Reinhard Gehlen

The anticommunist espionage networks of the Gehlen Organization remained in place after the Red Army's conquest and the consolidation of Soviet hegemony in the east of Europe.

In spring of 1942, Gehlen assumed command of the Fremde Heere Ost (FHO) from Colonel Eberhard Kinzel.[10] Before the Wehrmacht disasters in the Battle of Stalingrad (23 August 1942 – 2 February 1943), 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.[11]

Gehlen made great use of cables received from the Max Network[12]. [13] Originally an Abwehr creation, Max was one of the primary sources of FHO intelligence on the Soviet Military. Based in Sofia, Max - the Klatt Bureau (Dienststelle Klatt) was led by a Jew, Richard Kauder[14] [15] and included many other Jews as radio operators.[16] Max cables were highly accurate, and amounted to 10,700 cables from 1942-44,[17] causing a British warning – Ultra intercepted the Max cables[18] – to Stalin regarding a high-placed mole in Stavka.[19] When the cables continued, the British suspected a Soviet operation but later dismissed that idea upon investigation. The cables are available to be read upon purchase from the British archives at cost.[20] The fact remains that aside from several instances of possible Soviet disinformation, most of the Max cables contained extremely accurate intelligence. Max was a big reason for the rise of Gehlen's career, and he leveraged the "success of Max" into a Spymaster's reputation and a postwar career. Possible Soviet penetration of Max would parallel and be a strong contributor for the thorough Soviet penetration of NTS and the Gehlen Org.[21]

During the war the some German officers attempted to trace the mechanics of Kauder's networks, and never found a satisfactory explanation. Nevertheless, the information was so potent that FHO refused to allow any tainting of their golden source.

After the war, the allies interrogated Kauder and his associates and promptly concluded that the Soviets ran the entire Max operation, and that Kauder was not a professional spy but merely allowed himself to be the figurehead relaying information he received from his NKVD contacts and sources. However, the Max information was accurate, and both the NKVD and Smersh later investigated the Max network. It is possible that Stalin kept Max away from the regular organizational structures, which he never fully trusted.

It is argued that the accuracy of the Max reports were the bait that caused the FHO overreliance on Max – to the extent that Nazi officials defied Hitler's explicit directive to stop working with the Kauder the Jew.[22] This information was the bait that may have carried costs for the Soviets but was worth the payoff when it was later used as part of the Soviet Maskirovka Strategy to trap the Wehrmacht in Stalingrad, Kursk, and the Summer Offensive of 1944 (Operation Bagration). Many of the Jews who stayed alive working for Kauder later moved to Israel. Aging Israelis have made the claim "a handful of Jews won World War Two[23]" - slightly legitimate if Max caused the downfall of the German effort in the east - where most of the German army were destroyed.[24] [25]

On the other hand, Max cables clearly warned FHO regarding Operation Mars, a terrible defeat for the Red Army. This caused the British to conclude that it was impossible for Max to be a Soviet operation. However, the British may have been blinded by western ideals regarding acceptable costs of national sacrifice.

The Max Network is one of the unsolved mysteries of the war, with Kauder's loyalties and sources of information still unclear.

Kauder was born in Vienna in 1900. Provided a Pacifist upbringing by his father, Kauder became a lifelong self-declared pacifist. [26] His time in Vienna was marked by associations and friendships with idealists, some communist, some socialist, and some zionist. Some were future spies, like Kim Philby – then with his Jewish and NKVD agent-wife Litzi Friedman. Also present then were Harry Peter Smollet – then Hans Peter Smolka, Ehud Avriel and Teddy Kollek. [27] Teddy Kollel's career in Israeli intelligence saw him informing the CIA of Philby's communist activism, but was told by James Angleton to keep the information to himself. Ehud Avriel's connections to Kauder were instrumental in the Maxwell - Czechoslovakia weapons deal of 1948. Kauder himself was later considered by the CIA to be working with Israeli intelligence. [28]

Smollet introduced Kauder to Otto Hatz, an Hungarian intelligence officer, who later introduced him to Momotaro Enomoto, a Japanese journalist for the well-known newspaper Mainishi Shimbun. [29] Enomoto believed in pro-communist anarchism, and was himself friends with Smollet. Enomoto's journalist passport which allowed him to travel freely between Budapest, Vienna and Berlin. He had friends among the German elite and had unrestricted access to all Japanese ambassadors to Europe. however, he was expelled from Turkey for being a collaborator of the Japanese military attache, for whom he conducted some investigations in Turkey. [30]

