Byroade recommended that the Western powers accord “full control over foreign and domestic affairs” to Germans themselves.
According to Kisatsky, Byroade's comment, "Only by “[convincing] the Germans that they are equals” could the United States “retain . . . power” and achieve its global objectives." showed that U.S.-German policy, in a broader policy of Atlantic politics, had multiple dimensions and multiple time periods. A subtle but important point is not that the US was concerned both with right-wing nationalism, which might or might not be a Nazi resurgence, and Communism. Right-wing nationalism could be present anywhere in the world, and possibly provide a haven for Nazis.
- During the occupation, "American leaders during the Allied occupation (1945–55) worked to transform the former Nazi dictatorshipDictatorshipA dictatorship is defined as an autocratic form of government in which the government is ruled by an individual, the dictator. It has three possible meanings:...
into a reliable partner of the West. DenazificationDenazificationDenazification was an Allied initiative to rid German and Austrian society, culture, press, economy, judiciary, and politics of any remnants of the National Socialist ideology. It was carried out specifically by removing those involved from positions of influence and by disbanding or rendering...
and related programs helped expunge totalitarian practices and promote democratic governanceGovernanceGovernance is the act of governing. It relates to decisions that define expectations, grant power, or verify performance. It consists of either a separate process or part of management or leadership processes...
. - West German economic and military integration with Europe (1955-1990) minimized risk of a third World War by enhancing mutual interdependence among the major continental states. Nationalism potentially undermined US goals. Growing resentment of Germany’s occupation and division roused competitive national urges inimical to peace. Allied leaders could best ensure the Federal Republic’s allegiance to the West by granting full autonomyAutonomyAutonomy is a concept found in moral, political and bioethical philosophy. Within these contexts, it is the capacity of a rational individual to make an informed, un-coerced decision...
and by treating West Germans as equals. - After German reunificationGerman reunificationGerman reunification was the process in 1990 in which the German Democratic Republic joined the Federal Republic of Germany , and when Berlin reunited into a single city, as provided by its then Grundgesetz constitution Article 23. The start of this process is commonly referred by Germans as die...
in 1990, cooperative Allied-German relations facilitated progress and enabled the United States to “retain power” in Europe.
She suggested US leaders, in the period following the Second World War and through the Cold War, followed a "moral pragmatism" that led to authoritarian governments who supported the economic order desired by the United States, as well as directly countering perceived Soviet and sometimes Chinese influence. While the purpose of this article is not to examine worldwide US policy toward authoritarian governments, it is relevant to consider situations where a government might provide sanctuary to Nazi war criminals.
Internal to the US government, and by its critics, is a constant debate between absolute morality and the perceived needs of realpolitik
Realpolitik
Realpolitik refers to politics or diplomacy based primarily on power and on practical and material factors and considerations, rather than ideological notions or moralistic or ethical premises...
with respect to communists and allies. "Elizabeth Holtzman, a former US Congresswoman from New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
and member of the panel, the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group
Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group
The Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group is a United States government interagency group, which tasked with locating, identifying, inventorying, and recommending for declassification classified U.S. records relating to Nazi and Japanese war crimes.The...
, said the documents showed that the CIA "failed to lift a finger" to hunt Eichmann and "force us to confront not only the moral harm but the practical harm" of relying on intelligence from ex-Nazis.
The United States government, preoccupied with the cold war, had no policy at the time of pursuing Nazi war criminals. The records also show that US intelligence officials protected many former Nazis for their perceived value in combating the Soviet threat. But Holtzman, speaking at a news briefing at the National Archives on Tuesday, said information from the former Nazis was often tainted both by their "personal agendas" and their vulnerability to blackmail. "Using bad people can have very bad consequences," Holtzman said. She and other group members suggested that the findings should be a cautionary tale for intelligence agencies today."
Evaluating the intelligence process
Naftali and others have suggested that a useful, if amoral choice, is to consider whether the results of the use of tainted resources produced good results:"...People are now welcome to look at the operational records of these tainted individuals, and they can come to their own conclusions about whether making the moral compromise was operationally useful. And more often than not, these people were not productive.
His response to an interview question of "Is it still important to look at documents about the Nazi era?" was
"It's healthy for a society to have the tools to evaluate the performance of its intelligence community -- even if the performance involves activities that are 50 years old. And I would also hope that the intelligence community itself will take lessons from the past. " In another article, he writes of the experience with Iraq, in using tainted sources.
Did these criteria, at least, help contain communism? Hans-Georg Wieck, head of the German BND
Bundesnachrichtendienst
The Bundesnachrichtendienst [ˌbʊndəsˈnaːχʁɪçtnˌdiːnst] is the foreign intelligence agency of Germany, directly subordinated to the Chancellor's Office. Its headquarters are in Pullach near Munich, and Berlin . The BND has 300 locations in Germany and foreign countries...
intelligence organization between 1985 and 1990, responded "With the disclosure of documents on the U.S. Army's and the CIA's relationships with Gehlen
Reinhard Gehlen
Reinhard Gehlen was a General in the German Army during World War II, who served as chief of intelligence-gathering on the Eastern Front. After the war, he was recruited by the United States military to set up a spy ring directed against the Soviet Union , and eventually became head of the West...
, the downside of that cooperation has become known. The upside-the quality of the intelligence project-remains undisclosed. Hence even with righteous, detached hindsight, a cost-benefit analysis of hiring Gehlen and his people remains far more difficult to make, even today, than Naftali thinks. He concedes that contacts with unsavory characters sometimes prove beneficial. This was the case with Gehlen's organization."
European Policy
Not only British sensitivities were involved, but others, including German. "That's not up to us. Our mandate is to declassify US government records, not the records of other countries. I would assume that is something for the German press, German scholars, and German people to demand. I find it interesting that when the US releases information about Eichmann, it gets a lot of play in Germany. But there's no follow-up with the German government. After all, German scholars should be asking their government, "Why can't you do the same? Why can't you be as open as the US government? What are you hiding?" Why doesn't the BND release materials to have an open history of its past? What is it afraid of?"Occupiers also acquiesced in the appointment to leading positions in the new West German government of such former aides to Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
as Hans Globke
Hans Globke
- See also :* Theodor Oberländer* Rudolf Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff- Bibliography :* Tetens, T.H. The New Germany and the Old Nazis. Random House/Marzani & Munsel, New York, 1961. LCN 61-7240....
, who had co-authored the antisemitic Nuremberg Laws
Nuremberg Laws
The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 were antisemitic laws in Nazi Germany introduced at the annual Nuremberg Rally of the Nazi Party. After the takeover of power in 1933 by Hitler, Nazism became an official ideology incorporating scientific racism and antisemitism...
of the 1930s and then went on to become one of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer
Konrad Adenauer
Konrad Hermann Joseph Adenauer was a German statesman. He was the chancellor of the West Germany from 1949 to 1963. He is widely recognised as a person who led his country from the ruins of World War II to a powerful and prosperous nation that had forged close relations with old enemies France,...
’s closest advisors. The motivation here seemed again to be harmony with an ally, in this case West Germany,
The Gehlen Organization
Much of the immediate postwar activity, until the mid-fifties when it became part of West Germany's BND intelligence agency, was the Gehlen Organization. Reinhard GehlenReinhard Gehlen
Reinhard Gehlen was a General in the German Army during World War II, who served as chief of intelligence-gathering on the Eastern Front. After the war, he was recruited by the United States military to set up a spy ring directed against the Soviet Union , and eventually became head of the West...
approached US Army intelligence shortly after the end of the war, and offered his files and staff on the Eastern Front and Soviet Union. Gehlen himself was not considered to be a war criminal, but some of his staff were far more likely to have been so.
