A Look Over My Shoulder

by Richard Helms

  As RUSTY’s East German reporting became more useful, the Pentagon clamored for even more intelligence. Gehlen expanded his efforts to oblige, but adamantly resisted anything resembling close control by his American “partners.” By rough count some four thousand people had been helped to survive the most difficult postwar months by becoming affiliated one way or another with RUSTY. Costs soared and the problems of supervising such a vast supposedly secret organization were staggering. G-2 realized it had an outsized and ravenous bear by the tail.

  CIA officers in Germany were uniformly dismayed by the noisy and insecure activity of the RUSTY operatives. The intelligence, particularly on East Germany, was valuable, but as seen by our German station, it hardly offset the poor security and discipline of the RUSTY operatives.

  The security and control problems continued to worsen in Germany until in 1947, the year CIA came into existence, the Pentagon asked the Agency to take over the RUSTY operation.

  The decision to accept responsibility for the operation was made by the DCI; the ongoing responsibility was very much mine. At my level this meant establishing a headquarters section and then selecting the personnel who would begin work in Germany with what was becoming publicly known as the “Gehlen organization.” It always struck me as odd that as much as Gehlen professed to admire the British approach to official secrets—and to envy the fact that the identity of the British intelligence chief was never publicly acknowledged or mentioned in the press—he was the only intelligence chief I can recall who had never troubled to discourage the public linking of his own name to that of his service.

  Staffing the Washington headquarters unit was relatively easy. Donald Huefner, levelheaded, fluent in German, sensitive to policy considerations, and detail-oriented, was an obvious choice to head the Washington office. Finding a man with these qualities senior enough to cope with Gehlen in Germany was a greater problem. The former general was more than a handful, and we had no illusions about his probable reaction to the inevitable changes our new management would introduce. To begin, we would insist on having the names and biographic data of everyone on the organization’s staff. Moreover, we would screen the political backgrounds of all the staff personnel.

  The perceived Nazi flavor of the Gehlen organization had not yet become a favorite East German and Soviet propaganda target. It was not until 1950 that this charge developed considerable resonance in the Western press and political circles. Although he played no role in the German resistance and his memoirs reflect little criticism of Hitler, Gehlen was never a Nazi Party member. His failure to keep all former Nazi security and intelligence officials out of RUSTY was a costly mistake. It provided East German and Soviet propagandists with a long-lasting and potent propaganda source. The threat to expose a RUSTY member’s unsavory Nazi background also offered the various communist espionage services a potentially useful blackmail tool.

  When it became apparent that none of the CIA officers in Germany were interested in picking up this hot potato, there occurred one of the bits of luck that sometimes—if too rarely—save the day. At the moment I was most desperate, Colonel James Critchfield’s file crossed my desk. A regular Army officer from the North Dakota plain, with extensive combat experience in Italy, France, and Germany, and a recent military intelligence assignment in Vienna, Colonel Critchfield had become so convinced of the importance of intelligence in the postwar world that he decided to abandon his promising military career—he was one of the youngest ground-force colonels in the Army—and join CIA. When Colonel Galloway, a loyal West Pointer, failed to talk Critchfield into remaining in the Army, he got up from his desk, clapped Jim on the shoulder, and said, “I think you’re a damned fool, but I’m sure glad to have you join CIA.”

  If ever I hit upon the right man for the right job, the choice of Jim Critchfield for the Gehlen organization was among the best. Although he had but recently arrived in Germany to take over an important Soviet assignment, Jim’s military background and experience suggested he might be the man to make an on-the-ground assessment of RUSTY. Five weeks later, Critchfield filed a long cable to Washington. He emphasized that an organization employing some four thousand people, with offices scattered across Germany, and unknown agents operating at various posts in Western Europe, controlling—to some degree—scores of other agents, and feeding the Pentagon intelligence it badly wanted, could scarcely, as had once been suggested in Washington, be broken up and allotted at random to various American offices. Critchfield made the point that Germany would eventually become sovereign, it would surely have an intelligence service of its own, and in time would again figure prominently in any European equation. Current American interests and future German concerns would both be served by continuing a joint endeavor under stricter management. Failing such a decision, Critchfield felt the RUSTY project should be terminated.

