The report notes that "approximately 1,200 newly released files relate to the penetration of German Communist activities and specifically to "Project Happiness,' the CIC's codename for counterintelligence operations against the KPD," the German Communist Party.
Though Barbie "known for personally torturing French partisans during the war" may be the best known ex-Gestapo officer recruited by the CIC, others had similar histories.
For instance, Anton Mahler was the chief interrogator of Hans Scholl, a leader of the White Rose, a Munich-based student organization that secretly passed out leaflets urging Adolf Hitler's overthrow and decrying German apathy in the face of Hitler's crimes. Hans and his sister Sophie Scholl were convicted of high treason and beheaded in February 1943.
Mahler also served in Einsatzgruppe B in occupied Belarus as the group slaughtered more than 45,000 people, most of them Jews, the report said. Nevertheless, CIC deployed Mahler as an informant starting in February 1949 and soon made him a full-time employee.
Regarding Barbie, the report builds on a 1983 investigation by a Justice Department investigator who confirmed suspicions that U.S. intelligence had worked with and protected this hunted war criminal who was accused of executing 4,000 people and shipping 7,000 Jews to concentration camps.
"In the spring of 1947 a CIC agent named Robert S. Taylor from CIC Region IV (Munich) recruited Klaus Barbie, the one-time Gestapo Chief of Lyon (1942 "44)," the new report said. "Barbie helped run a counterintelligence net named "BÃ ¼ro Petersen' which monitored French intelligence.
"In 1948 Barbie helped the CIC locate former Gestapo informants. In 1949 "50, he penetrated German Communist Party (KPD) activities in CIC Region XII (Augsburg). "He continued to work for the CIC in return for protection against French war crimes charges."
Ratline to Bolivia
The story of Barbie's escape to South America with the CIC's collaboration was addressed in the 1983 report by Allan A. Ryan Jr., head of the Justice Department's Nazi-hunting Office of Special Investigations. Ryan's 218-page report said that in 1951, the CIC helped Barbie evade French authorities and flee over a "ratline" to Bolivia.
Ryan said that a half dozen CIC officers participated in the cover-up of Barbie's identity and excused their actions by claiming that the French arrest of Barbie could jeopardize the security of other CIC operations. To get Barbie to Bolivia, the CIC officers used a ratline run by a Croatian priest, Father Krunoslav Draganovich, Ryan wrote.
Ryan said the Central Intelligence Agency later rebuffed suggestions that Barbie be reactivated in the 1960s, but Barbie "using the name Altmann" held an official position with a state-owned shipping company that allowed him move freely and even to travel to the United States. [For more on Ryan's report, see Time magazine, Aug. 29, 1983]
More significantly, Barbie became a figure in Bolivian intelligence and used that perch to coordinate with other right-wing intelligence services around the continent that were engaged in Operation Condor, a program of assassinating suspected subversives and other dissidents.
In the 1970s, these intelligence agencies had teamed up to give their assassination squads regional and even global reach, including the murder of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and an American co-worker on the streets of Washington in 1976.
For the Cocaine Coup in 1980, Barbie recruited Argentina's feared intelligence service along with young neo-Nazis from Europe. The World Anti-Communist League arranged support from Moon and other Asian rightists.
For years, Moon had been sinking down roots in South America, especially in Uruguay after right-wing military dictators seized power there in 1973. Moon also cultivated close ties with dictators in Argentina, Paraguay and Chile, reportedly ingratiating himself with the juntas by helping the regimes buy weapons and by channeling money to allied right-wing organizations.
"Relationships nurtured with right-wing Latin Americans in the [World Anti-Communist] League led to acceptance of the [Unification] Church's political and propaganda operations throughout Latin America," the Andersons wrote in Inside the League.
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