Originally, Gehlen had an excellent reputation in intelligence, but more recent information has brought this into question. At the GHI
GHI
GHI may stand for:* Gardens for Health International, an American non-profit which provides land advocacy and nutritional support for Rwandans living with HIV/AIDS* Ghee, sometimes spelled Ghi* Ghost Hunters International...
symposium, Michael Wala, managing editor of the German publication, Journal of Intelligence History, said Gehlen was assumed to have transformed German intelligence during the war. Wala, however, said it was less that Gehlen was so good as a Soviet analyst, but that his predecessors, prior to his taking over the Fremde Heere Ost (FHO, English "Foreign Armies East") had been so bad. Prior to 1942, according to Wala, Nazi racism caused FHO to deprecate Soviet strength and equipment, such as the T-34
T-34
The T-34 was a Soviet medium tank produced from 1940 to 1958. Although its armour and armament were surpassed by later tanks of the era, it has been often credited as the most effective, efficient and influential design of World War II...
, widely believed to be the best tank of the Second World War. Even though Gehlen was not able to keep Nazi ideology out of estimates, leading to such things as a failure to predict the Soviet resistance at Stalingrad, he remained highly regarded by the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht
The Oberkommando der Wehrmacht was part of the command structure of the armed forces of Nazi Germany during World War II.- Genesis :...
(OKW, English: High Command of the Armed Forces).
In his essay reviewing James Critchfield's book Partners at the Creation, Timothy Naftali devalues and disparages the early postwar cooperation between the CIA and what later became West Germany's Bundesnachrichtendienst
Bundesnachrichtendienst
The Bundesnachrichtendienst [ˌbʊndəsˈnaːχʁɪçtnˌdiːnst] is the foreign intelligence agency of Germany, directly subordinated to the Chancellor's Office. Its headquarters are in Pullach near Munich, and Berlin . The BND has 300 locations in Germany and foreign countries...
(BND, English: federal intelligence service). Naftali said Gehlen's organization and its successor, the BND, was of "questionable" value. Wieck responded, "At no time during my tenure as president of the BND (1985-90) was the significance of its assessments of Soviet bloc developments doubted within NATO. This was true during the time of my predecessors and successors as well. With the disclosure of documents on the U.S. Army's and the CIA's relationships with Gehlen, the downside of that cooperation has become known. The upside-the quality of the intelligence project-remains undisclosed. Hence even with righteous, detached hindsight, a cost-benefit analysis of hiring Gehlen and his people remains far more difficult to make, even today, than Naftali who agreed that "contacts with unsavory characters sometimes prove beneficial."
Rather than accept Wieck's contention that the "upside" of the cost-benefit analysis could not be done, Naftali argues "CIA records show that Gehlen was insubordinate, his organization was insecure, and the entire operation provided intelligence of questionable value. Fifty years later, the German government still refuses to declassify its own records on the subject. Until it does, and unless those documents paint a dramatically new picture of the situation, the account of the Gehlen organization in the early Cold War will remain damning."
"Such assertions, it should be noted, are not simply casual opinions, but scholarly conclusions based on analysis of more than 800 "name files," including a multivolume "Gehlen file," released by the CIA from 1999 to 2004, pursuant to the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998. An extensive interpretation of this material can be found in the study "U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis," issued in May 2004 by the Nazi War Crimes and Imperial Japanese Records Working Group, and co-authored by Richard Breitman, Norman J.W. Goda, Robert Wolfe, and myself."
Naftali said US intelligence underestimated the extent to which Gehlen had hired war criminals, and overestimated the value of Gehlen and his organization. Wieck asked which other Germans could have provided the United States with intelligence in the early Cold War period, to which Naftali said that the correct approach would have been to recruit and train anticommunist Germans, "who could have done a much better job with far fewer tradeoffs." Elsewhere, Norman Goda describes as "catastrophic" the Soviet penetration of the Gehlen Organization, sponsored by CIC and CIA.
Wieck said that the Gehlen Organization "recruited some former SS men (around 100) possibly guilty of war crimes-great weight must be given to the desperate need of the United States in the 1940s and early 1950s for information about the Soviet Union, its forces in Europe, and the communist regimes east of the Elbe
Elbe
The Elbe is one of the major rivers of Central Europe. It rises in the Krkonoše Mountains of the northwestern Czech Republic before traversing much of Bohemia , then Germany and flowing into the North Sea at Cuxhaven, 110 km northwest of Hamburg...
. The United States had almost no agents of its own in the area during those years. Alternatives to Gehlen's group and remnants of other German espionage organizations
Espionage organizations
Espionage is a subset of human intelligence, one of many intelligence collection methods, which are organized by intelligence collection management....
from World War II capable of collecting such information simply did not exist." Wieck suggests that Critchfield, the US liaison with Gehlen from 1948 to 1956, "had in mind a good greater than intelligence collection: assuring that the security elite of the new German state would be firmly Atlanticist. This contributed in no small way both to the development of mutual trust between the Federal Republic of Germany and the United States and to the preclusion of a domestic neofascist or nationalist threat to the former."
Schmitz, a member of Critchfield's staff from 1949 to 1954, and his deputy in 1953 and 1954, said "the implication is that these former SS personnel-indeed, all former SS personnel-were unexposed war criminals and, as such, were subject to blackmail by the Soviets. The German Army General Staff, of which Gehlen and many of his subsequent co-workers had been a part, was by no means a haven for war criminals. Indeed, Gehlen did not have a high standing with Hitler, who had him fired after Gehlen produced estimates on Soviet military capabilities that exceeded what Hitler wanted to hear"
Planning Stay-Behind Networks
Alongside the Gehlen Organisation, CIC had set up "stay-behind networks" in West Germany, who were supposed to stay put in the event of a Soviet invasion and transmit intelligence from behind enemy lines. Certain of these networks included ex-Nazis. These networks were separate from those that have been called Operation GladioOperation Gladio
Operation Gladio is the codename for a clandestine NATO "stay-behind" operation in Italy after World War II. Its purpose was to continue anti-communist actions in the event of a shift to a Communist party led government...
, which refers specifically to Italian stay-behind networks.
Most of the networks were dismantled in the early 1950s when it was realised what an embarrassment they might prove. Those were the least of their flaws as would-be anti-communist agents. They had not risen in the Nazi ranks because of their respect for facts. They were ideologues with a keen sense of self-preservation. "The files show time and again that these people were more trouble than they were worth," Mr Naftali said. "The unreconstructed Nazis were always out for themselves, and they were using the west's lack of information about the Soviet Union to exploit it."
One example of a network later dismantled was an apparent equivalent to the East German Freie Deutsche Jugend (Free German Youth), the Bund Deutscher Jugend (BDJ, League of German Youth) seemed, at first, to be a youth group that countered Communist movements. Its increasing militancy and secretiveness about its financing, however, brought it to the attention of Georg August Zinn, the Socialist Minister President of Hesse
Hesse
Hesse or Hessia is both a cultural region of Germany and the name of an individual German state.* The cultural region of Hesse includes both the State of Hesse and the area known as Rhenish Hesse in the neighbouring Rhineland-Palatinate state...
.
Zinn discovered that BDJ was US-funded, and inside BDJ was a covert operations service, Technischer Dienst ("Technical Service") made up of former German officers, some Nazis and SS men, between 35 and 50 years old. Their mission was to wage guerilla warfare against a Soviet invasion. "The BDJ affair demonstrated that at least some agencies of the U.S. government willingly worked with undemocratic elements in service to American power."
