How many Nazis were secretly recruited at the creation of the CIA?

Lots...

Lots!

It was publicly documented a long time ago—way back in 1988—that, following WWII, US bosses took over, whole, the German Nazi intelligence infrastructure in Eastern Europe. Giant multitudes of war criminals complicit in outrages to shake History itself were taken into receivership and adopted by the US government. The resulting creature was called ‘the US Central Intelligence Agency’: the CIA.

The historian who made this known is Christopher Simpson. The title of his book is Blowback. The subtitle has varied a bit with different editions, but the first one was: The First Full Account of America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Disastrous Effect on Our Domestic and Foreign Policy.

As you may know, the issue that consumes me is the management of reality. So the first thing I ask myself is: Why should I have to tell you about Simpson’s research at all? I mean, this is tremendous. It should already be super, super famous. But from experience I can tell you: hardly anybody knows about this subject.

Why don’t they?

Mind you, this is not the story of a handful of Nazi scientists recruited to build rockets for NASA. That’s a different—and less outrageous—story. What Simpson documented is this: the intelligence infrastructure of the German Nazis—the people who managed and executed a genocide in Europe—became the postwar intelligence infrastructure of the United States: the CIA.

Got it? Same personnel.

In fact, the guy who set up and ran the network of Nazi spies that became the CIA is the same general who’d been running that very spy network for Adolf Hitler: Reinhard Gehlen.

You really need to know this stuff. And you need to understand why you didn’t know about it before. And what it all means. So, below, I will summarize Christopher Simpson’s main findings and give you some context.

And I will be pointing you to other materials that can help us make sense of the long arc of US foreign policy, illuminating its more recent developments in the context of the Hamas-Israel war.

In future pieces I’ll explain more fully how Simpson’s findings were submerged as part of a grand strategy to manage our reality.

Our story begins with Barbie (not the doll).

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Klaus Barbie

That was his name. His nickname was ‘the Butcher of Lyon.’ A monster.

As GESTAPO (Nazi Police) chief in the city of Lyon during the WWII Nazi occupation of France, Barbie was the literal face of terror. A pathological sadist, he delighted in torture of Jews and French Resisters—many thousands!—before executing them or sending them to death camps.¹ Yet he escaped justice.

How?

On 16 August 1983, a press conference was convened so that the Justice Department’s chief investigator, Allan Ryan, could answer that question: Barbie had (until now) managed to escape justice, Ryan said, because the US Army Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) had been hiding him from the French police.

“Butcher of Lyon” Klaus Barbie

Wait. What?

Calm down. According to Allan Ryan this was really nothing: a one-time error, committed entirely in good faith. Just a huge screw-up, because the CIC hadn’t known about Barbie’s crimes.

You’ll need a bit of context about the CIC to understand fully what Ryan was saying.

The CIC, or the US Army Counterintelligence Corps, was “the leading intelligence organization in the American occupation zones,” meaning the zones—including of course Germany—that were militarily occupied for some years by the Americans “in the immediate post-war period.” As such, the CIC was charged with “searching for and arresting notable members of the previous regime,” meaning German Nazi war criminals.²

So Allan Ryan was saying this: that the outrageous crimes committed in the city of Lyon by local GESTAPO head Klaus Barbie—the infamous ‘Butcher of Lyon,’ certainly a notable member of the previous regime—had somehow remained unknown to the professional Nazi hunters at the CIC.

That’s… difficult to accept.

But implausibility is not the largest defect, here. For the US government confessed that the Counterintelligence Corps had hidden Klaus Barbie from the French Police. And the following observation obeys the elementary laws of logic: when you hide a war criminal from the police, that’s because you are aware of his war crimes.

Allan Ryan was not courting absurdity—he was making love to it. And that should have motivated suspicion of his other claims.

According to Ryan, he just couldn’t find any evidence, any at all, that other Nazi war criminals had ever been smuggled and recruited by the US government.

