It is reasonable to suspect that some Americans were aware of this ruse. It is, after all, the job of any professional intelligence officer to learn everything there is to know about the groups on his payroll and to collect information concerning his contract agents that might reveal their loyalty. General Sibert, who by then had become the leading American sponsor of the Gehlen Organization, had not gotten to be chief of U.S. Army intelligence in Germany by being naïve. It is hard to believe that Gehlen would have attempted to trick Sibert if the American had bluntly asked the German general if he was employing SS men; such deceit would have seriously undermined Gehlen’s credibility had he been caught in the lie. The most likely scenario, according to intelligence veterans of the period, is one that repeated itself over and over again at virtually every level of contact between U.S. intelligence and former Nazis. Quite simply, Sibert knew what was going on—but didn’t ask.
“Nobody had legalized, really, the functions of intelligence in those days,” says Lieutenant Colonel John Bokor, the son of the man who first recruited Gehlen and a career intelligence officer in his own right. “Today maybe things have changed, but back then the intelligence agent was on his own.… There just wasn’t any sheet music for us all to sing from in those days. That’s how a lot of those guys [former Nazis] got hired.”7
Nazis and collaborators became integral to the operation of Gehlen’s postwar organization, and nowhere was this clearer than in control of émigré operations. As early as 1946 Gehlen had resumed limited funding of the Vlasov Army, the Ukrainian underground army OUN/UPA, and collaborationist leaders of other exile groups originally sponsored by Berlin. The cooperation of these groups was seen as crucial to successful interrogations of newly arrived refugees in the displaced persons (DP) camps. Although it is certainly true that the majority of the postwar refugees in Germany were not Nazi collaborators and had not committed war crimes, it is also true that the minority who had done such things were exactly the ones who were carefully sought out by the “Org,” as Gehlen’s group has since come to be known. “The main source of informers,” noted a secret Gehlen study on recruitment of that time, “will … be the refugees from German minorities and ex-members of the Nazi organization.”8
By the end of 1947 Gehlen had restored, for the most part, the lines of command that Berlin had once used to control its assets inside the collaborationist organizations during the war. Two SS veterans, Franz Six and Emil Augsburg, took charge of essential aspects of émigré work for Gehlen. The careers of these Gehlen men illustrate the depth of the Nazi influence both within the Org and in the émigré organizations it had penetrated.
Each of them was a veteran of Amt VI (“Department 6”) of the SS RSHA, Nazi Germany’s main security headquarters. This SS section had been a combined foreign intelligence, sabotage, and propaganda agency and was, in effect, the CIA of Nazi Germany. By war’s end SS RSHA Amt VI had consolidated not only the foreign sections of the Nazis’ police intelligence apparatus but military intelligence (Abwehr), Gehlen’s own FHO, and much of the Nazi party’s internal foreign espionage network as well. Amt VI was an extraordinarily rich collection of trained agents, intelligence files, saboteurs, and propagandists. Both Gehlen and the United States drew many of their most valuable recruits from this department after the war. Its hoard of files on the USSR and Eastern Europe, in particular, was without equal anywhere.
There was another side to the agency. Most of Amt VI’s top officers had been instrumental in the mass extermination of Jews. Both Six and Augsburg had led mobile killing squads on the eastern front. Others had participated in the Holocaust as administrators, paper shufflers, and idea men.
Gehlen’s man in émigré enterprises, SS Brigadeführer Franz Six, is a major war criminal and is still alive at last report. He was once described by Adolf Eichmann as a Streber (a “real eager beaver”) on the so-called Jewish Question and as a favored protégé of SS chief Himmler’s. Eichmann should have known: His own first efforts in the Holocaust were carried out under Six’s personal command in the “Ideological Combat” section of the security service. In 1941 Six led the Vorkommando Moskau, an advance squad of the Nazi invasion, whose job it was to seize Communist party and NKVD archives in order to compile lists of hunted Soviet officials and to liquidate those who were caught. Six’s Vorkommando never made it to Moscow, but his own reports indicate that his unit murdered approximately 200 people in cold blood in Smolensk, where they had stopped on the march to the Russian capital. The Smolensk victims, Six wrote headquarters, included “46 persons, among them 38 intellectual Jews who had tried to create unrest and discontent in the newly established Ghetto of Smolensk.”