Beyond the direct anti-Soviet activity, according to Zinn, the Technical Service had prepared long lists of West German "unreliables" to be "put on ice" on Invasion Day. Only a handful were Communists; the rest were Socialists, including such prominent anti-Reds as West Germany's No. 1 Socialist Erich Ollenhauer
Erich Ollenhauer
Erich Ollenhauer was the leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germany 1952-1963.- Early political career and exile :...
, the mayors of Hamburg and Bremen, and the Minister President of Lower Saxony.
After Zinn's presentation, the US High Commissioner for Germany (HICOG), Walter J. Donnelly, asked the West German government and Socialist Party to join in a U.S.-German investigation of the whole affair: "Let's get to the bottom of this. Let the chips fall where they may." Donelley and the United States Department of State
United States Department of State
The United States Department of State , is the United States federal executive department responsible for international relations of the United States, equivalent to the foreign ministries of other countries...
were correct in that senior HICOG personnel had refused to meet with BDJ. John J. McCloy
John J. McCloy
John Jay McCloy was a lawyer and banker who served as Assistant Secretary of War during World War II, president of the World Bank and U.S. High Commissioner for Germany...
, the previous HICOG, refused to meet with BDJ, but US intelligence organized BDJ after becoming concerned by the invasion of Korea. US intelligence seemed to have been unaware of the BDJ blacklist and tried, too late, to denounce it and avoid Soviet propaganda. The Communists, however, termed it a proof of US-Nazi conspiracy. The independent Frankfurter Rundschau
Frankfurter Rundschau
The Frankfurter Rundschau is a German daily newspaper, based in Frankfurt am Main. It is published every day but Sunday as a city, two regional and one nationwide issues and offers an online edition as well as an e-paper...
editorialized: "One would like to assume that the secret American sponsors knew nothing of the assassination plans. However, their support of a fascist underground movement is bound to produce distrust of American officials. We refuse to fight Stalinism with the help of fascism." No one seemed to understand, according to Time, that the U.S. had not been sinister, just silly.
Subsequent CIA operations involving German and associated war criminals
The CIA had been aware of the location of some high-profile Nazi war criminals, including the whereabouts of Adolf EichmannAdolf Eichmann
Adolf Otto Eichmann was a German Nazi and SS-Obersturmbannführer and one of the major organizers of the Holocaust...
two years before he was captured by Israeli agents, but the agency did not publicize this information, as it did not have a policy of pursuing Nazi war criminals at the time.
Several former Nazi operational agents were recruited as U.S. secret agents, yet formed just a minor portion of the agents at that time; they were induced financially and promised exemption from criminal prosecution and trial for war crimes committed during World War II.
CIA name file analysis
The IWG analyzed CIA name files as they became available. In an article by Richard Breitman, professor of history at American UniversityAmerican University
American University is a private, Methodist, liberal arts, and research university in Washington, D.C. The university was chartered by an Act of Congress on December 5, 1892 as "The American University", which was approved by President Benjamin Harrison on February 24, 1893...
and IWG Director of Historical Research, Nazi name files studied were broken into two categories of criminal. The process here involved analysis of the name file mechanism, not necessarily protection, since some of the criminals did not survive the war or its immediate aftermath.
| Tier 1 | Tier 2, contact with GO | Tier 2, no contact with GO |
|---|---|---|
| Adolf Hitler Adolf Hitler Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945... |
Emil Augsburg Emil Augsburg Emil Augsburg was a Polish-born SS Standartenführer and minor Nazi war criminal.-Career:Emil Augsburg was born in Congress Poland in 1904 and learnt to speak fluent Polish and Russian.... |
Eugen Dollman |
| Klaus Barbie Klaus Barbie Nikolaus 'Klaus' Barbie was an SS-Hauptsturmführer , Gestapo member and war criminal. He was known as the Butcher of Lyon.- Early life :... (1) |
Horst Kopkow Horst Kopkow Horst Kopkow was a Nazi Germany SS major who worked for German Security police and, after the war, was concealed by British intelligence so that they could use his knowledge in the Cold War.During World War II, Kopkow served in German national security police headquarters in Berlin... (2) |
Franz Goering(3) |
| Adolf Eichmann Adolf Eichmann Adolf Otto Eichmann was a German Nazi and SS-Obersturmbannführer and one of the major organizers of the Holocaust... |
Wilhelm Krichbaum(4) | Wilhelm Harster (3) |
| Josef Mengele Josef Mengele Josef Rudolf Mengele , also known as the Angel of Death was a German SS officer and a physician in the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. He earned doctorates in anthropology from Munich University and in medicine from Frankfurt University... |
Franz Six Franz Six Dr. Franz Alfred Six was a Nazi official who rose to the rank of SS-Brigadeführer. He was appointed by Reinhard Heydrich to head department Amt VII, Written Records of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt... (4) |
Wilhelm Hoettl(5) |
| Heinrich Mueller | Hans Sommer | Michel Kedia(6) |
| Kurt Waldheim Kurt Waldheim Kurt Josef Waldheim was an Austrian diplomat and politician. Waldheim was the fourth Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1972 to 1981, and the ninth President of Austria, from 1986 to 1992... |
Friedrich Panzinger(4) | Wilfried Krallert(7) |
| Guido Zimmer(8) | Martin Sandberger Martin Sandberger Martin Sandberger was an SS Standartenführer and commander of Sonderkommando 1a of the Einsatzgruppe, as well as commander of the Sicherheitspolizei and SD in Estonia. He played an important role in the mass murder of the Jews in the Baltic states... |
- (1)CIC but not CIA
- (2)The GO information did not come from the CIA name file
- (3)BND but not GO
- (4)Probable Soviet asset
- (5)OSS & CIC but not GO or BND
- (6)OSS & CIA, no GO or BND
- (7)BfV (West German domestic intelligence)
- (8)OSS, World War Two only
A CIA document, dated 19 March 1958, from the Munich station chief to headquarters, stated that German intelligence had provided a list of former Nazis and their locations. Eichmann was third on the list. The memo passed on a rumour that he was in Jerusalem "despite the fact that he was responsible for mass extermination of Jews", but also states, matter-of-factly: "He is reported to have lived in Argentina under the alias Clemens since 1952."
There is no record of a follow-up in the CIA to this tip-off. The reason was, according to Timothy Naftali, a US historian who has reviewed the freshly declassified archive, it was no longer the CIA's job to hunt down Nazis. "It just wasn't US policy to go looking for war criminals. It wasn't British policy either for that matter. It was left to the West Germans ... and this is further evidence of the low priority the Germans gave to hunting down war criminals."
It was not just a question of bureaucratic inertia. But it was not just Globke. When Eichmann was captured the CIA combed files it had captured from the Nazis to find information that might be useful to the Israeli prosecution. The results caused near panic among the CIA's leadership because, unknown to the junior staff who had looked through the files, a few of Eichmann's accomplices being investigated had been CIA "assets", and who might be discovered through Soviet knowledge of the Israeli prosecution records.
Individuals not in name files
Several Nazis were not evaluated in the preceding name file analysis, but are significant examples of the complications of accepting Nazis: Soviet counterespionage in the case of Heinz Felfe and smoothing US-German relationships with Konrad AdenauerKonrad Adenauer
Konrad Hermann Joseph Adenauer was a German statesman. He was the chancellor of the West Germany from 1949 to 1963. He is widely recognised as a person who led his country from the ruins of World War II to a powerful and prosperous nation that had forged close relations with old enemies France,...
