MAN WITHOUT A FACE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01350R000200510002-6
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 21, 2004
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: June 19, 1972
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

V
Approved For Release 2004 * PY? IA-RDP88-01350R0002O051 O,q2-f
19 JUN 1972
and ; injury m tlliem. Gehlen is CSC- n , G6
dally' hard on Brandt's moves to accom-
modate the Soviets, and he will probably
be no.happier with President Nixon's re-
cent SALT agreements. But he admits
that "if Nixon succeeds in his political
ambitions toward China, he may yet
achieve a termination of the American
involvement in Vietnam which would be
in the interests of the West."
Gehlen created and nurtured his
agency in the belief that intelligence-
gathering and espionage are an integral
political function and implement of for-
eign policy. While politicians and diplo-
mats must dissemble and pursue half
measures, someone must know what is
General Gehlen today and reviewing
W II troops: Passion for anonymity
Man Without a Face
THE, SERVICE: TILE MEMOIRS OF CEN-
TRAL REINIHARD GEIILEN. Translated by
David Irving. 386 pages. World. $10.
Sacked by Hitler as an intelligence
chief for the German General Staff,
Reinhard Gehlen surrendered to the Al-
lies in 1945 with 50 steel boxes contain-
ing priceless espionage dossiers on the
Soviet Union. Soon he was working for
the CIA, in a compound near Munich;
in 1956 West Germany created her own
secret service, the BND, with Gehlen at
the head. As such, Gehlen is the su-
preme cold warrior; the West's eyes and
cars in the East after World War II. His
memoirs are mostly an-ice-water analy-
sis of the undaunted aims and undying
intransigence of "Soviet imperialism," a
coldly reasoned insistence that the
West's true enemy is still the Soviets.
It is an ironic time for such a thesis,
with Mr. Nixon just back from Moscow.
Gehlen's clarion call to reunite against
the Communists is calmly and convinc-
ingly argued, but it falls upon a? war-
weary nation, swept with an undercur-
rent of neo-isolationism. To top it off, a
spate of books on German espionage has
recently appeared in the U.S.-two in
particular on Cehlen's organization.* But
both these books, while more informa-
tive in a sense than Gehlen's own care-
fu'ly restrained recitation, are more par-
tisan and more suspiciously impassioned
-pro and con-than the general's own.
The three make a bulky, if comprehen-
sive, package, but it's best straight from
the horse's mouth.
Masks: These memoirs must be read
more for their. serious political discourse
than for cloak-and-dagger thrills, though
Golden includes enough to keep a Bond
fan fairly satisfied, But there are prob-
lems. Gehlen's passion for anonymity
earned him the sobriquet "the man with-
out a face"-and a man without a face
could fool us with a hundred masks.
Even so, what Gehlen chooses to reveal
sounds convincing and consistent, how-
ever complicated and internecine. IIow-
ever selective his facts (lie does not
mention how badly the BND failed to
forecast the Berlin Wall) or however
Partisan his politics, they are leavened
by that steely-eyed objectivity that
seems to allow espionage geniuses to
weigh triumph and disaster equally.
Gehlen makes controversial charges-
some of which were banned in the Ger-
man edition. Ile darkly reports that Willy
Brandt's Ostpolitik (which Gehlen ab-
hors as give-aways to Moscow and War-
saw for nothing in return) grew mainly
from clandestine talks with the Commu-
nists in Rome and Minieh before he was
elected Chancellor. Ile speaks frankly of
the U.S. Bay of Pigs debacle, giving JFK
low marks, and nails American sanction of
Diem's murder-along with military "half
measures"--as perhaps, the U.S.'s most
tragic mistake in Vietnam. Ile contends
that the Berlin Wall would have come
down if the Allies had reacted strongly,
and declares that the Soviet Union now
hopes to neutralize NATO, consolidate
its oastem holdings further and begin
encroaching westward while keeping the
U.S. bogged down in the sort of trou-
bles Moscow supports in Vietnam and
the Middle East.
Schisms: Gehlen also avers that the
U.S.S.R. will have a Stalin-style dictator
after Brezhnev goes, possibly .Aleksandr
Shelepin (former chief of the Soviet se-
cret police), and that the Peking-Mos-
cow rift is not as permanent as it is
cracked up to be: "In any case, the Conn
munist and Socialist movements have
"The General Was i SrYf'iw~Y S'I~i '''}rCrgell l@18itt7flmf}11HY1/l7ui# sU}l(AuR[11R?!t@azfl11 F,f1Rf1f1f17Ms;10002-6
really going on. Gehlen's service had the
first transcript of Khrushchev's electrify-
ing speech denouncing Stalin in 1956
and he predicted the Israeli six-day war
to the day of its beginning five days in
advance. He isn't tho man to tell all,
however, and tends to show only the
bony hand rather than the whole skele-
ton in the closet. Even his disputed
assertion that Hitler henchman Martin
Borinann was a Soviet agent takes only a
page and a half. But he can hardly be
disputed as' an expert oti Soviet affairs
and intentions, and for these alone he
deserves being read carefully.
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