Earl S. Browning, an Army counterintelligence officer in World War II, dies at 96 Col. Browning served for much of the war as a Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) officer, including in military campaigns in Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge. After the Nazi regime surrendered in May 1945, he was stationed in Frankfurt, Germany, and tasked with monitoring intelligence activities in the U.S. occupation zone. As the Cold War began, the rise of communist influence throughout Europe - including Germany and neighboring France - was an utmost concern for Col. Browning's unit. He was credited with successfully penetrating the German communist party in Bremen in 1946. Former Nazi intelligence officers and police chiefs once stationed in France began peddling themselves as informants, and Barbie was among them. At the time, Barbie was wanted by the Allies for his alleged involvement in a clandestine organization of former SS officers in Germany. Little was known to the Americans about his stint as Gestapo chief in Lyon, where he ordered the death, torture or deportation of thousands of Jews and French resistance fighters. Because of the chaos of the era, Barbie - later dubbed the "Butcher of Lyon" - easily cloaked the extent of his wartime atrocities. "There was no centralized data bank" of information that would have identified Barbie, said Allan A. Ryan, the former director of the Justice Department's Nazi-hunting Office of Special Investigations who wrote a detailed report in 1983 on the U.S. relationship with Barbie. Records were scattered, incomplete and wrong in many situations. In 1947, Barbie sent word through another CIC informant that he wanted to help the Americans. He impressed several of his handlers as a charismatic and savvy operator, established a network of subinformants and sent back reports that seemed to validate his services. Col. Browning said he was stunned when he learned that Barbie - considered a fugitive by the Allies - had been employed for intelligence work. "It was a shock to me," Col. Browning later told the New York Times. Here he was being looked for - and there he was! He argued for Barbie to be detained for interrogation. But Col. Browning's opponents in the CIC feared that Barbie knew too much about the organization's operations, which included spying on Allies such as the French. Col. Browning briefly prevailed. Barbie was held from December 1947 until May 1948 and was officially dropped as an informant a few months later. But in reality, he worked with American handlers while living at a CIC safehouse in Augsburg, Germany, for the next three years. Col. Browning returned to the United States in August 1949. The next year, according to Ryan's Justice Department report, the French government formally requested that the U.S High Commission for Germany extradite Barbie. The report accused several ranking CIC officers of obstructing justice by deceiving U.S. civilian authorities in Germany about their continued relationship with Barbie and their knowledge of his whereabouts.