A Useful Enemy
By Robert Gerald Livingston

Why Americans collaborated with an ex-Nazi

This April, Germany's Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst, BND) is celebrating its 50th anniversary. The American secret service works closely with the BND, yet the BND founder's Nazi background did not disturb the CIA. Reinhard Gehlen, a high-ranking intelligence officer in Hitler's Wehrmacht, brought extensive files about the Russian military with him, easing fears about his Nazi past.

The BND has recently been attracting more public attention than ever before, not because of its anniversary but because of revelations that its agents in Iraq have been working with American intelligence. Such collaboration has caused a huge stir in Germany's parliament, the Bundestag, where opposition to America's war in Iraq remains strong.

Close working relations between German and American spy services are anything but new. Cooperation began as far back as 1946, before the Federal Republic even existed. Indeed, it constituted the first institutional relationship between the two countries after World War II. The BND's founder was a brigadier general (Generalmajor) in the German army during World War II, Reinhard Gehlen. Gehlen had commanded the army's intelligence unit on the Eastern Front against the Soviet Union, a unit that had operated under the title "Foreign Armies in the East."

Fully informed as he was about the risky state of Germany's armed forces as the war drew to a close, Gehlen in the spring of 1945, a month or so before the Third Reich's final collapse, took his unit's extensive files about the Russian military, put them into metal cylinders, and buried them at various spots in the Bavarian Alps, where he himself fled after Germany surrendered. That summer he came down from his mountain meadow, turned himself in to the American army, and offered them the files.

Apprehension about Soviet political designs was already growing in Washington. Before taking up Gehlen's offer, however, the American army packed him onto a plane and flew him to the United States. For a year, he was held as a prisoner of war at a base on the Potomac River just south of Washington; he was interrogated in great detail on his vast knowledge of the Soviet military.

In those early postwar days, the U.S. intelligence files on the Soviet Union, which was rapidly becoming the new adversary, were sparse. America had not spied on the Russians during World War II and now desperately sought intelligence.

Brought back to Germany in 1946, Gehlen struck a deal with G-2, the European intelligence branch of the U.S. Army: he would gear up his old organization to collect information on the Soviet Union, the Soviet Zone of Germany and the countries of Eastern Europe, who were becoming Soviet satellites. Of particular interest to American generals was "order of battle" information, that is, data on the disposition, armaments, movements and commanders of the Russian army, particularly of their many divisions stationed dangerously close in the eastern part of Germany.

Such information, obtained mainly by intercepting Soviet communications and interrogating Soviet deserters and German prisoners of war returning from Russia, had been the specialty for years of Gehlen's erstwhile "Foreign Armies in the East."  During the blockade of Berlin (1948-1949), Gehlen's revived organization provided the Americans with real-time data on the movements of Soviet military aircraft which, the Americans feared, might be ordered to interfere with their military airlift to the beleaguered city.

Richard Helms, former head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), who was responsible for Central and Eastern Europe in the early postwar period, makes clear in his memoirs that Gehlen's deal with first the U.S. Army and later the CIA did not foresee his spy organization working for the Americans but in a joint operation with them.

At first, the army funded the organization by selling gasoline, cigarettes and other American goodies on the black market. Soon after the German currency reform in 1948, the CIA assumed funding. The CIA sponsored the Gehlen organization until April 1956, when it was taken over by the German government in Bonn, becoming the Bundesnachrichtendienst.

As early as 1948, Gehlen foresaw the creation of a new West German state and strove then to make sure his organization became its intelligence service. That gradually caused problems with his American counterparts. No intelligence service likes to disclose the names of its agents to another, no matter how close the working relationship might be. That was as true for Gehlen as for any intelligence chief. It later turned out that he had recruited as many as 100 former Nazi party members, SS-men, and even Gestapo operatives for his organization of about 4,000. Besides military information, his organization in the early 1950s began channeling political information to the new German government of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, the quality of which seemed dubious to many in the CIA.

Gehlen in the 1940s and early 1950s laid the basis for what developed into the BND's very close working relationship with the CIA, which staffed large stations in cities like Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, Hamburg and Bonn throughout the Cold War. This cooperation constituted one important pillar of a massive, worldwide American intelligence effort of more than 50 years to divine Moscow's political and military intentions and capabilities. As the current furor about BND collaboration in Iraq demonstrates, the habit of German and American agents working together became deeply ingrained during that half-century and is likely to continue.

..............................................................................................

Robert Gerald Livingston, a senior visiting fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, was the founding director of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at the Johns Hopkins University. His e-mail address is JLiving844@aol.com.

..............................................................................................

This essay originally appeared in the May 2006 The Atlantic Times, as well as the May 26 AICGS Advisor.