The Boston Globe
 
PART I    PART II    PART III    PART IV    PART V    LATER
Back to Boston.com
IN THIS SEGMENT ...
  • The perfect spy
  • World history in the raw

    • PHOTO GALLERY
  • More Fritz Kolbe pictures
  • Samples of Kolbe documents

    • 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

    This series is based on some of the more than 3 million files the CIA is declassifying as part of a global effort to unlock the last stash of secrets about World War II war crimes.

    'We don't know what we don't know'

    By Mark Fritz / Globe Staff / March 11, 2001

    COLLEGE PARK, Md. - A memo to the president predicting an attack on Pearl Harbor. A dispatch revealing that Chinese Communists were stealing Japanese nuclear technology. Leaks to the Nazis about plans for D-Day.

    This is world history in the raw, a paper trail left not just by presidents, but all their hidden men and women, from the code-breaker, to the slightly unhinged secret agent trying to keep his cover. ''We'll have to rewrite the history of intelligence,'' says John Taylor, an archivist at the US National Archives since 1945.

    What has duly impressed Taylor is the wealth of World War II records that a task force has been prying from the white-knuckled grip of the author of this country's epic cover story, the CIA. To some people, those records represent the last body of evidence about how widely US intelligence agencies employed, overlooked, or expedited the escape of Axis figures responsible for hideous crimes against humanity.

    ''We have to make that information public,'' says former New York congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, a member of the task force, officially known as the Interagency Working Group on Nazi and Japanese War Crimes - known to the relief of many as simply IWG.

    The committee, given sweeping authority by an executive order from President Clinton in 1999, has secured the release of more than three million secret documents, including nearly 500,000 since June.

    Though such records have been sporadically declassified since 1972, the latest release is remarkable because it contains the names of people, the specifics of missions and the sort of raw field data that the CIA has traditionally withheld purely to preserve its power to keep secrets.

    This wildly disorganized cache of papers includes stolen microfilm, fake passports, and photos of spies smiling after they practiced their night skydiving - and occasionally pictures of their bloody corpses after they landed too conspicuously behind enemy lines.

    Taylor just shakes his head at the depth of detail that has been added to the 520 miles of shelves at the massively airy Archives II building built seven years ago on 33 wooded acres adjacent to the University of Maryland here. ''I just saw a list of all German agents in Spain, with real names and code names.''

    The sheer breadth of the material ranges far beyond the war crimes commission's mandate, which is to oversee the release of any classified information pertaining to World War II atrocities and profiteering.

    ''It's like when fishermen throw the net in: You get tuna but you also get the porpoises as well as a lot of little stuff,'' says National Archives historian Greg Bradsher, who has been indexing the new information. ''For every folder that deals with a stolen painting, there are five or six about some marching band making a trip to the Soviet Union in the 1960s.''
    The Perfect Spy    * Page 1  * Page 2

    This story ran on page A1 of The Boston Globe on 3/11/2001. © Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.