As late as 1944 Six spoke at a conference of “consultants” on the “Jewish Question” at Krummhübel. The stenographic notes of the meeting indicate that “Six spoke … about the political structure of world Jewry. The physical elimination of Eastern Jewry would deprive Jewry of its biological reserves,” he announced. “The Jewish Question must be solved not only in Germany but also internationally” (emphasis added).9 Himmler was so pleased with Six’s work that he lifted him out of projects in Amt VI and gave him a newly created department, Amt VII, of his own.
But Six was not simply a killer. He was a college professor with a doctorate in law and political science and a dean of the faculty of the University of Berlin and was regarded by some of his peers as one of the most distinguished professors of his generation. Six—Dr. Six, as he preferred—had joined the Nazi party in 1930, then the SS and SD a few years later. He was, along with Walter Schellenberg and Otto Ohlendorf, one of the nazified professors and lawyers who supplied a thin cover of intellectual respectability to the Hitler dictatorship. A number of such men enlisted in the security service and became the brains of the party, the intelligence specialists who presented dispassionate analyses to the Nazi high command concerning ideological warfare, racial questions in the East, and tactics for the Final Solution.
One of Six’s most important projects in Amt VI was the Wannsee Institute, an SS think tank located near beautiful Lake Wannsee in the suburbs of Berlin. This was the SS’s most sophisticated effort to gather strategic (i.e., long-term or long-range) intelligence on the USSR. It included collection and analysis of details on Soviet defense production capabilities, for example, activities at scientific research institutes, details of five-year plans, locations of oil and mineral deposits, identities of party officials, as well as the hoarding of Russian maps and technical books of every description.
Wannsee’s work also involved, in characteristically Nazi fashion, studies of the location and size of the various ethnic groups in the USSR. Wannsee’s highly secret reports were distributed to fewer than fifteen persons at the very top of the Nazi government, including General Gehlen (in his capacity as military intelligence chief on the eastern front), propaganda boss Paul Joseph Goebbels, and Hitler himself. The studies, which were among the most reliable information on the USSR produced by the Reich, were essential to the process of setting military strategy and selection of targets on the eastern front. The ethnic reports, which were the most accurate information available to the SS concerning locations of concentrations of Jewish population inside the USSR, provided a convenient road map for the senior SS leaders assigned the task of exterminating Jews.*
Most of the twenty-man staff at Wannsee were defectors from the USSR or scholars in Soviet studies from top German universities. It was this group that Gehlen sought out after the war to form the heart of his staff for émigré operations aimed at Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. At least one Wannsee veteran, Nikolai N. Poppe, lives in the United States today.10
Dr. Six was sought for war crimes after the fall of Berlin. He went to work for Gehlen in 1946, however, and was given the task of combing the Stuttgart-Schorndorf area for unemployed German intelligence veterans who might be interested in new assignments. Unfortunately for Six, however, one of his subagents was a certain SS Hauptsturmführer Hirschfeld,
who was also working for a joint U.S.-British operation tracing fugitive war criminals. Hirschfeld betrayed Six to the American CIC, which disregarded his protests and charged him with several war crimes, including murder. Once the capture of Six had been announced in the newspapers, there was little that Gehlen—or Gehlen’s U.S. patron, General Sibert—could do for Six, at least not publicly. Six was tried before an American military tribunal in 1948, convicted of war crimes (including the murders in Smolensk), and sentenced to twenty years in prison.