In January, 1940, Kauder was called into a meeting with Abwehr officers in Vienna. At the advice of Enomoto and Hatz he went into what he thought would be a trap for a jew like him. Colonel Rudolf von Marogna-Redwitz, head of the Vienna station, asked him to head to Sofia and run their intelligence operations there through a cover of a Japanese news service. Sofia was chosen being the only Axis country that continued to have diplomatic relationships with the Soviet Union, and the huge staff of the Soviet Embassy in Sofia included NKVD agents. He informed Kauder that the idea of the Sofia base and that Kauder should run it was all from Enomoto.[31] Although Kauder did charge for his services, he was also promised Abwehr protection for his Jewish mother. The Abwehr gave him the codename Fritz Klatt. Arriving in Sofia in 1940, he was soon after joined by both Enomoto and Hatz.

Kauder was sent initially to collect intelligence on the Bulgarian Air Force, but reported that he made contact with anti-communist Ukrainian emigre groups, who still had vast connections in Ukraine and southern Russia. the Nazis were impressed and reported it up the chain of command, who promptly approved the establishment of Kauder's network. In reality, a Japanese international news service was something the Japanese and the Nazis had been working towards for awhile. [32] Enomoto – a well placed Japanese communist loosely in the employ of Japanese Intelligence seems to have learned of this from both Japanese sources and by overhearing a conversation. Max was thus the Soviet counterstroke. [33] Kauder's network was kept secret apart from a few Abwehr officers, and was stowed away in Abwehr 2, and not in Abwehr 1 where spies belong. Kauder's cables were actually split into Max and Moritz, with Moritz focusing on the Mediterranean front. The Moritz cables are considered to have been much less accurate than the Soviet-focused Max cables.[34]

The German decision to launch Max (and pay Kauder's hefty fees) was taken by Abwehr Director Wilhelm Canaris, who was one of the few Germans involved in the secretive joint venture with the Japanese. Otto Wagner, The initial supervisor of Kauder, was not trusted by the secretive Canaris and was not read in on the Japanese connection and how a Jew came to be implausibly working for the Nazis. Wagner would make many luckless attempts at figuring out the Kauder network, which he did not fully trust. [35]

On May 6, 1940, Kauder brought two of his Ukrainian contacts, namely Prince Anton Turkul[36] and Ira Longin (Ilya Longa)[37] [38] to meet the Abwehr officers. Turkul said he had previously worked with British intelligence, and was handled by Dickie Ellis. Turkul also informed them that he had already put his NTS network into existence. [39] Turkul's past work for MI6 went a long way in establishing his credibility with the Abwehr.

Enomoto then took Kauder to Salonika to meet NKVD officer Nahum Eitingon aboard a Russian Merchant Ship in the port.[40] Eitingon informed Kauder that going forward he would be the only one to have any contact with the Germans. Eitingon promised Kauder personal protection. [41] It was at this time that Kauder realized that his network was really a Soviet operation.

Max was probably the most sophisticated radio operation in World War Two:

"Kauder now had skilled German radio operators at his disposal. He also formed his own team [of Jews] that worked with the radio operators and managed detailed records of all messages. Each message was assigned a serial number, which tracked its number within the series of messages; and a secondary catalogue number that indicated the region and location that the message referred to. The messages were also filed by date, which was of no less importance. It was an incredibly efficient and well-organized system. If asked what exactly was reported about a specific city or region, or what was reported on a specific date, Kauder could retrieve the message instantly, using his simple, intelligent and efficient filing method.[42]

Gehlen's cadre of FHO intelligence-officers produced accurate field-intelligence about the Red Army that frequently contradicted rear-echelon perceptions of the eastern battle front. Hitler dismissed the gathered information as defeatism and philosophically harmful to the Nazi cause against "Judeo-Bolshevism" in Russia. In April 1945, despite the accuracy of the intelligence, Hitler dismissed Gehlen, soon after his promotion to major general.[43]

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.[44]

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.[45] 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.

