So What Really Goes On In Washington?

Well hell, how about things like this, and since this obviously went on, way back when, (WWII) I wonder if things improved or maybe became worse..

The Secret Treaty of Fort Hunt
An article by Carl Oglesby
William Shirer closed his 1960 masterpiece, The Rise and Fall of the Third
Reich, with the judgment that the Nazi regime “had passed into history,”1 but we
cannot be so confident today. On the contrary, the evidence as of 1990 is that
World War II did not end as Shirer believed it did, That Nazism did not surrender
unconditionally and disappear, that indeed it finessed a limited but crucial victory
over the Allies, a victory no less significant for having been kept a secret from all
but the few Americans who were directly involved.
The Odessa and its Mission
Hitler continued to rant of victory, but after Germany’s massive defeat in the
battle of Stalingrad in mid-January 1943, the realists of the German General Staff
(OKW) were all agreed that their game was lost. Defeat at Stalingrad meant, at a
minimum, that Germany could not win the war in the East that year. This in turn
means that the Nazis would have to keep the great preponderance of their
military forces tied down on the eastern front and could not redeploy them to the
West, where the Anglo-American invasion of Italy would occur that summer.
Apparently inspired by the Soviet victory, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt
and Prime Minister Winston Churchill announced at Casablanca, on January 24,
1943, their demand for Germany’s unconditional surrender and the complete de-
Nazification of Europe.2
Within the German general staff two competing groups formed around the
question of what to do: one led by Heinrich Himmler the other byMartin
Bormann.3
Himmler was chief of the SS (Schutzstaffel, “protective echelon”), the
blackshirted core of the Nazi party that emerged as Hitler’s bodyguard in the late
1920s and grew into the most powerful of the Nazi political institutions. After the
failure of the attempted military coup of July 20, 1944, which wounded but did
not kill Hitler, the SS seized all power and imposed a furious blood purge of the
armed services in which some seven thousand were arrested and nearly five
thousand.4 The SS was at that point the only organ of the Nazi state.
Himmler’s plan for dealing with the grim situation facing Nazism found its
premise in Hitler’s belief that the alliance between “the ultra-capitalists” of the
U.S. and “the ultra-Marxists” of the Soviet Union was politically unstable. “Even
now they are at loggerheads,” said Hitler. “If we can now deliver a few more
blows, this artificially bolstered common front may suddenly collapse with a
gigantic clap of thunder.”5 Himmler believed that this collapse would occur and
that the U.S. would then consider the formation of a new anti-soviet alliance with
Nazi Germany. The Nazis Would then negotiate “a separate peace” with the
United States, separate from any peace with the USSR, with which Germany
would remain at war, now joined against the Soviets by the United States.
But Martin Bormann, who was even more powerful than Himmler, did not accept
the premise of the separate-peace idea. Bormann was an intimate of Hitler’s, the
deputy fuhrer and the head of the Nazi Party, thus superior to Himmler in rank.
Bormann wielded additional power as Hitler’s link to the industrial and financial
cartels that ran the Nazi economy and was particularly close to Hermann
Schmitz, chief executive of I.G. Farben, the giant chemical firm that was Nazi
Germany’s greatest industrial power.
With the support of Schmitz, Bormann rejected Himmler’s separate-peace
strategy on the ground that it was far too optioptimistic.6 The Allied military
advantage was too great, Bormann believed, for Roosevelt to be talked into a
separate peace. Roosevelt, after all, had taken the lead in proclaiming the Allies’
demand for Germany’s unconditional surrender and total de-Nazification.
Bormann reasoned, rather, that the Nazi’s best hope of surviving military defeat
lay within their own resources, chief of which was the cohesion of tens of
thousands of SS men for whom the prospect of surrender could offer only the
gallows.
Bormann and Schmitz developed a more aggressive self-contained approach to
the problem of the looming military defeat. the central concept of which was that
large numbers of Nazis would have to leave Europe and at least for a time, find
places in the world in which to recover their strength. There were several
possibilities in Latin America, most notably Argentina and Paraguay; South
Africa, Egypt, and Indonesia were also attractive rear areas in which to retreat.7
After the German defeat in the battle of Normandy in June 1944, Bormann took
the First external steps toward implementing concrete plans for the Nazis’ great
escape.
An enormous amount of Nazi treasure had to be moved out of Europe and made
safe. This treasure was apparently divided into several caches, of which the one
at the Reichsbank in Berlin included almost three tons of gold (much of it the socalled
tooth-gold from the slaughter camps) as well as silver, platinum, tens of
thousands of carats of precious stones, and perhaps a billion dollars in various
currencies.8
There were industrial assets to be expatriated, including large tonnages of
specialty steel and certain industrial machinery as well as blue-prints critical to
the domination of certain areas of manufacturing.
Key Nazi companies needed to be relicensed outside Germany in order to escape
the reach of war-reparations claims.
And tens of thousands of Nazi war criminals, almost all of them members of the
SS, needed help to escape Germany and safely regroup in foreign colonies
capable of providing security and livelihoods.
