But in Washington, Elizabeth Holtzman was livid. The Brooklyn congresswoman had been watching the long-playing drama surrounding Soobzokov with keen interest, and she was seething over how it had ended. The CIA’s eleventh-hour discovery of long-buried documents that had saved its ex-spy from deportation seemed almost too convenient to believe. If the 1950s-era documents really were authentic, that seemed almost worse: it would mean that the State Department and the CIA had decided to let into the country an admitted member of the Waffen SS. Either scenario was damning. The CIA sat Holtzman down for a briefing to explain its version of what had happened, but she was not mollified. “This once again raises the specter of connivance and collusion on the part of our government in admitting and providing sanctuary to suspected Nazis,” she fumed. For seven years, Holtzman had been waging a lonely fight in Congress to shine a spotlight on Nazis living in America. She had made more progress than anyone else, but too often, her efforts had fallen into the usual black hole of government inertia: one step forward, two steps back.