  Within days the field responsibility for this rambunctious and unloved baby was deposited on Critchfield’s doorstep. For the ensuing seven years he turned in a remarkable performance managing our relations with the German organization. By nature cool and soft-spoken, Jim came quickly to understand his German military associates, some of whom he had actually faced on the battlefield as he led his task force across France and into southern Germany. With a minimum of guidance from Washington, he effected the necessary changes in policy and practice, and weathered the inevitable arguments and conflicts, while also managing to win the confidence and respect of Gehlen’s group.

  It was perhaps typical of Critchfield’s approach to his job, and his ability to establish rapport with the difficult general, that, in his first meeting with Gehlen, Jim asked for a list of German staff employees. Gehlen balked, but a day later he handed the data to his new colleague. Assembling the details on the widespread Gehlen operations took more time.

  One of the serious operational problems was Gehlen’s continued support of individuals and groups of intelligence entrepreneurs which CIA had begun to identify as fabricators devoted to creating and peddling information, allegedly coming from Eastern Europe and the USSR, which was often both false and deceptive. Ironically, some of the agents involved had been employed by German intelligence during World War II.

  It was not long after we had accepted responsibility for the Gehlen organization that Critchfield realized that along with Gehlen’s intention eventually to shape an independent German intelligence service, he had a second, less obvious objective. This was to help preserve, pending an eventual German government position on “remilitarization”—a real buzzword in those days—a handful of former senior Wehrmacht officers well qualified to lead such a development. To this end he employed, among others, Lieutenant General Adolf Heusinger, who had served as chief of the Operations Division of the Wehrmacht until he was arrested and imprisoned by Hitler after the July 20 assassination attempt. Heusinger, who sympathized with the plotters but was not involved in the attempted coup, was briefing Hitler and was wounded when the bomb went off. In the investigations that followed, Heusinger’s anti-Nazi opinions were uncovered. After the war he was a witness for the prosecution at the Nuremberg trials.

  Under Heusinger’s direction, the former Wehrmacht officers worked nominally in the evaluations and estimates component of Gehlen’s staff. They scrupulously avoided responsibility for anything smacking of espionage, their primary concern being to develop plans for what would become the armed forces of a new German federal republic. With the 1950 outbreak of war in Korea, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer moved to ease Germany into the treaty organization that was to become NATO. Despite what seemed to be irreconcilable views within our government, and with the British and French, a common policy was achieved and Germany was admitted to the treaty organization in 1955. General Heusinger went on to play an important role in the new Germany until his retirement as chairman of the Federal Republic’s Supreme Military Council.

  The German Federal Republic became sovereign in May 1955. A year later, when the Gehlen organization became the Bun
desnachrichtendienst (BND), the German Federal Intelligence Service, Jim Critchfield’s job in Germany came to term.

  In the years that followed, the BND suffered its share of difficulty. Gehlen’s sometimes eccentric security practices, based in part on his notion of the “honor” of the German officer corps, could not cope with the exposed and very difficult situation he faced. The Soviet, East German, and other communist services effected penetrations of Gehlen’s organization that laid bare secrets which might have destroyed any other intelligence service. Gehlen’s proclivity for involving himself in domestic political matters harmed the service and in time damaged his relationship with Chancellor Adenauer. His efforts to assume responsibility for domestic counterintelligence as well as foreign operations were seriously mistaken but wisely ignored by his government. In a democracy these two activities should remain separate.

  In the end, Gehlen achieved his objective. An independent German intelligence service had been formed. The BND survived its many difficulties and today enjoys a respected partnership with the NATO community.

  *Germany’s Underground (New York: Macmillan, 1947).

  †General Reinhard Gehlen, The Service (New York: World, 1972).

  Chapter 9

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  FABRICATION FACTORIES

  By 1949 the Cold War was an established fact of life. The civil war in Greece, Stalin’s heavy-handed occupation of most of Eastern Europe, his repeated observation that the communist and capitalist worlds could not indefinitely coexist, and his manipulation of the European Communist Parties had erased most remaining notions of any East-West cooperation.

