THE CIA took no action after learning the pseudonym and whereabouts of the fugitive war criminal Adolf Eichmann in 1958, according to CIA documents that shed new light on the spy agency's use of former Nazis as informants after World War II.
The CIA was told by West German intelligence that Eichmann was living in Argentina under the name Clemens, a slight variation on his actual alias, Ricardo Klement. But the agency did not share the information with Israel, according to Timothy Naftali, a historian who examined the documents.
Two years later, Israeli agents ended a long hunt by abducting Eichmann in Argentina and flying him to Israel, where he was tried and executed in 1962.
The Eichmann papers are among 27,000 newly declassified pages released by the CIA to the US National Archives in the wake of growing congressional pressure to open files about former Nazi officials later employed as American agents. The material reinforces the view that most former Nazis gave US intelligence authorities little of value and in some cases turned out to be damaging double agents for the Soviet KGB.
Elizabeth Holtzman, a former congresswoman and a member of the US government panel examining the files, said the documents showed the CIA "failed to lift a finger" to hunt Eichmann and "force us to confront not only the moral harm but the practical harm" of relying on intelligence from ex-Nazis.
The US government, preoccupied with the Cold War, had no policy at the time of pursuing Nazi war criminals. The records show US intelligence officials protected many former Nazis for their perceived value in combating the Soviet threat.
But Ms Holtzman, speaking at a press briefing at the National Archives on Tuesday, said information from the former Nazis was often tainted both by their "personal agendas" and their vulnerability to blackmail.
"Using bad people can have very bad consequences," she said. She and other group members suggested the findings should be a cautionary tale for intelligence agencies today.
As head of the Gestapo's Jewish affairs office during the war, Eichmann implemented Hitler's policy of exterminating Europe's Jews and promoted the use of gas chambers. He was in charge of all German trains carrying Jews to death camps in occupied Poland and once bragged he had personally sent more than 5 million Jews to their deaths on his trains.
Captured by the US Army at the end of the war, he gave a false name and went unrecognised, hiding in Germany and Italy before fleeing to Argentina in 1950.
The New York Times