CIA kept Nazi secrets

last updated 8 January 2015

Washington, D.C.

The CIA learned the whereabouts of Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann in 1958, but did not hunt him down, according to U.S. documents made public last week. West German intelligence informed the CIA that Eichmann was living in Argentina under the assumed name of Ricardo Klement. But the U.S. neither mounted a search for him nor shared the information with Israel, which had been hunting for Eichmann for years; Israel captured him in 1960, and executed him in 1962. Other documents unveiled by the National Archives show that in the 1950s, the CIA shielded escaped Nazis, organizing some into rings to spy on the Soviet Union. “Hiring these tainted individuals,” said historian Timothy Naftali, “brought little other than operational problems and moral confusion to our government’s intelligence community.”