And, he insisted, no high-level conspiracy was at work in the Barbie case. Important bureaucrats were of course all completely innocent of any wrongdoing. Those responsible for shielding and recruiting Klaus Barbie had been just a handful of low-level CIC personnel who’d acted entirely on their own. They were not really rogue agents, though, because—look, this was all just an innocent mistake. They had meant well. (But what they did was not sanctioned—there was no policy, as such, to protect and recruit Nazis.)

And for good measure, just in case anybody was wondering, Ryan added that other government agencies were not involved.

“The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in particular, was given a clean bill of health in the Barbie case and, by implication, in other incidents in which the agency is alleged to have had traffic with fugitive war criminals.”³

The anthropology of this

Since I am so interested in the management of reality, one aspect of our Universe that I feel compelled to try to understand concerns the anthropological laws governing gullibility. And so, given that Ryan’s performance reeked so strongly of a nervous and guilty conscience, I must pause here to consider the implications of the fact that US citizens accepted Ryan’s claims.

Why did they?

I find highly relevant the symbolic context of Ryan’s communications. For Allan Ryan was no mere investigator at the Department of Justice; he was a giant personality within the meaning-making and prestige system of the Western world. Consider Wikipedia’s summary:

“Allan A. Ryan Jr. (July 3, 1945 – January 26, 2023) was an American attorney, author and a law professor at Harvard University, where he taught from 1985 until his death. He is best known for his work as a Justice Department lawyer who in the early 1980s identified and prosecuted dozens of Nazi collaborators living in the United States, earning him a reputation as America’s foremost Nazi hunter.”

So here’s my hypothesis of how this works.

As Allan Ryan explained to the world that Klaus Barbie had been a most exceptional aberration and was in no sense a token of a pattern, and much less was he evidence for a policy officially sanctioned by the US government, the silent, implicit argument that every mind subliminally processed was this: “America’s foremost Nazi hunter” would never assist those who hide Nazis from justice!

Whammed thus nearly unconscious by the sheer awesomeness of Ryan’s Harvard-lawyer prestige, plus the added prestige of his Justice-Department moral authority, and his fame as “America’s foremost Nazi hunter,” US citizens found it difficult to examine the actual substance of what he was saying, and heard only the reassuring tones in his voice, which brought the calming message that everything was really okay with US democracy. Fear not.

With citizens thus mesmerized and transfixed, the absurdities flew right over their heads—they never saw them.

I submit this is strong evidence to support the view that the prestige bias in human cognition is a major force with gigantic effects on communication and cultural transmission, as Joe Henrich and I, following in the footsteps of Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson, have argued for many years. Most significantly, when a mind is in the grip of prestige bias, the rational evaluation of the transmitted content is short-circuited.

If that seems like a maladaptive thing, remember that the design of our cognition evolved in very small human societies of hunter-gatherers where everybody knew everybody else and hence where the correlation between the material and ethological markers of prestige, success leaving offspring, and the possession of higher quality, transmittable information (skills and knowledge) was very tight and tough to fake. Adopting information from high-prestige individuals without stopping to verify the quality of the information improves the benefits of social learning, because the process of verification can impose risks, involve costly errors, and consume precious time. So originally, at least, this cognitive bias was always adaptive on average.

But now this cognitive adaptation, the prestige bias, is being stimulated in a rather different environment. We live in societies of millions with complex institutional life and division of labor, anonymous interactions, broadcast communications by way of mass media, large power disparities, and infinite informational ambiguities. In this world, the powerful US bosses can thoroughly game the prestige bias to manipulate us.

My claim is that they’ve done precisely that. Wielding the media, the academic establishment, and the institutions of State, they can create and produce any personality and spin whatever narrative they like around it: they can take a Harvard lawyer, for example, and make him famous as the Justice Department’s chief investigator of fugitive Nazis, “America’s foremost Nazi hunter,” trotting him out to exonerate the US government when necessary.