For help with the first three of these tasks, Bormann convened a secret meeting
of key German industrialists on August 10, 1944, at the HotelMaison Rouge in
Strasbourg.9 One part of the minutes of this meeting states:
The [Nazi] Party is ready to supply large amounts of money to those
industrialists who contribute to the post-war organization abroad. In
return, the Party demands all financial reserves which have already been
transferred abroad or may later be transferred, so that after the defeat a
strong new Reich can be built.10
The Nazi expert in this area was Hitter’s one-time financial genius and Minister
of the Economy, Dr. Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, available to Bormann
even though he was in prison on suspicion of involvement in the anti-Hitler coup
of 1944. According to a U.S. Treasury Department report of 1945, at least 750
enterprises financed by the Nazi Party had been set up outside Germany by the
end of the war. These firms were capable of generating an annual income of
approximately $30 million, all of it available to Nazi causes.11 It was Schacht’s
ability to finesse the legalities of licensing and ownership that brought this
situation about.12
Organizing the physical removal of the Nazis’ material assets and the escape of
SS personnel were the tasks of the hulking Otto Skorzeny, simultaneously an
officer of the SS, the Gestapo and the Waffen SS as well as Hitler’s “favorite
commando.”13 Skorzeny worked closely with Bormann and Schacht in
transporting the Nazi assets to safety outside Europe and in creating a network of
SS escape routes (“rat lines”) that led from all over Germany to the Bavarian city
of Memmingen, then to Rome, then by sea to a number of Nazi retreat colonies
set up in the global south.
The international organization created to accommodate Bormann’s plans is most
often called “The Odessa,” a German acronym for “Organization of Veterans of
the SS.” It has remained active as a shadowy presence since the war and may
indeed constitute Nazism’s most notable organizational achievement. But we
must understand that none of Bormann’s, Skorzeny’s, and Schacht’s well-laid
plans would have stood the least chance of success had it not been for a final
component of their organization, one not usually associated with the Odessa at all
but very possibly the linchpin of the entire project.
Enter Gehlen
This final element of the Odessa was the so-called Gehlen Organization (the
Org), the Nazi intelligence system that sold itself to the U.S. at the end of the
war. It was by far the most audacious, most critical, and most essential part of the
entire Odessa undertaking. The literature on the Odessa and that on the Gehlen
Organization, however, are two different things. No writer in the field Of Nazi
studies has yet explicitly associated the two, despite the fact that General
Reinhard Gehlen was tied politically as well as personally with Skorzeny and
Schacht. Moreover, Gehlen’s fabled post-war organzation was in large part
staffed by SS Nazis who are positively identified with the Odessa, men such as
the infamous Franz Alfred Six and Emil Augsburg of the Wannsee Institute. An
even more compelling reason for associating Gehlen with the Odessa is that,
withought his organization as a screen, the various Odessa projects would have
been directly exposed to American intelligence. If the Counter Intelligence Corps
(CIC) and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) had not been neutralized by the
Gehlen ploy, the Odessa’s great escape scheme would have been discovered and
broken up.
At 43, Brigadier General Reinhard Gehlen was a stiff, unprepossessing man of
pounds when he presented himself for surrender at the U.S. command center in
Fischhausen. But there was nothing small about his ego. “I am head of the
section Foreign Armies East in German Army Headquarters,” he announced to
the GI at the desk. “I have information to give of the highest importance to your
government.” The GI was not impressed, however, and Gehlen spent weeks
stewing in a POWcompound before an evident Soviet eagerness to find him
finally aroused the Americans’ attention.14
Gehlen became chief of the Third Reich’s Foreign Armies East (FHO), on April
1, 1942. He was thus responsible for Germany’s military intelligence operations
throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. His FHO was connected in this
role with a number of secret fascist organizations in the countries to Germany’s
east. These included Stepan Bandera’s “B Faction” of the Organization of
Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN/B),15 Romania’s Iron Guard,16 the Ustachis of
Yugoslavia,17 the Vanagis of Latvia18 and, after the summer of 1942, “Vlassov’s
Army,”19 the band of defectors from Soviet Communism marching behind
former Red hero General Andrey Vlassov. Later on in the war, Gehlen placed
one of his top men in control of Foreign Armies West, which broadened his
power; and then after AdmiralWilhelm Canaris was purged and his Abwehr
intelligence service cannibalized by the SS, Gehlen became in effect Nazi
Germany’s over-all top intelligence chief.
The Great Escape
In December 1943, at the latest, Gehlen reached the same conclusion about the
war that had come upon Bormann, Schacht, Skorzeny, and Himmler. Germany
was losing and could do nothing about it. Several months later, Gehlen says, he
began quietly discussing the impending loss with a few close associates. As he
writes in his memoir: “Early in-October 1944 I told my more intimate colleagues
that I considered the war was lost and we must begin thinking of the future. We
had to think ahead and plan for the approaching catastrophe.”21
Gehlen’s strategic response to Gotterdammerung was a kind of fusion of
Himmler’s philosophy with Bormann’s more pessimistic Odessa line: “My view,”
he writes, “was that there would be a place even for Germany in a Europe
rearmed for defense against Communism. Therefore we must set our sights on
the Western powers, and give ourselves two objectives: to help defend against
Communist expansion and to recover and reunify Germany’s lost territories.”22
Just as Bormann, Skorzeny, and Schacht were beginning to execute their escape
plans, so too was Gehlen: “Setting his sights on the Western powers,” and in
particular on the United States, Gehlen pursued the following strategic rationale:
When the alliance between the United States and the USSR collapsed, as it was
bound to do upon Germany’s defeat, the United States would discover a piercing
need for a top-quality intelligence service in Eastern Europe and inside the Soviet
Union. It did not have such a service of its own, and the pressures of erupting
East-West conflict would not give it time to develop one from scratch. Let the
United States therefore leave the assets assembled by Gehlen and the FHO intact.
Let the United States not break up Gehlen’s relationship with East European
fascist groups. Let the United States pick up Gehlen’s organization and put it to
work for the West, the better to prevail in its coming struggle against a Soviet
Union soon to become its ex-ally.
