Jared Israel
Six decades of cover-up and still going strong...
Tue Jan 13 15:40:04 2004
64.140.158.84

Six decades of cover-up and still going strong...
The Nazi war crimes apparatus was recruited lock, stock and barrel and secretly redeployed worldwide

* Part 2: U.S. Intelligence takes Charge of Investigating the Recruitment of Nazis by...U.S. Intelligence *

by Jared Israel
[Posted 13 January 2004]

The first article in this series can be read at
http://emperors-clothes.com/coverup/summary.htm

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Early in 1983 it became clear that, whether the US Establishment liked it or not, people were going to learn about US recruitment of Nazi war criminals following World War II. This was not just a guess because the process had already begun. The question was, how much would people learn and how quickly would they learn it? And most important, would the US foreign policy establishment be discredited?

It started on January 25th when the recently elected Bolivian government arrested Klaus Barbie, former head of the Gestapo in Lyon, second biggest city in Nazi-occupied France. Barbie had lived in Bolivia for three decades. During that time France had tried him for war crimes in absentia two times. Twice he was sentenced to death. [1]

On February 5th, Bolivia expelled Barbie, putting him on a plane to French Guiana. There he was arrested and sent to the destination he dreaded most: France. Since the statute of limitations on Barbie's war crimes convictions had run out, France would put him on trial on a new charge, Crimes against Humanity.

Even as Barbie was being arrested in Guiana, an American professor, Erhard Dabringhaus, was giving an interview on NBC TV. Shocking millions of TV viewers, Dabringhaus said that after World War II, US intelligence had employed Barbie, paying him $1700 a month. How did Dabringhaus know this? Because as a US Army Intelligence (CIC) officer he had been Barbie's handler in conquered Germany in 1948.

The Associated Press headline the next day read, "Professor Says ‘Nazi Butcher' Was Paid U.S. Informant". The AP quoted Dabringhaus saying the US had financed Barbie's escape to Bolivia and that Barbie had tortured members of the French Resistance: [2]


[Excerpt from Associated Press starts here]

"He caught hundreds of them and if they didn't talk or cooperate with him, he would string them up by their thumbs in the basement until they were dead. He said there is a mass grave outside his headquarters that must have 200 people in it," Dabringhaus said.

Twice, Dabringhaus said, French intelligence agents asked him if the United States knew where Barbie was.

"They had heard that we knew something about him and I was ordered by my own headquarters not to say anything, that we knew anything about him."

[Excerpt from Associated Press ends here]


The news spread like wildfire. In a book published a year later, Dabringhaus wrote: [3]

"On Sunday, February 6, 1983, a line of reporters formed at my front door. They continued to write for three weeks and calls came in from as far away as Sidney, Australia."

Ordinary people were shocked. The movies depicted US intelligence agents parachuting into occupied France to fight the Nazis. Could it be that even as leading Nazis were being tried at Nuremberg, the US had recruited one of the worst Nazi butchers and shielded him from French justice? If so, who authorized this? Was it the only case? How much was the US involved in Barbie's escape to Bolivia? Did US intelligence continue to employ Barbie after he got there?

The intelligence ‘community' of course knew the damaging answers to these questions. And it knew that the US had recruited not one Nazi but thousands, some of them more important than Barbie. If the whole story came out, and especially if too much came out at one time, it could discredit the US foreign policy apparatus. And this could happen. After all, Dabringhaus had come forward out of nowhere. Would other CIC officers also come forward?

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* Damning evidence: Barbie's life as a fugitive *

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Given that there was a lot of readily available and incriminating evidence about Barbie's relationship to the US, it is amazing how little the public learned in 1983. Indeed, it is amazing how little the public knows today.

For example, while supposedly a hunted fugitive in Bolivia, Barbie played a central role in suppressing democracy. This was discussed in a 1989 Library of Congress study: [4]


[Quote From Library of Congress Study Starts Here]

In 1980 [Bolivian president Lidia] Gueiler presided over elections in which the parties of the left gained a clear majority of the vote. Siles Zuazo and his Democratic and Popular Unity (Unidad Democrática y Popular--UDP) coalition alone got 38 percent of the votes; the Congress was certain to name him president on August 6, 1980.

The process was disrupted on July 17, 1980, however, by the ruthless military coup of General Luis García Meza. Reportedly financed by cocaine traffickers and supported by European mercenaries recruited by Klaus Barbie, former Gestapo chief in Lyons, the coup began one of the darkest periods in Bolivian history. Arbitrary arrest by paramilitary units, torture, and disappearances - with the assistance of Argentine advisers - destroyed the opposition.

[Quote From Library of Congress Study Ends Here]


Keep in mind that this analysis was not published until December of 1989 and of course, even then, Library of Congress studies are not mass reading.

However, on February 25th 1983, the Associated Press *did* publish a related dispatch. It was in some ways stronger than the Library of Congress study. For instance, the AP dispatch makes clear that the "paramilitary groups" which the Bolivian government accused Barbie of organizing were in fact death squads: [6]


[Excerpt from AP starts here]

Said to number anywhere from 900 to 3,000, they terrorized the country for [the next]... two years, raided homes and factories and traveled with official government credentials provided by the Interior Ministry or the drug control agency, according to government documents.

...Following the coup, thousands of political and labor leaders were either killed, tortured, exiled or sent to internment camps in the interior.

[Excerpt from AP ends here]


These death squads were reminiscent of the Einsatzgruppen, the Nazis' mobile murder squads responsible for millions of deaths in World War II. [5]

Thus Barbie continued to do in Bolivia some of the same things he had done in France.

Anyone reading this AP dispatch might ask: how could the CIA *not* know that Barbie, who for years was a US Army Counter Intelligence (CIC) employee, was organizing death squads in Bolivia?

Was Barbie in fact CIA? Had he been given the job of wiping out thousands of Bolivian leaders who wanted to chart a social and political course opposed by the US foreign policy Establishment?

Who were the "European mercenaries recruited by Klaus Barbie"? Were they other Nazis whom the US had helped emigrate to South America? Was the US secretly using the old Nazi war crimes apparatus to create Einsatzgruppen to rid Latin America of political undesirables? Was the so-called flight of Nazis to Latin America therefore in fact a method of spreading a network of reliable killers all over the area?

These questions would have been asked by many people had the AP dispatch been read by ordinary people, but it was not. Nobody saw it.

Allow me to explain.

Associated Press is a 'wire service', meaning it produces news stories ('dispatches') and sends them to thousands of subscribers (newspapers, magazines and TV stations). Therefore an AP dispatch can only reach the public if one or more subscribers publishes it.

I chanced upon the AP dispatch about Barbie and the Bolivian death squads while doing research with the Lexis-Nexis media search engine. However, using this very effective search engine, I could find no evidence that any newspaper or TV news program had picked up the AP dispatch! Apparently Emperor's Clothes readers will be the first to read it. [6]

If ordinary people had read this dispatch in 1983 they would have had a lot to be upset about. They already knew the US had recruited Barbie and paid for his trip to Bolivia. Now it turned out that in Bolivia this Gestapo man continued doing some of what got him convicted for war crimes in France.

Was it a coincidence that not one newspaper picked up the AP dispatch? Or were steps taken to suppress the story? Either way, this AP dispatch illustrates the danger faced in 1983 by the powers-that-be: Barbie's activities in Bolivia were a time bomb waiting to blow.

Three weeks later it blew.

***

This text (Part 2) is being emailed in two parts. The second half will be sent out shortly. If you haven't received it and wish to continue reading, please go to
http://emperors-clothes.com/coverup/1983.htm#b 

Footnotes follow the fundraising appeal.

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