'DEAR REINIE' THE GENERAL WAS A SPY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP75-00001R000100010056-5
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: November 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: October 2, 1998
• Sequence Number: 56
• Publication Date: March 13, 1972
• Content Type: NSPR

CPYRG4proved Fo 61 T2000J652 iT1A-RDP75-0
`Dear Reinie"
THE GENERAL WAS A SPY
by HEINZ HOHNE and HERMANN ZOLLING
377 pages. Coward-McCann
& Geoghegan. $8.95.
GEHLEN: SPY OF THE CENTURY
by E.H. COOKRIDGE
402 pages. Random House. $10.
THE GAME OF THE FOXES
ARAGO
C 696696 pcKay. $11.95.
While waiting for further commu-
niques from th,-. nostalgia front-Rich-
and Burton's Mussolini and
the return of the crew cut, per-
haps-the American public is
being deafened by old spies
and their chroniclers whisper-
ing: "Now it can be told."
An alert literary scavenger
named Ladislas Farago dug
a tin box of German intel-
ligence papers out of the Na-
tional Archives, and recycled
them into a bestseller: The
Game of the Foxes. The book,
an almost day-to-day account
of German agents at work in
Britain and the U.S. during
World War II, is a stunning
proof of the incredible cost
and even more incredible in-
efficiency of most espionage
networks. Of the many Ab-
,,vehr agents smuggled into
England, fot example, not
one was still operating at the
. time of the Normandy in-
vasion in 1944.
Diaries are negotiable cur-
rency, too. The London Jour-
nals of General Raymond E.
Lee, 1940-41 (Little, Brown)
as Hitler's favorite intelligence of-
cer, then after the war played "Dear
einie" to his CIA chief Allen Dulles.
Born in 1902, just too late for
World War 1, he marked time as an ar-
illery and cavalry officer until World
War 11 brought out his special talents.
He was one of those who could put war
on paper. Statistics and maps filled him
with a passion to organize them. By
1942 he was chief of intelligence on the
eastern front. Toward the end, when ac-
curacy meant prognosticating defeat,
Gehlen's accurate reports earned him
one of Hitler's temper tantrums. But
this last-minute fall from favor only
AP
LIEUT. NERAL REINHARD GEHLEN (1944)
Just lik home.
are bringing $12.50 on the open mar-
ket, mostly for predicting-you read
it here!-that Russia will prove too
much for Hitler. So it's "Once more
into the attics, fellow soldiers." Even
old memos are worth their weight in
gold, and that, given the art of mil-
itary memo writing; is ? saying some-
thing. In 1945 Sir John Masterman,
V peacetime Oxford don, wartime coun-
terspy, was ordered to write an of-
ficial report about the remarkable suc-
cess British intelligence enjoyed turning
around German spies in England and
deploying them as double agents. Yale
University Press has simply reprinted
this surprisingly readable document
(The Double-Cross System in the War
of 1939 to 1945) on the coded doings
of Garbo, Tricycle and the rest, and
bargain-priced the instant book a
$6.95.
ThNoNY, Ne Qtf of the re
pro pM
ve ~ ~ eRWI,
ever, promises to be Reinhard Geh
len. How can you upstage a man wh
oney funded the Org. By 1948-the-
Orgy numbered 4,000 agents and sup-
lied an estimated 70% of the U.S.
overnment's information on the So-
iet military. Once Gehlen had the
ea of putting 432 simultaneous wire-
aps on East Berlin phones. New Jer-
ey Bell Telephone supplied the switch-
oard, courtesy of the CIA, at a total
ost of $6,000,000.
When the Org became the official
spionage service of West Germany
n 1956, Gehlen became a global ca-
erer. He and the BND-the Org's new
ame-discreetly contracted them-
elves out to Tanzania, Afghanistan
nd the Congo. The secret services of
srael and Egypt alike found occasion
o use Gehlen's services.
British Author Cookridge and Ger-
nans Hohne and Zoning have com-
iled dossiers on Gehlen that might
atisfy the Org itself. Cookridge, an
Did agent who makes a living out. of
py chronicles like The Truth About
inn Philby, tends a bit to trade
on man-in-the-shadows glamour.
Gehlen turned the gentleman's av-
ocation of spying-Sir John Master-
man still compares it to cricket-into
big business. But Hohne and Zolling
argue that, despite all his thermos-
flask cameras and secret, secret ink,
he still couldn't keep up with the
times. Forced into retirement in 1968,
he sat in his study on Lake Starnberg
with a death mask of Frederick the
Great looking down and wrote his
memoirs (due out later this year) rath-
er like Buffalo Bill after the frontier
went thataway. For spying, like ev-
erything else, has gone automated.
"They expect you to be able to say
that a war will start next Tuesday at
5:32 p.m.," Walter Bedell Smith com-
plained when*he was head of the CIA.
While he lasted?Gehlen gave his cus-
tomers what they thought they wanted.
In the cold war he catered to their sense
of sinister conspiracy, then by a more
or less relevant act or report relieved
the anxiety he had helped create. He
predicted the Hungarian revolt, for in-
stance, and the Israeli-Arab Six-Day
War. But these events occurred any-
way. Sentiment dictates that Gehlen be
treated as the last of the Scarlet Pim-
pernels. He was, in fact, more like the
last of the Prussians-a nostalgia the
world could hardly afford even in his
nwn time. ^ Melvin Maddocks
helped certify his anti-Nazi postur
afterward.
Nothing suggests Gehlen's sublim
insolence better than what he did whe
everything fell apart in 1945. He dis
guised himself as jolly Dr. Wendland
collected the microfilms of his files
and buried them in a Bavarian moun
tain meadow. Then he waited for th
American troops. Whisked to Wash
ington, the archenemy of only a fe
months before convinced his conquer
ors that they should appoint him (an
those files) as their primary espionag
source against the Soviet Union. Th
Gehlen Organization, or simply th
"Org," set up in what had been a
side of Munich. To a number of r
may have run as high as. 30%-
was just like hone.
The layout cost the United Stat
Gehlen worked exclusively for t
CIA, another $200 million in America
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