Refused permission to immigrate to the United States because of his Nazi past, he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency in the early 1950s.

Aleksandras Lileikis was born on 10 June 1907 to a peasant family in Paprūdžiai [lt] in the present-day Kelmė District Municipality.

[4] In August 1941, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union and German occupation of Lithuania, he returned to Lithuania and reorganized the Lithuanian Security Police in Vilnius (about 130 men) on Gestapo lines according to instructions he received in Germany, complete with a special division (Komunistų-Žydų Skyrius) for dealing with "Jews and Communists".

For example, a report from 16 February to 21 March 1942 details that the security police in Vilnius arrested 319 people and 137 of them were sent to Ponary: 73 Jews, 23 Communists, 14 members of the Polish resistance, 20 document counterfeiters, and 7 spies.

The duties related to non-Jewish groups increased as the number of Jews in the Vilna Ghetto dwindled and the anti-Nazi resistance grew.

[6] Eli Rosenbaum of the Office of Special Investigations (OSI), part of the Department of Justice, described Lileikis as "a senior-level perpetrator of the Holocaust".

[14] He was recruited for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1952 when he was living in Munich, described as a member of the Lithuanian National Union.

Although the CIA passed negative information to United States immigration authorities, his application was accepted without explanation.

[18] In late 1982, Lileikis was mentioned in a cable from Berlin as a potential war criminal and head of the Lithuanian Security Police, who had possible connections to Einsatzkommando 3, part of the Einsatzgruppen.

[23] In late 1994, the OSI opened civil denaturalization proceedings against him, seeking to strip Lileikis of his United States citizenship under Section 340(a) of the Immigration and Naturalization Act,[24] which requires United States district attorneys to open civil proceedings against naturalized citizens suspected of lying on their immigration paperwork.

[1][33] The judge noted that Lileikis was "attempting to turn the classic Nuremberg defense on its head by arguing that 'I was only issuing orders.'"

[35] In 1997, he told the Lithuanian newspaper Respublika that "All of us were collaborators—the whole nation, since it was acting according to Nazi laws" and acknowledged that he had made "mistakes".

[21] Lileikis published a memoir in Lithuanian before his death, which is a useful source on his life if not "entirely accurate" on his World War II activities.

At the time, the country sought membership in NATO and the United States asserted that prosecution of Lileikis and other war criminals would be strong evidence of adherence to "western values," a prerequisite to joining the alliance.

Three special laws were passed in order to enable continuing prosecution of Lileikis and his former deputy Gimžauskas[1] (who had left the United States in 1995, facing denaturalization proceedings).

[1] He was questioned over video on 23 June 2000 but after twenty minutes the proceedings were interrupted by an attending doctor and Lileikis was taken to a hospital.

[21] The Simon Wiesenthal Center accused Lithuanian authorities of deliberately prolonging the trial in hopes that Lileikis would die of natural causes before he could be convicted.

[1][42] His funeral at the Vaiguva [lt] cemetery was attended by about a hundred people, including Mindaugas Murza, a radical nationalist.