Reinhard Gehlen
Reinhard Gehlen was a German military and intelligence officer, later dubbed "Hitler's Super Spy," who served the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany, and West Germany, and also worked for the United States during the early years of the Cold War. He led the Gehlen Organization, which worked with the CIA from its founding, employing former SS and Wehrmacht officers, and later became the first head of West Germany's Federal Intelligence Service. In years prior, he was in charge of German military intelligence on the Eastern Front during World War II and later became one of the founders of the West German armed forces, the Bundeswehr.
The son of an army officer and World War I veteran, in 1920 Gehlen joined the Reichswehr, the truncated army of the Weimar Republic, and was an operations staff officer in an infantry division during the invasion of Poland in 1939. After that he was appointed to the staff of General Franz Halder, the Chief of the Army High Command, and quickly became one of his main assistants. Gehlen had a significant role in planning the German operations in Greece, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union. When the Red Army continued to fight after the initial German success during Operation Barbarossa, in the spring of 1942 Gehlen was appointed by Halder as director of Foreign Armies East, the military intelligence service of the OKH tasked with analyzing the Soviet Armed Forces. He achieved the rank of major general before he was dismissed by Adolf Hitler in April 1945 because of the FHO's alleged "defeatism" and accurate but pessimistic intelligence reports about Red Army military superiority.
Following the end of World War II, Gehlen surrendered to the United States Army. While in a POW camp, Gehlen offered FHO's microfilmed and secretly buried archives about the USSR and his own services to the U.S. intelligence community. Following the start of the Cold War, the U.S. military accepted Gehlen's offer and assigned him to establish the Gehlen Organization, an espionage service focusing on the Soviet Union and Soviet Bloc. Beginning with his time as head of the Gehlen Organization, Gehlen favored both Atlanticism and close cooperation between what would become West Germany, the U.S. intelligence community, and the other members of the NATO military alliance. The organization employed hundreds of former members of the Nazi Party and former Wehrmacht military intelligence officers.
After West Germany regained its sovereignty, Gehlen became the founding president of the Federal Intelligence Service of West Germany. Gehlen obeyed a direct order from West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, and also hired former counterintelligence officers of the Schutzstaffel and the Sicherheitsdienst, in response to an alleged avalanche of covert ideological subversion hitting West Germany from the intelligence services behind the Iron Curtain.
Gehlen was instrumental in negotiations to establish an official West German intelligence service based on the Gehlen Organization of the early 1950s. In 1956, the Gehlen Organization was transferred to the West German government and formed the core of the Federal Intelligence Service, the Federal Republic of Germany's official foreign intelligence service, with Gehlen serving as its first president until his retirement in 1968. While this was a civilian office, he was also a lieutenant-general in the Reserve forces of the Bundeswehr, the highest-ranking reserve-officer in the military of West Germany.
Early life and career
Gehlen was born 1902 into a Protestant family in Erfurt and had two brothers and a sister. His father was Walther Gehlen, an officer in the Imperial German Army during World War I, and his mother, Katharina Margaret Gehlen, was a Flemish noblewoman. He grew up in Breslau, where his father, a former army officer, was a publisher for the Ferdinand-Hirt-Verlag, a publishing house specializing in school books. In his youth, Gehlen's main interests were mathematics and horses.He wanted to follow his father's path and become an army officer, despite the recent defeat of Germany in World War I and the reduction in the size of the army. In 1920, at the age of eighteen, Gehlen completed his Abitur and joined the Reichswehr. In 1921 he was posted to the 6th Light Artillery Regiment in Schweidnitz, a town in Silesia near the Polish border, and 1923 he became a lieutenant. He graduated from the infantry and artillery schools. Gehlen received an assignment at the cavalry school in Hanover in 1926, where he spent two years before requesting a transfer, and in 1928 he was sent to back to his original unit in Schweidnitz. There he met a secretary working for the military, Herta von Seydlitz-Kurzbach, and they married in 1931. She was a member of an aristocratic Prussian military family.
After Adolf Hitler rose to power in 1933 there was an expansion of the Reichswehr, including more opportunities for officers to receive promotions. That same year in October, Gehlen began attending the "Commander Assistants Training," the equivalent of the German staff college during the Weimar Republic, and in June 1935 he graduated as second in his class. The following month he was promoted to captain and assigned to the "Troop Office," or what was renamed the German General Staff in 1936. During his early years on the General Staff, in October 1936 he was assigned to the Operations Section, and in the following year he was reassigned to the Fortifications Section. In November 1938 Gehlen was again posted to an artillery regiment.
