Henry Kissinger Obama's envoy to Moscow was suspected of being a spy for Nazi Germany - Wayne Madsen Report

February 11, 2009 -- Henry Kissinger: Obama's envoy to Moscow was suspected of being a spy for Nazi Germany
publication date: Feb 10, 2009
Download Print
Previous | Next


February 11, 2009 -- Henry Kissinger: Obama's envoy to Moscow was suspected of being a spy for Nazi Germany

On February 6, 2009, the Daily Telegraph of the UK featured a story that 85-year old former Nixon and Ford Secretary of State Henry Kissinger served as then-President-elect Barack Obama's special envoy to Moscow in December to secretly discuss mutual nuclear arms reductions. The choice of Kissinger to act as Obama's envoy shocked many in the progressive community who view Kissinger as a war criminal. Even President Ronald Reagan, suspicious of Kissinger's long-time ties to the Rockefellers, studiously kept Kissinger away from his administration. Kissinger withdrew his name from consideration as President George W. Bush's nominee to be chairman of the 9/11 Commission after widespread protests over his conflict-of-interests.

The Telegraphalso revealed that Obama forged close ties to Kissinger during the presidential campaign and quotes Kissinger as saying Obama could bring about a "new world order" after the Bush administration. Kissinger seemed to be implying that Obama could repair the damage caused by the neocons who infiltrated the Bush administration, yet it is Kissinger who is the granddaddy of all neocons - an individual whose bloody fingerprints are found throughout the world through his overt and covert support for all sorts of nasty fascists and corrupt and murderous dictators. Kissinger's association with Obama during the presidential campaign is even more troubling considering that Kissinger publicly endorsed John McCain for president.

For Obama to choose as his envoy to Moscow an individual who has outstanding bench warrants for his arrest in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and France for his role in not only supporting, bit directing "Operation Condor," which saw thousands of leftists and progressives, incluidng U.S. citizens, "disappeared" by fascist regimes in South America during the 1970s is a slap in the face of every decent American who hoped that with the end of the Bush regime would come a change in U.S. relations with the rest of the world. Sadly, Obama, in choosing Kissinger to represent him, is not much better than Bush when it comes to shoving fascism in the face of the American people.

Kissinger's bloody past has involved the slaughter of millions in Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, East Pakistan/Bangladesh, East Timor, Cyprus, South America, southern Africa, and elsewhere.

Some ten years ago, this editor was contacted by two top investigative journalists for one of Germany's top news magazines who were looking into a story that Henry Kissinger was planted as a refugee by German Abwehr military intelligence in the United States to spy on the German Jewish refugee community that was arriving in increasing numbers in the United States after Adolf Hitler's rise to power. They said documentation was sketchy since it was believed that Reinhard Gehlen, a former German military intelligence Major General, had incriminating evidence against Kissinger either destroyed or hidden after he became the head of the post-war German Federal Intelligence Service, the Bundesnachrichtendienstor BND. Kissinger was very close to one of Gehlen's top agents, Eberhard Blum, who served as the BND's station chief in London for four years and Washington for twelve years. Blum, a Brigadier in Nazi Germany's Abwehr, was recruited personally by Gehlen.

I told the two journalists that I had not heard of the story before and was rather floored by the notion that Kissinger, who is Jewish, could have been a spy for the Nazis.

Kissinger arrived with his parents from Germany in 1938. His parents, Louis and Paula Stern Kissinger, changed Henry's name from "Heinz" to "Henry" because they felt "Heinz Kissinger" sounded "too German." In 1943, the former Heinz Kissinger was drafted into the U.S. Army and was assigned to the 970th Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) as a German translator earning the rank of Sergeant. Kissinger had access to the Army's most sensitive codes used to encrypt classified military communications. After the war, Kissinger was sent to Germany where he was an instructor at the European Command Intelligence School, a position from which he could re-establish any pre-war and war links with former Nazi intelligence officers who had then working for the Americans.

According to America's Secret Army by Ian Sayer and Douglas Botting, Kissinger, a mere Staff Sergeant, managed to evict a German from his villa and supposedly sought out Gestapo and SS officers for arrest. However, the CIC made exceptions, for example, in recruiting "Butcher of Lyons" Klaus Barbie who killed hundreds of French citizens and who was a wanted Nazi war criminal, as an agent for United States intelligence.

According to Sayer and Botting, in Germany, Staff Sergeant Kissinger had a German cook, a German housekeeper, a German secretary, and a German girlfriend. And Kissinger drove around in a Mercedes Benz.

Kissinger returned to the United States from Germany in 1947.

