Critchfield, James Hardesty

▪ 2004

      American spymaster (b. 1917, Hunter, N.D.—d. April 22, 2003, Williamsburg, Va.), employed his military, diplomatic, and intelligence skills—and readiness to make moral compromises—on many fronts in the Cold War, including Germany, Iraq, Tibet, and Cuba. Critchfield was a colonel in a U.S. Army assault battalion in World War II and joined the CIA in 1948. He was sent to Germany to act as liaison officer with the Gehlen Organization—a group of ex-Nazi officials led by Gen. Reinhardt Gehlen (formerly the Reich's anti-Soviet espionage chief)—which was forming the core of a postwar West German defense intelligence system. Gehlen's agency proved to be teeming with double agents and war criminals, but Critchfield believed that the risks posed by the Soviet Union were more dangerous and advised the Western governments to proceed anyway. The Gehlen Organization was disbanded and integrated with NATO in 1955. Critchfield was made CIA division chief for the Middle East and was among those who in the early 1960s recommended that the U.S. support the Iraqi Baʿth Party to oppose the threat of communism in that country. Critchfield retired from the CIA in 1975; the agency awarded him two medals for his services.

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