Reinhard Gehlen, founder and head of the Bundednachrichtendienst of BNDS, the Federal intelligence service (of West Germany) in the days of the cold war, has enjoyed a publicity remarkable for one who, ostensibly (not to say ostentatiously), has fled the limelight. For in the days of his power he always moved in the shadows. He invariably wore dark glasses and a low that that concealed his face. He approached and left his office by the back door. He allowed false photographs of himself to circulate. And yet, in spite of all these precautions, he has evidently failed in his ambition of anonymity. In his own account of his work, he dwells with apparent envy on the methods of the British secret service, whose reigning head is never known to the public nor named in the press. Could this, he asks, happen with us in Germany? Perhaps not, we may reply, if the head of the German secret service makes himself so conspicuous by his secretiveness; if he boasts of his contact with the media; if he seeks to use the press as an ally, or a weapon, in the internal politics of his department; if he allows his organization to be known by his name; and if, in the end, he publishes his memoirs.
Gehlen himself would say that this publicity has been forced upon him. It was Sefton Delmer’s article in the Daily Express of 17 March 1952, he says, which, by unleashing a ‘flood of further publications’, dragged him into the daylight. The public loves a spy-story; it also loves a mystery-man; and in a period of ideological war there are many who love to have someone to hate. Moreover, Gehlen himself has doubled the intensity of feeling about him by being active in two different, if overlapping, ideological struggles. Once the hunt was up, he could be attacked alike from the West as an old Nazi, employing other old Nazis, and thereby discrediting the ‘democratic’ West German government, and from the East as an agent of American imperialism, using that government, and the old Nazis in it, to continue Hitler’s aims. The former argument is implicit in the article by Sefton Delmar; the latter has been repeated, with fanatical iteration, in the copious writings of Gehlen’s most persistent East German persecutor, Julius Mader. the climax of publicity came when Hermann Zolling and Heinz Hohne published in the German periodical Der Spiegel a series of articles about Gehlen. It was those articles, Gehlen now says, which provoked him into writing, in his retirement, his own memoirs. It is those articles which have been now been expanded into this book [ The Truth About General Gehlen and His Spy Ring, 1972]
Gehlen is certainly a controversial man; but he is also, it must be admitted, a remarkable man. Apart from anything else, he is remarkable for his power to survive. When his name first came to my notice during the war, he was head of Fremde Heere Ost (FHO), the section of the German General Staff which, through the Abwehr or secret service of the Armed Forces, collected military intelligence about the countries of Eastern Europe. He had held this position since the spring of 1942: the failure of the first offensive against Russia had been fatal to his predecessor, whose intelligence reports has been almost invariably wrong. Two years later it looked as if it would be Gehlen’s turn to go. Hitler then decided that the whole Abwehr had failed. He dismissed its chief, Admiral Canaris, and ordered Himmler to create a new unified service under the control of the SS. In the following months, heads rolled throughout the old Abwehr and the SS took over the amputated fragments of its bodies. But Gehlen somehow survived. His own Eastern organization remained intact within the new system, and he himself became the trusted ally of the SS. This was the first of his survivals. It was a pattern that was to be repeated again and again.
It is true that Gehlen was once dismissed, but that dismissal proved a great asset for him. It came three weeks before the end of the war, the outcome of one of Hitler’s rages. It had no practical effect except to provide Gehlen with a small drop of anti-Nazi virtue, which he afterwards greatly increased and used to lubricate his next, and most difficult, act of survival: his transformation from Hitler’s and Himmler’s chief intelligence officer in the East into the Central European expert of the American CIA and, afterwards, the head of the secret service of the Federal Republic of Germany.
The key, of course, lay in the East. If Gehlen had been an intelligence officer on the Western Front, we would probably never have heard from him again. But in the East, it was different. Circumstances there were special. For when the halcyon days of the Grand Alliance ended and the Iron Curtain dropped, cutting off half of Germany and all of Eastern Europe, the Western Allies had almost no sources of intelligence behind it. During the war, inevitably, they had left military intelligence there, like military operations, to their Eastern ally. So, when the Eastern ally became, potentially, the Eastern enemy, they were at a great disadvantage. Their disadvantage was Gehlen’s opportunity. The Germans alone had had an intelligence system which had worked continuously in the vast area now dominated by Russia. Gehlen had controlled that system. He had controlled and used it effectively. The very fact of his dismissal by Hitler was proof of his efficiency, for Hitler had resented the discouraging accuracy of his reports. And finally, the very fact of German division strengthened his hand. For intelligence purposes, a divided country is a natural bridgehead. East Germany was a natural recruiting round for West German agents, which only a system controlled by Germans could fully exploit. The formula could also, of course, be reversed; as Gehlen was to find.
With the visible imminence of the Cold War, the opportunity was clear, and Gehlen’s tactical skill lay in his seizure of it. This book shows, in detail, how he seized it and how, through every crisis, he contrived to preserve his position: how he first persuaded the Americans, then the Federal Government of Dr. Adenauer, that he alone could provide intelligence from the East; and to what extent her provided it. It also shows the price at which these Western governments bought that provision, and the internal maneuvers by which Gehlen ensured the continuation, and expansion, of his personal power.