Gehlen brought his top staff people into the planning for this amazing proposal.
Together, during the last months of the war, while Hitler was first raging at
Gehlen for his “defeatist” intelligence reports, then promoting him to the rank of
brigadier general, then at last firing him altogether (but promoting into the FHO
directorship one of Gehlen’s co-conspirators), Gehlen and his staff carefully
prepared their huge files on East Europe and the Soviet Union and moved them
south into the Bavarian Alps and buried them. At the same time, Gehlen began
building the ranks of the FHO intelligence agents. The FH0 in fact was the only
organization in the whole of the Third Reich that was actually recruiting new
members as the war was winding down.23 SS men who knew they would be in
trouble when the Allied forces arrived now came flocking to the FHO, knowing
that it was the most secure place for them to be when the war finally ended.24
When Gehlen’s plans were complete and his preparations all concluded, he
divided his top staff into three separate groups and moved them (as Skorzeny was
doing at the same time) into prearranged positions in Bavaria. Gehlen himself
was in place before the German surrender on May 7, hiding comfortably in a
well-stocked chalet in a mountain lea called MiseryMeadow. Besides Gehlen,
there were eight others in the MiseryMeadow group, including two wounded
men and three young women. For three weeks, maintaining radio contact with
the two other groups, Gehlen and his colleagues stayed on the mountain, waiting
for the American army to appear in the valley far below. “These days of living in
the arms of nature were truly enchanting,” he wrote. “We had grown accustomed
to the peace, and our ears were attuned to nature’s every sound.”25
Destruction of the OSS
Gehlen was still communing with nature when William Donovan, chief of the
Office of Strategic Services (OSS), arrived in Nuremberg fromWashington,
dispatched by the new president to assist Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson.
Harry S. Truman had made Jackson the United States’s chief prosecutor with the
InternationalMilitary Tribunal (IMT), established to try the Nazis’ principal
military leaders. Donovan’s OSS was to function as an investigative arm of the
IMT.
By the last half of the war if not before, President Roosevelt and Donovan were
convinced that the U.S. needed a permanent intelligence service and that this
service, like the OSS, should be civilian rather than military. They were
convinced too that the OSS should be its foundation. On October 31, 1944,
Roosevelt directed Donovan to prepare a memo on how such a service should be
organized.26
Donovan consulted on this assignment with his colleague Allen Dulles, a force
unto himself as wartime chief of OSS operations in Bern. Dulles advised
Donovan to placate the military by proposing that the new agency be placed
automatically under military command in time of war.27 Donovan’s proposal
incorporated this idea,28 but only in order to state all the more strongly the case
for civilian control and for making the OSS the basis of the new organization. As
he wrote in his memo to Roosevelt of November 18, 1944, “There are commonsense
reasons why you may desire to lay the keel of the ship at once…. We now
have [in the OSS] the trained and specialized personnel needed for such a task,
and this talent should not be dispersed.”29
Donovan proposed establishment of a civilian intelligence service responsible
directly to the President and the Secretary of State, the chief mission of which
would be to support the President in foreign policy. Except for the civilian
Secretaries ofWar and the Navy, Donovan’s plan did not even include a place for
military representation on the advisory board, and he was careful to specify that
the advisory board would merely advise and not control. The new service was to
be all-powerful in its field, being responsible for “coordination of the functions
of all intelligence agencies of the Government.” The Donovan intelligence
service, in other words, would directly and explicitly dominate the Army’s G-2
and the Navy’s ONI.30
Naturally, therefore, the Donovan plan drew an intense attack from the military.
One G-2 officer called it “cumbersome and Possibly dangerous.”31 Another
referred to the OSS as “a bunch of faggots.”32 Nor was the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover
silent. Hoover had fought creation of the OSS perhaps more bitterly than the
military and had insisted throughout the war on maintaining an FBI intelligence
network in Latin America despite the fact that this was supposed to be OSS
turf.33
Certain elements within Army intelligence were not only opposed to Donovan’s
plan but were also beginning to formulate their own notions of what a post-war
intelligence system should be like.
Roosevelt sent the Joint Chiefs of Staff ultra-secret copies of Donovan’s proposal
along with Roosevelt’s own draft executive order to implement it. On January 1,
1945, the Chiefs formally reported to Roosevelt their extreme dissatisfaction with
this scheme and leaked Donovan’s memo to four right-wing newspapers, which
leapt to the attack with blaring headlines accusing FDR and Donovan of
conspiring to create “a super Gestapo.” This attack put the Donovan plan on hold,
and the death of FDR on April 12, 1945 destroyed it.34
In earlyMay 1945, president for less than a month, Truman made the OSS the
American component of the investigative arm of the IMT. It is one of the
fascinating conjunctions of this story that Donovan should have left for
Nuremberg just as Gehlen was coming down from his mountain. It is one of its
riper ironies that Donovan would soon resign from Jackson’s staff in a
disagreement over trying German officers as war criminals, which Donovan
objected to but Jackson and Truman sup- ported.35 Had Donovan lent his
energies to the trial of Nazis within the German officer corps, he might have
confronted the very adversaries who would shortly take his place in the
American intelligence system, not only militarizing it, but Nazifying it as well.
Gehlen Makes his Move
Gehlen had been on the mountain for exactly three weeks and the war had been
over for almost two weeks when he decided on May 19 that it was time to make
contact. He left the three women and the two wounded men at MiseryMeadow
and with his four aides began the decent to the valley town of Fischhausen on
Lake Schliersee.
