Dry Bones (42 page)

The documentation unearthed by the IWG leaves no doubt that the relationship between Nazi war criminals and American intelligence organizations—including the CIA—was far deeper and more intimate than formerly thought. For example, current records show that associates of Adolf Eichmann worked for the CIA; a score of other Nazis, including former SS concentration camp personnel, were actively recruited; and at least 100 officers within the Gehlen organization were former SD or Gestapo officers.

The IWG enlisted the help of distinguished scholars and historians to consult during the declassification process. Last May, they released their own interpretation of the declassified material,
U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis
, in which they concluded: “The notion that they [the CIA, Army Counterintelligence Corps, and the BND] employed only a few bad apples will not stand up to the new documentation … Hindsight allows us to see that American use of actual or alleged war criminals was a blunder in several respects … there was no compelling reason to begin the postwar era with the assistance of some of those associated with the worst crimes of the war.

“Lack of sufficient attention to history—and, on a personal level, to character and morality—established a bad precedent, especially for new intelligence agencies. It also brought into intelligence organizations men and women previously incapable of distinguishing between their
political/ideological beliefs and reality. As a result, such individuals could not and did not deliver good intelligence. Finally, because their new, professed ‘democratic convictions’ were at best insecure and their pasts could be used against them, these recruits represented a potential security problem.”

In answer to the question “Can we learn from history?” the IWG’s consulting historians quoted from the conclusion of Turlough Bassante’s
Let the Murderers Be Judged
: “The real question is not whether we can make use of our past to deal with the present and shape the future, but whether we have the courage, vision, and resolve to do so.”

Eat the Moon
by Thornton Van Hull.
(
Forensic Manor Press)
Before his death in 1958, OSS veteran Van Hull deposited his manuscript on a library shelf in the girls’ academy in which he taught. It lay there unread until the school closed and a local bookseller was invited to cart off what he wished. “The dusty binder that tumbled into his hands,” writes military historian John Murray in his introduction, “contained a firsthand account of a botched rescue mission in near war’s end. It’s a small, elegantly told tale filled with the larger truths of what war really involves.” Van Hull’s ground-level view is of ordinary men who do extraordinary things not in service to patriotic abstractions but out of loyalty to one another. Among the memoir’s many notable aspects is Van Hull’s frank description of his homosexuality, in particular his love affair with a fellow OSS agent (identified only as M.), who was captured and killed by the SS. The title is taken from Yeats’s poem, “Brown Penny”: “O love is the crooked thing / There is nobody wise enough / To find out all that is in it / For he would be thinking of love / Till the stars had run away / And the shadows eaten the moon.” Amid the unending torrent of WWII narratives, Van Hull’s is a reminder of the millions of untold stories and tragedies hidden forever beneath the shadows of the last “good war.” (
www.bookblitz.com
)

Cutchogue, New York, 12/30/13:
With a dozen bestsellers behind her—several made into movies—writer Tess O’Keefe might seem ready to sit back and smell the roses. (Or, as part owner of a vineyard on the North Fork, sip chardonnay.) But at age 76, she’s just signed a contract for a series of detective novels featuring private eye Fintan Dunne. “I took the name from real life,” says O’Keefe. “Fintan Dunne was a mentor of mine. He had a wonderful edge about him, a blend of cynicism and humanism, sharpened by a decade on the NYPD and service in both world wars. But my Fintan won’t be a duplicate of the original. He’ll be cyber hip and post-modern, with a Peruvian partner/girlfriend who shares an apartment in Williamsburg.” Dunne makes his debut in November 2014. (
www.newyorkpressgang.org
)

PETER QUINN
is the author
of Hour of the Cat, The Man Who Never Returned, Looking for Jimmy
, and
The Banished Children of Eve
, all available from Overlook. He has worked as a speechwriter for New York governors Hugh Carey and Mario Cuomo, and as the Editorial Director for Time Warner. He is a third generation New Yorker whose grandparents were born in Ireland.

www.newyorkpaddy.com

Jacket photography by National Archives

Author photograph by Don Pollard

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