Free The Nazis Next Door by Eric Lichtblau Page A

funds that were supposed to go to his U.S.-financed spy operations, American officials discovered. He was selling his intelligence elsewhere, too. Red-faced Army officials ended up paying another source about $3,000 in Austrian shillings for a thick stack of intelligence on Soviet activities in the region, only to learn that their own spy Höttl was the one marketing the secret documents in the first place. The revelations only got worse, as the Americans stumbled onto a number of Höttl’s other secret customers. It turned out that Höttl—or Cheka, as he was secretly known in Moscow—was a Soviet double agent, and one of the Russians’ most highly paid, too, according to evidence that would emerge from a KGB defector. Linked to a pair of American citizens in Vienna accused of spying for the Russians, Höttl was thought to have given the Russians intelligence on America and even the names of Allied agents. True to his reputation, the ex-Nazi was playing all sides.
    In 1952, after years of unheeded warnings about their “dangerous” spy, Dulles and the CIA finally cut ties with Höttl for good. All the predictions about the damage the ex-Nazi might do to America had come true.
     
    While the CIA’s Dulles was the de facto ally of America’s many Nazi spies overseas in battling the Soviets, J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI was his like-minded counterpart inside the United States—and every bit as powerful.
    Hoover embraced the Cold War as his own. Like Dulles, he viewed the Nazis through a lens tinted a bright shade of Russian red. And like Dulles, Hoover would intervene time and again on behalf of Nazi intelligence agents and allies inside the United States when they were accused of war crimes. His FBI worked with dozens of ex-Nazis as informants and intelligence agents against the Soviets. Their wartime records were largely irrelevant. Hoover himself, then at the apex of his power, invariably saw whatever evidence of war crimes that emerged against European immigrants in the United States as a concoction of Soviet propagandists meant to smear their American opponents for political gain.
    “Since the war, there have been a great number of complaints that people aided the Germans during the war in persecuting the Jews,” Hoover wrote in 1955, regarding a New Jersey immigrant suspected of executing Polish Jews. “Interviews in other cases have developed no substantiation of the allegations.”
    Hoover’s tacit support for suspected Nazi war criminals reached the highest levels of the government. In 1962, the FBI learned from an apparent wiretap of columnist Drew Pearson that he might be planning to ask President John F. Kennedy about war crimes allegations against Andrija Artukovic, the Nazi collaborator in Croatia who became the FBI’s anti-Communist tipster. Hoover saw the case against Artukovic as largely Communist propaganda. So the FBI alerted Kennedy’s press secretary to help brace the president for possible questions at a news conference. Hoover didn’t want the president ambushedby reporters demanding to know why a top Nazi collaborator from Croatia was living freely off the beaches of Southern California. Lucky for JFK, the question never came up.
    When immigration investigators were trying to build a deportation case against another Nazi collaborator, an FBI informant in New Jersey named Laszlo Agh, Hoover came to his aid as well. With dozens of eyewitnesses testifying against him, Agh was accused of forcing Jews at a Hungarian work camp to throw themselves onto buried bayonets and eat their own feces, and he had made a damning admission to an FBI agent about his involvement with Hungary’s Nazi-aligned Arrow Cross Party. But Hoover, in 1959, blocked his agent from testifying about Agh’s admissions, effectively killing the deportation case against him. Agh was allowed to stay in Newark. At the same time, Hoover shut down a field investigation into the right-wing Hungarian American political group that Agh