03 September 2007

New Bottles, Old Wine

War Department Identity Card issued to “Hans Holbein,” the cover name of Major General Reinhard Gehlen

At the end of World War II, The Navy and Army each operated airfields on the narrow strip of flat land along the Anacostia River across from the Capital in Washington. It was a matter of efficiency; each service had unique requirements and vast bureaucracies. Coordination was too difficult.

In late 1946 a U.S. Army C-47, configured for passenger transport, touched down at Bolling Air Field, Headquarters of the Air Corps.

The aircraft was ferrying a top-secret German cargo under conditions of unusual secrecy. Stepping off the plane, possibly disguised as an American officer, was the diminutive former Nazi intelligence officer Major General Reinhard Gehlen. He walked to a waiting Army Sedan, and was whisked across the city to the Potomac River Bridge and the exit to the George Washington Parkway.

The sedan headed south, to a dirt road that led to a special installation just north of Mount Vernon called PO Box 1142.

There the cargo was met by General Hoyt Vandenberg, Director of the Central Intelligence Group, and served by a white-coated NCO staff.

Vandenberg was a trim fighter pilot, six feet tall and with carefully brushed hair. His qualifications were mostly those of an organization man, rather than an intelligence specialist, but that species of Washington life was only beginning to emerge.

The General had a distinguished wartime career, serving first in the United Kingdom before establishing the 12th Air Force in North Africa. With preparations underway for the invasion of the Continent, he returned to Washington to coordinate the air strategy, and led a three-month mission to Moscow in late 1943, returning to Washington in January of 1944.

He had no illusions about the wartime Ally, and his grim impression of the Russians stayed with him at a critical time in the formation of the New World.

Vandenberg was appointed assistant chief of the Air Staff for Intelligence at Bolling Field in July 1945, shortly before the Air Corps delivered the coup de grace to Japan. The following January he became director of Intelligence on the War Department general staff where he served until his appointment in June 1945, as director of the Central Intelligence Group.

I used to see General Vandenberg's portrait on the wall of former Director's at the Agency at Langley, placed in order after Major General “Wild Bill” Donovon. For all the pride of place, it should be remembered that the directorship in General Vandenberg's time came with a small “d,” which is to say, he did not have the powers of the DCI's who served in the Cold War.

Hoyt Vandenberg had something more than they did. He had the full resources of the War Department, and a victorious army in the field in Germany, confronting a Red Army that was apparently digging in for the long haul.

Fierce partisans were leading the military departments. Controversy swirled through the Pentagon on what the national security establishment might look like, now that an unexpected empire needed to be managed. The rivalry between the Navy and War Department was bitter and entrenched. Each was a cabinet-rank Department, and the adjacent independent airfields on the Anacostia River were just symptoms of the problem.

Flush with victory and proud of the contribution of air power to the demise of the Fascists, there was strong support for an independent Air Force, which could deliver the Atom Bomb to any place on earth. Creation of a third Cabinet level position was out of the question, and the move to consolidate military power in a single Department became inevitable.

That was only part of the national security debate that began in 1944. There was the Russian Question. Navy Secretary James V. Forrestal was a key influence in the tone of the conversation. Elevated to the Cabinet with the death of Frank Knox, he was deeply suspicious of the Russians. As Berlin fell, he waged a zealous campaign to alert new president Harry Truman on the Soviet threat. Forrestal believed that the Soviets were committed to spreading Communism world-wide, and that they would risk another war to do it.

Reinhard Gehlen was a man who might hold the key to stopping them. It was a matter of extraordinary delicacy, and General Vandenberg ordered that he be bought to the States under “unusual” security to discuss the matter.

Gehlen was not an ordinary Nazi prisoner. He had been Chief of the Foreign Armies East section of Admiral Canaris' Abwehr, the German military intelligence service. He was a survivor, and he had ensured that he had something to offer the CIG.

His portfolio was the collection of Human Intelligence on the Soviet Union, and he had been the senior intelligence officer on the Eastern Front. His presence there meant that he escaped implication in the Frau Solf Tea Party plot in September of 1943.

That informal gathering of anti-fascist intellectuals had been penetrated by the Gestapo, and led to the arrest and execution of most of the participants, and the unraveling of the Abwehr itself. Hitler personally fired Vice Admiral Canaris and re-subordinated military intelligence to the Reichsichersheindeinst- the Security Service of Himmler's SS.

Admiral Canaris was executed in the aftermath of the attempted assassination at the Wolf's Lair on the 20th of July, 1944.