, to whom Hans Globke was a key advisor.
Heinz Felfe
In particular, the recruitment of Heinz Felfe
Heinz Felfe
Heinz Paul Johann Felfe was a German national who was a former SS Obersturmführer , who worked for the Bundesnachrichtendienst , after the Second World...
, an SS officer who rose through the ranks of West Germany’s Gehlen organization to become its counterintelligence chief in 1955 did not only raise questions of ethics, but produced a major security failure, since, in 1961, Felfe was identified as a Soviet spy. According to Norman Goda of Ohio University, Felfe was "the West German official most knowledgeable about CIA operations in Eastern Europe", which let him sabotage one of the CIA’s most important spy operations, against the KGB base in East Germany. The CIA subsequently estimated that Felfe had compromised 15,000 items. The article cited an unidentified CIA officer as saying, in 1953, "Clear evidence of a war crimes record might also serve as a possible control." Christopher Simpson claims that these agents had a long-term corrosive effect on American intelligence agencies.
Hans Globke
Naftali does not understand the level of sensitivity about Globke, who at that point was the subject of a very public dispute with a man named Max Merten, who accused Globke of disposing of Greek Jews. "What could Eichmann have added that would have altered Globke's position? I don't know. I can only report the alarm that is evident in the document."
"It is very difficult to do international history from one side … It's a real shame that the German government refuses to release its information on these topics. Naftali believes the immediate West German fear was what Eichmann would say about Hans Globke
Hans Globke
- See also :* Theodor Oberländer* Rudolf Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff- Bibliography :* Tetens, T.H. The New Germany and the Old Nazis. Random House/Marzani & Munsel, New York, 1961. LCN 61-7240....
, who had also worked in the Nazis' Jewish affairs department. While Eichmann had gone on the run, Globke stayed behind, and, by 1960 he was Chancellor
Chancellor
Chancellor is the title of various official positions in the governments of many nations. The original chancellors were the Cancellarii of Roman courts of justice—ushers who sat at the cancelli or lattice work screens of a basilica or law court, which separated the judge and counsel from the...
Konrad Adenauer
Konrad Adenauer
Konrad Hermann Joseph Adenauer was a German statesman. He was the chancellor of the West Germany from 1949 to 1963. He is widely recognised as a person who led his country from the ruins of World War II to a powerful and prosperous nation that had forged close relations with old enemies France,...
's national security adviser. West Germany, NATO, and the CIA were concerned about "how the East Germans and Soviet bloc in general might make use of what Eichmann would say about Hans Globke." At the request of the West Germans, the CIA even managed to persuade Life magazine to delete any reference to Globke from Eichmann's memoirs, which it had bought from the family.
Handling Nazis outside Germany
A "rat-line" is a term of art in clandestine operations, which deals with the methods used to get a human asset physically away from a dangerous environment, remove threats to that individual, or both. While the term is used in multiple contexts, it has been used in the specific context of protecting Nazis, either by getting them to welcoming countries or improving their security. It also has been used for specific postwar resources for escaping Nazis, which, in their entirety, may make up what has been dubbed the ODESSAODESSA
The ODESSA, from the German Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen, meaning “Organization of Former SS Members,” is believed to have been an international Nazi network set up toward the end of World War II by a group of SS officers...
support system.
In one known case and possibly a few others, relatively few cases, CIC personnel, may have directly participated in the evacuation of a Nazi that was not to work directly for US engineering or intelligence. It is possible that there was a quid pro quo for such evacuation, such as protecting a more valuable asset by removing a source of denunciation, or protecting an ally from embarrassment and making that joint effort more difficult (see Hans Globke and working with Adenauer).
Erhard Dabringhaus, a U.S. Army (CIC) intelligence officer in post-war Germany from 1946 to 1952 (i.e., the year that the OPC
Office of Policy Coordination
The Office of Policy Coordination was a United States covert psychological operations and paramilitary action organization. Created as an independent office in 1948, it was merged with the Central Intelligence Agency in 1951....
clandestine service was brought under CIA control), and later a a language professor at Detroit's Wayne State University, was Klaus Barbie
Klaus Barbie
Nikolaus 'Klaus' Barbie was an SS-Hauptsturmführer , Gestapo member and war criminal. He was known as the Butcher of Lyon.- Early life :...
's case officer. Dabringhaus said he was ordered to house and pay Barbie, and did inform his command of Barbie's past actions.
According to Dabringhaus, "They told me to forget it for now. When he was 'no longer useful, they would deal with him." They never did. In 1951 Barbie turned up in Genoa, Italy, before escaping to Bolivia with documents issued by the International Committee of the Red Cross
International Committee of the Red Cross
The International Committee of the Red Cross is a private humanitarian institution based in Geneva, Switzerland. States parties to the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocols of 1977 and 2005, have given the ICRC a mandate to protect the victims of international and...
.
Bill Moyers
Bill Moyers
Bill Moyers is an American journalist and public commentator. He served as White House Press Secretary in the United States President Lyndon B. Johnson Administration from 1965 to 1967. He worked as a news commentator on television for ten years. Moyers has had an extensive involvement with public...
quoted Dabringhaus as saying "[Barbie] was wanted by the French as their number one war criminal and somehow we employed a man like that as a very secretive informant." According to Moyers, Barbie worked with ex-Nazi Germans reporting on the Soviets. Once his work was done, the US did not turn him over to the French, but helped him escape, via Italy, to Bolivia. An analysis of Barbie's U.S. Army file, by the IWG, recounted that in May 1949, the French Ministry of Interior pressed the U.S. military government of Germany, HICOG, for Barbie's extradition. The CIC, however, was concerned both that Barbie knew too much about CIC espionage networks, but also about the adverse publicity if it became known he had been recruited. From the HICOG file,
To have exposed BARBIE to interrogation and public trial would not have been in consonance with accepted clandestine intelligence operational doctrine. . . . [H]e was knowledgeable of high level operations and operational procedures, which would have been compromised. Through procedures in effect at that time, BARBIE was therefor [sic] assisted in 1951 in leaving Europe for resettlement. U.S. Army Intelligence has had no further contact with BARBIE subsequent to his departure from Europe
CIC, therefore, arranged for Barbie to reach South America through a "ratline" in Italy. Barbie, using an alias but otherwise living openly in Bolivia, was extradited to France in 1983. While in Bolivia, he was also a security advisor to Alfredo Stroessner
Alfredo Stroessner
Alfredo Stroessner Matiauda, whose name is also spelled Strössner or Strößner , was a Paraguayan military officer and dictator from 1954 to 1989...
, President
President
A president is a leader of an organization, company, trade union, university, or country.Etymologically, a president is one who presides, who sits in leadership...
of Paraguay
Paraguay
Paraguay , officially the Republic of Paraguay , is a landlocked country in South America. It is bordered by Argentina to the south and southwest, Brazil to the east and northeast, and Bolivia to the northwest. Paraguay lies on both banks of the Paraguay River, which runs through the center of the...
from 1954 to 1989. Since CIC involvement clearly would become public, the United States Attorney General
United States Attorney General
The United States Attorney General is the head of the United States Department of Justice concerned with legal affairs and is the chief law enforcement officer of the United States government. The attorney general is considered to be the chief lawyer of the U.S. government...
ordered the Office of Special Investigations of the United States Department of Justice
United States Department of Justice
The United States Department of Justice , is the United States federal executive department responsible for the enforcement of the law and administration of justice, equivalent to the justice or interior ministries of other countries.The Department is led by the Attorney General, who is nominated...
to produce an investigative report. Alan Ryan, outgoing head of OSI, detailed the use by U.S. intelligence of Barbie, including his escape using a line that included assistance from a Croatian priest in the Vatican. Ryan concluded that "no other case was found where a suspected Nazi war criminal was placed in the rat line, or where the rat line was used to evacuate a person wanted…" But, he did find, "that officers of the CIC engaged in obstruction of justice… although "prosecution is moot because of the statute of limitations")
A copy of a Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
citation quoted Dabringhaus about Barbie. "Barbie was so well in with my superiors that he did not ask me for orders, but just told me what he was going to do. In fact he was so well thought of that I was more like his chauffeur."
