by Jim Marrs
But Gehlen’s accurate and realistic intelligence soon rankled Hitler, who toward the end of the war cried, “Gehlen is a fool!” Such vitriol may have led to Gehlen lending a sympathetic ear to plotters against Hitler. But whatever his role, if any, in the failed July 1944 bomb plot against the fuehrer, Gehlen managed to survive.
By then, he had a new plan—one that was to have lasting effect on the Allied nations and particularly the United States and Russia.
In April 1945, realizing that the war was lost for the Germans, Gehlen offered his spy network in Russia to the British but received no answer. “Taking everything into consideration, it seemed more expedient to make our approach to the American military forces,” Gehlen recalled. “I suspected that once the shooting stopped the Americans would probably recover a sense of objectivity toward us more rapidly then their European allies, and subsequent history bore me out on this point.”
Gehlen also showed no signs of being anything other than an unrepentant National Socialist. In his 1971 memoirs, he stated, “I still believe that we could have achieved our 1941 campaign objectives, had it not been for the pernicious interventions of Adolf Hitler.” In other words, Gehlen’s only objection to Nazi aggression was that Hitler lost.
Gehlen and his organization stashed their voluminous intelligence files in more than fifty sealed steel containers and buried them as they retreated westward—one cache was stored near the Wendelstein Mountains, another in the Algau province of southwest Bavaria, and the third in the Hunsruck mountain range in the Rhineland. After hiding out in a mountain lodge for some time, Gehlen made his move. “We were determined not to be taken prisoner,” he later recounted. “We wanted to surrender on our own initiative to the Americans. It was all part of the plan.”
Initially spurned by American officers who failed to recognize his importance, including a member of the Counterintelligence Corps (CIC), Gehlen finally arrived in front of Brigadier General Edwin L. Sibert, senior intelligence officer of the American occupation zone in Germany. “While fighting was still in progress in France, [Sibert] had been prepared to make use of Adolf Hitler’s officers in the cause of American strategy,” wrote Gehlen chroniclers Heinz Hoehne and Hermann Zolling, adding, “The idea came from…the adviser to Allen W. Dulles, the U.S. secret-service officer in Berne.”
Sibert listened attentively as Gehlen detailed “the actual aims of the Soviet Union and its display of military might,” despite U.S. Army regulations that prohibited personnel from listening to any remarks made by a German against their erstwhile ally in the East. “My later discussions with General Sibert in Oberursel ended with a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ which for a variety of reasons we never set down in black and white,” Gehlen stated.
The terms of this “gentlemen’s agreement” were as follows:
A clandestine German intelligence organization was to be created.
This organization would work “jointly” with the Americans, but would not be subordinate to them.
The organization would operate exclusively under German leadership with only assignments coming from the Americans.
The organization would be funded by the Americans but not from occupation costs.
The organization would remain in American hands until a sovereign German government was created and agreed to take responsibility for the group.
Should the organization at any time find German and American interests in conflict, it would consider the interests of Germany first.
“The political risk [of this agreement] to which Sibert was exposed was very great,” conceded Gehlen, who was most pleased with the arrangement. “Anti-German feeling was running high, and he had created our organization without any authority from Washington and without the knowledge of the War Department. I understand that he informed his opposite number in the British zone, Major General Sir Kenneth Strong, of our existence, but he asked him not to inquire too closely into the matter for fear that the press might discover our activities.”
Gehlen and some of his staff members were soon flown to Washington in a military plane belonging to Walter Bedell Smith, General Eisenhower’s chief of staff, who went on to direct the CIA from 1950 to 1953 and also succeeded Averell Harriman as U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union. Smith was to become an early member of the secretive Bilderberg Group initially headed by former SS officer Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands.
