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This series is based on some of the more than 3 million files the CIA is declassifying as part of a global effort to unlock the last stash of secrets about World War II war crimes.

'We don't know what we don't know'

COLLEGE PARK, Md. - A memo to the president predicting an attack on Pearl Harbor. A dispatch revealing that Chinese Communists were stealing Japanese nuclear technology. Leaks to the Nazis about plans for D-Day.

This is world history in the raw, a paper trail left not just by presidents, but all their hidden men and women, from the code-breaker, to the slightly unhinged secret agent trying to keep his cover. ''We'll have to rewrite the history of intelligence,'' says John Taylor, an archivist at the US National Archives since 1945.

What has duly impressed Taylor is the wealth of World War II records that a task force has been prying from the white-knuckled grip of the author of this country's epic cover story, the CIA. To some people, those records represent the last body of evidence about how widely US intelligence agencies employed, overlooked, or expedited the escape of Axis figures responsible for hideous crimes against humanity.

''We have to make that information public,'' says former New York congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, a member of the task force, officially known as the Interagency Working Group on Nazi and Japanese War Crimes - known to the relief of many as simply IWG.

The committee, given sweeping authority by an executive order from President Clinton in 1999, has secured the release of more than three million secret documents, including nearly 500,000 since June.

Though such records have been sporadically declassified since 1972, the latest release is remarkable because it contains the names of people, the specifics of missions and the sort of raw field data that the CIA has traditionally withheld purely to preserve its power to keep secrets.

This wildly disorganized cache of papers includes stolen microfilm, fake passports, and photos of spies smiling after they practiced their night skydiving - and occasionally pictures of their bloody corpses after they landed too conspicuously behind enemy lines.

Taylor just shakes his head at the depth of detail that has been added to the 520 miles of shelves at the massively airy Archives II building built seven years ago on 33 wooded acres adjacent to the University of Maryland here. ''I just saw a list of all German agents in Spain, with real names and code names.''

The sheer breadth of the material ranges far beyond the war crimes commission's mandate, which is to oversee the release of any classified information pertaining to World War II atrocities and profiteering.

''It's like when fishermen throw the net in: You get tuna but you also get the porpoises as well as a lot of little stuff,'' says National Archives historian Greg Bradsher, who has been indexing the new information. ''For every folder that deals with a stolen painting, there are five or six about some marching band making a trip to the Soviet Union in the 1960s.''

The Perfect Spy    * Page 1  * Page 2