Weitzman referred to a 22 May 1999 report, in The Times, which painted a much larger scope. It cited Dabringhaus as personally having recruited hundreds of Nazis, operating at least into the 1960s. Some SS men may have worked for the CIA in Latin America, and may have taught methods of torture.
Pacific Policy
OSS, however, had a much more limited role in the Pacific, primarily in China. General of the ArmyGeneral of the Army
General of the Army is a military rank used in some countries to denote a senior military leader, usually a General in command of a nation's Army. It may also be the title given to a General who commands an Army in the field....
Douglas MacArthur
Douglas MacArthur
General of the Army Douglas MacArthur was an American general and field marshal of the Philippine Army. He was a Chief of Staff of the United States Army during the 1930s and played a prominent role in the Pacific theater during World War II. He received the Medal of Honor for his service in the...
essentially banned the OSS from his South West Pacific Area
South West Pacific theatre of World War II
The South West Pacific Theatre, technically the South West Pacific Area, between 1942 and 1945, was one of two designated area commands and war theatres enumerated by the Combined Chiefs of Staff of World War II in the Pacific region....
(SWPA), while OSS simply was less relevant to the naval and "island hopping" operations in Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz
Chester Nimitz
Fleet Admiral Chester William Nimitz, GCB, USN was a five-star admiral in the United States Navy. He held the dual command of Commander in Chief, United States Pacific Fleet , for U.S. naval forces and Commander in Chief, Pacific Ocean Areas , for U.S...
's Pacific Ocean Area (POA; Nimitz was referred to as CINCPAC [Pacific] /CINCPOA) theater. Since there was no postwar alliance to be preserved for US intelligence, there were few reasons to keep matters classified due to the sensitivities of a key ally. While the US did work with Australia and New Zealand, MacArthur had essentially subordinated their commands.
The number and types of Japanese who formed relationships with U.S. intelligence differ from their Nazi counterparts. The Japanese were fewer in number than the Germans who were directly to collect HUMINT from the Soviets or take part in stay-behind networks after invasion. Some of the Japanese were imprisoned for investigation, or actually served prison time for war crimes, perhaps being released early. Far more of the Japanese were later at a much higher level of authority than were the Germans.
U.S. intelligence conflict in postwar Japan
MacArthur's distaste for the OSS continued into an equal reluctance to allow the CIA to operate in the Occupation, until he was relieved of duty. Until his relief, MacArthur used his own intelligence organization, G-2, headed by Major GeneralMajor General
Major general or major-general is a military rank used in many countries. It is derived from the older rank of sergeant major general. A major general is a high-ranking officer, normally subordinate to the rank of lieutenant general and senior to the ranks of brigadier and brigadier general...
Charles A. Willoughby (a confidante of MacArthur).
Japanese ex-officers and nationalists, immediately after the war, created an informal network intended to preserve, as far as possible, the Imperial system and eventually to reestablish the military. Subsequently, the CIA referred to these as "underground" groups, although not in the sense that they were resistance organizations.
Most US contacts with the underground groups were combat rather than intelligence specialists. With the exception of Arisue Seizo and a few key others, most of the links established by U.S. authorities to the Japanese “underground” groups, as the CIA called the Japanese networks, were to highranking officers with operational and combat experience. Another significant intelligence specialist, with an extensive network of contacts among officers, was Lieutenant General
Lieutenant General
Lieutenant General is a military rank used in many countries. The rank traces its origins to the Middle Ages where the title of Lieutenant General was held by the second in command on the battlefield, who was normally subordinate to a Captain General....
Kawabe Torashiro. Kawabe joined with Arisue in providing the services of former Japanese Army personnel to occupation authorities, particularly G-2. Kawabe’s last headquarters assignment gave him informal authority over many groups and individuals within the army. His network was made up primarily of former high-ranking army general staff members and their subordinates. These individuals were in networks of subordinate organizations, called kikan, that would carry out actual operations.
In one important case, that of Ishii Shiro, the intelligence cooperation was not for shaping the political destiny of postwar Japan or for obtaining future intelligence, but as a trade of immunity for technical data.
Since the relationships often were established after a convicted or investigated Japanese left prison, the working relationships started later than did those with Germans. Some of the Japanese eventually reached Cabinet or Prime Ministerial level. In at least one case, that of Kodama Yoshio with Kishi Nobusuke, the close working relationship grew when they were cellmates.
Japanese who worked with US intelligence
A variety of relationships existed, first with G-2 and then with the CIA. Characteristic of the G-2 relationships was a significant amount of delegation of both planning and execution to Japanese, since SCAP did not itself have the manpower for detailed monitoring, nor would it work with CIA in the theater or in the US.After his rehabilitation in 1950, Tsuji Matsonubu received U.S. finding through the G-2’s Historical Branch under Willoughby. Through Arisue, G-2 recruited and employed some 200 former Japanese officers to assist historian Gordon Prange’s work on the history of MacArthur’s Pacific campaign. A central figure in this effort was Colonel
Colonel
Colonel , abbreviated Col or COL, is a military rank of a senior commissioned officer. It or a corresponding rank exists in most armies and in many air forces; the naval equivalent rank is generally "Captain". It is also used in some police forces and other paramilitary rank structures...
Hattori Takushiro. One of the most important members of the Hattori kikan, known in some CIA documents as “Willoughby’s Stable,” was Hattori’s close friend Tsuji Masanobu.
Arisue Seizo
The key individual in the "undergrounds" was Lieutenant GeneralLieutenant General
Lieutenant General is a military rank used in many countries. The rank traces its origins to the Middle Ages where the title of Lieutenant General was held by the second in command on the battlefield, who was normally subordinate to a Captain General....
Arisue Seizo, chief of the intelligence department at Imperial General Headquarters at the end of the war. Shortly before the end of the war, Arisue began collecting intelligence documents to use as a bargaining chip with the Occupation.
SCAP sentiment toward Arisue was mixed, and officers outside G-2 considered indicting Arisue as a Class A war criminal. Willoughby, however, had met and liked Lieutenant General
Lieutenant General
Lieutenant General is a military rank used in many countries. The rank traces its origins to the Middle Ages where the title of Lieutenant General was held by the second in command on the battlefield, who was normally subordinate to a Captain General....
Kawabe Torashiro who had been head of intelligence for the Kwantung Army, military attaché to Berlin, deputy chief of staff for Imperial GHQ, and the leader of the surrender delegation to Manila.
Willoughby asked Arisue, in September 1945, to set up a domestic intelligence network to warn of a potential Communist coup. Ironically, Willoughby was unaware that Arisue and some of his associates, at various times, considered right-wing coups against the Japanese government.
