new york | The CIA’s apparent refusal to divulge information about its relationship with some Nazis after the Holocaust has outraged legislators, Jewish officials and members of a government taskforce looking into war crimes.
“Even the KGB has opened up their files,” Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) told reporters during a news conference this week.
“Our government has protected its cozy relationship with the Nazi war criminals for far too long,” she added.
The CIA and other national agencies are required under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998 to release classified information about Nazi war criminals to investigators. The group would then make the materials available to the public at the National Archives in Washington and in reports.
So far, the State, Justice and Defense departments and the FBI and National Security Council all have given the Nazi War Crimes Interagency Working Group some 8 million pages of formerly classified material, in what group members say is the largest governmentwide document declassification since the Kennedy assassination.
But Maloney and members of the group say that although the CIA has released 1.2 million pages, largely from its predecessor organization, the Office of Strategic Services, otherwise the agency has obstructed their efforts to achieve an accurate historical record of the period.
Maloney, the lead sponsor of the 1998 legislation in the House of Representatives, said that she and members of the group — along with Sen. Mike DeWine (R-Ohio) and other members of both the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Intelligence Committee — were scheduled to meet with CIA representatives.
A CIA spokesman said the agency had acknowledged having maintained relationships with war criminals and “provided a general description of the operational tasks those individuals were asked to perform.”
The “CIA has not withheld any materials identified in its files related to the commission of war crimes,” the spokesman said, requesting that his name not be used.