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THE SERIES TO DATE
PART I: THE
PERFECT SPY
German bureaucrat Fritz Kolbe smuggled out information so good the Allies didn't trust it

PART II: INSIDE
THE EMPIRE
How Americans behind Japanese lines helped change the fate of WWII

PART III: CALLING JAPAN TO ACCOUNT
Nation asked to detail, and pay for, its WWII crimes

PART IV: THE HOLOCAUST
Early Nazi documents warned of genocidal intentions

PART V: VENGEANCE
AT DACHAU
US soldiers shocked by Holocaust executed captured Nazi troops after liberating death camp

PART VI: THE RESISTANCE
Declassified documents demystify World War II underground

PART VII: CLOAKED BUSINESS
How Allied companies covered their deals with Axis

PART VIII: THE WAR OF WORDS
While troops and arms do their part, propaganda also proves central to military doctrine

PART IX: HOT CONFLICT TO COLD WAR
US made moral compromises in using former Nazi spy network against Soviet threat
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Cold War

Page 2 of 9

Continued from page 1

"I don't want to be in the position of defending Nazi war criminals," Critchfield said in an interview earlier this year, as the CIA began releasing some of the most sensitive espionage records in American history.

With the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, however, the political mood has swung back to a place that seems circa 1947, when the spread of Communism - a strange, threatening ideology opposed to American ideals - launched the Cold War and prompted Congress to create a powerful central intelligence agency in the first place.

The so-called Inter-Agency Working Group, known as the IWG, set up to oversee the declassification of World War II's darkest secrets, has now become almost irrelevant, Critchfield suggests.

"I think the wind has been knocked out of its sails," he said. "It has been too fashionable to treat central intelligence during the war and afterward as somewhat villainous. It was blown out of proportion. Now, we're back where we were."

Not everybody agrees. Former New York congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, who has been crusading since the 1970s to make the US intelligence apparatus accountable for its errors, said the declassification process has become more important.

"It's not just the willingness to use bad guys, but bad guys who can bring bad results to us," said Holtzman, a member of the IWG's public oversight board. "How could we have used somebody like Osama bin Laden? If we learned one lesson from 9-11 and World War II, it is that you have be very careful about using people who are fanatics or mass murderers."

Shifting sentiments at times of crisis

Yet the moral judgments made in peacetime on the actions of people who were at war tend to change when a new conflict arises. The IWG is, in a sense, the embodiment of three decades of public cynicism with government in general and intelligence operations in particular. With the officially sanctioned duplicity that accompanied the Vietnam War and characterized the Watergate scandal, the CIA was increasingly viewed as a bloated, blooper-prone institution that trampled civil liberties and recruited unsavory characters while still blowing cases and leaking secrets.
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This story ran on page A1 of The Boston Globe on 12/26/2001. © Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.