Something else to consider, I believe, is an important background assumption that acted as a second social-psychological force contributing to the gullible acceptance of Ryan’s claims. This is the assumption that the media constitute a reasonably free market of news producers who are autonomous from government and independent of each other, so that, rather than profit from protecting the government, they profit from exposing its scandals. I think most people in the United States still believed that back in 1983 (many believe it still).

A mind that holds as premise the above background assumption will express subliminally the following implicit argument: If there were any reason to think that Allan Ryan was lying, the media would be having a field day exposing him! But if Big Media expresses strong agreement with Ryan’s claims—as indeed was the case—then the same mind thinks: Ryan must be kosher.

This is how Simpson summarized the media’s take on Ryan:

“United Press International, for example, headlined PROBER: BARBIE THE EXCEPTION, NOT RULE, and quoted [Allan] Ryan as indicating that the Justice Department’s search had ‘uncovered no evidence that there was any other former Nazi that the US had shielded from justice.’ ABC TV’s Nightline program featured Ryan on its broadcast that evening. Ryan said that the United States had ‘innocently recruited Barbie, unaware of his role in France... [and that] the Barbie case was not typical.’ Under Ted Koppel’s questioning, Ryan expanded on the theme. It was ‘very likely there were no other Nazi officials who were relied upon as Klaus Barbie was... [and] this closes the record.’ ”⁴

The CIA was ‘exonerated’ on Ted Koppel’s Nightline show.

This closes the record! A tad insistent? A bit strenuous? As Shakespeare said: “The lady doth protest too much, methinks…”

Let us go in deeper, then, and ask:

Was there any special reason for all this to happen in the year 1983?

There was.

In early 1983, the government of Bolivia, the country where Barbie was hiding, had found, arrested, and extradited Barbie to France for trial. The US bosses could not control this legal process in France, apparently, and Barbie’s trial brought to light his embarrassing ties to the US government. At which point a lot of people began asking the uncomfortable question:

Were US bosses secretly protecting and recruiting Nazis?

Sensitive to this, the US government promptly rushed to investigate itself, deputizing Allan Ryan, “America’s foremost Nazi hunter,” for the job. By August 1983, just a few months later, Ryan had ‘closed the record.’ Conclusion: Nope, it was just Barbie. US bosses were not protecting and using Nazis. Cue the media applause: Bravo.

But Ryan’s conclusion—if that’s what it was—was false. Just five months later, the Washington Post was writing this:

“It is no longer necessary—or possible—to deny the fact: the U.S. government systematically and deliberately recruited active Nazis by the thousands, rescued them, hired them and relied upon them...”⁵

The Post was commenting on “the archival sleuthing of Christopher Simpson,” who, provoked by Allan Ryan’s strange performances, had gone rooting in a mountain of “documents ... declassified under the Freedom of Information Act.” Out of that work emerged Blowback: The First Full Account of America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Disastrous Effect on Our Domestic and Foreign Policy.

What were all those recruited Nazis for, specifically?

According to Simpson’s findings, a great many of these Nazis, including quite a few who “participated in the worst atrocities committed by the Nazi regime,” meaning genocide, became part of the Gehlen Organization—or ‘Gehlen Org’—headquartered in the postwar in Pullach (a suburb of Munich).⁶

This outfit was so named for Reinhard Gehlen—previously “Hitler’s most senior military intelligence officer on the eastern front”—who had specialized in obtaining vital intelligence for Hitler by torturing to death millions of Soviet prisoners of war (many were slowly starved). Gehlen had obliged the US military officers who shielded him from justice by putting Hitler’s network back together for them.⁷

How important was the ‘Gehlen Org’? Crushingly important, because the US did not have much of an intelligence infrastructure.

You probably heard about the famous Office of Strategic Services (OSS), created during WWII, which is always mentioned as the supposed ‘precursor’ to the CIA. But the OSS was tiny, and, as Simpson documents, it was almost entirely gutted at the end of the war when alleged ‘communists’ (identified by their strong criticism of fascists) were purged.⁸ There was hardly anybody from the OSS still on the US-government payroll to spawn the CIA in 1947. It is therefore misleading to say that a preexisting ‘US Intelligence’ absorbed Gehlen’s Nazis; rather, the postwar US intelligence infrastructure was just Gehlen’s Nazis all over again.

