The Gehlen Organization

Background

The Gehlen Organization was the institutional successor to Operation Rusty, the 1946–1949 US Army G-2 and Counter Intelligence Corps operation that had re-employed Reinhard Gehlen and the cadre of the Wehrmacht's Foreign Armies East branch as an American-controlled intelligence-collection apparatus in the US occupation zone of Germany. Operational control of the underlying network was transferred from the Department of the Army to the Central Intelligence Agency on 1 July 1949 following an internal US Government dispute that had run across 1948 and the first half of 1949. The CIA assigned the operation the cryptonym ZIPPER and gave the network the internal designation "the Gehlen Organization" — sometimes rendered "Org Gehlen" or simply "the Org" in CIA documentation.¹

The transfer was effected at a moment of substantial institutional flux. The CIA had been established by the National Security Act of 1947 only two years earlier; the Office of Policy Coordination, Frank G. Wisner's covert-action arm, had been authorised under NSC 10/2 in June 1948 and was expanding rapidly across Western Europe. The newly proclaimed Federal Republic of Germany, established in May 1949 with Konrad Adenauer as Chancellor, had no foreign-intelligence service of its own and would not acquire one in formal terms until 1956. The Organization filled that vacuum on a contingent basis, operating as a German-staffed but American-funded and American-supervised collection apparatus across the seven-year ZIPPER period.²

The Operation

The Organization's headquarters remained at the walled Pullach compound south of Munich — the former Hess complex, taken over for Rusty in December 1947 — across the entire CIA period. Operational direction at Pullach was exercised on the American side by James H. Critchfield, the senior CIA officer assigned to the operation from December 1948 onward, who served as Chief of Base Pullach until 1956. Internal to the German staff, Gehlen retained the senior position; Gerhard Wessel, Heinz Danko Herre, and the Foreign Armies East-derived cadre held the principal operational portfolios. The Organization's German staff grew from the low hundreds at the start of the CIA period to approximately four thousand by the time of the 1956 conversion to BND.³

The Organization's collection product was directed primarily at Soviet-bloc military, political, and economic targets. Reporting drew on a network of human sources operating under various commercial and journalistic covers across Eastern Europe; on the debriefing of Soviet-zone refugees passing through the Federal Republic; on technical collection at the inner-German border; and on the residual Foreign Armies East archival product carried over from the Wehrmacht period. Particular attention was given to Red Army order of battle in the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany, to the East German People's Police (Volkspolizei) and the developing Ministry for State Security, and to Soviet political-administrative developments in the satellite states.⁴

The operation's recruitment policy across both the Rusty and ZIPPER periods admitted former officers of the Wehrmacht and the Abwehr, and a smaller but significant complement of former Schutzstaffel (SS) and Sicherheitsdienst (SD) personnel. The CIA's institutional history identifies named individuals associated with Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, RSHA) sub-departments who entered the Organization during the Rusty and early ZIPPER periods. The CIA's contemporary internal assessment of the recruitment risk — repeated through the 1948 Bolling Report and successive CIA evaluations across 1949–1956 — identified the Organization's permeability as a significant operational concern; subsequent Soviet-bloc penetration substantially confirmed those concerns.⁵

Disclosure

The conversion of the Organization into the West German Bundesnachrichtendienst was effected on 1 April 1956 by Cabinet decision of the Adenauer Government, which had since 1955 been preparing the legislative and administrative framework for a sovereign German foreign-intelligence service. The Pullach compound, the German staff, and the operational portfolios passed substantially intact into the BND. Gehlen was appointed the first President of the BND, a position he held until his retirement on 30 April 1968. Gerhard Wessel succeeded Gehlen as the second President of the BND, holding the position from 1968 to 1979.⁶

The post-conversion record is dominated by the identification of senior officers of the Organization as agents of hostile services. Heinz Felfe, an SS-Hauptsturmführer in the wartime RSHA Amt VI who had been recruited into the Organization in 1951, was identified as a long-standing agent of the Soviet KGB; he was arrested by the BND on 6 November 1961 and convicted in July 1963 by the Federal High Court (Bundesgerichtshof) to fourteen years' imprisonment. Felfe was traded to the German Democratic Republic in February 1969 in exchange for West German political prisoners. The Felfe case implicated an extensive network of subordinate sources within the Organization and the BND; the institutional damage assessment carried out across 1961–1965 has been characterised in subsequent BND historical-commission work as the most consequential counter-intelligence event in the Organization's history.⁷