Part of the price was, of course, that Gehlen was, or had been, a Nazi and was believed to continue into the Adenauer era not only the methods but also the contacts which he had discovered and used when he had served Hitler. Naturally the Russians would seize on this fact, in order to exploit the doubts of Western moralists – although, being themselves realists, they do not apply this severe morality to their own political actions. Allen Dulles and Adenauer would no doubt have had an answer to his objection. Gehlen was certainly a Nazi in his mental structure, and it is clear from his memoirs that even today his only objection to Hitler is that he lost the war. However, most German professionals of his time had this mentality, and it could be argued that what was needed in 1946 was, above all, a professional. The British did not like Gehlen, and preferred to back a more virtuous amateur. The result was not a success. The ruthless Gehlen soon destroyed (with his own aid) the more sympathetic Otto John.
More serious was the objection that Gehlen recruited into his service other Nazis who perhaps, as they were less professional, were more objectionable than himself, and that, as it grew in power, the organization used Nazi methods to protect itself against internal enemies. One of the more interesting parts of this book describes how Gehlen, having at first kept his distance from the ex-SS men, gradually recovered confidence and brought them into his organization -and how, after the disastrous Felfe trial*, he was obliged, in order to avoid damaging publicity, quickly to pay the off.
Why did Gehlen’s power so grow? This book makes the answers quite clear. Whatever extensions he added to it, with his excursions into Asia. Africa, South America, and the Neat East, the center of Gehlen’s system was always, after as during the war, espionage against Russia in Eastern Europe. He lived on the Cold War and on the favor of those American and German governments which believed in the primacy of the Cold War. This need not be held against him, or them. The Colds War was an historical fact, perhaps a historical necessity. If Western governments had not hardened their postures in the decade after the Second World War, Germany and with-it Western Europe, might well have been subverted and conquered by Stalin. This being so, no Western government is to be blamed for taking what may have been the only means of filling a vacant gap. It is legitimate to use Beelzebub to drive out Satan [!!]. What can be deplored, and what those Germans who were determined to clear German politics of the Nazi taint did both deplore and oppose, was the large measure of irresponsible power which these government, in their anxiety, allowed to Gehlen: a man whose philosophy – as shown by his own book – was narrow, whose past was tainted, and whose methods reflected the past. This book shows how Gehlen, by his personal courtship of Adenauer, gained a central position, responsible, through the Secretary of State Hans Globke, to the Chancellor alone. Since Globke himself was widely distrusted for his past services to the Nazi Party, this made Gehlen’s privileged and secret activities even more suspect.
However, the proof of the pudding is always in the eating. Ultimately, any secret service justifies itself by results. How well did Gehlen in fact serve his Western masters? How fully did he justify the huge budget which he obtained, the power and the privilege which he exercised? Gehlen himself, of course, makes large claims; but they are curiously vague and undocumented. Those who read his memoirs will also find that they leave out much. There is, in that book, a curious lack of proportion. Two-thirds of it is spent in describing the author’s history, and that of his organization, up to 1955 – i.e. up to the year in which Gehlen’s organization at last achieved its long-pursued aim and became the official secret service of the Federal Republic. The events of the next twelve years, the period when it acted as such, are squeezed into one chapter; and the rest of the book consists of not very profound generalities. Those who seek a reason for this falling-off in the memoirs will find it, amply documented, in Messrs. Hohne and Zolling’s book. The falling-off in the detail of the memoirs is directly related to the falling-off of the efficiency of the BND.
In its early
days of the Gehen organization certainly enjoyed some successes, which ae here recorded;
but from 1958 the decline in its efficiency is clear. There was a series of small
failures. Then, in 1962-3, came the great failures. First came the ‘Spiegel
affair’ of 1962 – Gehlen’s attempt, in an alliance of convenience with the
periodical Der Spiegel, to run Adenauer’s Defense Minister, Franz Josef
Strauss. This led to a public scandal. Those who enlist the media in their
private battles must expect publicity, and although Strauss was destroyed, so
was the old alliance between Adenauer and Gehlen. Then, in 1963, came the trial
of Heinz Felfe, which showed that Gehlen’s whole organization in East Germany
had been penetrated by the ‘enemy.’ Finally, in 1963, Adenhauer retired and was
replaced as Chancellor by the unsympathetic Ludwig Erhard, who loved neither
Gehlen nor espionage. Erhard even evicted the BND’s liaison staff from the
Chancellery attics: he refused ‘to live under the same roof with these people.’
With the heart of his rotten empire and his external patron gone, Gehlen’s days
were numbered. He was allowed to serve out his time, but the legend had been destroyed
and, after he had gone in 1968, a government inquiry revealed nepotism, the
scandal and the ineptitude that had thrived in a privileged private empire
sustained and protected from criticism by the political conjuncture of the Cold
War.
There is a certain momentum in the
history of the secret services which, I believe, is accentuated by their secrecy
and compounded by their privilege. Espionage is always at a disadvantage compared
with counter-espionage, for the former depends on individual skill in hostile
surroundings, while the latter operates on home ground, supported by the ample
resources of the state. Successful espionage therefore requires continual
regeneration: fresh thought, constant vigilance, continuous adaptation to
changing circumstances. Only thus can it keep the advantage which it may have
gained by initial enterprise. But the privileged secrecy of a secret service,
which can protect its members from the strain, or the stimulus, of regular
criticism, operates in the opposite direction. The chief of the secret service,
who knows that he has this additional protection, is invariably tempted to exploit
it. He is the priest of a mystery, guarded by ritual formulae and sacred taboos,
which it becomes second nature to invoke when success is lacking or small
failures need to be attenuated or covered up. Only great failure, which cannot
be so concealed, can finally break through the protective wall which successive
uncorrected small defects may already have silently rotted.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinz_Felfe