Writes Simpson,

“during the first years of the CIA... Gehlen’s reports and analysis were sometimes simply retyped into CIA stationary and presented to President Truman without further comment...”⁹

It was Gehlen—and his Nazi spies—doing all the work, and teaching the Americans how to do it.

And there is an even bigger story here, because many German Nazis and collaborators—besides those stationed in Europe with the Gehlen Org—ended up elsewhere on the US government payroll.

Some were given US passports and imported to work in intelligence and propaganda from within the US; others were given US passports and integrated into the US Army (many into the Special Forces or ‘Green Berets’); still others were given US passports and imported to behave on US soil as alleged ‘governments in exile’ for countries behind the Soviet Iron Curtain, and were secretly provided with large budgets so they could lobby the US Congress for ‘anti-Communist’ foreign policy.¹⁰

(By contrast, during the Nazi persecution, Jews were denied entry to the United States—even Jews already wait-listed for US visas.)

US bosses were fulfilling Maurice Joly’s prophecies, made in the late 19th century.

Joly had warned that, if Western democratic citizens authorized government bureaucrats to create secret services, the bureaucrats would use them to flood the institutional system with their secret agents and would clandestinely take over all the citizen institutions: political parties, media, NGOs, universities, etc. They would destroy democracy while keeping the facade.

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Maurice Joly and the Theory of Counterfeit Democracy

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US bosses were doing precisely that—and using actual Nazis for the job.

In fact, what I mention here is just the tip of the iceberg. Younger people no longer know anything about this, but, beginning with a 1967 exposé in Ramparts magazine on the CIA’s takeover of the National Student Association, there followed an entire decade of revelations and scandals concerning just how thorough the CIA’s clandestine penetration of institutional democratic life in the United States had become.

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The National Student Association, the CIA, and the structure of a captured organization

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Yet, despite those dramatic disclosures, the sickness was too advanced. The system was unable to respond and heal itself. Democracy was not restored.

Put another way, the Nazis remained in power.

What about Germany?

An obvious question is: If US bosses were doing this to the United States, using German Nazis and Nazi collaborators, then: What were they doing to Germany? Was Germany really denazified after the war?

Not according to the guy in charge of that job: Justice Department attorney James Stewart Martin, who charged in All Honorable Men, a book he published in 1950, that the US government had thoroughly sabotaged his efforts to denazify Germany.

Indeed, what happened in Germany is the very opposite, and it got worse after Martin published his book.

“The Gehlen Organization,” we are told, “became the responsibility of the CIA, which continued the relationship until 1956.”¹¹ But the relationship hardly ended in 1956. What happened is this: in 1956 West German bosses obeyed the orders of their masters, the US bosses, and “Gehlen’s organization became the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), West Germany’s foreign intelligence agency.”¹²

Let that sink in…

Everything was kept consistent. The BND was established right there in Pullach, in the former Führer Headquarters. And the BND naturally spied on Germans, too. When Gehlen retired in 1968, another Nazi general, Gerhard Wessel, took the helm of the thoroughly Nazi ‘Gehlen Org’/BND.¹³

Seal and main offices of the BND, Pullach (Munich).

Now there’s a story for the front pages (never seen there¹⁴ ): the US power elite returned the Nazis to power in Germany.

And not just there. CIA clandestine operations—organized through and by the Gehlen Org—dressed up fascists in ‘Christian Democratic’ suit-and-tie and returned them to power elsewhere in Europe.¹⁵

What are the ramifications of all this?

We will be discussing the ramifications of all this in a number of articles. But I want to leave you here with two directions that you can already explore.

The first concerns the background context. In other words, what would have to be true about US bosses so that they would even think of protecting and recruiting all those Nazis as their own? Wouldn’t they have to be Nazis themselves?

