MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

US knew Eichmann's whereabouts since early fifties

Since the early fifties United States was aware on the whereabouts of Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Nazi Holocaust, but chose to keep the matter secret, fearing that the arrest of the Nazi fugitive might lead to embarrassing revelations about links between senior West German officials and other Nazis.

The information as well as the pressure that West Germany applied on the Central Intelligence Agency in order to prevent the leak of sensitive information, is detailed in documents released by the U.S. government Tuesday.

A total of 27.000 CIA newly declassified documents related to Nazi war crimes during World War II also show evidence on the employment of Nazi war criminals by the US intelligence agency.

Timothy Naftali, a historian from Virginia University and author of a paper summarizing the material in the released documents, wrote that they contribute significant details to information previously known.

The new material, he said, provides information suggesting that West German intelligence could have arrested fugitive war criminal Adolf Eichmann during the 1950s, but was wary of the effect that such an action could have on then minister Dr. Hans Globke, director of the Federal Chancellery.

Globke, a former senior Nazi and close associate of then chancellor Konrad Adenauer, was one of the authors of the Nuremberg Laws in the 1930s. But in the 1950s, according to Naftali, he was the chancellor's main contact person with American intelligence.

According to the declassified documents, a German intelligence officer reported to the CIA in March 1958 that Germany had known since 1952 that Eichmann lived in Argentina under the pseudonym "Clemens." The information was not entirely accurate, as the name Eichmann used at the time was "Clement."

However, the CIA chose not to make use of the information.

Eichmann was finally captured by Israel in 1960 and illegally flown out of Argentina. He was sentenced to death penalty in 1962.

The documents were declassified as part of an interagency effort to release material related to Japanese and German war criminals during World War II. Since the work commenced in 1999, more than eight million documents have been released.

The material released Tuesday documents many cases in which former SS members were employed in Germany and other countries for espionage purposes. In one case, a team of agents, manned by a number of war criminals, was deployed in Germany under the code name "Pastime." Its mission was to provide the U.S. with intelligence from Germany in case of a Soviet invasion.

Israeli intelligence officers who have published their memoirs have written that Israel knew that Eichmann lived in Argentina by 1957, but lacked any information regarding his pseudonym.

According to Naftali, the Israeli agents gave up their search for a while, because without a name, it was difficult to locate him in Argentina.

The documents also reveal that the CIA, in response to a West German request, asked Life Magazine, which planned to publish Eichmann's memoirs in 1960, to delete any mention of Globke from them.

Eichmann had been arrested by Mossad agents earlier that year, and his family sold his memoirs to the magazine to pay for his legal defense.

Allen Dulles, then head of the CIA, wrote in September 1960 to his counterpart in West Germany assuring him that a "minor" mention of Globke in the memoirs would be deleted, pursuant to the CIA's request.

The war criminals "peddled hearsay and gossip, whether to escape retribution for past crimes, or for mercenary gain, or for political agendas not necessarily compatible with American national interests," said Robert Wolfe, an expert on German history and former archivist at the National Archives.

Former Nazi officers such as Heinz Felfe, who served in the "Gehlen organization" ? the West German intelligence service which in its early years was sponsored by the U.S. Army and then the CIA ? were typically hired by the Soviet Union to be double agents.