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The cost of accepting unsavory allies

Yet that manic urge to see into the future led to some unholy alliances. For every Wernher von Braun - the former SS major and Nazi party member better known as the father of the US space program - there were other recruits who backfired spectacularly.

The newly declassified files include a 1952 CIA report on Emil Augsburg, former head of the notorious Nazi think tank, the Wansee Institute, who had joined a security unit during the war that specialized in the execution of Jews. The report says Augsburg worked for US Army intelligence in 1947, but was dumped the following year on the advice of Klaus Barbie, another US espionage asset who was subsequently prosecuted for overseeing the slaughter of Jews in France. Augsburg then worked for Gehlen until 1966.

"They were like roaches," said historian Paul Brown, an IWG consultant who has researched the roots of the Gehlen circle. "When the war was over and the lights were turned on, they scattered everywhere. A lot of these Americans [who employed them] were clueless."

Earlier this year, the flow of declassified data washed ashore hundreds of pages of CIA and US Army intelligence on Wilhelm Hoettl, an SS major in Hungary during the deportation of nearly half a million Hungarian Jews into the Auchswitz death camps in Poland. Hoettl purportedly stole a fortune in jewels, gold, and other valuables from Holocaust victims. He even testified at the Nuremburg war crimes trials, where he estimated the number of Jews killed by the Nazis at 6 million.

Though Hoettl was considered a master fabricator, the files linked him to a dozen intelligence agencies in the two decades following the war, including those run by the United States, Soviet Union, Israel, the Vatican - even famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, who denied the relationship when the allegation first surfaced in 1963. The records show that Hoettl was dropped as a US source in 1953 because of suspicions that he was also on the KGB payroll, yet he enjoyed freedom and wealth until he died in the 1960s.

In an analysis of the Hoettl dossiers, IWG researchers concluded that the case "illustrates the difficult situation in which US post-war intelligence agents found themselves - desperate for knowledge on Soviet activities, they saw no choice other than accepting the intelligence information from former Nazis with offensive pasts and questionable reliability."