Sayer, Ian and Botting, Douglas. America's Secret Army: The Untold Story of
the Counter Intelligence Corps. New York: Franklin Watts, 1989. 400 pages.
The U.S. Army's Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) served in World War I,
World War II, and Korea, but the public first heard of it in 1983. Nazi
war criminal Klaus Barbie was being extradited from Bolivia to France and
his picture was in the news. College professor Erhard Dabringhaus saw the
picture and dialed the local TV station in Sarasota, Florida to tell them
that he was the agent who had run Barbie in 1949 when they were both
employed by CIC in Germany. It seemed that another window was slowly
opening on secret U.S. history. Other CIC agents during and shortly after
the war included Henry Kissinger, J.D. Salinger, and Richard Helms.
Sayer and Botting are experts on Nazi history. For this book they
gained exclusive access to CIC archives and corresponded with dozens of
former agents. Although well-written, the book tends to romanticize the
history of CIC, perhaps as an antidote to all the negative 1983 publicity.
This is probably why the authors enjoyed so much official cooperation in
the first place. But as the only book available on the CIC "big picture,"
we take what we can get. It has just 20 pages on Barbie and is not very
concerned with CIC's use of ex-Nazis, but Dabringhaus has written a book
of his own ("Klaus Barbie", Washington: Acropolis Books, 1984).
ISBN 0-531-15097-6
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