With documentation on Kissinger's alleged Nazi past either destroyed or hidden, there was a seeming dead end to the story of America's most diabolical and dastardly foreign policy official. Until a trip to London's Foyle's bookstore and the discovery of a book titled Hitler's Jewish Spy: The Most Extraordinary True Spy Story of World War II, written in 1985 by Israeli author Michael Bar-Zohar, who also wrote an acclaimed biography of Israel's first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion.

The book describes the exploits of decorated World War I veteran Paul Fackenheim, a German Jew who was an old wartime friend of Hermann Goring but who was interned as Prisoner Number 26,336 at the Dachau concentration camp. Fackenheim was ordered released from Dachau by the Abwehr to be trained as a spy for the Nazis and be parachuted into Palestine to learn about British military preparations to stop Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps from seizing the Suez Canal.

The Abwehr gave Fackenheim a new identity -- Paul Koch -- and trained him how to use German military intelligence code books and radio transmitters as a training center in Brussels. After being transported through Sofia, Bulgaria and Athens, Fackenheim/Koch was parachuted into Palestine on October 10, 1941. He was then captured by the British and imprisoned as a German spy in Haifa.

Fackenheim was disturbed by the British treatment of Jewish immigrants in Palestine, even equating it to the Nazi treatment of the Jews in Germany. The British intelligence headquarters in Cairo was convinced that Fackenheim was only pretending to be Jewish after he was arrested by the British. The British were convinced that they had captured an SS agent in Lebanon and Syria named Paula Koch. Others within British Staff Intelligence Middle East (SIME) were aware of a German intelligence colonel operating a spy network in Lebanon and Syria. Ironically, his last name was Falkenheim, very close to Fackenheim.

The British Information Services circulated pamphlets and other material in the United States claiming that illegal Jewish immigration into Palestine was being run by the Gestapo. Bar-Zohar's book quotes one such British circular: "Many of the German immigrants are disguised Nazis who intend to establish espionage networks in the Middle East." Bar-Zohar, although finding the claim revolting, admits that "Fackenheim seemed to be living proof that it wasn't totally false."

In 1940, the British government rounded up 30,000 German Jewish refugees suspected of being German agents and shipped them to an internment camp on the Isle of Man. Many of these were later shipped to Canada and Australia. MI-5 discovered that one German Jewish refugee, Hans Arnheim, was sending intelligence reports to German intelligence agents in the Netherlands. The New Zealand government also believed that many German Jews entering that country as refugees were Nazi spies. The New Zealand Returned Services Association, the chief veterans group, launched a campaign against spies in the ranks of the Jewish refugees from Germany.

In wartime South Africa, a number of Jews collaborated with the right-wing National Party, which advocated apartheid. The Nationalists supported the aims of Nazi Germany.

After the war, Fackenheim was prosecuted at Nuremberg. Another concentration camp inmate, Josef Jakobs, a Luxemburgish Jew, was freed from his camp, trained as an agent, and parachuted into Huntingdonshire, England in 1941 with espionage gear. Like Fackenheim, Jakobs proclaimed that he was coerced into being a Nazi agent. Jakobs was sentenced to death and shot in the Tower of London in August 1941.

Dr. Ivar Lissner, who was half Jewish, was a valued Abwehr agent. Lissner was a correspondent for the German newspaper Vuelkischer Beobachterbut was actually an Abwehr agent who established a Nazi intelligence network in Manchuria from his bases in Shanghai and Harbin. Lissner was made a member of the Nazi Party and he later claimed he was the Gestapo chief in Japanese-occupied Manchukuo Hans Mosberg was another German of Jewish origin who worked for the Abwehr station in Shanghai.

