4 more years....

It's just sad. The New York Times is reporting that CIA knew where a Nazi war criminal was for several years. By not disclosing their knowledge to the global community, CIA let him continue to do the one thing his wartime actions denied millions of innocents: live.

Yes, it may have only been for an additional 4 years (until his execution in 1962 after being tried in Israel), but it was 4 years longer than the mother who survived a camp was able to spend with her children that did not. It was 4 years longer than a child in the camps got to spend with the father that Eichmann's orders killed. 4 years of extra time could have meant the difference between dying in a camp and being liberated by the allies at the end of the war.

Eichmann got those 4 years. His victims did not.

I'm not really interested in how he spent them. The bottom line is that he got them courtesy of our Central Intelligence Agency, which knew quite well what he'd been up to during the war.

And for what?

The West German government was wary of exposing Eichmann because officials feared what he might reveal about such figures as Hans Globke, a former Nazi government official then serving as a top national security adviser to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, Mr. Naftali said.

So a perpetrator of genocide was allowed to remain at large because CIA and their counterparts in the West German intelligence agencies did not want his arrest to cause the disclosure of other former Nazi officials who had successfully hidden their past. Card carrying members of the Nazi Party who had moved into positions of power in the West German government. After all, this was the Cold War, and West Germany, being host to NATO and considered ground zero of the new European Theater should World War III break out, could not have such scandalous facts revealed.

Apparently, the real issue wasn't the crimes these men had committed in the past, it seems that

... [t]he United States government, preoccupied with the cold war, had no policy at the time of pursuing Nazi war criminals. The records also show that American intelligence officials protected many former Nazis for their perceived value in combating the Soviet threat. [Emphasis Eliel's--Ed.]

So, again, the Freedom of Information Act has allowed historians to reveal exactly what the true cost of the Cold War was. In this instance, trading the restitution due innocents to protect the guilty so that they could "protect" our interests. Which of course the Times articles shows they did not do. In the end, all that happened was that our nation sacrificed it's integrity in exchange for the fool's gold of anti-Soviet "intelligence".

This quotation sums up the issue quite succinctly:

"Using bad people can have very bad consequences," Ms. Holtzman said. She and other group members suggested that the findings should be a cautionary tale for intelligence agencies today.

Postscript: I wasn't going to post this to the blog, but today Daniel Schorr of NPR did his own story on the subject. You can listen to it here. Schorr's story adds more depth to the original story from the Times as he discusses how the German's were worried about Eichmann's trial and it's effect on German/Israeli/American politics.