Revealed: How the CIA protected Nazi murderers

[Octafish]

Don't recall seeing this story on my television screen.

Revealed: How the CIA protected Nazi murderers

US shielded war-time collaborators to try to destabilise Soviet Union

By Cristian Salazar and Randy Herschaft in New York
The Independent (London)

Declassified CIA files have revealed that US intelligence officials went to great lengths to protect a Ukrainian fascist leader and suspected Nazi collaborator from prosecution after the Second World War and used him to stir up trouble inside the Soviet Union from an office in New York.

Mykola Lebed led an underground movement to undermine the Kremlin and wage guerrilla operations for the CIA during the Cold War, said a report prepared by two scholars under the supervision of the US National Archives. During the Second World War, Lebed helped to lead a Ukrainian nationalist organization that collaborated with the Nazis in the murder of the Jews of the western Ukraine and also killed thousands of Poles. The report details post-war efforts by US intelligence officials to throw the federal government's Nazi hunters off his trail and to ignore or obscure his past.

The report, titled Hitler's Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, US Intelligence, and the Cold War, draws from an unprecedented trove of records that the CIA was persuaded to declassify, and from more than a million digitised army intelligence files that had long been inaccessible. Among other things, the authors say, the files also show that US intelligence officials used and protected ex-Nazis during the Cold War to a greater extent than previously known.

Elizabeth Holtzman, a former Democratic congresswoman from New York who fought for the disclosure of Nazi files, welcomed the release. "This is a difficult, and in some respects shameful, chapter in American history," she said. "It was not known to the public, and I think it's a mark of governmental courage and of national courage to take this era and these documents and say, 'We want to learn the truth about what our government did', and to do it in a way that was professional and serious."

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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/revealed-how-the-cia-protected-nazi-murderers-2158071.html

Dunno about you, but learning that my nation's spy agency protected NAZI war criminals after World War II would be important to know, considering how my nation today acts like it's run by war criminals.