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Accounts of Barbie's wartime deeds gradually leaked out through gossip from other Nazis on the U.S. intelligence payroll. U.S. CIC Agent Erhard Dabringhaus, who was Barbie's controller for a short time during the late 1940s, remembers that Barbie's erstwhile friend Kurt Merk informed on Barbie after having been shortchanged in his spy pay. Merk “told me these stories about Klaus Barbie having tortured French resistance fighters,” Dabringhaus says. “He told me that [Barbie] used to hang them by their thumbs until they were dead … [and that] if the French ever found out how many mass graves Barbie was responsible for, even Eisenhower would not be able to protect him.”
²⁴
Dabringhaus asserts that he reported all this to CIC headquarters but was met with only silence.

The fact that Barbie may have been a war criminal simply was not of interest at CIC headquarters. There were clearly hundreds of SS men working for the United States at the time, and hundreds more working for the French, British, and Soviets. Why worry about a
Hauptsturmführer
who had served in France? The rumors
concerning Barbie were not startling; they were routine. Even Dabringhaus, who today expresses shock at the use of Barbie as an agent, concedes that his other work for the CIC consisted in large part of running still another network of SS men, that one in the Stuttgart area.

But Barbie was different from most of the other Nazis. By coincidence, one of the men whom Barbie had tortured and murdered was Jean Moulin, a French resistance hero. Many French veterans were determined to see Rene Hardy, who they believed had betrayed Moulin to the Nazis, hang for his role in this murder, and Barbie was the one man who might have the evidence they needed. Thus, there was a powerful constituency for bringing pressure to bear on the CIC in the Barbie case, while other Nazis working for the CIC were, well, just “other Nazis.”

Rumors concerning Barbie's employment (and protection) by the Americans began to reach French newspapers and politicians at least as early as 1948. They, in turn, brought increasing pressure to bear on the U.S. government through publicity and eventually through official notes requesting Barbie's extradition from Germany. That, in the final analysis, is why the CIC chose to provide Barbie with a new identity and safe passage to Argentina in 1951, while thousands of other ex-Nazis who had been “of interest” to the CIC at one time or another have simply lived out their lives in Germany. If the CIC had dumped Barbie when the French government began requesting his extradition, he would have had plenty of compromising things to say about the CIC, his handlers agreed at the time. If he talked to the British, it would be “an embarrassing situation” (one internal memo argued) because the Americans had hidden Barbie from them in the wake of Operation Selection Board. If the French got him it would be even worse: CIC headquarters believed that the French Sûreté (security service) had been “thoroughly penetrated by Communist elements,” as the U.S. Justice Department's later report on the affair put it, who wanted to “kidnap Barbie, reveal his CIC connections, and thus embarrass the United States.”
²⁵

CIC headquarters' response to France's extradition request was a bureaucratic maneuver of breathtaking simplicity. Barbie, according to headquarters, should be immediately “dropped as an informant.” At the same time, however, it was “desired that subject [Barbie]
not be made aware
that his status within this organization has been altered.”
²⁶
The only way that Barbie could remain unaware
of his “altered status” was for the CIC to continue to pay him, accept his reports, and provide him with new assignments; and that is exactly what happened. Barbie, in short, was employed by the CIC in order to conceal the fact that he had actually been dismissed.

In December 1950 the CIC helped arrange new false identification for Barbie (“Klaus Altmann”), then paid Monsignor Dragonovic to arrange visas and travel to South America for the Nazi fugitive. Agent George Neagoy (who took over the ratline operation from Agent Lyon) handled the affair for the CIC. Barbie's departure from Europe was calm, even routine, according to the army's postmortem of the events.
²⁷

It is valuable to pause for a moment here to place Barbie's escape in a broader historical perspective. The intense apprehension in Washington created by the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 became an important factor in shaping relations between U.S. security agencies and many former Nazis in Europe, of whom Klaus Barbie was only one. U.S.-led United Nations forces scored some impressive early gains against the North Koreans that summer, but the Chinese Communist People's Liberation Army entered the conflict in the fall and inflicted heavy casualties on the UN troops. Communist forces took South Korea's capital, Seoul, during the first week of January 1951. Washington's morale plummeted, and senior officers at the Pentagon and National Security Council began serious discussions of tactics for using atomic weapons against the Chinese.