Gehlen’s self-serving proposal was accepted by Sibert’s military superiors, who did not know of the globalists’ control over the Soviet Union and, therefore, were easily frightened by Gehlen’s description of this militarily ambitious “evil empire.” Under the proposal, Gehlen would operate independently and as an equal, offering the Americans only the information they requested or he decided to share, but never in any way conflicting with the interests of his Fatherland. In other words, virtually everything the United States learned about Soviet aims and capabilities at the end of World War II came from an anticommunist underground filtered through a Nazi organization with connections to the international financial elite.
Carl Oglesby, author of The Yankee and Cowboy War, wrote that by 1948, following the formation of the CIA, “Gehlen had grown tight with Dulles and his organization and become in effect the CIA’s department of Russian and East European affairs. Soon after the formation of NATO [in 1949], [the Gehlen organization] became the official NATO intelligence organization.” It has been made public in recent years that the Gehlen organization received an aggregate of $200 million in CIA funds from Allen Dulles.
Much of Gehlen’s intelligence proved questionable, although this was not known at the time, since the Russians had tight control over information behind the Iron Curtain. “Gehlen flooded the Americans with ‘authentic’ documents provided by the Byeorussians,” noted Loftus. “Because the information pertained to Soviet activity in areas where verification was impossible, the Americans had no choice but to view Gehlen’s information as genuine. In reality, most of the secret intelligence that Gehlen furnished came from recently arrived émigrés, Soviet newspapers, and mail from Belarus and the Ukraine.”
Gehlen went on to an illustrious career in spy craft. In 1946, he returned to Germany and began forming an intelligence organization that evolved into the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), or federal intelligence service, in West Germany. His cadre of 350 former comrades grew to more than 4,000. True to the initial agreement, Gehlen became president of the BND from its inception in 1956 until 1968, when he was forced to resign in the wake of a political scandal. Following his death in 1979, Gehlen, a member of the Knights of Malta, was hailed as the consummate Cold War spymaster.
In 2000, the CIA finally admitted its relationship with Gehlen. As the result of a Freedom of Information Act request from Oglesby, the agency filed an affidavit in a U.S. District Court “acknowledging an intelligence relationship with German General Reinhard Gehlen that it has kept secret for 50 years.”
ANOTHER FORGOTTEN CONNECTION between U.S. authorities and the Nazis was the International Criminal Police Organization, known as Interpol, which was created as the International Criminal Police Commission in 1924, the same year J. Edgar Hoover became director of the FBI. It was headquartered in Vienna, Austria. It was established to assist in international police cooperation. In 1938, following the Anschluss, or unification, of Germany and Austria, the organization came under Nazi control and until the end of World War II functioned as an intelligence and enforcement arm of the Gestapo.
During those years, Interpol was headed by some of the most notorious Nazi war criminals, such as SS Obergruppenfuehrer Reinhard Heydrich, who chaired the infamous Wannsee Conference where the Holocaust was planned; Arthur Nebe, the criminal police chief who also commanded Einsatzkommandos, or killer squads, that liquidated “undesirables”; and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who succeeded the slain Heydrich and was hanged at Nuremberg for war crimes. Working with Heydrich at Interpol was a young SS officer named Paul Dickopf. After the war, Dickopf served as
president of Interpol from 1968 to 1972.
At the recommendation of FBI director Hoover, who always seemed more concerned about communists than Nazis, the United States formally joined Interpol just two weeks after the 1938 Nazi Anschluss of Austria. Hoover kept up a friendly correspondence with Nazi Interpol leaders until a few days after Pearl Harbor, when apparently he felt such connections might tarnish his image.
After the war, Interpol officials insisted that all its files were destroyed in Allied bombings. However, according to researcher Vaughn Young, a Swedish policeman named Harry Soderman, who had worked with Interpol since its inception, argued that an aborted attempt in 1945 to take the files out of Germany left them in French hands. The next year, Interpol was reestablished with strong support from the French police and headquartered in Paris. Also in 1946, Hoover sidestepped the U.S. State Department by attending a meeting in Brussels to formally reconstitute Interpol, where he was elected vice president. Former U.S. Army intelligence officer William Spector stated Hoover gained blackmail leverage over many prominent American business and political leaders by acquiring the Nazi/Interpol intelligence files at the end of World War II.
