The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith has defended its use as a panelist on international terrorism a former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency who, on the October 18 ABC-TV “Nightline” program, supported American utilization of Nazi war criminals. Dr. Ray Cline was a featured participant last Friday at ADL’s news conference on world terrorism. (See December 10 Bulletin).
Abraham Foxman, ADL’s associate national director and head of the International Affairs Division, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, in response to a query, that Cline’s comments on the television program did not disqualify him from speaking on a subject on which he is an expert.
Foxman said he had communicated his displeasure to Cline, but that Cline’s comments on “Nightline” did not “make him a persona non grata” nor “blacklisted forever.” Cline’s expertise on terrorism is “in tune with what we believe,” Foxman said.
CLINE’S STATEMENT ON ABC-TV
Cline, who was the number twoman at the CIA from its inception until his retirement in 1969, said on the TV program that accused Nazi war criminal Arthur Rudolph’s role in a slave labor camp should be overlooked in return for his later contributions as a missile scientist in the American space program.
In answer to “Nightline” host Ted Koppel, Cline said, “I am inclined to think (Rudolph) should have been recognized as having paid whatever debt to society his World War II activities deserved because of his very deliberate effort to contribute his science and technology, which was of great genius to the United States and to the strategic defenses of this country in the troubled period after World War II.”
Continuing, Cline said, “I feel that it was an exceptional contribution to our security interests and I feel that the moral issue of his particular behavior in the circumstances at the end of the war should not be allowed to offset this enormous benefit which we deliberately sought and got from him. I feel a little sad to see him now deprived of his American citizenship and made to feel a criminal as an old man after all these years of trying to redeem a record which many Germans have tried to redeem.”
Two days before the “Nightline” program, the Justice Department had announced that Rudolph, a German-born National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) official, who in 1965 was made director of the Saturn V program that carried the Apollo astronauts to the moon, had quietly surrendered his American citizenship and left the United States for West Germany.
This precluded him from facing charges here that he had persecuted slave laborers at Dora-Nordhausen, a Nazi concentration camp and rocket factory in which one-third to one-half of the 60,000 prisoners in the camp died because of inhumane conditions under which they were forced to work.
To shore up his defense of Rudolph, who managed the slave labor rocket factory, Cline on the “Nightline” program brought up the name of Reinhard Gehlen whom he defended and said he “knew well.” Gehlen was the Nazi chief of Wehrmacht intelligence on the Russian front who later ran the CIA’s anti-Soviet sabotage operation in Europe. He ran scores of behind-the-lines terror operations against the occupied Soviet peoples, and in particular against the partisans.
JURIST CRITICIZES U.S. UTILIZATION OF FORMER NAZIS
Prof. John Fried, who was Special Legal Consultant to the judges of the United States at the war crimes trials in Nuremberg, said about the U.S. utilization of Rudolph in the space program and about Cline’s defense of this: “As a general moral proposition, one should not contaminate oneself by using such malodorous persons. It is very unsavory to use people whose deeds we all condemn. To give the impression that for our defense program we need such people (Rudolph) is to demean U.S. science and scientists.”
Brooklyn District Attorney and former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, who led Congressional efforts to bring Nazi war criminals living in the U.S. to justice, told the JTA:
“I think it is wrong for the Jewish community to give a platform to a person who condones the murders of Arthur Rudolph. Rudolph was involved in working more than 20,000 human beings to death. Cline’s statement that Rudoph’s expertise was necessary is untrue. Rudolph was not a scientist. Cline’s thinking is that the end justifies the means. Under his theory, perhaps no one should have been tried at Nuremberg, and instead they should have been brought here to work on our space program.”
Nazi war criminal expert Charles Allen, Jr., who faced down Cline on the “Nightline” program, said of his inclusion in the ADL panel, “I question the competence, motivation and intentions of whomever at the ADL was responsible for selecting Ray Cline as a so-called Internationally known expert on terrorism. He was completely exposed on the ‘Nightline’ program as a blatant apologist for his CIA’s utilization of two major Nazi war criminals, namely Gehlen and Rudolph. If these two aren’t international terrorists, I don’t know who is.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