Not according to a common apology that has been made for US bosses: they allegedly needed to recruit all those Nazis to fight communism. It’s such a common argument that you may have accepted its alleged ‘logic’ from the sheer weight of authoritative repetition in the Big Media and in established academia. I will carefully examine this apology—which is like saying that your doctor needs you to drink a glass of cyanide in order to defeat your cancer—in a future article.

For now, I give you a powerful fact: even before World War II, US bosses had long been the international leaders of the eugenics movement, and with their financing and intellectual support, eugenics became German Nazism.

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EUGENICS. Before WWII, the US power elite were major sponsors of the eugenics movement, which became German Nazism.

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And wouldn’t the US Army, so eager to recruit Nazis (for they began that process), be tempted to treat US citizens like lab rats, in the manner of the criminal Nazi doctors? Well, it is a historical fact—documented in the US Congress—that they were so tempted, and indeed succumbed to their temptations.

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Did the US Army spray bioweapons on your family?

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Another question, going forward, is what US foreign policy has really been in the postwar.

Because many have asserted over the years that US foreign policy is built around a very special and very positive relationship that US bosses supposedly have with the State of Israel, whose security US bosses allegedly strive—even with prejudice—to protect.

Now, the least that can be said about the CIA is that it has a rather important role shaping US foreign policy. So the question becomes: Is it really believable that a nest of Nazi war criminals, complicit in history’s greatest anti-Jewish genocide, could have become the staunchest ally of the Jewish State?

Isn’t it more likely that these Nazi war criminals would work hard to prepare the genocidal destruction of the Jewish State?

Wouldn’t they be tempted, for example, to give strategic territory of the Jewish State to Iran, which promises to repeat the Shoa (Holocaust) in Israel? Well, it is a historical fact that this is precisely what US bosses did do.

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WAR IS PEACE: Did the US force Israel to cede strategic territory to Iran?

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And wouldn’t they be tempted, if they thought they could manage it, to insert the spawn of the German Nazis into the Jewish State? Well, it is a historical fact that this is precisely what US bosses did do.

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The responsibility of the Arab Palestinian movement in the German Nazi Final Solution

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Of course, all this raises the question of what US bosses were really doing in World War II (we’ll get to that). For the moment, you have some adventures to choose from. Choose your own adventure…!

1. Historian Guyora Binder writes:

“Born near Germany’s French border, and of partly French extraction, Barbie lost his father to the lingering effects of a World War I wound in 1933. The following year, Barbie graduated from high school. Finding himself penniless and without prospect of employment, Barbie became involved with the Nazi movement and, in 1935, was accepted into the SS. ‘Any idiot couldn’t join the SS,’ Barbie has insisted. ‘I had to study law and philosophy.’ Barbie became a lieutenant in the intelligence section of the SD in 1940. He was posted to occupied Holland where he participated in roundups of Jews for deportation and execution. Because of his fluency in French, Barbie was moved to occupied France in 1942; towards the end of the year he became head of the Gestapo in Lyons, the center of Resistance activity in the South. His chief responsibilities were the suppression of the Resistance, communists and Jews. Historians estimate that more than 4,000 people were executed on his orders during the last two years of the Occupation. In addition, the records of a local magistrate indicate that the Gestapo deported 7,591 people from Lyons to the death camps; but ‘shot or deported, there’s no difference,’ Barbie reportedly philosophized. It is not known how many of these approximately 12,000 victims were Jewish. Barbie’s reputation as the ‘Butcher of Lyons’ rested also on his routine practice of torturing suspected Resistance members and Jews in an effort to uncover other members of both groups.”

SOURCE: Binder, G. (1989). Representing Nazism: Advocacy and identity at the trial of Klaus Barbie. The Yale Law Journal, 98(7), 1321-1383.