To this day, Interpol officials have declined to seek out Nazi war criminals, claiming such action is beyond its jurisdiction.
BY 1980, MARTIN Bormann, then in his eighties, had traveled extensively in South America, often just ahead of Nazi hunters. He lived in a luxurious estate near Buenos Aires, writing his memoirs while still under the protection of “Gestapo” Mueller.
Paul Manning said this aging recluse remained the guardian and silent manipulator of a gigantic industrial pyramid centered in Germany. Bormann also had become mentor to a new generation of lawyers, bankers, and industrialists. In an undated interview following the 1981 publication of his book Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile, Manning stated, “The Bormann organization is not merely a group of ex-Nazis. It is a great economic power whose interests today supercede their ideology.”
It is estimated that as many as 100,000 ranking Nazis remained at large after the war. “As such, it constitutes one of the largest—and best-funded, best-trained, best-equipped, and best-connected—cults in the world today,” stated Peter Levenda. “And the second generation is being trained and indoctrinated in the streets of London, Berlin, New York, Buenos Aires…and in secret, heavily armed estates like Colonia Dignidad [in Chile].”
Colonia Dignidad, or Dignity colony, today is called Villa Baviera, or villa Bavaria. It was founded in 1961 by Paul Schaefer, formerly of the Nazi Luftwaffe, and was made up of German immigrants who had been living there since the early 1950s. The large compound boasted its own power plant, two runways, and a restaurant, all surrounded by barbed wire, searchlights, and guard towers. In 1986, an inspection by Amnesty International discovered underground cells where prisoners suffered remote-control torture by means of electronic sound systems and electric shock. “It was a torture and execution center during the regime of Au-gusto Pinochet who was placed into power in Chile by Henry Kissinger in 1973 to protect Rockefeller interests there,” stated Peter Levenda.
The compound was run by approximately three hundred Nazi exiles, some of whom still live there today. An estimated three thousand persons died and thirty thousand were tortured during the violent overthrow of Chile’s democracy by Pinochet, which included the still-disputed circumstances of President Salvador Allende’s death. In 1997, Schaefer fled Chile after being accused of sexually molesting two young boys at the colony. In 2005, large caches of arms and ammunition were found there.
While there can be no doubt that Bormann’s surviving Nazi empire still exerts tremendous control over world economies and politics even today, the full extent may never be known.
What is known is that many of Nazi Germany’s most brilliant minds continued their work outside Europe after the war, most notably in the United States.
CHAPTER 7
PROJECT PAPERCLIP AND THE SPACE RACE
ON MAY 19, 1945, JUST TWELVE DAYS AFTER GERMANY’S UNCONDITIONAL surrender, Herbert Wagner, creator of the first Nazi guided missile used in combat, landed in Washington, D.C., in a U.S. military aircraft with blacked-out windows.
Wagner was the first of a stream of Nazi scientists, technicians, and others to arrive in the United States in a program that came to be known as Project Paperclip. It began as Operation Overcast, a program authorized by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to exploit the knowledge of Nazi scientists. (Overcast was mentioned but not clearly explained in the 2006 film The Good German starring George Clooney.) This operation was renamed Paperclip and formally authorized in August 1945 by President Harry Truman, who was assured that no one with “Nazi or militaristic records” would be involved.
By mid-November, more Nazi scientists, engineers, and technicians were arriving in America, including Wernher von Braun and more than seven hundred other Nazi rocket scientists.
By 1955, nearly a thousand German scientists had been granted citizenship in the United States and given prominent positions in the American scientific community. Many had been longtime members of the Nazi Party and the Gestapo, had conducted experiments on humans at concentration camps, used slave labor, and committed other war crimes.