Hattori Takushiro
Hattori, a staff colonel, had served as a senior operations staff officer in the Kwantung Army during the Nomonhan Incident. Shortly afterwards, Hattori, became Chief of the Army General Staff Operations Branch, making him one of the principal planners of the successful Japanese Army offensives of 1941–42. He does not appear to have been under investigation for war crimes, but he had significant involvement with SCAP G-2 after the war. Hattori believed, along with his friend Tsuji, that the rearmament of Japan could not be achieved “through democratic methods,” and advocated a revival of the disbanded army, in which he would be Chief of Staff.According to an AP article, the plot was developed after the U.S. postwar occupation of Japan ended in April 1952, by which time the US was no longer funding Hattori. Two CIA documents said the plot reportedly had the support of 500,000 people in Japan, and that the group planned to use a contact who controlled a faction inside the National Safety Agency - a precursor to the Defense Ministry - to help launch the coup. The article reinforces the lack of cooperation and common policy between SCAP G-2 and the CIA.
"Since the beginning of July 1952, plans for a coup d'etat have been initiated among a group of ex-purgees including former military officers. The leader of the group is ex-Colonel Hattori Takushiro," said an Oct. 31, 1952, report, which claimed "this report is the first to mention a definite rightist plan involving violence." "The original plan of the group was to engineer a coup d'etat, including the assassination of Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru on account of his hostile attitude toward depurgees and nationalists," the CIA document said. "The group is considering the possibility of some minor assassination attempt in lieu of a coup d'etat," the Oct. 31, 1952, document said.
Ishii Shiro
Perhaps the most blatant violator the Lieutenant GeneralLieutenant General
Lieutenant General is a military rank used in many countries. The rank traces its origins to the Middle Ages where the title of Lieutenant General was held by the second in command on the battlefield, who was normally subordinate to a Captain General....
Shiro Ishii
Shiro Ishii
was a Japanese microbiologist and the lieutenant general of Unit 731, a biological warfare unit of the Imperial Japanese Army responsible for human experimentation and war crimes during the Second Sino-Japanese War.-Early years:...
, head of the Japanese biological warfare program based at Unit 731
Unit 731
was a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that undertook lethal human experimentation during the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II. It was responsible for some of the most notorious war crimes carried out by Japanese...
in Pingfan, China. Ishii, who had presided over human experimentation perhaps on a greater extent than the Nazis, and waged biological warfare against the Chinese, was given protection by CIC in exchange for data.
Tsuneini Keiichi, a professor at Kanagawa University
Kanagawa University
, abbreviated to is a private university in Japan. The main campus is located in Rokkakubashi, Kanagawa-ku, Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture.- History :The university was founded in 1928 by as . It was an evening school for the working youth...
, found two significant documents from Willoughby, dealing with the Japanese biological warfare research and operations by Unit 731
Unit 731
was a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that undertook lethal human experimentation during the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II. It was responsible for some of the most notorious war crimes carried out by Japanese...
. One, titled "report on bacteriological warfare" was for the chief of staff of the Far Eastern Commission and was dated July 17, 1947. The other, dated July 22, went to Major General SJ Chamberlin, director of intelligence of the US War Department General Staff, to illustrate the need for continued use of confidential funds without restrictions to obtain such intelligence.
Willoughby described the achievements of his unit's investigations, saying the "information procured will have the greatest value in future development of the US BW (bacteriological warfare) program". Citing a US War Department specialist in charge of the investigation, Brig Gen Willoughby wrote in the report that "data on human experiments may prove invaluable" and said the information was "only obtainable through the skilful, psychological approach to top-flight pathologists" involved in Unit 731 experiments.
Tsuneishi said it had been thought that the US had gathered the information high-handedly by making unit members choose between cooperating or facing war crime charges, "but it has become clear that this was done by winning (unit members') hearts with money and rewards". In 1947, SCAP G-2 tried to obtain the experimental data but "because war crime charges against the Unit 731 officers had been waived by then, the GHQ was apparently forced to offer monetary rewards to access the information."
Kaya Okinori
Department of State records refer to Kaya Okinori, a Class A war criminal, and wartime Finance Minister. Kaya had been the finance minister in Japan's wartime cabinet. Convicted as a war criminal, he was sentenced to life in prison. Paroled in 1955 and pardoned in 1957, he became one of Kishi's closest advisers and a key member of the LDP's internal security committee.Kaya started to work for the CIA around the time of his election to the Diet
Diet of Japan
The is Japan's bicameral legislature. It is composed of a lower house, called the House of Representatives, and an upper house, called the House of Councillors. Both houses of the Diet are directly elected under a parallel voting system. In addition to passing laws, the Diet is formally...
in 1958. After his recruitment, he wanted to travel to the United States and meet Allen Dulles in person. Kaya came to visit Dulles at CIA headquarters in 1959, and asked the director to enter into a formal agreement to share intelligence with his internal security committee. "Everyone agreed that cooperation between CIA and the Japanese regarding countersubversion was most desirable and that the subject was one of major interest to CIA", say the minutes of their talk. Dulles regarded Kaya as his agent, and six months later he wrote him to say: "I am most interested in learning your views both in international affairs affecting relations between our countries and on the situation within Japan".
Kaya's on-and-off relationship with the CIA reached a peak in 1968, when he was the leading political adviser to Prime Minister Eisaku Sato. Kaya was instrumental in a CIA action intended to swing the Okinawan election to the LDP, an action that failed. Okinawa was a key U.S. base, both for Vietnam operations and nuclear basing. Kaya played a key role in the CIA's covert actions aimed to swing the elections for the LDP, which narrowly failed. Okinawa itself returned to Japanese administration in 1972, but the American military remains there to this day.
Kishi Nobusuke
In 1941, Kishi was a Cabinet member who co-signed the declaration of war against the United States. During the war, he had held portfolios for Commerce and Industry and later Munitions, and directed forced labor by Koreans and Chinese. In 1945, he was arrested as a suspected Class A war criminal, and spent three years, in Sugamo Prison, being investigated. Eventually, he was not charged. His cellmate was Kodama Yoshio. His political rehabilitation led to his becoming Prime Minister in 1957.While the Occupation originally had bold goals to restructure and democratize Japanese society, ambitions became more modest as the Cold War chilled. Kennan's containment doctrine was the priority of the Truman Administration. United States Secretary of Defense
United States Secretary of Defense
The Secretary of Defense is the head and chief executive officer of the Department of Defense of the United States of America. This position corresponds to what is generally known as a Defense Minister in other countries...
James Forrestal
James Forrestal
James Vincent Forrestal was the last Cabinet-level United States Secretary of the Navy and the first United States Secretary of Defense....
said that real security against communism required the "restoration of commerce, trade and business" worldwide. This meant putting "Japan, Germany and other affiliates of the Axis back to work."
Before the war, Kishi had been a friend of U.S. Ambassador
Ambassador
An ambassador is the highest ranking diplomat who represents a nation and is usually accredited to a foreign sovereign or government, or to an international organization....
Joseph C. Grew. Grew, along with journalists, diplomats and lawyers, all of whom had had prewar ties with the Japanese elite. They opposed the SCAP
Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers
Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers was the title held by General Douglas MacArthur during the Occupation of Japan following World War II...
policies calling for the renunciation of military capability.
After the end of the Korean War
Korean War
The Korean War was a conventional war between South Korea, supported by the United Nations, and North Korea, supported by the People's Republic of China , with military material aid from the Soviet Union...
, and economic repercussions for Japan, the Yoshida government fell. The U.S. Ambassador in 1954, not intelligence officials, urged the conservative parties to name Kishi as Prime Minister. Another official who had been purged after the war, Hatoyama Ichiro, was selected. Hatoyama was reluctant to rearm, and wanted peaceful relations with China and the Soviets. These positions infuriated John Foster Dulles
John Foster Dulles
John Foster Dulles served as U.S. Secretary of State under President Dwight D. Eisenhower from 1953 to 1959. He was a significant figure in the early Cold War era, advocating an aggressive stance against communism throughout the world...
