General Reinhard Gehlen

This is the first authoritative account of the postwar relationship between General Reinhard Gehlen, a figure unique in the history of espionage, and American intelligence. Eleven years after the defeat of Germany, Gehlen, Hitler's chief of eastern front intelligence, became head of the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) for the democratic West German government of Konrad Adenauer.

The core of his staff in the BND were the same officers who had served with him under Hitler. The instruments for this metamorphosis were agencies of Gehlen's former enemy: U.S. Army Intelligence and the CIA. How did this happen and why? Was there a Nazi connection? This book answers these questions in detail, combining the elements of a gripping novel of espionage with solid scholarship based on U.S. government documents and interviews with former G-2, CIC and CIA officers.




From Publishers Weekly

Lacking an espionage apparatus in Eastern Europe during the early Cold War, the U.S. turned to General Reinhard Gehlen, former chief of Eastern Front Intelligence for Hitler. This highly controversial gamble paid off handsomely as Gehlen, assisted by virtually the same staff that served him during WW II, provided U.S. Army Intelligence and the CIA with reliable information about the Soviet arms buildup. In a coolly objective and well-researched study, Reese reveals the close association between Gehlen and CIA director Allen Dulles and describes how Gehlen's organization ultimately became the official intelligence service of the West German government until 1963, when Soviet agent Heinz Felfe succeeded in wreaking the same sort of havoc that Kim Philby caused British intelligence at about the same time. By the author of Breaking Cover , this authoritative book emphasizes Gehlen's uncanny ability to trim his sails to whatever political breeze was blowing in Germany.

From Library Journal

Reese, whose best-selling Breaking Cover ( LJ 8/80) made public a secret military fund that was used for personal purposes by a string of U.S. Presidents, here turns her considerable journalistic skills to uncovering the truth about how Hitler's former chief intelligence officer became, with CIA support, West Germany's Chief of Intelligence. With meticulous fairness and close attention to detail, Reese carefully describes how Gehlen's skills and knowledge about the Soviet threat to the West in 1945 was considered more important to some in the U.S. government than his at-best checkered past serving the Nazi war machine. Only when Gehlen became embroiled in a political battle with the West German defense minister and then in West German court proceedings concerning Soviet spy infiltration and the leaking of classified documents did the CIA abandon its support of this former Nazi general. A microcosmic and fascinating case study of how the emerging Cold War shaped America's treatment of her former enemy. - Jack Forman, Mesa Coll. Lib., San Diego

Publisher : George Mason University Press
Author : Mary Ellen Reese
Published date : 06/11/1990
ISBN-10 : 0913969303
ISBN-13 : 978-0913969304