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Obituaries can barely scrape the
surface of anyone's 86-year life. That's especially true for a
covert intelligence officer whose responsibility for top-secret
decisions - and their consequences - is rarely
acknowledged.
But long before he succumbed to cancer on April
22, at the age of 86, retired CIA official James Critchfield had
owned up to two of his decisions that were so momentous that they
still influence the course of international events. One opened the
CIA's doors to ex-Nazis. The other cleared
the way for Saddam Hussein's rise to power in Iraq.
Critchfield made the first of his fateful
decisions soon after he joined the fledgling CIA in 1948. Three
years earlier, Hitler's master spy for the Eastern Front, Gen.
Reinhard Gehlen, had surrendered to U.S. forces. He then proposed a deal. In return for his
freedom, he would turn over his voluminous files on the Soviet Union
along with his former agents who had scattered across Europe.
Both the Army and the CIA considered Gehlen a hot
potato. They decided to assign someone the task of weighing the pros
and cons of his offer. That someone turned out to be James
Critchfield, a highly decorated Army colonel who had led wartime
units in Europe and North Africa and had greatly impressed senior
CIA personnel.
Critchfield was transferred to the Gehlen
compound in Pullach, Germany. After a month or so of deliberation,
he concluded that Washington would gain substantial advantage over
Moscow by annexing the "Gehlen Org" into the CIA. He recommended
that the agency do so and it did.
For the next four years, Critchfield remained
Gehlen's CIA handler in Germany. Then, in 1952, West German
Chancellor Konrad Adenauer chose Gehlen as the initial chief of the
BND, West Germany's post-war intelligence agency. Critchfield said
Gehlen - on his death bed 27 years later - thanked Critchfield for
his vital assistance in the post-war period.
War Criminals
Secret documents declassified by the Clinton
administration show that the CIA's collaboration with the ex-Nazis
was not merely a marriage of convenience. It was more like a deal
with the devil.
The documents reveal that Gehlen had hired and
protected hundreds of Nazi war criminals. The more notorious of
these Hitler henchmen included Alois Brunner, Adolf Eichmann's
right-hand man in orchestrating the Final Solution, and Emil
Augsburg, who directed the Wansee Institute where the Final Solution
was formulated and who served in a unit that specialized in the
extermination of Jews. Another was the former Gestapo chief Heinrich
Muller, Adolf Eichmann's immediate superior whose signature appears
on orders written in 1943 for the deportation of 45,000 Jews to
Auschwitz for killing.
Furthermore, the Gehlen Org was so thoroughly
penetrated by Soviet spies that CIA operations in Eastern Europe
often ended in the murder of its agents. To top it off, the Org fed
the CIA a steady diet of misinformation that fanned the flames of
East-West hostility - and thus assured the Org the continued
patronage of Washington.
Many historians of the CIA's early days have
concluded that letting the ex-Nazis in was the CIA's original sin, a
moral failure that also resulted in the distortion of the intelligence given U.S. policymakers
during the crucial early years of the Cold War.
Critchfield of Arabia
Critchfield's second fateful decision was in the
Middle East, another flashpoint of Cold War tensions.
In 1959, a young Saddam Hussein, allegedly in
cahoots with the CIA, botched an assassination attempt on Iraq's
leader, Gen. Abdel Karim Qassim. Hussein fled Iraq and reportedly
hid out under the CIA's protection and sponsorship.
By early 1963, Qassim's policies were raising new
alarms in Washington. He had withdrawn Iraq from the pro-Western
Baghdad Pact, made friendly overtures to Moscow, and revoked oil
exploration rights granted by a predecessor to a consortium of
companies that included American oil interests.
It fell to Critchfield, who was then in an
extended tenure in charge of the CIA's Near East and South Asia
division, to remove Qassim. Critchfield supported a coup d'etat in
February 1963 that was spearheaded by Iraq's Baathist party. The
troublesome Qassim was killed, as were scores of suspected
communists who had been identified by the CIA.
Critchfield hailed the coup that brought the
Baathists to power as "a great victory." Yet the reality is that the
coup further destabilized an Iraq
that had survived on the edge of crisis since its creation as a
British mandate, with arbitrarily selected borders, in the wake of
World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
The 1963 coup also
paved the way for another momentous political development.
Five years later, Saddam Hussein emerged as a leader in another
Baathist coup. Over the next decade, he bullied his way to power,
eventually consolidating a ruthless dictatorship that would lead to
three wars in less than a quarter century.
After invading Iraq and ousting Hussein from
power in April 2003, U.S. occupiers of Iraq outlawed the Baath party
that James Critchfield and the CIA had helped install in the 1960s.
Critchfield died two weeks after Hussein's government was
toppled.
In retrospect, the United States and the world
paid - and continue to pay - a high price for the clandestine
decisions made by Critchfield and his unaccountable CIA cohorts. As
was true of many other "intelligence" decisions, actions perceived
to be short-term political gains turned out to be long-term
calamities, leading to corruption, disorder and human
suffering.
Today, with the Washington information flow again
tightly controlled and short on factual support, Critchfield's
choices are a reminder that un-elected officials, operating in
secret, still make policy decisions - and that their actions can
affect the lives of millions in the U.S. and around the world.
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