On the same day Soviet commissioners far to the north at Flensburg demanded
that the United States hand over Gehlen as well as his files on the USSR. This
was the first the U.S. command had heard of Gehlen.36
Gehlen and company took their time, staying three days with the parents of one
of his aides and communicating by radio with those who had remained at Misery
Meadow. On May 22, Gehlen at last decided the moment was right. He and his
aides marched into the Army command center and represented themselves to the
desk officer, a Captain John Schwarzwalder, to whom Gehlen spoke his prepared
speech:
“I am head of the Section Foreign Armies East in German Army headquarters. I
have information to give of the highest importance to your government.”
Schwarzwalder had Gehlen and his group jeeped to Miesbach where there was
a[n] OSS detachment. There Gehlen once again gave his speech, this time to a
Captain Marian Porter: “I have information of the greatest importance for your
supreme commander.” Porter replied, “So have they all,” and shunted him and
his cohorts off to the prison camp at Salzburg.
Gehlen’s disappointment at this reception was keen and his biographers all say he
never forgot it, “lapsing,” as one puts it, “into near despair” as he “presented the
strange paradox of a spy-master thirsting for recognition by his captors.”37
Recognition was inevitable, however, since the CIC was trying to find him. By
mid June at the latest, his name was recognized by a G-2 officer, Colonel
William H. Quinn, who had Gehlen brought to Augsburg for his first serious
interrogation. Quinn was the first American to whom Gehlen presented his
proposal and told of his staff dispersed at several camps in the mountains as well
as the precious buried archives of the FHO. Unlike Captain Porter, Colonel
Quinn was impressed. He promptly passed Gehlen up the command chain to
General Edwin L. Sibert.
Sibert later recalled, “I had a most excellent impression of him at once.” Gehlen
immediately began educating him as to the actual aims of the Soviet Union and
its display of military might.” As Sibert told a journalist years later, “With her
present armed forces potential, he [Gehlen] continued, Russia could risk war with
the West and the aim of such a war would be the occupation ofWest
Germany.”38
Acting without orders, Sibert listened to Gehlen for several days before
informing Eisenhower’s chief of staff, GeneralWalter Bedell Smith.39 Smith and
Sibert then continued to develop their relationship with Gehlen secretly, choosing
not to burden Eisenhower with knowledge of what they were doing “in order not
to compromise him in his relations with the Soviets.”40 Eisenhower in fact had
strictly forbidden U.S. fraternization with Germans.
Gehlen was encouraged to resume contact with his FHO comrades who were still
at large in Bavaria, releasing them from their vow of silence. Gehlen was
sufficiently confident of his American relationships by this time that he dug up
his buried files and, in special camps, put his FH0 experts to work preparing
detailed reports on the Red Army for his American captors. Well before the end
of June he and his comrades were “discharged from prisoner of war status so that
we could move around at will.”42 They were encouraged to form a unit termed a
“general staff cell” first within G-2′s Historical Research Section, then later in the
Seventh Army’s Intelligence Center in Wiesbaden, where they worked in private
quarters and were treated as VIPs.43
Indeed, a partly declassified CIA document recapitulated this story in the early
1970s, noting at this time:
Gehlen met with Admiral Karl Dognitz, who had been appointed by Hitler as his
successor during the last days of the Third Reich. Gehlen and the Admiral were
now in a U.S. Army VIP prison camp in Wiesbaden; Gehlen sought and received
approval from Doenitz too!44
In other words, the German chain of command was still in effect, and it approved
of what Gehlen was doing with the Americans.
Gehlen’s biographers are under the impression that it took six weeks for someone
in European G-2 to notice and recognize Gehlen in the POWcage, that Sibert did
not tell Smith about finding him until the middle of August, and that it was much
later still before Sibert and Smith conspired to circumvent Eisenhower to
communicate their excitement about Gehlen to someone at the Pentagon
presumably associated with the Joint Chiefs of Staff.45 But documents released in
the 1980s show that this part of Gehlen’s story raced along much more quickly.
Already on June 29, in fact, the Pentagon had informed Eisenhower’s European
command that the War Department wanted to see Gehlen in Washington.46
It was a fast time. By no later than August 22, one of Gehlen’s top associates,
Hermann Baum was forming what would become the intelligence and
counterintelligence sections of Gehlen’s new organization. Gehlen himself, with
retinue, was departing for Washington in General Bedell Smith’s DC-3 for highlevel
talks with American military and intelligence officials. And the whole
concept of the deal he was about to offer his conquerors had been approved by a
Nazi chain of command that was still functioning despite what the world thought
and still does think was the Nazis’ unconditional surrender.47
Gehlen arrived in Washington on August 24 with six of his top FHO aides and
technical experts in tow.48 World War II had been over about a week, the war in
Europe about three and a half months.
