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CONCLUSION

This report discusses only a sample of newly released records, hinting at their overall richness. The 1.3 million Army files include thousands of titles of many more issues regarding wartime criminals, their pursuit, their arrest, their escape, and occasionally, their use by Allied and Soviet intelligence agencies. These include files on German war criminals, but also collaborators from the Baltic States, Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Croatia, and elsewhere. These files also include information on Allied and non-aligned states that had an interest in Axis personalities, including Great Britain, France, Italy, Argentina, and Israel.

The 1,110 re-released or newly released CIA name files are in most cases far more detailed than the files of the initial CIA release in 2001 and after. They contain a trove of information on Nazis who eventually worked for the Gehlen Organization or as Soviet spies after the war. They hold information about important Nazi officials who escaped and became figures of security interest in other countries spanning the globe from the Middle East to South America. Together, the Army and CIA records will keep scholars of World War II and the Cold War busy for many years.

The new files also have postwar intelligence on other subjects. The CIC kept close watch on other suspect groups, such as German communists, and kept thousands of files on them. They kept watch on politically active Jewish refugees in displaced persons camps. Indeed, there are many hundreds of newly released files concerning the remnant of European Jews who searched for a new life in Palestine or the United States. Thus the new records are of great interest to those researching a very broad range of topics from international Communism to the Jewish diaspora to the history of mass migration.

The declassification of intelligence-related material is a controversial subject, involving as it does the release of records formerly of national security interest. The current releases show, however, that the passage of years lessens the information’s sensitivity while providing researchers access to raw information that is simply not available elsewhere. By their very nature, intelligence agencies attain and record information that other government or non-government organizations cannot. None of the chapters in this report could have been written without declassified intelligence records, nor could the many articles and books that will emerge as a result of the current release. The funding for declassification and the assurance that intelligence records are opened to the public thus preserve key aspects of world history. In the interest of understanding our past Congress should, in our view, ensure that such openness continues.

16

WARREN COMMISSION

CIA “Propaganda Notes” on the Kennedy Assassination

This CIA memo of “Propaganda Notes” from 1964 is self-explanatory. They were going to make sure the Warren Report that concluded President Kennedy was assassinated by a lone nut named Lee Harvey Oswald got disseminated far and wide. The intention was to bury suspicions of conspiracy, part of a systematic government-promoted distribution of—they said it, not me—propaganda.

A great deal of the CIA’s job seems to be to “spin” whatever happens in the best light they can. And for the most part, spinning is done to cover up the truth: If we’ve done it, then it has to be right.

17

NORIEGA AND THE U.S.

Running Drugs with Dictators

The Reagan years are remembered, of course, for the Iran-Contra scandal that made a notorious celebrity (and future political hero to many) of Colonel Oliver North. He claimed that John Kerry’s 1988 Senateto Foreign Relations subcommittee report on the interplay between U.S. support for the Nicaraguan Contras and the drug trade was all wrong. “The fact is nobody in the government of the United States…ever had anything to do with running drugs to support the Nicaraguan