The man who led the team of U.S. prosecutors at his trial, Benjamin Ferencz, remembers Six as a “clever man, one of the biggest swine in the whole [mobile killing squads] case.… Personally, I had more respect even for Ohlendorf, because he said, ‘Yes, I did it [commit mass murder].’ Six, on the other hand, would say, ‘Who me? They were killing Jews? I had no idea!’”11
In the end, Six served about four years in prison before being given clemency by U.S. High Commissioner in Germany John McCloy. Even if the Americans had not known who Six was when he went to work for the Gehlen Organization in 1946, they could hardly plead ignorance after having convicted him in a U.S. military tribunal. Nevertheless, McCloy’s clemency board specifically approved the former SS man for work in the Org, and Six was back at work in Gehlen’s Pullach headquarters only weeks after his release from prison.*12
The second important member of Gehlen’s eastern affairs staff was Dr. Emil Augsburg, a former SS Standartenführer from Himmler’s staff in Poland. Augsburg, like Eichmann, had begun his career in Six’s “Ideological Combat” section in the SD, where, according to an account found in SD records, he had become adept at using Jew baiting to smear political opponents within the SS by claiming they had Jewish ancestors.
During the war Augsburg led a murder squad in German-occupied Russia, according to his Nazi party membership records. He obtained “extraordinary results … in special tasks” during the invasion,13 as a recommendation in his personnel dossier puts it. (“Special tasks,” in SS parlance, is generally a euphemism for the mass murder of Jews.) The SS found him to be an “absolutely trustworthy National Socialist” and appointed him a Direktor at Wannsee, overseeing the highly successful index of Soviet personalities used to target intelligence gathering and behind-the-lines assassinations—a job he later did for the Gehlen Organization as well. Augsburg was no mere technician, however. Under Six’s and Wannsee Direktor Mikhail Akhmeteli’s* tutelage, he became recognized as one of the Nazi regime’s most influential experts on Eastern Europe. Although never a public figure, Augsburg maintained this reputation among German foreign policy cognoscenti after the war as well.
The Gehlen Organization’s ability subtly to manipulate other intelligence agencies is clearly illustrated by Augsburg’s career in the first years after the war. In addition to his work for Gehlen, Augsburg was simultaneously employed by the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps; a U.S. military intelligence unit known as the Technical Intelligence Branch (TIB) that was supposedly interested only in German scientists but was actually also recruiting former German intelligence agents; a French intelligence agency; and a private network of ex-SS officers headed by former SS General Bernau,14 all of whom appear to have been aware that Augsburg was a fugitive from war crimes charges.
Augsburg’s specialty was the use of émigrés and defectors to collect information on the East. According to top secret U.S. CIC records, the Bernau SS network provided Augsburg with U.S. EEIs (essential elements of information) that served as a shopping list of information the Western Allies were most interested in buying. Augsburg then acted as gatekeeper for exchange of information among groups of informants working for each of his employers, a position that permitted him to promote selected information or to “confirm independently” a report that he himself had placed through another informant network. Theoretically Augsburg’s primary loyalty could have been to any one of his employers, to the Soviets, or to anyone else. His subsequent lifelong devotion to the Org, however, makes it clear that he was first and foremost a Gehlen man.
Augsburg’s postwar work for Gehlen’s organization was an extension of what he had done for the SS at Wannsee: administration of the painstaking compilation of extraordinarily detailed records on the USSR. One specialty was preparation of remarkable cover stories for Gehlen agents scheduled to cross into the Soviet Union on both espionage and covert action missions. These “legends” included not only false documentation, such as travel passes and food ration books, but also carefully prepared stories of families, jobs, and events that appeared genuine but would be impossible for Soviet police officials to check. Details of geography, climate, local culture, even jokes were carefully collected and cataloged to provide realistic cover stories.15 Augsburg and Six maintained close relations after the war with the émigré groups that had been supported by Berlin and assisted in the selection of agents that were used by the CIA in behind-the-lines operations in Eastern Europe.
*Frank Wisner’s Special Intelligence Branch staff, which was engaged in work with Gehlen, had more than its share of brilliant operatives who were to leave their marks on the history of U.S. espionage. They included Richard Helms, for example, later to become CIA deputy director for clandestine operations and eventually agency director under Presidents Johnson and Nixon; William Casey, CIA director under President Reagan; Harry Rositzke, soon to become chief of CIA clandestine operations inside the USSR and later CIA chief of station in India; and, of course, Wisner himself, soon to be chief of all American clandestine warfare operations worldwide.