The Secret Treaty of Fort Hunt
As Gehlen and his six men were en route from Germany to Washington,
Donovan’s OSS troubles became critical. On August 23, AdmiralWilliam Leahy,
chief of the JCS, the President’s national security adviser and a man who
despised Donovan, advised Truman to order his budget director Harold Smith to
begin a study of the intelligence question. Stating “this country wanted no
Gestapo under any guise or for any reason.”49 Truman may not have known that
the Gestapo’s Odessa heirs were landing in the lap of the Pentagon even as he
spoke. Smith in any case responded to Truman’s directive by asking Donovan for
his OSS demobilization plans. Now, too late. Donovan tried to fight. The Gehlen
party, “Group 6,” was checking out its very comfortable accommodations at Fort
Hunt at the very moment at which Donovan, writing from a borrowed
Washington office, fired back a memo to Smith defending the OSS and its right
to live:
Among these assets [of the OSS] was establishment for the first time in our
nation’s history of a foreign secret intelligence service which reported
information as seen through American eyes. As an integral and inseparable part
of this service, there is a group of specialists to analyze and evaluate the
material for presentation to those who determine national policy.”50
Much more significant than the question of the adequacy of U.S. intelligence on
the Soviet Union, however, was the question of civilian versus military control of
the intelligence mission. Germany and England had fought this battle in the 19th
century, the military capturing the intelligence role in Germany and the civilians
maintaining a position in England. Throughout the summer and fall of 1945, this
same battle raged in the U.S. government.51 The battle for intelligence control
was indeed the background for the arrival of Gehlen and his six aides at Fort
Hunt, where Gehlen’s party was housed and Gehlen himself provided with an
NCO butler and several white-jacket order lies.52
A momentous relationship was established at Fort Hunt, one that had the
profoundest effects on the subsequent evolution of United States foreign policy
during an exceptionally difficult passage of world history. The period of the Cold
War as a whole, and more especially its early, formative years – from Gehlen’s
coming aboard the American intelligence service until he rejoined the West
German republic in 1955 — was laden with the peril of nuclear war. On at least
one occasion, in 1948,53 Gehlen almost convinced the United States that the
Soviet Union was about to launch a war against the West and that it would be in
the U.S. interest to preempt it.
Clearly it is important to know who made and authorized the decisions that led to
our national dependency on a network of underground Nazis, yet because the
relevant documents are still classified this central part of the Gehlen story still
cannot be reconstructed.
From the handful of published books about the Gehlen affair (none of which cite
their sources on this point) we can list only seven Americans who were said to be
involved with Gehlen at Fort Hunt:
?? AdmiralWilliam D. Leahy, chief of staff end Truman’s national security
advisor.
?? Allen Dulles, OSS station chief in Bern during the war.
?? Sherman Kent, head of OSS Research and Analysis Branch and a Yale
historian.
?? General George V. Strong, head of Army G-2.
?? Major General Alex H. Bolling of G-2.
?? Brigadier General John T. Magruder, first head of the Army’s Strategic
Services Unit, a vulture of OSS.
?? Loftus E. Becker, a lawyer assc. with G-2 and the Nuremberg war-crimes
operation; the CIA’s first deputy director.
We do not know if these people were involved as a committee, if they talked
with Gehlen and his six aides a lot or a little, separately or all at once, or if they
sent their own aides to work out the details. We do not know how a POWinterrogation
was transformed into a bargaining process. Above all, we do not
know what kind of communication the U.S. participants in the Fort Hunt-Gehlen
talks had with the political authorities to whom they were responsible. Leahy is
the only one who had obvious contact with President Truman. But there is
nothing in the revealed record to indicate that he ever discussed Gehlen or the
Fort Hunt deal with Truman, or took the least trouble to explain to Truman the
implications of hiring a Nazi spy network. We have no idea, for that matter, how
Leahy himself saw it.
What we do know is the outlines of the Gehlen deal itself, however it was
hammered out and however it was or was not ratified by legal, political authority.
That is because Gehlen himself laid out its terms in his autobiography, The
Service. Gehlen says in this work (which has been attacked for its inaccuracies)
that the discussion ended with “a gentleman’s agreement,” that the terms of his
relationship with the United States were “for a variety of reasons never set down
in black and white.” He continues, “Such was the element of trust that had been
built up between the two sides during this year of intensive personal contact that
neither had the slightest hesitation in founding the entire operation on a verbal
agreement and a handshake.”54
According Gehlen, this agreement consisted of the following six basic points.
His language is worth savoring. “I remember the terms of the agreement well,”
he wrote:
“1. A clandestine German intelligence organization was to be set up. using the
existing potential to continue information gathering in the East just as we had
been doing before. The basis for this was our common interest in a defense
against communism.”
“2. This German organization was to work not ‘for’ or ‘under’ the Americans, but
‘jointly with the Americans.”
“3. The organization would operate exclusively under German leadership, which
would receive its directives and assignments from the Americans until a new
government was established in Germany.”
“4. The organization was to be financed by the Americans with funds which were
not to be part of the occupation costs, and in return the organization would
supply all its intelligence reports to the Americans.” (The Gehlen Organization’s
first annual budget is said have been $3.4 million.55)”
“5. As soon as a sovereign German government was established, that government
should decide whether the organization should continue to function or not. but
that until such time the care and control (later referred to as ‘the trusteeship’) of
the organization would remain in American hands.”
“6. Should the organization at any time find itself in a position where the
American and German interests diverged, it was accepted that the organization
would consider the interests of Germany first.”56
Gehlen acknowledges that the last point especially might “raise some eyebrows”
and make some think that the U.S. side “had one overboard in making
concessions to us.” He assures his readers that actually “this point demonstrates
better than any other Sibert’s great vision: he recognized that for many years to
come the interests of the United States and West Germany must run parallel.”57
Gehlen and his staff left Fort Hunt for Germany on July 1, 1946, having been in
the United States for almost a year. They were temporarily based at Oberursel
then settled into a permanent base in a walled-in, self-contained village at Pullach
near Munich. Gehlen set up his headquarters in an estate originally built by
Martin Bormann.58 There a start-up group of 50 began to turn the “gentlemen’s
agreement” of Fort Hunt into reality. The first order of business being staff,
Gehlen’s recruiters were soon circulating among the “unemployed mass” of
“former” Nazi SS men, the Odessa constituency, to find more evaluators,
couriers and informers.59 Gehlen had “solemnly promised in Washington not to
employ SS and Gestapo men,”60 although it will be noted that Gehlen includes no
such provision in his list of terms. There is not the least question that he did
recruit such men, supplying them with new names when necessary.