2. Counterintelligence Corps | From Wikipedia (consulted 20 May 2024)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterintelligence_Corps

3. Simpson, C. (1988). Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and its Effects on the Cold War. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicholson. (p.xii)

4. Blowback, op. cit. (pp.xii-xiii)

5. ‘Uncle Sam’s Nazi’s’; The Washington Post; April 24, 1988; Sunday, Final Edition, BOOK WORLD; PAGE X11; 905 words; Peter Grose, REVIEW.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/1988/04/24/uncle-sams-nazis/d75881c2-5d80-436e-89ce-df8a4d1cf539/

6. Christopher Simpson writes that

“at least a half dozen -- and probably more -- of [Gehlen’s] first [postwar] staff of fifty officers were former SS or SD men, including SS Obersturmführer Hans Sommer (who had set seven Paris synagogues to the torch in October 1941)…” (a)

In the year 2005, historian Timothy Naftali explains that “newly released information from the CIA and the Army,” as a consequence of the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act,

“make it possible to assess the extent of Gehlen’s recruitment of former officers of the SD [the intelligence service of the SS] and Gestapo. It turns out that it was widespread. At least one hundred of Gehlen’s officers and agents had served with the SD or the Gestapo, and the number may in fact be significantly higher. …some of those hired had participated in the worst atrocities committed by the Nazi regime.” (b)

SOURCES IN THIS FOOTNOTE:

(a) Blowback, op. cit. (pp.40, 44-45)

(b) Naftali, T. 2005. “Reinhard Gehlen and the United States,” in US Intelligence and the Nazis. Edited by R. Breitman, N. J. W. Goda, T. Naftali, and R. Wolfe, pp. 375-418. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (p.377)

7. Blowback, op. cit. (pp.40, 44-45)

8. Blowback op. cit. (pp.57-59)

9. Blowback op. cit. (p.53)

10. Blowback op. cit.(pp.138-42, 199-245)

11. “CIA Intends to Release Records on Cold War Spymaster”; Interagency Working Group (IWG); The National Archives; October 5, 2000
https://www.archives.gov/iwg/about/press-releases/cold-war-spymaster-records.html

12. The following is explained in a National Archives document:

“the West German intelligence organization established by General Reinhard Gehlen... was initially under the control of the U. S. Army and was taken over in 1949 by the CIA. Later Gehlen's organization became the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), West Germany's foreign intelligence agency.” (a)

This is not a secret and there is zero controversy about it (though it is true that the public largely does not know it). If you consult Wikipedia’s article on the Gehlen Org, it says this:

“The Gehlen Organization or Gehlen Org (often referred to as The Org) was an intelligence agency established in June 1946 by U.S. occupation authorities in the United States zone of post-war occupied Germany, and consisted of former members of the 12th Department of the German Army General Staff (Foreign Armies East, or FHO). It was headed by Reinhard Gehlen who had previously been a Wehrmacht Major General and head of the Nazi German military intelligence in the Eastern Front during World War II.

The agency was a precursor to the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND or Federal Intelligence Service) which was formed in 1956.” (b)

If you consult Wikipedia’s article on Reinhard Gehlen it says this:

“Beginning with his time as head of the Gehlen Organization, Gehlen favored both Atlanticism and close cooperation between what would become West Germany, the U.S. intelligence community, and the other members of the NATO military alliance. The organization employed hundreds of former members of the Nazi Party and former Wehrmacht military intelligence officers.

After West Germany regained its sovereignty, Gehlen became the founding president of the Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst, BND) of West Germany (1956–68). Gehlen obeyed a direct order from West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, and also hired former counterintelligence officers of the Schutzstaffel (SS) and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), in response to an alleged avalanche of covert ideological subversion hitting West Germany from the intelligence services behind the Iron Curtain.”(c)

SOURCES IN THIS FOOTNOTE:

(a) ‘Records of the Central Intelligence Agency (RG 263)’; Interagency Working Group (IWG); The National Archives; By Dr. Richard Breitman, Professor of History, American University, IWG Director of Historical Research.
https://www.archives.gov/iwg/declassified-records/rg-263-cia-records/rg-263-report.html

(b) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gehlen_Organization

(c) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhard_Gehlen

13. The New York Times—though never on the front page—on occasion reported interesting details about General Gerhard Wessel, the ‘former’ Nazi. For instance, Wessel was “West German representative on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization [NATO]” (a).

