The old man shut his eyes and let his head sink back into the pillow. He's dead, Critchfield thought, exchanging a look of grim finality with the man's wife. Then the eyes opened, the head rose, and the old man struggled to speak. "Before I go," he told Critchfield, "I want to thank you for letting me achieve the goal of my life."

It was June 1979, in a villa on a lake outside a small town in Bavaria. The dying man was Reinhard Gehlen. The goal he had achieved? Running West Germany's espionage agency after the nation rose from the rubble of World War II.James Critchfield, Gehlen's old CIA handler, says the spymaster did indeed die a few days after their final conversation. But considering the interest remaining in a man cunning enough to run spy rings not just for West Germany, but for Adolf Hitler and Harry Truman as well, Gehlen figuratively is still not quite dead.

The mystery surrounding the history of Reinhard Gehlen has been one of the prime targets of a commission that President Clinton appointed in 1999 to oversee the release of intelligence records under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act.

Gehlen's vast network of opportunistic spies, because of its huge impact on a half century of US espionage, is a symbol of the moral compromises this country made as the clear line between good and evil during World War II blurred into the much murkier, yet equally terrifying, Cold War. The superpower showdown effectively ended a decade ago this Christmas with the dissolution of the USSR. But the impact of the Soviet Union's implosion remains one of the forces that move the world.

Both the US recruitment of Hitler's Soviet specialists and the roots of the military action in Afghanistan are byproducts of the Cold War. From Nazi butcher Klaus Barbie to Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein to anti-American Islamic extremist Osama bin Laden - all of whom were once employed or aided by US intelligence - people who once seemed like weapons against Soviet expansion became security liabilities at best and threats to American lives at worst.

Critchfield was appointed to the Clinton commission's historical advisory panel, not to mention a spot on its hot seat. It was Critchfield who at war's end recommended that 4,000 of the Third Reich's spies be kept on the US intelligence payroll because of their knowledge of Washington's new enemy, the Soviet Union.