MINORITY REPORT

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-01208R000100120057-8
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 25, 2011
• Sequence Number: 57
• Publication Date: November 17, 1984
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

IIL _ _ L
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/25: CIA-RDP90-01208R000100120057-8
STAT
/ 1 Tl^ 'E
.- NATION
17 November 1984
MINORITY REPORT.
ow delightful to read of the departure of Arthur
Louis Hugo Rudolph from these shores. We are
all supposed to be in his debt because he designed
the Saturn rocket and the Pershing missile. But
death cancels all debts, and Rudolph was in the death
business. Honored and well-paid in America until this year,.
he has renounced his American citizenship and gone back to
Germany rather than'face deportation. Having joined the
Nazi Party in 1931, which suggests zeal rather than conform-
ity, he rose to be overseer of the Dora concentration
camp. Dora's inmates were used as slaves in the construc-
tion-of Hitler's missile sites, and were worked to death in the
race to build enough V-bombs to destroy London. Incen-
tives on the production line included public hangings and
torture. Deaths averaged 160 a day. Commenting on Ru-
dolph, Neal Sher, director of the Justice Department's Of-
fice of Special Investigations, said, "It is an awful irony that
his. experience and expertise in rocketry had to be used in
this country over the bones of so many innocent victims of
Nazi Germany's crimes against humanity."
I'm sure that Sher is a decent man, but I fail to see the
"irony" here. Rudolph and his type were brought to the
United States not in spite of their Nazi past but because of
it. It was precisely their Hitlerite expertise that was in de-
As head of the Central Intelligence Agency's Office
of Policy Coordination in the late 1940s and the 1950s,
Frank G. Wisner brought to this country a num r of
known-and wanted war criminals. He recruited the leaders
of the Byelorussian collaborationist regime; men who had
served in the "A'affen SS. He enlisted the aid of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation and the Immigration and Naturali-
zation Service in burying their past and creating new iden-
tities for them. The idea was to employ those debased
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
characters in a .rollback operation to liberate Eastern
Europe. Wisner at least had the decency to commit suicide
when all this crazed "liberating" came to nothing, but his
gruesome clientele survived to get Jobs with Radio Liberty
and to expire, unmourned but also unpunished, in their
beds. Gen. Reinhard Gehlen, who was Hitler's chief of
military intelligence on the Eastern front and who must have
seen a thing or two, was reincarnated by his American han-
dlers as the head of West German espionage. He parlayed
the deal through his knowledge of Communism in the East.
More recently, we have learned that Klaus Barbie was
recruited into the American Counter Intelligence Corps
(C.I.C.) only two years after the fall of the Third Reich and
only three years after he ceased to be, in the wearisome
newspaper cliche, "the butcher of Lyon."
Barbie was employed by the C.I.C. as an agent in the
American zone of occupied Germany until French outrage
over the discovery of his employment forced him to flee to
South America. This flight, too, was made possible by the
C.I.C. and its wide network of friends among Croatian and
Austrian Nazis. Thereafter, Barbie made himself useful to
the extreme right in Bolivia (his country of adoption) as well-
as in. Chile, Argentina and El Salvador. Those who found use
for him cannot claim they were ignorant of his real identity.
If it is read against this background, the C.I.A. handbook
for counterrevolutionaries in Nicaragua becomes readily in-
telligible. How do you employ fascists while denying that
your methods are fascistic and while hysterically flapping
the banner of democracy? The answer is that you cannot-
but you can lie about it to a gullible Congress. In Washing-
ton late last month, a new.official justification for the famous
terrorist manual was put forward. It now is claimed that the
booklet was designed -to tame the contra forces, whose
fondness for sadism and pillage. was becoming an em-
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/25: CIA-RDP90-01208R000100120057-8