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General Arthur Trudeau, the Army's chief of intelligence, told Adenauer that Gehlen and his group were a security risk and if the chancellor hired the man to run West German intelligence, NATO's security would be compromised. He also gave the chancellor secret Army intelligence documents raising questions about Communist penetration of the group and Nazis who were suspects in wartime atrocities against non-combatants.
"Trudeau told Adenauer, `Better watch that guy,' " said Kelly, Trudeau's aide at the time. "Trudeau said it's full of Russian agents. Dulles went ballistic."
Dulles, whose brother, John Foster Dulles, was Eisenhower's secretary of state, demanded Trudeau's head, and the general was soon fired as chief of army intelligence. Adenauer subsequently named Gehlen chief of West German intelligence in 1955, when the Allies granted their old enemy its sovereignty.
Gehlen realized his dream, even surviving his failure to predict the construction of the Berlin Wall, not to mention the 1962 arrest of his longtime counterintelligence chief, Heinz Felfe, who turned out to have been a KGB agent.
One of the potentially richest veins of information in this country are dossiers dealing with the little-known Hundred Persons Act, which allows the CIA to grant US residency to 100 people per year, no questions asked. The 1949 law was designed to get informants out of countries in which their lives might be in danger, but there is evidence that it was used in some instances as an escape hatch for truly evil people.
"There's no doubt that the CIA got carried away with recruiting some pretty bad people," Critchfield said.
Holtzman says the IWG is entitled to any information about the Hundred Persons Act that relates to war criminals, regardless of whether the CIA invoked it for that purpose 50 years ago or last Thursday.
But Helms expressed outrage when asked about the IWG's hope of making that material public.
"If that's true, we don't need that kind of animus in the world today, among Americans," he said. "I think it's a shame. This is the kind of thing that is absolutely beyond the pale. You're trying to win a war and you're doing all sorts of things. War is not something about human rights. It's all gone crazy."
Helms, 88, is the ultimate CIA career man. A former United Press International foreign correspondent who scored an interview with Hitler in 1935, he joined the Navy during World War II and then joined the OSS. Even though President Truman dissolved the agency at the end of the war - scattering the Ivy League Northeasterners who gave it its clubby cachet - Helms remained with the stopgap Central Intelligence Group in Germany and worked with the Gehlen organization. He was one of the engineers of the legislation that created the CIA in 1947, and served as director of the agency from 1966 until 1973. Helms was fired by a beleaguered President Nixon when Helms tried to protect the CIA from the fallout of the Watergate scandal.