The Korean crisis precipitated an incident halfway around the world that starkly revealed the extent to which the U.S. security policy of the period depended upon obscuring Nazi criminality. The Americans wanted West Germany's military muscle and steel mills as a linchpin for Western European defense against what many feared was an imminent invasion from the USSR. The West German military and much of that country's political establishment balked, however, arguing that America's treatment of Nazi war criminals thus far had been too harsh and had besmirched the honor of the German officer corps.

The price the new German administration wanted for its cooperation in an alliance with the United States was freedom for the convicted Nazi war criminals imprisoned in Landsberg Prison, near Munich. Many West German leaders were insistent that the fifteen Nazi inmates facing death sentences—most of whom were murder
squad leaders—be saved from hanging. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer himself publicly contended that continuing incarceration of these convicts posed what he called a “psychological problem” for the West Germans because imprisonment of certain convicts popular with the West German officer corps “would … put obstacles in the way of future [military] recruitment if people against whom no war crimes have been proved continue to be held in jail.”
²⁸
The chancellor's bland comment was misleading—the Landsberg inmates had, in fact, been tried and found guilty of the murder of at least 2 million people, profiteering from slave labor, massacring American POWs, and thousands of other specific acts of terror—but it is an indication of what the attitudes of high-level West German government officials were at the time.

Following the outbreak of the Korean War, U.S. High Commissioner for Germany John McCloy moved rapidly to resolve the U.S.-West German dispute over the Landsberg prisoners. He hand-picked a legal review commission to advise him on clemency for the inmates, and the group then spent the next six months poring over the various appeals and requests for mercy filed on behalf of the convicts. McCloy's commission refrained from any contact with the U.S. Nuremberg prosecutors, however, and declined to review documentary evidence of specific acts of Nazi criminality that had been brought to light during the prisoners' trials.
²⁹

McCloy announced the recommendations of this task force in January 1951, only a few days after Seoul had fallen to Communist forces. He began by acknowledging the “enormity of the crimes” committed by the prisoners at Landsberg and called for stern measures against them. But he then went on to argue that in some cases there was a “legitimate basis for clemency,” as he put it, for example, when the Landsberg prisoner's sentence “was out of line with sentences for crimes of similar gravity in other cases” or when the convict had had “relatively subordinate authority” during the war, or when other mitigating factors were present.
³⁰

McCloy ruled that five of the criminals, including
Einsatzgruppen
commander Otto Ohlendorf and concentration camp chieftain Oswald Pohl, had to hang. He then substantially reduced the prison sentences of seventy-nine other major Nazi war criminals, most of whom were set free within a few months of McCloy's ruling. The beneficiaries of this act included, for example, all of the convicted concentration camp doctors; all of the top judges who had administered the Nazis' “special courts” and similar machinery of repression;
fourteen of fifteen convicted criminals from the first
Einsatzgruppen
and concentration camp administration trial, seven of whom were released immediately; sixteen of twenty defendants in the second
Einsatzgruppen
mass murder case; and all of the convicted criminals in the Krupp corporation slave labor case, each of whom was released immediately.
³¹

Equally important, McCloy's clemency decisions for the Landsberg inmates set in motion a much broader process that eventually freed hundreds of other convicted Nazi criminals over the next five years. Convicted I. G. Farben executive Fritz Ter Meer put the matter succinctly upon his release from Landsberg a few days after McCloy's clemency. “Now that they have Korea on their hands,” he quipped, “the Americans are a lot more friendly.”
³²

Klaus Barbie was only a small part of these much larger events. But his U.S.-sponsored escape, when taken together with McCloy's clemency of major war criminals and the Nazi utilization programs discussed thus far, points to an important conclusion. By the winter of 1950–1951 the most senior levels of the U.S. government had decided to abrogate their wartime pledge to bring Nazi criminals to justice. The atrocities of the Holocaust had been reduced to just another uncomfortable fact of history that had to be sidestepped in the interests of preserving West German military support for American leadership in the cold war. While nazism and Hitler's inner circle continued to be publicly condemned throughout the West, the actual investigation and prosecution of specific Nazi crimes came to a standstill.