Reinhard Gehlen was no fool, and if he had doubts about reporting to Heinrich Himler, he kept them to himself. He was completely pragmatic in his approach to the war, and to the end of it.

He began planning his surrender to the United States at least as early as the fall of 1944. In early March 1945, he directed his senior staff microfilm their complete files on the Soviet Union. The reels of film were packed in steel drums and buried throughout the Alpine Redoubt.

On 22 May 1945 Gehlen and his top aides surrendered to an American Counter-intelligence Corps [CIC] team.

The Americans did not immediately recognize what they now had in custody, though the Russians were asking. Gehlen was briefly treated as a regular prisoner, but tantalizing material was produced from the steel drums. A special top-secret program, code-name RUSTY, was established by the CIC to control and exploit the material.

It is clear that Gehlen had decided that the Americans were the lesser of the two evils confronting Germany, and he determined that the only way to continue to fight the Communists was to cooperate with the Allies.

That cooperation succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Operation RUSTY was exactly what Washington needed, an existing, battle-tested intelligence service that was already in place.

Gehlen was returned to Germany after his meetings with General Vandenberg, President Truman's National Security Advisor and CIG senior Allen Dulles as the Chief of the CIG covert organization in Germany.

Hundreds of army and SS officers were released from internment camps to join his headquarters in the Spessart Mountains; when the staff grew to 3,000, the Gehlen organization moved to a twenty-five-acre compound south of Munich. It operated under the cover of the “South German Industrial Development Organization.”

The information produced by the organization was unquestionably timely, and reached the highest levels of the US Government, and provided as much as 70% of the NATO holdings on the Warsaw Pact.

The Gehlen Organization was also, unfortunately, thoroughly compromised by the Russians. Stalin's men were very good at what they did. The security services of the Kremlin had not only compromised German intelligence, but they also penetrated Whitehall and Washington in every major Department and Agency. Their British master agent, Kim Philby, was dispatched by MI-5 to help the Americans establish the CIA, successor to the CIG.

Gehlen's RUSTY group was transferred from the CIA to the West Germans in 1956, and Gehlen stayed on as the first director of the independent German intelligence service until his retirement in 1968.

The whole thing is enough to give you the creeps. But that is the way it was. The Soviets ran a brutal police state, and their security services were most effective in propping up an otherwise absurd economic system. There was no question that they had to be dealt with in a realistic way.

It is a problem with democracies that their intelligence organizations really are no match for an experienced police state. And of course, Mr. Putin is now running one that is really first class.

In the old days, the KGB was just one of the troika horses, balancing the interests of the Red Army and the Party.

Now Russia is a KGB state, or at least effectively administered by a complete set of its alumni.

I don't know if Gehlen was wrong. I guess we will see.

General Vandenberg retired from active duty June 30, 1953, having left the Central Intelligence Group to become the second Chief of Staff of the Air Force. The CIG became the CIA in 1947, part of the complete overhaul of the American defense establishment.

Vandernberg lost a bitter battle with Secretary of Defense “Engine Charlie” Wilson over a $5 Billion dollar cut to the Air Force 1954 budget as the Korean War wound down. He died the next year, and is buried in section 30 at Arlington, not far away from Jim Forrestal, who threw himself off the 14th floor of the Bethesda Naval Hospital.

In 1953, five billion dollars was real money. It could have been used to set up an intelligence service that actually worked.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

This concludes this short appreciation of PO Box 1142 and Project PAPERCLIP. For those seeking further wild rides through the late 1940s, a declassified compendium of documents and summary materials are contained in:

Forging and Intelligence Partnership: CIA and the Origins of the BND, 1945-49. Edited by Kevin C. Ruffner for CIA History Staff, Center for the Study of Intelligence, and European Division, Directorate of Operations. 1999. Released May 2002.

For PO Box 1142 matters, on Friday October 5th, 2007, PO Box 1142 veterans will hold the first reunion since the unit disbanded. The National Park Service is taking the lead on the reunion. The veterans are few, and frail. The Friday session will tour Fort Hunt, and interpret where the hundred-odd structures were located. A seminar will be held the following day, Saturday, Oct 6th, at the Women in the Military Auditorium at Arlington National Cemetery. There will be a wealth of historical and operational information on the art of eliciting information from captured foreign personnel.

I'm planning on being there. Reservations are required. For additional information, contact National Park Service Chief Ranger Vince Santucci, a Chief Ranger at NPS (703) 289-2531 / Vincent_santucci@nps.gov

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