Late in his life, Critchfield admitted to a Washington Post reporter, “There’s no doubt that the CIA got carried away with recruiting some pretty bad people.” In a secret 1954 memo, later declassified, the agency acknowledged that at least 13 percent of the Gehlen Organization was made up of former hard-core Nazis. But, to the end of his life, Critchfield insisted that Gehlen was not one of these “bad people.”
