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Though the newly declassified files have added significant new layers of detail about World War II and its aftermath, allegations that the Allies employed Nazi war criminals during the Cold War are not new. Gehlen even sent former CIA director Allen Dulles copies of articles in East Germany's newspapers on the topic from the 1950s, according to correspondence in Dulles's personal papers archived at Princeton University.

What the raw intelligence conveys most vividly is the mood of a moment when it was impossible to predict what would happen next. One 1946 dispatch from Helms, then the US intelligence chief in conquered Berlin, warned that the Soviet troops on the eastern side of the city appeared to be in attack formation.

"What we know about the Cold War now is a lot more than what was known about the Cold War in the 1940s," said Norman Goda, an Ohio University historian working with the IWG. "The Soviet intentions were very unclear. There was looting, raping. Their behavior seemed especially brutal."

Stalin considered the fall of the Third Reich a victory for Communism. He viewed the Marshall Plan, aimed at bringing the western, US-occupied half of Germany back to recovery, as an attempt at American colonization.

When World War II ended, the US Army's Counter Intelligence Corps rounded up and detained 120,000 Germans from a list of known war criminals and people considered suspect. Gehlen was later considered important to this effort.

"A lot of people don't understand what it was like in Germany during the occupation period," said Merrill Kelly, a former Army counter-intelligence officer stationed in Germany at the time. "They were the people who knew how to go after the Russians."

Relations between the Gehlen organization and the Army soured, though Helms and other US intelligence officials, such as Allen Dulles, lobbied to keep it alive. By the time the Gehlan group had grown to several thousand people and seemed to be a rat's nest not only of old Nazis, some with bloody pasts, but Communist infiltrators and rank opportunists, it was under control of the newly created CIA.

"They weren't well-managed, to be honest," Kelly said.

In some ways, the dispute over the Gehlen group was fueled by the mutual contempt between the Army and the Ivy Leaguers who dominated the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II predecessor of the CIA.