Second World War
At the time of the Germany's invasion of Poland in September 1939, Gehlen was a major and an operations staff officer in the 213th Infantry Division. It was mobilized for the Polish campaign but did not see any action, being held in reserve. He was still awarded the Iron Cross, second class. In late 1939 he was transferred to the staff of General Franz Halder, the Chief of the Oberkommando des Heeres, the Army High Command. In his early work, Gehlen was once again planning the construction of fortifications, both along the Soviet border and in the west. Halder increasingly relied on Gehlen during the spring of 1940 and he became one of Halder's main assistants. Gehlen was sent as his liaison officer to several German units that were involved in the Battle of France in May 1940, and in October of that year he was assigned to the Eastern Group of the Operations Section, led by Colonel Adolf Heusinger. Heusinger—who incidentally would later work with Gehlen after the war, as the first head of the West German Bundeswehr—also recognized Gehlen's talent as a staff officer.From late 1940 Gehlen worked on operational planning for Germany's movement east. That included the invasion and occupation of Greece and Yugoslavia, as well as the preparations for Operation Barbarossa. In February 1941 Gehlen was described in a report by his superiors as "a fine example of a general staff officer... Great operational ability and a great deal of foresight in his thinking." He was also noted to be very hardworking. His role in Barbarossa was mainly planning for the difficulties of bringing reserves up to the front, separating the areas of the army groups and armies in the invasion, and arranging transportation. For this work Gehlen was awarded the War Merit Cross, first and second classes, in the spring of 1941.
As Operation Barbarossa began and the Red Army continued to fight despite its losses, Halder became upset at his intelligence department for not informing him of the true extent of Soviet military capabilities. In late 1941 Gehlen was being considered to replace Colonel Eberhard Kinzel as the head of Foreign Armies East, the Army Staff section responsible for analyzing the Soviet Union, on the recommendation of Colonel Heusinger. Halder was dissatisfied with Kinzel's performance and was looking for a replacement, though he thought that the 40-year old Gehlen was too young for such an important role and had no previous intelligence background. Heusinger believed that Gehlen was a good manager, and on his advice, Gehlen was appointed the head of FHO on 1 April 1942.
Head of FHO
In spring of 1942, Lieutenant Colonel Gehlen assumed command of the Foreign Armies East after the dismissal of Colonel Kinzel. Prior to that he had little intelligence experience, though he did have interactions with military intelligence, the Abwehr, during his earlier work at the Army High Command, to the point where he received a warning for meddling too much in the affairs of that agency.Before the Wehrmacht disasters in the Battle of Stalingrad, a year into the German war against the Soviet Union, Gehlen understood that the FHO required fundamental re-organization, and secured a staff of army linguists and geographers, anthropologists, lawyers, and junior military officers who would improve the FHO as a military-intelligence organization despite the Nazi ideology of Slavic inferiority.
As leader of the FHO, Gehlen relied heavily on reports from the Max Network from the Klatt Bureau which provided over 10,000 highly accurate reports on Soviet troop movements.
Dismissal, 1945
Gehlen's cadre of FHO intelligence-officers produced accurate field-intelligence about the Red Army that frequently contradicted Nazi Party ideological perceptions of the eastern battle front. Hitler dismissed the gathered information as defeatism and philosophically harmful to the war effort against "Judeo-Bolshevism" in Russia. In April 1945, despite the accuracy of the intelligence, Hitler dismissed Gehlen, soon after his promotion to major general.Preparation for Post-War
The FHO collection of both military and political intelligence from captured Red Army soldiers assured Gehlen's post–WWII survival as a Western anticommunist spymaster, with networks of spies and secret agents in the countries of Soviet-occupied Europe. During the German war against the Soviet Union in 1941 to 1945, Gehlen's FHO collected much tactical military intelligence about the Red Army, and much strategic political intelligence about the Soviet Union. Understanding that the Soviet Union would defeat and occupy the Third Reich, Gehlen ordered the FHO intelligence files copied to microfilm; the FHO files proper were stored in watertight drums and buried in various locations in the Austrian Alps.They amounted to fifty cases of German intelligence about the Soviet Union, which were at Gehlen's disposal as a bargaining tool with the intelligence services of the Western Allies. Meanwhile, as of 1946, when Joseph Stalin consolidated his absolute power and control over Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe as agreed at the Potsdam Conference of 1945 and demarcated with what became known as the Iron Curtain, the Western Allies of World War II, the U.S., Britain, and France had no sources of covert information within the countries in which the occupying Red Army had vanquished the Wehrmacht.