*The Wannsee Institute also provided the setting for the January 1942 meeting in which SS leader Reinhard Heydrich announced the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” to representatives of other branches of the German government. That gathering was the first time that Adolf Eichmann, then an enthusiastic young SS officer, had met quite so many “high personages,” he was to remember. Eichmann’s recollections of the Wannsee session—a crucial watershed in the development of the Holocaust—are almost rhapsodic: “[A]fter the conference, [then SS chief] Heydrich, [Gestapo leader] Mueller and your humble servant sat cozily around a fireplace,” Eichmann noted later. “I noticed for the first time that Heydrich was smoking. Not only that, he had cognac.… We sat around peacefully after our Wannsee Conference, not just talking shop but giving ourselves a rest after so many taxing hours.”
*In 1961 Six gave testimony as a defense witness during Adolf Eichmann’s trial for crimes against humanity. Six had retired from the Gehlen Organization by that time and was employed as an agent for Porsche automobiles. Eichmann was a department head for Porsche’s rival, Daimler-Benz.
*Professor Mikhail Akhmeteli was a third noteworthy member of Gehlen’s postwar émigré affairs apparatus that had been drawn from the staff of the SS’s Wannsee Institute. During the war Akhmeteli led much of the work involved in compiling lists of Soviet officials slated for execution, related strategic counterintelligence operations, and development of Nazi racial theory as it applied to peoples of Eastern Europe. His personal contributions to the latter field included a theory (which Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg eventually adopted) that the Georgians in the south of the USSR were “Russia’s Germans” and as such were suitably “superior” SS recruits for use against Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, and other “racially inferior” peoples. It was on the basis of this work that Akhmeteli became one of the very few non-Aryans admitted to the Nazi party—quite an honor in Germany of that time. His party number was 5360858.
Akhmeteli was the son of an oil-rich Georgian family that had been dispossessed during the 1917 Russian Revolution. He helped finance the White Army’s resistance to the Bolsheviks for a time but was eventually forced to flee to Germany. There he established an anti-Communist center for Soviet studies at the University of Breslau that eventually emerged as the seat of the most comprehensive collection of materials on the USSR outside the Soviet Union. In time the Breslau collection became the heart of the SS archives on the
USSR, complete with a card file index of notable Soviet personalities and an extensive collection of information on Soviet railroads, industry, communications, and other infrastructure.
The Georgian became one of the primary liaisons between the SS team at Wannsee and Gehlen’s military intelligence headquarters in the East. After the war Gehlen provided Akhmeteli with a chalet near Unterweilbach purchased with U.S. funds drawn from his discretionary account. Akhmeteli, a restless, stubby figure with deep-set eyes and a fleshy potato of a nose, was one of the very few men welcomed for visits in Gehlen’s home.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Eyes and Ears
Of all the networks of former Nazis and collaborators employed by the United States after World War II, it is Gehlen’s organization that has left the most substantial imprint on the United States. Gehlen’s analysis of the forces that guide Soviet behavior, which were forged in part by his personal defeat at the hands of the Russians during World War II, became widely accepted in U.S. intelligence circles and remain so to this day.
Gehlen’s singular error, says Arthur Macy Cox, a career Soviet affairs analyst who has served with both the CIA and the Department of State, is that he presented the political threat posed by the USSR as though it were an imminent military problem, thus “ingratiating himself,” as Cox puts it, “with the unreconstructed cold warriors in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill.”1 Gehlen’s influential intelligence and analysis also strongly reinforced the “Communist conspiracy” model of foreign affairs, in which the hand of the Kremlin could be seen in almost every labor dispute and student strike on the Continent.
It is probably impossible to determine with certainty the extent to which Gehlen influenced American policymakers’ decisions concerning European affairs during the cold war. The complex, dynamic relationship between information gathering, analysis, and policy-making is difficult to deduce under the best conditions. In Gehlen’s case the problem is still more recondite as a result of the layers of secrecy that surround nearly every aspect of his long relationship with the Americans. Neither the West German nor the U.S. government is known to have released official documentation concerning Gehlen’s work on behalf of U.S. agencies, although there have, of course, been leaks. Source material on the subject is often limited to the recollections and memoirs of persons who participated in these events, some of whom have requested anonymity in exchange for cooperation.
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