Von Braun, who in later years became the head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), is one of the more recognizable names of the Paperclip scientists. Others included Major General Walter Dornberger, a close associate of von Braun’s; Werner Heisenberg, physicist and Nobel laureate who founded quantum mechanics; gaseous uranium centrifuge expert Dr. Paul Harteck; Nazi atomic bomb physicist and military project leader Kurt Diebner; uranium enrichment expert Erich Bagge; 1944 Nobel Prize winner Otto Hahn, called the “father of nuclear chemistry”; scientists Carl Friedrich von Weizsaecker, Karl Wirtz, and Horst Korsching; and physicist Walter Gerlach.
CNN reporter Linda Hunt’s 1991 book Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip, 1945–1990 first revealed the extent to which Nazi infiltration was aided by persons within the U.S. federal government and military. Like other researchers, Hunt found many government files pertaining to recruited Nazis “missing” or otherwise unavailable. Despite government claims that Paperclip was ended in 1947, according to Hunt, this project was “the biggest, longest-running operation involving Nazis in our country’s history.”
“The project continued nonstop until 1973—decades longer than was previously thought. And remnants of it are still in operation today,” she wrote. By the 1990s, when details of Paperclip finally reached the public’s ears, the infusion of Nazis into America’s military-industrial complex was complete.
IN 1952, NEWLY elected President Dwight D. Eisenhower was persuaded to name John Foster Dulles as his secretary of state, and his brother, Allen Dulles, as the director of the CIA. “The reigning Dulles brothers were the ‘Republican’ replacements for their client and business partner, ‘Democrat’ Averell Harriman. Occasional public posturing aside, their strategic commitments [to the globalists] were identical to his,” stated authors Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin in their well-documented 1992 unauthorized biography of George H. W. Bush. It should be noted that the Dulles brothers were both attorneys for and business partners with Averell Harriman. It should also be noted that Allen Dulles, as OSS station chief in Bern, Switzerland, sat at the nexus of U.S. intelligence as well as Soviet intelligence, such as the infamous Rote Kapelle, or Red Orchestra, spy network. It was during his stint as assistant to the U.S. ambassador that Dulles used SS Brigadefuehrer, or brigadier general, Walter Schellenberg to communicate with his immediate superior, Reichsfuehrer Heinrich Himmler. Dulles constantly sent intelligence reports to Washington, although, as stated by Adam LeBor, “there are questions as to whether his motive was supplying genuine economic intelligence or merely building a complicated empire of information and disinformation that reached from Bern to Berlin and back again.”
Dulles moved from Bern to become
OSS station chief in Berlin at the end of the war. In 1947, when the OSS was rolled into the newly created CIA, Dulles’s translator was an army intelligence officer named Henry Kissinger, who would go on to become secretary of state under President Richard Nixon, a lifelong friend to Dulles.
Project Paperclip quickly came under the control of an “old boy” network encompassing members of the globalists centered in the Council on Foreign Relations.
After its inception, Paperclip was run by the intelligence division of the U.S. Army’s European Command, directed by Robert Walsh operating out of Berlin. “The Paperclip office operated out of the intelligence division’s headquarters in Heidelberg, under Deputy Director Colonel Robert Schow, who would become assistant director of the CIA in 1949 and assistant chief of staff for intelligence in 1956,” Hunt wrote in Secret Agenda. She added that officers of the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) who managed Project Paperclip soon began receiving security reports from Schow’s office, regarding the Germans recruited into the program. All reports on these men had been altered from a determination of “ardent Nazi” to read “not an ardent Nazi.”
After assuming the directorship of the newly created CIA, Allen Dulles, who, as attorney for the Shroeder bank, had brokered the deals allowing Hitler’s rise to power, assumed control over Project Paperclip and increased the flow of National Socialists into the United States.
After former Nazi spymaster General Reinhard Gehlen met with the CIA director Dulles and offered to turn over his extensive spy network to the CIA in exchange for non-prosecution of their Nazi pasts, the scientists’ dossiers were rewritten to eliminate incriminating evidence of their work for the Nazis. “For over forty years…Paperclip’s dark secrets lay safely hidden in cover-ups, lies, and deceit,” stated Hunt.