Reinhard Gehlen

Reinhard Gehlen was born April 3, 1902, in Erfurt, Germany. He pursued a military career in the Reichswehr and subsequently the Wehrmacht, rising through staff positions to become chief of Fremde Heere Ost (Foreign Armies East), the Wehrmacht's intelligence branch covering the Soviet Union and Eastern Front, in 1942. He died June 8, 1979, in Berg am Starnberger See, Bavaria.¹

Fremde Heere Ost

As chief of FHO from April 1942, Gehlen directed the Wehrmacht's intelligence assessment of Soviet order of battle, capabilities, and intentions on the Eastern Front. His office compiled assessments of Soviet military strength from prisoner interrogations, agent networks, signals intelligence, and document exploitation. His analyses were presented to Hitler and the Wehrmacht High Command. The quality of FHO's intelligence was disputed: German intelligence consistently underestimated Soviet industrial and manpower recovery capabilities, contributing to strategic miscalculations in the later stages of the war.

Anticipating German defeat, Gehlen in 1944-1945 ordered the microfilming of his organization's records - particularly its agent networks in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and its accumulated analysis of Soviet military and political structures - and had the film containers buried in the Alps.¹

Surrender and American Recruitment

Gehlen surrendered to U.S. Army forces on May 22, 1945, and immediately proposed a bargain: his organization, its records, and its agent networks in the Soviet bloc, in exchange for American protection and support. The Strategic Services Unit, successor to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), accepted. Gehlen was brought to the United States in August 1945 for debriefing at Fort Hunt, Virginia, and returned to Germany in 1946 to begin operations under American control.²

The arrangement - known informally as the "Gehlen deal" - gave the United States its primary human intelligence network covering the Soviet bloc at the very moment when the emerging Cold War made such capability most valuable. The CIA, formally established in 1947, inherited the arrangement from its predecessor organizations. Gehlen's organization was funded and directed by the CIA as a contractor throughout the period of West German occupation.¹

Gehlen Organization, 1946-1956

The Gehlen Organization (Org) operated from a compound at Pullach, near Munich, in the American occupation zone. It recruited former Wehrmacht intelligence officers, SS personnel, and other German specialists with relevant experience and Eastern European contacts. The organization's personnel roster included significant numbers of former SS officers and individuals with wartime records that would have disqualified them from employment by the postwar German state's official denazification standards - a fact that the CIA accepted as the price of operational capability.²

The Org was penetrated by Soviet intelligence. Heinz Felfe, who joined the Org in 1951 and rose to become chief of counterintelligence, was a KGB agent who had been recruited by Soviet intelligence during his postwar capture. Felfe operated as a double agent for a decade before being exposed in 1961; his penetration compromised substantial portions of the Org's operations and agent networks in the Soviet bloc.¹

BND Directorship

When West Germany regained sovereignty in 1955 and the Federal Republic was established, negotiations produced the transfer of the Gehlen Organization to West German government control as the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND, Federal Intelligence Service), formally established April 1, 1956. Gehlen served as the BND's first president until his forced retirement in 1968, when Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger replaced him with Gerhard Wessel.

Under Gehlen, the BND maintained close liaison with the CIA and shared intelligence on Soviet bloc countries. The BND's origins in the Org - and the corresponding presence of former Nazi intelligence personnel throughout the organization's senior ranks - remained a persistent problem. The extent of SS and Nazi party affiliation among BND staff was minimized in official accounts during Gehlen's tenure and was not comprehensively documented until subsequent academic research, including the 2013 Scholz Commission investigation commissioned by the German government.²

Memoir and Later Life

Gehlen published his memoir, Der Dienst (The Service), in 1971, presenting a largely self-justifying account of his wartime intelligence work and the postwar organization. The memoir was influential in establishing Gehlen's own narrative about the Org's value and its relationship with American intelligence. He maintained that his organization had served both German and Western interests by providing intelligence capability that neither could have assembled independently. Critics argued that the memoir obscured the extent of Nazi personnel integration and overstated the Org's operational successes.¹