More than thirty years later the maturing of public opinion and a change of government in both France and Bolivia, where Barbie had ended up, led to the capture of Klaus Barbie by Bolivian authorities and his shipment to France to stand trial for crimes against humanity. This in turn led to a decision by the U.S. Justice Department to open its own investigation into the Barbie matter, a move that was motivated at least in part by the fact that new leaks and rumors concerning the former Nazi's work for U.S. intelligence were now surfacing almost daily and receiving extensive play in the world's press.
³³
As noted above, this investigation concluded that the United States had indeed protected Barbie in Europe and engineered his escape but that Barbie was the
only
such Nazi who had been assisted in this fashion.

The U.S. Justice Department's 1983 report on the Barbie escape
finessed the inevitable questions concerning just how many other Nazis might have moved through Monsignor Dragonovic's ratline. By limiting its definition of the U.S. responsibility in this affair to only those persons whom the United States directly sponsored for travel through the ratline, the report ignores the role that the CIC's tacit—and at times active—support had in facilitating Dragonovic's
own
Nazi smuggling work. Taking this tack in the report may have some narrow legal justification—this was, after all, an official Department of Justice study. But this approach obscures the fact that the ratline was actually used for mass escapes of Ustachi war criminals throughout the 1940s, and it effectively hides the extent to which the United States' interest in bringing Ustachi war criminals to justice was obstructed by the CIC's pact with Dragonovic.

Then, while addressing the question of just those ratline travelers who were directly sponsored by the CIC, the study concludes: “No other case was found where a suspected Nazi war criminal was placed in the rat line or where the rat line was used to evacuate a person wanted either by the United States Government or any of its post-war allies.”
³⁴

This statement has the ring of being a straightforward declaration, and it was accepted without question by most of the U.S. media to mean “No other Nazis or war criminals were saved through the ratline.” The Department of Justice was careful, however, to choose the phrase
post-war allies
. The fact is that Dragonovic and the CIC combined to facilitate the escape of a number of Nazi collaborators sought by the Eastern European governments who were
not
U.S. postwar allies.

The thrust of the Justice Department's presentation on this point is directly contradicted, furthermore, by the very documentation that its own study has made public. Agent Lyon, who is now deceased, wrote a brief report on his ratline activities in 1950. It leaves little doubt that a number of those escapees sponsored by the Americans were, in fact, fugitives from war crimes charges. Obtaining false identification and visas for his “visitors,” Lyon states,
“was done illegally in as much as such persons could not possibly qualify for eligibility [for emigration assistance] under the Geneva IRO [International Refugee Organization] charter
. “
³⁵
As noted previously, there were two such groups barred by the IRO charter. Nazis and Nazi collaborators, on the one hand, and common criminals, on the other. At least one American agent attached to the 430th CIC in Austria was engaged in moving such “shipments,” as the clandestine
travelers were called, on a regular basis for more than three years.

Lyon makes it clear that he, Dragonovic, and U.S. officials at least as high as the director of U.S. Army intelligence in Europe were well aware that some of the passengers on the ratline were fugitive war criminals. Dragonovic himself “is known and recorded as a Fascist, war criminal, etc.,” Lyon writes, “and his contacts with South American diplomats of a similar class are not generally approved by U.S. State Department officials.” In a second report, Lyon says, “some of the persons of interest to Father Dragonovic may be of interest to the DeNazification [
sic
] policy of the Allies”—in other words, they are Nazis. “[H]owever … [they] are also of interest to our Russian ally.”
³⁶
Ally
is presumably used sarcastically here, considering this was written at the height of the cold war. According to Lyon, because the Soviets were looking for these Nazis, the program had to go ahead under such secrecy that even most of the CIC had to be kept in the dark about its existence.