Klaus Barbie, the Nazi war criminal also known as the "Butcher of Lyon," was a paid agent of the German intelligence service BND during the 1960s, according to news magazine Der Spiegel. Barbie served as the head of the Gestapo Nazi police in Lyon, France, during World War 2. After the war he fled to Bolivia and lived there under the name Klaus Altmann. He was recruited by the BND – West Germany’s foreign intelligence agency – in 1965, and was employed by it until the winter of 1966/67.
The BND file on Barbie, whose codename was Eagle, says he was of “complete German attitude” and a “committed anti-Communist." He provided at least 35 reports and was seen as a reliable source. It is not yet known what information he gave the agents. The BND paid him through a branch of the Chartered Bank of London in San Francisco.
After he was recruited, Barbie took over the Bolivian arm of a German company which sold decommissioned weapons from the German military. According to BND records, Barbie was supposed to report whenever the Bolivians ran short of weapons or ammunition.
The BND ended its work with Barbie in the winter of 1966/67, apparently because of concerns that he could be blackmailed by other intelligence services over the murders he committed as a Nazi. In the early 1970s, French Nazi-hunters Beate and Serge Klarsfeld tracked Barbie down in Bolivia and obtained his extradition to France in 1983. He was convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life in prison. He died in 1991.
The revelations about Barbie come only a week after the newspaper Bild cited newly released documents that showed German intelligence services knew that former top Nazi official Adolf Eichmann was hiding out in Argentina eight years before Israeli agents kidnapped him there in 1960. Eichmann was brought to Israel for trial, where he was convicted and executed in 1962.