Huh.

And consider what the New York Times wrote in Wessel’s obituary:

“Gerhard Wessel, a spy for Nazi Germany who went on to head West Germany’s espionage agency, died on July 28 at his home in Pullach, a suburb of Munich. He was 88.

...He is regarded as the founder of West Germany’s counterintelligence service, which he headed for seven years. As the successor to Reinhard Gehlen as chief of the agency— known as the BND, for Bundesnachrichtendienst—he is credited with modernizing German intelligence gathering and curbing some abuses.

He hired academic analysts and electronics experts to serve alongside agents, and ordered spies to stop shadowing Germans inside Germany.

...In 1952, General Gehlen detached General Wessel, then a colonel, from their tightly guarded compound in Pullach to help organize intelligence services for the new West German Army. He supervised counterintelligence for the army for seven years.

...In truth, he always remained an aide to General Gehlen, as the Gehlen Organization was transferred to newly sovereign West Germany's intelligence service in April 1956. In 1968, General Gehlen retired and General Wessel replaced him.

...[Wessel] immediately responded to government demands for reforms. The BND was to work only on foreign intelligence and avoid the domestic surveillance into which General Gehlen had allowed the agency to drift.” (b)

This is a rather strange story.

According to the New York Times, Wessel

“immediately responded to government demands for reforms. The BND was to work only on foreign intelligence and avoid the domestic surveillance into which General Gehlen had allowed the agency to drift.”

And so Wessel “ordered spies to stop shadowing Germans inside Germany.”

No doubt Wessel said he did that. But did he really?

As we also see above, Wessel, who “always remained an aide to General Gehlen,” was sent by Gehlen for a few years to create the West German Army’s counterintelligence service. It follows that Wessel was Gehlen’s trusted expert in counterintelligence.

What is counterintelligence?

The job of German counterintelligence is to discover who is spying on Germany. How do foreign countries spy on Germany? In part by recruiting Germans who will share privileged information. So how does German counterintelligence combat this? Why, by “shadowing Germans inside Germany.” Such activities then easily expand into spying on Germans generally, and also for entirely domestic reasons, because power always seeks more power. And that’s the sort of thing that a Nazi does naturally anyway. And Gerhard Wessel, like Reinhard Gehlen, was a Nazi.

Moreover, crucially, “the domestic surveillance into which General Gehlen had allowed the agency to drift” was a program for which Gerhard Wessel was directly responsible. It was Wessel in charge of Gehlen’s “drift.”

So is it plausible that Wessel really stopped the very domestic spying activities that had been at the center of his intelligence career?

The New York Times seems to think we should take Wessel’s word on that, because, sure: Why would anybody doubt the word of a Nazi? Certainly not the New York Times. Those people are doing journalism!

SOURCES IN THIS FOOTNOTE

(a) “Gehlen Is Retiring as German Intelligence Chief; Gen. Wessel to Succeed Him in Bonn Post Next May 1 New Head Has Long Served on NATO Committee”; The New York Times; January 16, 1968; Page 16; By DAVID BINDER

(b) “Gerhard Wessel, 88, German Espionage Chief”; The New York Times; August 3, 2002; By DOUGLAS MARTIN

14. The New York Times—“the newspaper of record”—always knew that those running the West German intelligence service were Nazis, but it always chose not to make a fuss about it. Here follow three examples of mentions of Reinhard Gehlen, acknowledging that he was a Nazi, that I was able to find in the New York Times before the 1988 publication of Christopher Simpson’s Blowback:

1. 1963. The tiniest note on page 5.

   
   “RETIREMENT SEEN FOR TOP BONN SPY; Gehlen Seen Compromised by Soviet Penetration; Ex-Nazis in Key Spots”; The New York Times; July 14, 1963; Page 5; By ARTHUR J. OLSEN

2. 1972. A book review (on page BR3), written by “a former American diplomat and intelligence officer.”