Successive declassifications across the post-2002 period have made the CIA-period operational record substantially available in public form. The CIA's institutional history of the Rusty-to-ZIPPER transition, Forging an Intelligence Partnership: CIA and the Origins of the BND, 1945–49, prepared by Kevin C. Ruffner and originally classified Secret, was declassified in 2002 in connection with the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act review. The companion volume Eagle and Swastika: CIA and Nazi War Criminals and Collaborators, also by Ruffner, was declassified in 2010. The German Federal Intelligence Service has, since 2011, supported a multi-volume institutional history (Independent Historical Commission for Research into the History of the BND) drawing on BND records covering the Organization period and the early BND. The combination of US and German institutional declassifications constitutes the principal public-record basis for the period.⁸

Legacy

The Gehlen Organization represents the longest-running and institutionally deepest of the post-war American re-employments of Nazi-era German intelligence personnel. Its conversion into the BND in 1956 means that the contemporary German foreign-intelligence service descends in a direct institutional line from a Wehrmacht General Staff branch — a fact addressed at length in the BND's own historical-commission output and in the academic literature. The Organization's record, on the assessment of its own American sponsors as documented in the Ruffner volumes, was a record of substantial collection volume, of contested analytical quality, and of significant penetration by hostile services across the entire CIA-control period.⁹

The Organization's significance for the broader question of post-war Nazi recruitment is its scale and its institutional permanence. Where other elements of the post-war recruitment effort — Operation Paperclip in the scientific-and-technical domain, Operation Bloodstone in the émigré-covert-action domain, the Klaus Barbie case in the single-officer-protection domain — operated as discrete programmes that were eventually wound up, the Gehlen Organization was institutionalised. Its successor exists, draws operating funds from the German federal budget, and continues to occupy a portion of the Pullach compound. The 2014 partial relocation of the BND to its new headquarters at Chausseestraße in Berlin did not dissolve the Pullach element.¹⁰

The institutional recognition of the Organization's wartime origins by the BND itself has been a substantive feature of the post-2010 period. The BND-supported Independent Historical Commission has produced a multi-volume institutional history that addresses the recruitment of named former SS, SD, and RSHA officers into the Organization and the early BND, and the Commission's work has been characterised by the BND leadership as a deliberate institutional reckoning with that origin. Critical academic and journalistic accounts have argued that the reckoning has been incomplete; the Commission's work continues.¹¹

Related dossiers and agencies

This dossier is the immediate successor to Operation Rusty (1946–1949 US Army-control phase) and runs in parallel with Operation Paperclip (scientific-and-technical recruitment), Operation Bloodstone (émigré covert-action recruitment), and the Klaus Barbie case (a single-officer protection case from the same period). The agency-level entries are the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Intelligence Service (BND); the country-level context is on the pages for the United States and Germany.

Sources & Further Reading

1. Kevin Conley Ruffner, Forging an Intelligence Partnership: CIA and the Origins of the BND, 1945–49 (CIA History Staff, 1999), declassified 2002, vol. II, chs. 9–10; James H. Critchfield, Partners at the Creation: The Men Behind Postwar Germany's Defense and Intelligence Establishments (Naval Institute Press, 2003), chs. 4–6.
2. National Security Act of 1947, Pub. L. 80-253; NSC 10/2, "Office of Special Projects," 18 June 1948; Ruffner, Forging an Intelligence Partnership, vol. II.
3. Critchfield, Partners at the Creation; Mary Ellen Reese, General Reinhard Gehlen: The CIA Connection (George Mason University Press, 1990).
4. Ruffner, Forging an Intelligence Partnership, vol. II; Independent Historical Commission for Research into the History of the BND, Die Geschichte der Organisation Gehlen und des BND, 1945–1968 (multi-volume; published from 2011 by Christoph Links Verlag).
5. Kevin C. Ruffner, Eagle and Swastika: CIA and Nazi War Criminals and Collaborators (CIA History Staff), declassified 2010; Christopher Simpson, Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988), chs. 3–6.
6. German Federal Cabinet decision of 1 April 1956 establishing the Bundesnachrichtendienst; Reinhard Gehlen, The Service: The Memoirs of General Reinhard Gehlen (World Publishing, 1972).
7. Hans-Henning Crome, Heinz Felfe: Spion für Stalin und Mielke (Christoph Links Verlag, 2008); Federal High Court of Germany, judgment in Felfe et al., July 1963; Felfe's CIA-era name file is among the records released at NARA RG 263 second-release name files.
8. Final Report to the United States Congress, Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group, April 2007; Independent Historical Commission for Research into the History of the BND, multi-volume institutional history.
9. Ruffner, Forging an Intelligence Partnership and Eagle and Swastika; BND Independent Historical Commission outputs; Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014).
10. BND, public statements on the Berlin headquarters relocation, 2014–2019; BND Independent Historical Commission, ongoing publications.
11. Independent Historical Commission for Research into the History of the BND, multi-volume institutional history; academic critical-reception literature, including Wolfgang Krieger, Die Deutschen Geheimdienste (C.H. Beck, 2014).