"It is quite an amazing event in history, to think that Hitler's chief of intelligence, Reinhardt Gehlen, became a U.S. Army general by act of Congress and his job was intelligence for the United States. And almost no break in service -- he was a German general right up to a certain day and then all of a sudden he was an American general. But this is all on the record and this is what he was doing. " - L. Fletcher Prouty, Colonel USAF - from a 1989 interview in UNDERSTANDING SPECIAL OPERATIONS And Their Impact on The Vietnam War Era, by David T. Ratcliffe [1]
On Gehlen and the origins of the Cold War:
Spy master Reinhardtt Gehlen, for example, created the rationale for starting the Cold War out of whole cloth. As we now know, had the Red Army actually been intending to continue their drive westward, as Gehlen said they did, they would not have been tearing up railroad track in front of themselves. They relied heavily on rail to transport their troops. Our leaders didn't know; they believed Gehlen, and acted accordingly. [2]In the beginning:
Gehlen had masterminded the Wehrmacht's intelligence gathering on the eastern front and, in 1945, surrendered with his entire archive to General Omar Bradley. When the Americans asked him to summarise this vast hoard he tacked on a proposal for a new organisation to conduct espionage against the Soviet Union and its allies in central Europe, which he would run and Washington would fund.With Moscow repeatedly inquiring whether Gehlen had yet been captured, the spymaster was quietly spirited to the US. Allen Dulles, then with the Office of Strategic Services and later head of the CIA, agreed to the plan and an autonomous Gehlen Organisation sprang to life. It went down like a lead balloon in London, where Guy Liddell of MI5 warned that it might turn out to be the nucleus of a revived Abwehr.
The plan proceeded, however, and, with President Truman's creation of the CIA in 1948, Critchfield was made the agency's link with Gehlen. As he later acknowledged, he quickly discovered that the German had recruited some pretty unsavoury characters, many of whom had been senior officers in the SS or Gestapo. Gehlen had briskly furnished them with false papers so that they could carry on more or less where they had left off.
In spite of this discovery, Critchfield decided that the new enemy was more important than the old and recommended that Washington continue giving its full support to the network. [3]
The release of the Gehlen-related records follows CIA's acknowledgement last September that the Agency had an intelligence relationship with the Gehlen Organization during the Cold War. [4]
Allen Dulles is described as the chief architect of U.S.-Nazi business and spy networks:
[See also the Fletcher Prouty interview on the Dulles brothers: [6]
- spy at the U.S. embassy in Bern, Switzerland, collecting political data for the State Department on Germany and the Austro-Hungarian empire (1916-1918)
- member, U.S. staff, Versailles Peace Conference (1918-1922)
- head, State Department's Near East Affairs division (1922-27)
- worked with brother John Foster Dulles, as lawyer and international finance specialist for Sullivan & Cromwell, a Wall Street law firm in New York (1927-1941). While there, he worked with top Nazi industrialists and played a pivotal role in promoting U.S.-Nazi corporate relations. Allen worked with Prescott Bush (grandfather of President George Walker Bush) and George Herbert Walker (Prescott's father-in-law) who ran Union Banking Corporation for the Nazis. Allen was legal counsel for Standard Oil and the Nazi's I. G. Farben, co-owned by the Rockefellers. (Other U.S. millionaires allied to the Nazis were: William Randolph Hearst Sr, Andrew Mellon [Secretary of Treasury under Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover], Irenee du Pont, Henry Ford and J.P. Morgan. Morgan, du Pont and others were even involved in a Fascist plot to overthrow the U.S. government in 1934.)
- President Roosevelt, realizing Dulles was a traitor, had his New York "Office of Coordinator of Information" wiretapped (1941-42). Some Dulles-linked firms, like Bush's Union Banking Corp., were seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act (1942)
- Berne station chief, Office of Strategic Services (1942-1945). Roosevelt's plan to charge Dulles with treason failed when Dulles was warned and covered his tracks (1944). Roosevelt's plan died with him (1945).
- as OSS station chief in Berlin, Dulles negotiated the agreement with General Reinhardt Gehlen to establish a Nazi spy network within the OSS (1945).
- Dulles helped in the development of the CIA (1947), became its deputy director (1951) [in the Truman Administration] and its director (1953-1961). He oversaw numerous covert operations, such as election rigging in Italy (1948), coups in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) and many other notorious operations ...
- When Union Banking Corp. was liquidated, Prescott Bush and George Herbert Walker received $1.5 million (1951)
- was fired by President Kennedy after the failed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs (1961)
- as a member of the Warren Commission, he promoted the theory that a "lone gunman" assassinated John F. Kennedy (1963).[5]
The CIA, at age 50 - 'Still Hiding Its Original Nazi Sin':
For U.S. policy-makers, the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Central Intelligence Agency on Sept. 8 provides yet another opportunity for congratulatory pronouncements about 'winning the Cold War.' But the American public would be better served if U.S. officials marked the occasion by owning up to the CIA's 'original sin,' which dates back to the spy agency's earliest days: its covert use of a Nazi spy network brimming with war criminals. ... Under CIA auspices, and later as head of the West German secret service (BND), Gehlen was able to influence U.S. policy toward the Soviet Bloc. ...Much of what he supplied exaggerated the Soviet threat and whipped up fears about Russian military intentions. The Nazi spymaster fostered paranoia in the West about a worldwide communist conspiracy. Gehlen's strategy was based on a rudimentary equation: the colder the Cold War got, the more political space for Hitler's heirs. [7]