   “The General Was a Spy; The Truth About General Gehlen and His Spy Ring”; The New York Times; April 16, 1972; Section BOOK REVIEW, Page BR3; By CHRISTOPHER FELIX;

3. 1980. An article in the New York Times Magazine about “The Spy War” located—amazingly—in a section called “Beauty & Health THE SCIENCE OF LOOKING GOOD” (on page SM11).

   “THE SPY WAR”; Beauty & Health THE SCIENCE OF LOOKING GOOD; The New York Times Magazine; September 28, 1980; Page SM11; By Edward Jay Epstein

15. Christopher Simpson documents CIA postwar campaigns to return fascists disguised as ‘Christian democrats’ to power in Italy and Greece (in both cases successful), repeating what was done in Germany. (a)

It is interesting, however, to consider the exception that confirms the rule.

Even though Christian democrats were the CIA’s favorites everywhere else, they didn’t benefit from CIA largesse in France. Why not? After all, as historian Kai Bird documents, there was indeed a postwar CIA program to influence politics in France. (b) So why didn’t the CIA support the French Christian democrats, organized in the MRP (Mouvement Républicain Populaire)?

In documenting the history of the MRP, historian Carolyn Warner provides an obvious clue. She writes that “Unlike other European Christian democratic parties—not to mention other French parties—the MRP did not have, or seek, former [Nazi] collaborators as activists.” (c) Apparently, then, the MRP got no clandestine help from the CIA, which was a nest of Nazis, because the MRP eschewed any contact with former Nazi collaborators. And this is no doubt why, despite starting out very strong, the MRP subsequently did so badly that it disappeared.

Who did do well in postwar France? The other parties, the ones that recruited former fascists, which they could do because most of the Vichy collaborators were not even tried, as there were “limited amnesties [in] 1946 and 1947 and… broader ones [in] 1951 and 1953 that left only the most serious offenders in prison,” as explained by historian Bertram Gordon. (d)

And even when a fresh new party, the Socialists, took power in 1981, nothing had changed. Consider that François Mitterrand, the socialist who governed France for a decade and a half, had been René Bousquet’s best friend, as documented in Pierre Péan’s biography, written with Mitterrand’s full cooperation. (e) That caused a scandal because Bousquet had been head of the Vichy police, the French regime allied with the Nazis. To get a sense for him, consider what historians Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton write in Vichy France and the Jews:

“When the Germans began their systematic deportation and extermination of Jews in 1942, Vichy’s rival anti-Semitism offered them more substantial help than they received anywhere else in Europe.... Having begged the Germans for years to take back their refugees, the Vichy leaders offered to dispatch foreign Jews from unoccupied areas—something that Bulgaria alone, in eastern Europe, did on a similar scale.... [In this the] French Police were indispensable. As SS-General Oberg wrote to French Police Chief [René] Bousquet in July 1942, as the two police services solidified their agreement to work together, ‘I am happy to confirm, moreover, that the French police has up to now performed in a manner worthy of appreciation.’ The Germans could never have accomplished this on their own.” —quoted in Scullion (1998:112) (f)

SOURCES IN THIS FOOTNOTE:

(a) Simpson, C. (1988). Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and its Effects on the Cold War. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicholson. (pp.80-95)

(b) Bird, K. (1998). The Color of Truth: McGeorge and William Bundy, Brothers in Arms: A Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster.(p.106)

(c) Warner, C. M. (1998). Getting out the Vote with Patronage and Threat: The French and Italian Christian Democratic Parties, 1944-1958. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 28(4), 553-582. (p.565)

(d) Gordon, B. M. (1995). The "Vichy Syndrome" Problem in History. French Historical Studies, 19(2), 495-518.

(e) Péan, P. (1994). Une jeunesse française: François Mitterrand, 1934-1947. Paris: Fayard. (pp.313-320)

(f) Scullion, R. (1998). Georges Perec, W, and the Memory of Vichy France. SubStance, 27, No.3(Special Issue (87): The Occupation), 107-129. (p.112)