Gehlen Organization and BND

In 1999, to mark fifty years of cooperation, the CIA's head of operations presented the West German intelligence service with a two-volume secret history of how it had been born. Forging an Intelligence Partnership, compiled by the CIA historian Kevin Ruffner, was declassified in 2002 under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act. Its introduction called the Gehlen Organization a "double edged sword": it had given the Americans eyes in the East, but it "boosted the Warsaw Pact's propaganda efforts" and "suffered devastating penetrations by the KGB"^1,4,7.

From Foreign Armies East to Pullach

Reinhard Gehlen had headed Foreign Armies East, the German army staff section that assessed the Red Army, from 1942 until the last weeks of the war. He planned to keep his staff and files together and hand them to the Americans. As Germany collapsed he surrendered to the US Army, and in the summer of 1945 he offered to continue the same work for the United States^2,4.

The Strategic Services Unit, the CIA's predecessor, searched the prisoner-of-war camps for his officers and interrogated them. As the Cold War began in 1946, American officers who lacked recent knowledge of Soviet forces decided to use German experts, "even though some may have been war criminals," as the National Archives put it in 2000. The organization began work in June 1946 under US Army sponsorship and was soon based in a guarded compound at Pullach, south of Munich^3,6,7,2.

The CIA was reluctant to take it on. Evaluations in October 1946 advised against it; by 1949, after an inspection of the operation code-named RUSTY, the agency accepted responsibility, and it sponsored the organization until 1956. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer learned of it in the summer of 1949^1,4,6.

What it did

Every German prisoner of war returning from Soviet captivity between 1947 and 1955 was questioned by the organization, giving the West an up-to-date picture of Soviet industry and military installations. It watched Soviet rail traffic, airfields and ports in East Germany⁷.

A CIA officer who knew the service well reviewed Gehlen's memoirs for the agency's classified journal in 1972. He credited the organization with a good record on military and economic intelligence about East Germany and Soviet forces there, but noted that this "came from observation and not from clandestine penetration." As far as the CIA knew, the reviewer wrote, the Germans "never had a good political penetration in East Germany or anywhere else in the Soviet Bloc"².

Former Nazis and Soviet moles

The organization recruited heavily among former officers of the Wehrmacht, the SS and the SD. Records released under the Disclosure Act show that at least 100 of its officers had been in the SD or Gestapo. The historians on the government's review panel concluded that such men were a security risk as well as a moral liability: their pasts could be used to blackmail them^1,5.

That risk was realized. Heinz Felfe, a former SS officer who joined the organization in the early 1950s, rose to a senior counterintelligence post while working for the KGB. He and two associates were uncovered in 1961 and convicted in 1963. The CIA reviewer of 1972 wrote that the BND's "very real and crushing defeat" had come at the hands of the KGB and was "best personified by the Felfe case." The historian Timothy Naftali, reviewing the CIA files for the government panel, concluded that the Gehlen Organization had been "the back door by which the Soviets penetrated the Western alliance"^5,7,2,1.

The BND

The federal cabinet decided on 11 July 1955 to take over the organization, and on 1 April 1956 it became the Bundesnachrichtendienst, attached to the Federal Chancellery, with Gehlen as president. It was West Germany's only foreign intelligence service. Gehlen led it until he retired in April 1968; his successor, Gerhard Wessel, began a reorganization^6,2,8.

For more than twenty years the BND had no statutory basis and no parliamentary oversight. A 1978 law brought the intelligence services under the scrutiny of a parliamentary control committee, and a BND Act followed in 1990⁶.

The American record opens

The CIA did not acknowledge its relationship with Gehlen until 20 September 2000, in a court filing in a Freedom of Information case brought by the researcher Carl Oglesby. It then released the Gehlen files and Ruffner's history through the National Archives^3,4.

Operations against the BND

5 May 1964 – March 1965 Operation Neptune (1964) In 1964 Czechoslovak intelligence sank chests of blank paper in a Bohemian lake, staged their discovery for television, then filled the story with Nazi files from Moscow to press West Germany over war crimes.