Two of the worst of them were Franz Six and Emil Augsburg. Six was a key
Nazi intellectual, and both Six and Augsburg were associated with the Wannsee
Institute, the Nazi think-tank in Berlin where SS leader Reinhard Heydrich, in
January 1942, announced “the Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” Both of
them had commanded extermination squads roving in East Europe in pursuit of
Jews and communists. and both had gone underground with the Odessa when the
Third Reich crumbled. Augsburg hid in Italy, then returned in disguise when
Gehlen called. Six was actually captured by Allied intelligence, tried at
Nuremberg and imprisoned, only to be sprung to work with Augsburg running
Gehlen’s networks of East European Nazis.61
From the edge of total defeat Gehlen now moved into his vintage years, more
powerful, influential and independent than he had been even in the heyday of the
Third Reich. Minimally supervised first by the War Department’s Strategic
Services Unit under Fort Hunt figure Major General John Magruder, and then by
the SSU’s follow-on organization, the Central Intelligence Group under Rear
Admiral Sidney Souers,62 the Org grew to dominate the entire West German
intelligence service. Through his close ties to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s
chief minister, Hans Globke, Gehlen was able to place his men in positions of
control in West Germany’s military intelligence and the internal
counterintelligence arm. When NATO was established he came to dominate it
too. By one estimate “some 70 percent” of the total intelligence take flowing into
NATO’S military committee and Allied headquarters (SHAPE) on the Soviet
Union, the countries of East Europe, the rest of Europe, and indeed the rest of the
world was generated at Pullach.63
Not even the establishment of the CIA in 1947 and the official transfer of the
Pullach operation into the West German government in 1955 (when it was
retitled the Federal Intelligence Service, BND) lessened the reliance of American
intelligence on Gehlen’s product.64 From the beginning days of the Cold War
through the 1970s and beyond, the United State’s, West Germany’s, and NATO’s
most positive beliefs about the nature and intentions of the Soviet Union, the
Warsaw Pact, and world communism would be supplied by an international
network of utterly unreconstructed SS Nazis whose primary purposes were to
cover the escape of the Odessa and make the world safe for Naziism.
The Cost of the Fort Hunt Treaty
Gehlen’s story has may branchings beyond this point. These include several spy
scandals that exposed his operation as dangerously vulnerable to Soviet
penetration. They include the pitiful spectacle of U.S. CIC agents pursuing Nazi
fugitives on war-crimes charges only to see them summarily pardoned and hired
by Gehlen. They include the dark saga of Klaus Barbie, the SS “Butcher of
Lyon” who worked with the Gehlen Organization and boasted of being a member
of the Odessa. They include assets of Operation Paperclip, in which right-wing
forces in the U.S. military once again savaged the concept of de-Nazification in
order to smuggle scores of SS rocket scientists into the United States. They
include continuation of the civilian-vs.-military conflict over the institution of
secret intelligence and the question of politically motivated covert action within
the domestic interior. They include above all the story of the enormous victory of
the Odessa in planting powerful Nazi colonies around the world — in such
countries as South Africa where the enactment of apartheid laws followed; or
several countries in Latin America that then became breeding grounds for the
Death Squads of the current day; and indeed even in the United States where it
now appears that thousands of wanted Nazis were able to escape justice and grow
old in peace.
In making the Gehlen deal, the United States did not acquire for itself an
intelligence service. That is not what the Gehlen group was or was trying to be.
The military intelligence historian ColonelWilliam Corson put it most
succinctly, “Gehlen’s organization was designed to protect the Odessa Nazis. It
amounts to an exceptionally well-orchestrated diversion.”65 The only intelligence
provided by the Gehlen net to the United States was intelligence selected
specifically to worsen East-West tensions and increase the possibility of military
conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. It was exactly as the right-wing
pairs had warned in 1945 when they were aroused by Donovan’s proposal for a
permanent intelligence corps, warning their readers that a “super spy unit” could
“determine American foreign policy by weeding out, withholding or coloring
information gathered at his direction.”66 It was exactly as Truman had warned
when he demobilized the OSS with the observation that the U.S. had no interest
in “Gestapolike measures.” The fact that this lively concern for a police-state
apparatus should have been focused on the relatively innocuous OSS while at the
same time the red carpet was being rolled out for Gehlen’s gang of SS men must
surely count as one of the supreme wrenching ironies of the modern period.
Another dimension of the cost the Gehlen deal is the stress it induced within
American institutions, weakening them incalculably. The Gehlen Organization
was the antithesis of the Allied cause, its sinister emergence on the scene of postwar
Europe the very opposite of what the western democracies thought they had
been fighting for.
Perhaps at least we can say that, despite Gehlen and despite the military, the
United States did after all finally wind up with a civilian intelligence service. The
National Security Act of 1947 did embody Donovan’s central point in creating a
CIA outside the military. But in fact the Gehlen Org substantially pre-empted the
CIA’s civilian character before it was ever born. The CIA was born to be rocked
in Gehlen’s cradle. It remained dependent on the Org even when the Org turned
into the BND. Thus, whatever the CIA was from the standpoint of the law, it
remained from the standpoint of practical intelligence collection a front for a
house of Nazi spies.
The Org was not merely military, which is bad, not merely foreign, which is
much worse, and not merely Nazi, which is intolerable; it was not even
professionally committed to the security of the U.S. and Western Europe. It was
committed exclusively to the security of the Odessa. All the Gehlen Org ever
wanted the U.S. to be was anti-communist, the more militantly so the better. It
never cared in the least for the security of the United States, its Constitution or its
democratic tradition.