, United States Secretary of State
United States Secretary of State
The United States Secretary of State is the head of the United States Department of State, concerned with foreign affairs. The Secretary is a member of the Cabinet and the highest-ranking cabinet secretary both in line of succession and order of precedence...
in the Eisenhower
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower was the 34th President of the United States, from 1953 until 1961. He was a five-star general in the United States Army...
Administration, whose brother Allen was Director of Central Intelligence
Director of Central Intelligence
The Office of United States Director of Central Intelligence was the head of the United States Central Intelligence Agency, the principal intelligence advisor to the President and the National Security Council, and the coordinator of intelligence activities among and between the various United...
. The Eisenhower Administration's support of Kishi became more and more obvious, when he made a state visit in 1957, addressing Congress and played golf with Eisenhower,
While detailed documentation has not been declassified, if it esists, indicates that early in 1958, Shaller states that Eisenhower, making what he and his aides earlier called a "big bet," authorized the CIA to provide secret campaign funds to Kishi and other members of the Liberal Democratic Party
Liberal Democratic Party (Japan)
The , frequently abbreviated to LDP or , is a centre-right political party in Japan. It is one of the most consistently successful political parties in the democratic world. The LDP ruled almost continuously for nearly 54 years from its founding in 1955 until its defeat in the 2009 election...
. The Administration agreed to renegotiate the 1951 security treaty and end the Occupation. In return for the right to use Okinawa as a base for nuclear forces, the U.S. renegotiated the treaty. While the Kennedy
John F. Kennedy
John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy , often referred to by his initials JFK, was the 35th President of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963....
administration continued the secret payments, Although the Kennedy administration in 1961 continued secret payments to the LDP and other parties, "it viewed trade expansion as a better way to stabilize Japan and bind it to the United States."
Kodama Yoshio
Kodama was Kishi's cellmate in Sugamo Prison, from which they were released in 1948, before other convicted criminals were executed. In 1928, he founded a right-wing group, the Dokuritsu Seinen Sha (Independence Youth Society). It tried to assassinate both opposition leaders and Prime MinisterPrime minister
A prime minister is the most senior minister of cabinet in the executive branch of government in a parliamentary system. In many systems, the prime minister selects and may dismiss other members of the cabinet, and allocates posts to members within the government. In most systems, the prime...
Saito Makoto
Saito Makoto
Viscount was an admiral in the Imperial Japanese Navy, two-time Governor-General of Korea from 1919 to 1927 and from 1929 to 1931, and the 30th Prime Minister of Japan from May 26, 1932 to July 8, 1934.-Early life:...
, for which Kodama was sentenced to 3.5 years of imprisonment.
By the 1930s, he had been rehabilitated by the Japanese and formed both an intelligence network in Manchuria
Manchuria
Manchuria is a historical name given to a large geographic region in northeast Asia. Depending on the definition of its extent, Manchuria usually falls entirely within the People's Republic of China, or is sometimes divided between China and Russia. The region is commonly referred to as Northeast...
and an extensive system for purchasing strategic materials, such as cobalt, copper, nickel and radium, sometimes bartering drugs for materials. Kodama called it "an organization with no thought of profit," but, by the end of the war, it was worth $175 million and the Japanese government made the former prisoner a rear admiral
Rear Admiral
Rear admiral is a naval commissioned officer rank above that of a commodore and captain, and below that of a vice admiral. It is generally regarded as the lowest of the "admiral" ranks, which are also sometimes referred to as "flag officers" or "flag ranks"...
. . After the war, Kodama began to pour part of his fortune into the careers of Japan's most conservative politicians, and he became a key member of a CIA operation that helped bring them to power. He worked with American businessmen, OSS veterans, and ex-diplomats to pull off an audacious covert operation, bankrolled by the CIA, during the Korean War. This operation obtained tungsten needed for U.S. munitions, for which the United States Department of Defense
United States Department of Defense
The United States Department of Defense is the U.S...
paid $10 million, with underwriting of $2.8 million from the CIA.
According to Weiner, the operation left Kodama in bad odor with the CIA's Tokyo station. "He is a professional liar, gangster, charlatan, and outright thief", the station reported on 10 September 1953. "Kodama is completely incapable of intelligence operations, and has no interest in anything but the profits". The relationship was severed, and the CIA turned its attention to the care and feeding of up-and-coming Japanese politicians - including Kishi - who won seats in the Diet, Japan's parliament, in the first elections after the end of the American occupation."
Tsuji Matsunobu
The recently declassified CIA documents explain why one of the most notorious Japanese war criminals was never indicted or even held. Arisue recruited ColonelColonel
Colonel , abbreviated Col or COL, is a military rank of a senior commissioned officer. It or a corresponding rank exists in most armies and in many air forces; the naval equivalent rank is generally "Captain". It is also used in some police forces and other paramilitary rank structures...
Tsuji Matsunobu into clandestine U.S. service. Tsuji, claiming the authority of Imperial General Headquarters, ordered a wide range of atrocities including the Bataan Death March
Bataan Death March
The Bataan Death March was the forcible transfer, by the Imperial Japanese Army, of 75,000 American and Filipino prisoners of war after the three-month Battle of Bataan in the Philippines during World War II, which resulted in the deaths of thousands of prisoners.The march was characterized by...
.
"U.S. officials also investigated the possibility that, late in the war, the Japanese Army expropriated three tons of gold from French Indochina with the idea that it would be used at a later
date to finance the resurgence of the Japanese military establishment. Reports indicated
that Tsuji, who spent a great deal of time in Southeast Asia, had distributed part of this
haul to his officers and told them to hide it away from Allied hands.
CIA documents releaseed through the IWG explained the puzzlement of many Japanese, who wondered why Tsuji was never charged for crimes sometimes worse that led to the gallows for others. Even after his release, he remained a "person of interest", but was not found to be interrogated. "He avoided capture first by hiding in Southeast Asia, later sheltered by Chang Kai-shek on mainland China, then secretly in Japan, including as a guest of Kodama. When the United States dropped its war crimes charges against him in 1950, he returned to the public scene, publishing two books about his wartime and postwar experiences that quickly became best sellers."
Before his rehabilitation, he was involved in G-2 planning of covert activities to assist the Chinese Nationalists against the Peoples Republic of China. Note that direct confrontation with China, even through Chiang Kai-Shek as a proxy, was against Truman Administration policy, a conflict that led to MacArthur's (and Willoughby's) dismisal.
By 1950, when there were no charges outstanding against Tsuji, Arisue asked him to expand Japanese intelligence operations into Southeast Asia. Tsuji had met many of the former Imperial Japanese Army officers associated with this operation while he was in Singapore.
Many of the other officers would not work with Tsuji and lobbied successfully to have Arisue replace him with former Shanghai kenpeitai Chief Tomita Bunichi.
Through Hattori, Tsuji became involved in planning one of Willoughby’s most ambitious operations, a Chinese Nationalist invasion of mainland China. In January 1951, G-2 began toying with the notion of encouraging Chang Kai-shek’s forces to invade south China and establish contact with Chinese anti-communist resistance forces.
Willoughby’s subordinates approached Hattori and requested that he and Tsuji prepare the operational details of such a plan. Hattori, whom the CIA believed was a key figure in getting the war crimes charges against Tsuji dropped, now sought to put Tsuji’s military expertise to work for G-2. Planning proceeded through early March, with Tsuji taking the lead.