On March 2, 2007, WMR reported on a Kissinger connection to an intelligence agent for the Japanese during World War II: "Israeli multi-billionaire tycoon Shaul Eisenberg began supplying weapons to Cambodia's genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s. Eisenberg, a close business partner of China's military, was also an early arms supplier to Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot. Eisenberg was active with Asia's Jewish community during World War II, not as an compatriot of the Allies but as a close intelligence and business partner of Japan's Imperial government, which was allied with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in the Axis Alliance. Escaping Nazi-controlled Europe, Eisenberg settled in the Far East, making his primary bases of operation Japanese-occupied Shanghai and Japan itself. In Shanghai, Eisenberg, along with Imperial Japanese military intelligence units, formed units of future Jewish terrorist groups -- the Irgun and the Shanghai Betar (Betar was founded in the 1930s by the Polish Zionist Yakob Jabotinsky, a supporter of Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini, to battle the British for control of Palestine and the ideological godfather of later neoconservative oracle Leo Strauss). The Japanese taught the Jewish paramilitary forces in Shanghai, including some who escaped from Joseph Stalin's Jewish Autonomous Region creation in the Soviet Far East on the Chinese border, how to disrupt colonial occupiers' logistics and command and control elements, strategies that had been successful against the British, Dutch, French, and American colonial authorities in Asia. The Irgun and Betar gangs would eventually use the knowledge gained from the Japanese in their terror campaign against British and Arab forces in Palestine following World War II. Eventually, Irgun and Betar veterans would form the present-day Likud Party, now headed by Binyamin Netanyahu, a noted extreme right-winger . . . As the United States faced imminent defeat in the Indochina War at the hands of the Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian communist-nationalist forces, Eisenberg wasted no time in cashing in on America's defeat and the new power alignments in Southeast Asia. He began selling weapons from his new business partner - China - to the Cambodian forces of Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot. After the defeat of the U.S.-backed military government of General Lon Nol, installed after Richard Nixon's National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, a close friend of Eisenberg, ordered the CIA to overthrow Cambodian head of state Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia fell victim to a bloody civil war between Vietnamese troops backing Pol Pot's one-time ally Hun Sen and the Chinese-backed 'Democratic Kampuchea' government of Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot. It was no mistake that the Gerald Ford administration and Secretary of State Kissinger backed the Khmer Rouge. Kissinger and Ford's long-time Michigan financial backer, industrialist Max Fisher were both financially and ideologically linked to Eisenberg. Ford's supposed "grand moment" -- the repatriation in 1975 of the crew of the U.S. 'merchant' (spy) ship, the SS Mayaguez, from Khmer Rouge forces was a Kissinger- and Eisenberg-designed ruse designed to build up Ford's support in the face of the American military defeat in Southeast Asia That ruse came at the cost of 41 Marines and countless Cambodian military forces and civilians.

Obama White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's father, Benjamin Emanuel, fought with the Irgun terrorists during the British mandate in Palestine.

However, just proving that one of Hitler's spies was Jewish is not proof, in itself, that Kissinger could also have been a Nazi agent. That perception changed, however, when Bryan Mark Rigg, a Marine Corps officer who served in the Israeli army but who is not Jewish, wrote Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers,published in 2002. The book describes the history of the "mischlinge," literally translated as "mongrels," 1200 German soldiers of Jewish descent, including two Field Marshals, including Goring's Luftwaffe deputy Erhard Milch, a war criminal, and 15 generals. Hitler, himself, approved special waivers for hundreds of Jewish officers under Germany's racial purity laws by certifying them as "Aryan," to the utter dismay of racial purists like SS chief Heinrich Himmler. Goring defended Jewish officers in his Luftwaffe and once berated the SS, which did not wish to see such a policy, by declaring, "I decide who is a Jew."

But even Himmler's SS was not averse to using Jews as their own agents. In 1944, the SS used two Jewish agents, Joel Brand and Bandi Grosz, to cut a deal with the Americans and British to exchange 1 million Jews for 10,000 trucks and other supplies. The negotiationd were condcuted without Hitler's knolwedge. In 1943, Jewish leaders in Slovakia, including Zionists, conducted secret negotiations with Gestapo agent Dieter Wisliceny on exchanging imprisoned Jews for money. Wisliceny was a close friend of Adolf Eichmann, later captured by Israeli agents in Argentina and convicted and hanged in Israel.

And there were German Jews who actually supported the Nazi cause, including Max Naumann who led the "Organization of National-German Jews," which welcomed the establishment of Nazi rule in Germany and Arthur Trebitsch, who supported the Austrian Nazis and welcomed the Nazi union of Germany and Austria.

With the question now settled that Kissinger's religion would not have barred him from being recruited as an agent for the Third Reich, the nascent investigation by the two German journalists on Kissinger's alleged past espionage activities appears to have had some merit.

With that in mind, President Obama had a choice between to very different representatives of the American people as his special envoy to Moscow: Kissinger, who may have been an agent for the Nazis who ravaged Soviet Russia, or former President Jimmy Carter, who best reflects the true policies of America enshrined by our nation's founders. Kissinger is at home in the neocons' "homeland" of America while Carter represents the democratic republic of the United States.

Shame on Obama for making the wrong choice.


Readers are solely responsible for the content of the comments they post on this web site. Comments are subject to the site's terms and conditions of use and do not necessarily reflect the opinion or approval of Wayne Madsen Report.com. Readers whose comments violate the terms of use may have their comments removed or all of their content blocked from viewing by other users without notification.