Free Blowback by Christopher Simpson Page B

charges. That was point number one.
    Point number two, on the other hand, was that the CIC agents who had recruited Barbie “had no reliable indication … that he was suspected of war crimes or crimes against humanity [until much later],” that Barbie was the only such war criminal that the United States had protected, and that he was the only such fugitive from justice that the United States had smuggled out of Europe. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in particular, was given a clean bill of health in the Barbie case and, by implication, in other incidents in which the agency is alleged to have had traffic with fugitive war criminals.
    Point number one was true enough. Point number two was, and is, false.
    At the time of the news conference Ryan stated point number two with what appeared to be genuine conviction. His extensive investigation had convinced him that “no other case was found where a suspected Nazi war criminal was placed in the ratline, or where the ratline was used to evacuate a person wanted by either the United States government or any of its postwar allies,” he said carefully, as the television cameras recorded his words.
    He noted, it is true, that his investigation had been limited to the Barbie affair, so he could not be certain that some other case might not have escaped his scrutiny. His mild qualification on that point was almost entirely ignored, however, by both the press and Ryan himself in the weeks that followed.
    United Press International, for example, headlined PROBER: BARBIE THE EXCEPTION, NOT RULE , and quoted Ryan as indicating that the Justice Department’s search had “uncovered no evidence [that] there was any other former Nazi that the U.S. shielded from justice.” ABC TV’s Nightline program featured Ryan on its broadcast that evening. Ryan said that the United States had “innocently recruited Barbie, unaware of his role in France … [and that] theBarbie case was not typical.” Under Ted Koppel’s questioning, Ryan expanded on the theme: It was “very likely there were no other Nazi officials who were relied upon as Klaus Barbie was … [and] this closes the record.” 2
    Since the Barbie case broke open, however, there has been a chain of new discoveries of Nazis and SS men protected by and, in some cases, brought to the United States by U.S. intelligence agencies. One, for example, was SS officer Otto von Bolschwing, who once instigated a bloody pogrom in Bucharest and served as a senior aide to Adolf Eichmann. According to von Bolschwing’s own statement in a secret interview with U.S. Air Force investigators, in 1945 he volunteered his services to the Army CIC, which used him for interrogation and recruitment of other former Nazi intelligence officers. Later he was transferred to the CIA, which employed him as a contract agent inside the Gehlen Organization, a group of German intelligence officers that was being financed by the agency for covert operations and intelligence gathering inside Soviet-held territory. The CIA brought the SS man to the United States in 1954. 3
    Following the revelation of the von Bolschwing affair, new evidence turned up concerning U.S. recruitment of still other former SS men, Nazis, and collaborators. According to army records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), SS Obersturmführer Robert Verbelen admitted that he had once been sentenced to death in absentia for war crimes, including the torture of two U.S. Air Force pilots. And, he said, he had long served in Vienna as a contract spy for the U.S. Army, which was aware of his background.
    Other new information has been uncovered concerning Dr. Kurt Blome, who admitted in 1945 that he had been a leader of Nazi biological warfare research, a program known to have included experimentation on prisoners in concentration camps. Blome, however, was acquitted of crimes against humanity at a trial in 1947 and hired a