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The pursuit of Nazi war criminals is but one of the many agendas jostling for space not just on the IWG, but among historians, writers, lawyers, conspiracy theorists, and corporations. Many firms are facing lawsuits demanding reparations for what some previous management team might have done to make a buck off of a war that not only killed 45 million people and redrew the world's borders, but often roguishly redistributed much of the planet's wealth.
''There's a kind of declassification fever that has hit Washington,'' says James Critchfield, a career CIA official who sits on the IWG's historical advisory committee. ''I've gone on record objecting to the disorganized way these records are being released.''
But Holtzman, a New York lawyer who has been trying to crack the CIA code of silence on the Nazi-for-hire question for nearly three decades, is concerned that the current flow of information is slower and less thorough than it should be.
Only Clinton's executive order and an act of Congress overrode the 1947 National Security Act, which had allowed the CIA director to withhold any data that dealt with operational details or the names of sources.
Though Holtzman says CIA Director George Tenet has accommodated virtually every request the group has made, some conservative members of Congress feel that the floodgates are open too wide.
In the 2001 intelligence budget passed last year, which financed the IWG through 2003, Senate Intelligence Committee staffers quietly snipped out the specific language in the initial law that gave the group blanket authority to demand operational intelligence data.
The IWG plans to proceed under the guidelines of the original law, though the wild card is the security sentiment that evolves within the new administration. President George W. Bush has asked Tenet to stay on at the CIA for the time being.
The dossiers are filled with accounts of missions accomplished, and operations gone awry. Yet while the files are loaded with new material, veteran archivists are also bemused by the millions of other records that were quietly declassified during the past 30 years.
''Literally, in March of 1996 the first researcher came in here looking for Jewish bank accounts,'' says Bradsher. ''And that was like throwing a pebble into the water and watching the ripples spread. That led to looted artwork and gold and unpaid insurance policies. And most of that stuff has been declassified forever.''
All the intelligence agencies are being asked for their records related to war crimes, and the response level has varied. ''The CIA has not been very rapid,'' Holtzman says. ''That's one of the things that's pretty disappointing.''
A big problem is the fact that the CIA keeps its files by name, yet researchers often don't know who they're looking for, particularly when it comes to Nazi war criminals.
''We don't know what we don't know,'' says IWG researcher and historian Paul Brown.