It is not the point of this essay that there would have been no Cold War if the
Odessa had not wanted it and had not been able, through the naive collaboration
of the American military Right to place Gehlen and his network in a position that
ought to have been occupied by a descendant of the OSS. But it was precisely
because the world was so volatile and confusing as of the transition fromWorld
War II to peacetime that the U.S. needed to see it, as Donovan put it in his
plaintive appeal to Truman in the summer of 1945, “through American eyes.” No
Nazi eyes, however bright, could see it for us without deceiving us and leading
us to the betrayal of our own national character.
Second, there was no way to avoid the Cold War once we had taken the
desperate step of opening our doors to Gehlen. From that moment on, from the
summer of 1945 when the Army brought him into the United States and made a
secret deal with him, the Cold War was locked in. A number of Cold War
historians on the left (for example D.F. Fleming and Gabriel Kolko) have made
cogent arguments that from the Soviet point of view the Cold War was thrust
upon us by an irrational and belligerent Stalin. The story of the secret treaty of
Fort Hunt exposes this “history” as a self-serving political illusion. On the
contrary, the war in the Pacific was still raging and the United States was still
trying to get the Soviet Union into the war against Japan when General Sibert
was already deep into his relation ship with Gehlen.
The key point that comes crashing through the practical and moral confusion
about this matter, once one sees that Gehlen’s Organization was an arm of the
Odessa, is that, whether it was ethical or not, the U.S. did not pick up a Gift
Horse in Gehlen at all; it picked up a Trojan Horse.
The unconditional surrender the Germans made to the Allied command at the
little red schoolhouse in Reims was the surrender only of the German armed
services. It was not the surrender of the hard SS core of the Nazi Party. The SS
did not surrender, unconditionally or otherwise, and thus Nazism itself did not
surrender. The SS chose rather, to seek other means of continuing the war while
the right wing of the United States military establishment, through fears and
secret passions and a naivete of its own, chose to facilitate that choice. The
history that we have lived through since then stands witness to the consequences.
References
Carl Oglesby is the author of several books, notably The Yankee and Cowboy
War. He has published a variety of articles on political themes. In 1965 he was
the President of Students for a Democratic Society. He is the director of The
Institute for Continuing de-Nazification. For information on the Institute write to:
294 Harvard Street, #3, Cambridge. MA 02139.
1. William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1960), p. 1140.
2. Ibid., p. 1033 fn. Enunciation of this policy surprised and upset some U.S.
military leaders who feared it would prolong the war. See, for example,
William R. Corson (USMC ret.), The Armies of Ignorance: The Rite of
the American Intelligence Empire (New York: Dial Press, 1977), pp. 8-
10.
3. William Stevenson, The Bormann Brotherhood: A New Investigation of
the Escape and Survival of Nazi War Criminals (New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1973).
4. Op. cit. n. 1, p. 1072.
5. Ibid., pp. 1091-92
6. This discussion of Bormann’s strategy is based mainly on Glenn B. Infield,
Skorzeny: Hitler’s Commando (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981); and
op. cit., n. 3.
7. My summary of the Nazi survival plan is based on op. cit., n. 3; Infield,
op. cit., n. 6; Ladislas Farago, Aftermath: Martin Bormann and the
Fourth Reich (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974); Charles Higham,
American Swastika (New York: Doubleday, 1985); Brian Bunting, The
Rise of the South African Reich (New York: Penguin, 1964); and Simon
Wiesenthal, The Murderers Among Us (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967).
On “neo-Nazi” colonies in the Near and Middle East and South America,
see Wiesenthal, pp. 78-95.
8. Infield, op. cit., n. 6. p. 192.
9. Ibid., p. 179; and Wiesenthal, op. cit., n. 7. pp. 87-88.
10. Wiesenthal, op. cit., n. 7, p. 88. Also quoted in Infield, op. cit., n. 6, p.
183.
11. Infield, op. cit., n. 6, p. 183.
12. Schacht, who had lost favor with Hitler in 1938, was acquitted of warcrimes
charges by the Nuremberg Tribunal. He was later convicted of
being a “chief Nazi offender” by the German de-Nazification court at
Baden-Wurttemberg, but his conviction was overturned and his eight-year
sentence lifted on September 2, 1948. Infield, op cit., n. 6.
13. Infield, op cit., n. 6, p. 16.
14. Heinz Hohne and Hermann Zolling, The General Was A Spy (New York:
Richard Barry, Coward McCann & Geoghegan, 1973), p. 54; and E.H.
Cookridge, Gehlen, Spy of the Century (New York: Random House,
1971), p. 120.
15. Christopher Simpson, Blowback (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
1988), p. 160 ff. Simpson’s is the best book on the Gehlen matter so far
published.
16. Ibid., pp. 254-55.
17. Ibid., pp. 180, 193.
18. Ibid., pp. 10, 207-08.
19. Ibid., pp. 18-22. Also see Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, pp. 35-37;
Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, pp. 56-58.
20. Cookridge op. cit., n. 14, p. 79.
21. Reinhard Gehlen, The Service (New York: World, 1972), p. 99.
22. Ibid., p. 107.
23. Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, pp. 103, 106.
24. I do not know of an estimate of the size of the Foreign Armies East
(FHO) as of the end of the war. Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p. 161, says
that by 1948, when the Gehlen Organization was probably back up to
war-time speed, its key agents “exceeded four thousand.” Each agent
typically ran a net of about six informants, Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p.