From the CIA’s perspective, Willoughby put undue trust in both Hattori and Tsuji. Tsuji, who had himself become enmeshed in rearmament plans, purportedly stated in 1951 that it was necessary to “deceive the ally prior to the enemy.” The agency’s analysts also saw “a serious danger that American military personnel in G-2, GHQ will be taken in by [Hattori’s group].” In any event, the planning came to very little, as Willoughby learned in March 1951 that news of the preparations leaked to the Communist Chinese, and the idea was shelved.
By 1952, Tsuji and Hattori decided that cooperation with the Americans was the best way to rapidly rearm Japan, a position unpopular with many other ex-officers. Backed by Kodama and others, they disagreed with Prime Minister
Prime minister
A prime minister is the most senior minister of cabinet in the executive branch of government in a parliamentary system. In many systems, the prime minister selects and may dismiss other members of the cabinet, and allocates posts to members within the government. In most systems, the prime...
Yoshida Shigeru’s policy of exclusively relying on U.S. military protection instead of rebuilding Japan’s own army. ...In July 1952, Hattori hatched a plot to conduct a coup by murdering Yoshida and replacing him either with the more sympathetic Hatoyama Ichiro or Ogata Taketora. While Tsuji initially supported a coup, Tsuji convinced Hattori to hold off his coup d’etat as long as the conservatives (of the ironically named Liberal Party) were in power. In other words, SCAP's staunchest political ally in Japan was protected by one of Japan’s most well-known alleged war criminals. Nevertheless, the group did consider murdering other government figures to send a message to Yoshida . Hatoyama succeeded in deposing Yoshida in 1954, but it is unclear what role, if any, Hattori and Tsuji played in this. In 1952, Tsuji was elected to the Diet and began a flamboyant career in politics, until his mysterious disappearance in 1961 during travel in Southeast Asia.
Ryuzo Sejima
Ryuzo Sejima was intimate with the group of Hattori Takushiro, Tsuji MasanobuTsuji Masanobu
was a tactician of the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second World War and later a politician. While he was never indicted for war crimes after World War II, subsequent investigations have revealed that he was involved in war crimes throughout the Pacific war including the massacre of Chinese...
and Kodama Yoshio, etc.. Ryuzo Sejima worked with them after World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
.
Kodama Yoshio and Ryuzo Sejima became intimate with Park Chung-hee
Park Chung-hee
Park Chung-hee was a Republic of Korea Army general and the leader of South Korea from 1961 to 1979. He seized power in a military coup and ruled until his assassination in 1979. He has been credited with the industrialization of the Republic of Korea through export-led growth...
and the Korea Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA)
National Intelligence Service (South Korea)
The National Intelligence Service is the chief intelligence agency of South Korea. The agency was officially established in 1961 as the Korea Central Intelligence Agency , during the rule of President Park Chung-hee's military Supreme Council for National Reconstruction, which displaced the...
of South Korea
South Korea
The Republic of Korea , , is a sovereign state in East Asia, located on the southern portion of the Korean Peninsula. It is neighbored by the People's Republic of China to the west, Japan to the east, North Korea to the north, and the East China Sea and Republic of China to the south...
in 1960's. Especially, because Ryuzo Sejima and Park Chung-hee
Park Chung-hee
Park Chung-hee was a Republic of Korea Army general and the leader of South Korea from 1961 to 1979. He seized power in a military coup and ruled until his assassination in 1979. He has been credited with the industrialization of the Republic of Korea through export-led growth...
were the relations of the senior and the junior at the Imperial Japanese Army Academy, Ryuzo Sejima became intimate with Park Chung-hee
Park Chung-hee
Park Chung-hee was a Republic of Korea Army general and the leader of South Korea from 1961 to 1979. He seized power in a military coup and ruled until his assassination in 1979. He has been credited with the industrialization of the Republic of Korea through export-led growth...
. By the way, Hisayuki Machii
Hisayuki Machii
, nicknamed the , was the founder of one of Japan's most notorious yakuza gangs, the Tosei-Kai.A Korean, Machii was born Jeong Geon Yeong in 1923 when Korea was under Japanese occupation. After World War II, Machii settled in Tokyo and became involved in postwar Japan's thriving black market...
was also intimate with them. Hisayuki Machii
Hisayuki Machii
, nicknamed the , was the founder of one of Japan's most notorious yakuza gangs, the Tosei-Kai.A Korean, Machii was born Jeong Geon Yeong in 1923 when Korea was under Japanese occupation. After World War II, Machii settled in Tokyo and became involved in postwar Japan's thriving black market...
cooperated in kidnapping of Kim Dae-jung. Ryuzo Sejima was able to become intimate with Chun Doo-hwan
Chun Doo-hwan
Chun Doo-hwan was a ROK Army general and the President of South Korea from 1980 to 1988. Chun was sentenced to death in 1996 for his heavy-handed response to the Gwangju Democratization Movement, but later pardoned by President Kim Young-sam with the advice of then President-elect Kim Dae-jung,...
from the relations of Ryuzo Sejima and Park Chung-hee
Park Chung-hee
Park Chung-hee was a Republic of Korea Army general and the leader of South Korea from 1961 to 1979. He seized power in a military coup and ruled until his assassination in 1979. He has been credited with the industrialization of the Republic of Korea through export-led growth...
in 1980 because Chun Doo-hwan
Chun Doo-hwan
Chun Doo-hwan was a ROK Army general and the President of South Korea from 1980 to 1988. Chun was sentenced to death in 1996 for his heavy-handed response to the Gwangju Democratization Movement, but later pardoned by President Kim Young-sam with the advice of then President-elect Kim Dae-jung,...
had been worshiping Park Chung-hee
Park Chung-hee
Park Chung-hee was a Republic of Korea Army general and the leader of South Korea from 1961 to 1979. He seized power in a military coup and ruled until his assassination in 1979. He has been credited with the industrialization of the Republic of Korea through export-led growth...
.
When Yoshio Kodama
Yoshio Kodama
was a prominent figure in the rise of organized crime in Japan. The most famous 'kuromaku', or behind-the-scenes power broker, of the 20th century, he was active in Japan's political arena and criminal underworld from the 1950s to the early 1970s....
died on January 17, 1984, Ryuzo Sejima was also intimate with U.S. Government and CIA as if Ryuzo Sejima succeeded the work of Yoshio Kodama
Yoshio Kodama
was a prominent figure in the rise of organized crime in Japan. The most famous 'kuromaku', or behind-the-scenes power broker, of the 20th century, he was active in Japan's political arena and criminal underworld from the 1950s to the early 1970s....
.
Ryuzo Sejima became the honorary post to govern NTT
Nippon Telegraph and Telephone
, commonly known as NTT, is a Japanese telecommunications company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. Ranked the 31st in Fortune Global 500, NTT is the largest telecommunications company in Asia, and the second-largest in the world in terms of revenue....
in June, 1986. Ryuzo Sejima managed the telephone records etc. of users of NTT and offered those information to the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
side.
Brent Scowcroft
Brent Scowcroft
Brent Scowcroft, KBE was the United States National Security Advisor under Presidents Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush and a Lieutenant General in the United States Air Force. He also served as Military Assistant to President Richard Nixon and as Deputy Assistant to the President for National...
etc. had come in contact with Ryuzo Sejima.
The Japan Forum For Strategic Studiesscandal was established on March 1, 1999. Ryuzo Sejima became the chairman of the Japan Forum For Strategic Studiesscandal.