US Intelligence and Bolivia
After the war had ended, he was recruited by the Western Allies and worked for the British until 1947. After that, in 1947, Barbie was recruited as an agent for the 66th Detachment of the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC). In 1951, he fled to Juan Peron's Argentina with the help of a ratline organized by U.S. intelligence services and the Croatian Roman Catholic priest Krunoslav Draganović. When asked by Barbie why he helped such escapes, Draganović said, "We have to maintain a sort of moral reserve on which we can draw in the future."
Barbie emigrated to Bolivia, where he lived under the alias Klaus Altmann. Testimony of the Italian insurgent Stefano Delle Chiaie before the Italian Parliamentary Commission on Terrorism suggests that Barbie took part in the "Cocaine Coup" of Luis García Meza Tejada, when the regime forced its way to power in Bolivia in 1980.
In 1965 Barbie was recruited by the West German foreign intelligence agency Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) under the codename "Adler" (Eagle) and the registration number V-43118. He had excellent relations with high-ranking Bolivian officials and was known for his nationalist and anti-communist stance. His initial monthly salary of 500 Deutsche Mark was transferred in May 1966 to an account of the Chartered Bank of London in San Francisco. During his stint with the BND, Barbie made at least 35 reports to the BND headquarters in Pullach.
Read more about this topic: Klaus Barbie
Famous quotes containing the word intelligence:
“The methodological advice to interpret in a way that optimizes agreement should not be conceived as resting on a charitable assumption about human intelligence that might turn out to be false. If we cannot find a way to interpret the utterances and other behaviour of a creature as revealing a set of beliefs largely consistent and true by our standards, we have no reason to count that creature as rational, as having beliefs, or as saying anything.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)