167. Thus, the total Gehlen net might have numbered in the range of
20,000 individuals
25. Op. cit., n. 21, p. 115.
26. Corson, op. cit., n. 2, pp. 6, 20; Anthony Cave Brown, The Last Hero,
Wild Bill Donovan (N.Y.: Vintage Books, 1982), p. 625; U.S. Senate,
“Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations
with Respect to Intelligence Activities,” Book IV, Supplementary Staff
Reports on Foreign and Military Intelligence (known as, The Church
Report), p. 5.
27. Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p.130.
28. Brown, op. cit., n. 26, p. 626.
29. Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p. 131.
30. WilliamM. Leary, ed., The Central Intelligence Agency: History and
Documents (Atlanta: University of Atlanta Press, 1984), pp. 123-25;
Corson, op cit., n. 2, pp. 214-17; Brown, op. cit., n. 26, p. 625.
31. Brown, op. cit., n. 26, p. 627.
32. Ibid., p. 170.
33. Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the
CIA (New York: Pocket Books, 1981), p. 31.
34. Ibid.
35. Brown, op. cit., n. 26, p. 744.
36. This account of Gehlen’s surrender is based on Hohne and Zolling, op.
cit., n. 14, pp. 52-56; Cookridge, op cit., n. 14, pp. 118-21; op. cit., 3, pp.
89-90; op cit., n. 15, pp. 41-43; and the BBC documentary, Superspy: The
Story of Reinhard Gehlen, 1974. There are many trivial discrepancies in
these four accounts but they are in perfect agreement as to the main
thrust.
37. Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p. 120.
38. Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, p. 58.
39. As to breaking orders, Gehlen is effusive in his praise of “Sibert’s great
vision…. I stand in admiration of Sibert as a general who this this bold
step — in a situation fraught with political pitfalls — of taking over the
intelligence experts of a former enemy for his own country…. The
political risk to which Sibert was exposed was very great. Anti-German
feeling was running high, and he had created our organizations without
any authority fromWashington and without the knowledge of the War
Department.” Op. cit., n. 21, p. 123.
40. Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, p. 58.
41. Ibid., pp. 58-59.
42. Op. cit., n. 21, p. 120.
43. Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, p. 58.
44. Undated CIA fragment with head, “Recent Books,” apparently published
circa 1972, partly declassified and released in 1986 in response to a
Freedom of Information (FOIA) suit.
45. Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, pp. 56, 58-59.
46. U.S. Army document SHAEF D-95096, September 15, 1946, declassified
FOIA release. The routing of this cable through SHAEF HQ raises a
question as to whether Eisenhower was really kept in the dark about
Gehlen.
47. As Gehlen was about to leave for the United States, he left a message for
Baun with another of his top aides, Gerhard Wessel: “I am to tell you
from Gehlen that he has discussed with [Hitler's successor Admiral Karl]
Doenitz and [Gehlen's superior and chief of staff General Franz] Halder
the question of continuing his work with the Americans. Both were in
agreement.” Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, p. 61.
48. There is variance in the literature concerning how many assistants Gehlen
took with him toWashington. John Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and
Decline of the CIA (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), p. 92;
Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p. 125; and op. cit., n. 15, p. 42, say it was three
while Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, p. 61, say four. A U.S. Army
note of August 28, 1945 (a 1986 FOIA release) refers to “the 7 shipped
by air last week” and that no doubt is the correct number. Another FOIA
release, an unnumbered Military Intelligence Division document dated
September 30, 1945, originated at Fort Hunt, labels the Gehlen party as
“Group 6” and names seven members: Gehlen, Major Alberg Schoeller,
Major Horst Hiemenz, Colonel Heinz Herre, Colonel Konrad Stephanus,
and two others whose rank is not given, Franz Hinrichs and Herbert
Feukner. The number is important for what it says about the nature of
Gehlen’s trip, Three might be thought of as co-defendants but six
constitute a staff. Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p. 125, says Gehlen made the
trip disguised in the uniform of a one-star American general, his aides
disguised as U.S. captains. Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, pp. 60-61,
inflate the rank to two stars but then call the story spurious. Gehlen’s
memoir says nothing about it.
49. Corson, op. cit., n. 2, p. 239.
50. Ibid., p. 240.
51. Ranelagh, op. cit., n. 48, p. 102ff.
52. BBC documentary, Superspy, op. cit., n. 36. Corson, in an interview with
the author, said the butler and the orderlies must have been CIC agents.
Still, the detail rankles.
53. Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, 203; op. cit., n. 15. p. 136.
54. Op. cit., n. 21, p. 121. Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14. p. 64, say that
the details of this “gentlemen’s agreement” were put into writing by the
CIA in 1949.
55. Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, p. 65.
56. Op. cit., n. 21, p. 122.
57. Ibid., pp. 122-23.
58. Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, p. 119; Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p.
155, BBC documentary, Superspy, op. cit., n. 36.
59. Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, p. 67.
60. Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p. 144.
61. Op. cit., n. 15, pp. 17, 46-47, 166, 225; Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, pp. 242-
43.
62. Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, p. 133.
63. Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p. 218.
64. Ibid., p. 128.
65. Author’s interview with Corson, May, 1986.
66. Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p. 131.
(This article was originally from CovertAction Information Bulletin, Fall, 1990)
NOTE: PREVAILING WINDS RESEARCH fully endorses the work of
CovertAction Information Bulletin and we urge all of our readers to subscribe to
this extraordinarily valuable magazine. Subscriptions are available from
CovertAction, P.O. Box 34583, Washington, D.C., 20043.

LMAO…