After he started working for the U.S. Government, Gehlen was subordinate to US Army G-2 (Intelligence). He resented this arrangement and in 1947, the year after his Organization was established, Gehlen arranged for a transfer to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The agency kept close control of the Gehlen Organization, because during the early years of the Cold War of 1945–91, Gehlen's agents were providing the United States Federal Government with more than 70% of its intelligence on the Soviet armed forces.[51]

Early in 1948, Gehlen Org Spymasters began receiving detailed reports from their sources throughout the Soviet Zone of covert East German remilitarization long before any West German politicians had even thought of such a thing. Further operations by the Gehlen Org produced detailed reports about Soviet construction and testing of the MiG-15 jet-propelled aircraft, which United States airmen flying F86 fighters would soon to face in aerial combat during the Korean War.[52]

East German propaganda in 1957

Between 1947 and 1955, agents of the Gehlen Organization also interviewed every German PoW who returned to West Germany from captivity in the Soviet Union. The network employed hundreds of former Wehrmacht and SS officers, and also recruited many agents from within the massive anti-Communist Soviet and East European refugee communities throughout Western Europe. They observed the operations of the railroad systems, airfields, and ports of the USSR, and their secret agents infiltrated the Baltic Soviet Republics and the Ukrainian SSR.

Among the Org's earliest counterespionage successes was Operation Bohemia, which began in March 1948 after Bozena Hajek, the sister in law of Czechoslovak Socialist Republic military intelligence chief Captain Vojtech Jerabek, defected to the American Zone. After learning from Hajek that Captain Jerabek was secretly expressing anti-communist opinions to his family, the Org dispatched a Czech refugee and veteran field agent codenamed "Ondrej" to make contact with the Captain and his family in Prague. During the night of 8-9 November 1948, after being warned by "Ondrej" of an imminent Stalinist witch hunt for "rootless cosmopolitans" within the Czechoslovak officer corps, Captain Jerabek and two other senior Czechoslovakian military intelligence officers crossed the border into the American Zone and defected to the West. In addition to several lists of Czechoslovakian spies in West Germany, Captain Jerabek also carried the keys to breaking Czechoslovakian intelligence's codes. The results were nothing less than devastating for Czechoslovakian espionage and led to multiple arrests and convictions.[53]

The security and efficacy of the Gehlen Organization were compromised by East German and Soviet moles within it, such as Johannes Clemens, Erwin Tiebel and Heinz Felfe who were feeding information while in the Org and later, while in the BND that was headed by Gehlen.[54] All three were eventually discovered and convicted in 1963.[55]

There were also Communists and their sympathizers within the CIA and the SIS (MI6), especially Kim Philby and the Cambridge Spies. As such information appeared, Gehlen, personally, and the Gehlen Organization, officially, were attacked by the governments of the Western powers.[56] The British government was especially hostile towards Gehlen, and the politically Left wing British press ensured full publicisation of the existence of the Gehlen Organization, which further compromised the operation.[57]

The Gehlen Organization in transition: CIA report on the negotiations to establish the BND (1952) of West Germany.

On 1 April 1956, 11 years after World War II had ended, the U.S. Government and the CIA formally transferred the Gehlen Organization to the authority of what was by then the Federal Republic of Germany, under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer (1949–63).[9] By way of that transfer of geopolitical sponsorship, the anti–Communist Gehlen Organization became the nucleus of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND, Federal Intelligence Service).[9]

Gehlen became president of the BND as an espionage service, until he was forced out of office in 1968. The end of Gehlen's career as a spymaster resulted from a confluence of events in West Germany: the exposure of a KGB mole, Heinz Felfe, (a former SS lieutenant) working at BND headquarters;[58] political estrangement from Adenauer, in 1963, which aggravated his professional problems; and the inefficiency of the BND consequent to Gehlen's poor leadership and continual inattention to the business of counter-espionage as national defence.

Gehlen's refusal to correct reports with questionable content strained the organization's credibility, and dazzling achievements became an infrequent commodity. A veteran agent remarked at the time that the BND pond then contained some sardines, though a few years earlier the pond had been alive with sharks.[59]

The fact that the BND could score certain successes despite East German Stasi interference, internal malpractice, inefficiencies and infighting, was primarily due to select members of the staff who took it upon themselves to step up and overcome then existing maladies. Abdication of responsibility by Reinhard Gehlen was the malignancy; bureaucracy and cronyism remained pervasive, even nepotism (at one time Gehlen had 16 members of his extended family on the BND payroll).[60] Only slowly did the younger generation then advance to substitute new ideas for some of the bad habits caused mainly by Gehlen's semi-retired attitude and frequent holiday absences.[60]

Gehlen was forced out of the BND due to "political scandal within the ranks", according to one source, He retired in 1968 as a civil servant of West Germany, classified as a Ministerialdirektor, a senior grade with a generous pension. His successor, Bundeswehr Brigadier General Gerhard Wessel, immediately called for a program of modernization and streamlining.[61]