  In February 1946 the news that a few months earlier Igor Gouzenko, a Soviet military intelligence code clerk in the Ottawa embassy, had defected and brought with him a bundle of documents detailing Russian intelligence activity in Canada—scarcely a threat to the USSR—and against the United States focused official and public attention on Stalin’s aggressive espionage operations. The scope of the Canada-based espionage net was not publicly disclosed, but as the investigation continued it was apparent that the Soviet intelligence operations against the American atomic weapons programs were well advanced and highly productive. We didn’t know it at the time, but these operations had begun in 1942.

  The certainty that the American monopoly on atomic weapons could not endure for as long as our policymakers had assumed added an urgent dimension to the Pearl Harbor syndrome. How long, Washington policymakers asked, would it take the USSR to develop its own atomic weapon? CIA was established to prevent the risk of another sneak attack. It was the Agency’s responsibility to answer the question. No matter that the USSR had been a target for less than three years, or that no Western intelligence service had established sources that might conceivably have answered this question. We had failed. The fact that CIA’s experienced officers amounted to little more than a cadre, none of whom had any experience in Soviet operations, was pertinent but less than consoling.

  There was no easy fix. The missing ingredients—an adequate operational data base and a body of experienced personnel—could not be purchased. It was up to the Agency to create both and at flank speed.

  The answer to Soviet atomic developments came in September 1949 when a long-range weather detection aircraft identified radioactive elements in a weather system over the North Pacific. Intensive analysis proved beyond doubt that the USSR had exploded an atomic device in late August. This was well ahead of the conventional estimate which had been prepared before the extent of the Soviet penetration of the Manhattan Project had been determined. The Los Alamos spies had given the Soviet scientists a considerable leg up.

  It is impossible to understand the role and activity of the Western intelligence services in the early postwar years without an appreciation of the intensity of the demand for information on the USSR and Eastern Europe, and the way in which urgent requirements expanded and accelerated. From mid-1946 onwards every political and military development fueled the demand for intelligence. Budgets were increased, eased upwards, and then increased again. If there are more graphic illustrations of the predictable result of throwing money at a problem that hasn’t been thought through, none comes to mind.

  One of the forgotten phases of the postwar years in Europe was the cottage industry that sprang up in response to the urgent need for solid information on the USSR and Soviet-occupied areas of Eastern Europe. By January 1947 the demand for intelligence had increased to the point that a legion of political exiles, former intelligence officers, ex-agents, and sundry entrepreneurs were turning themselves into intelligence moguls, brokering the sale of fabricated-to-order information to the various official intelligence services. For months after the end of hostilities, it was still possible for the émigré groups beginning to gather west of the Soviet-occupied areas to maintain contact with their compatriots and political sympathizers in the homeland and to receive some firsthand information. As the Soviet occupation settled down, these clumsy cross-border communications were destroyed or brought under Soviet control. By the time Western services had focused their sights on the new targets, none of the existing communications remained viable.

  In a textbook example of the supply-and-demand equation, a harvest of fabricated “intelligence” blossomed, with shares of the crop available to anyone with an open pocketbook. The faked reports were usually tacked onto a frame of overt material lifted from the press, and the debriefing of market-fresh refugees. Once assembled, the authentic and easily verified material was spiced and inflated with outright fabrication attributed to various—but always “high-level” and “in-place”—sources whose identities could be known only to the intelligence peddler.

  If an intelligence service was hard pressed for data on the production of uranium in East Germany—and we all were—fabricators would respond appropriately. I recall a sample of “radioactive uranium”—allegedly and improbably pinched from an East German shipment en route to Moscow—that arrived in a cocoon of tinfoil the girth of a softball. The enclosed walnut-size chunk of lead was less valuable than the wrapping.

  This is not to suggest that we were complete fools. Communications between field stations and headquarters were slow, there was less air travel, and the postwar espionage world was young. At that time the demand for a bit of East German or Czech uranium was so intense that the whiff of a breakthrough seemed reason enough to move quickly. Instead of taking the time to look into the agent’s background, examine the means by which the sample was obtained, and consult atomic energy experts on the likelihood of any outsider being able to identify and make off with a bit of uranium, the sample was purchased—albeit at a fraction of the asking price. At the time the few dollars involved in such cart-before-the-horse nonsense was of less moment than the remote possibility of missing a significant opportunity and, perhaps not incidentally, of losing a chance to show our clients that the young Agency was not sitting on its bureaucratic backside.

  I long ago came to suspect that the temptation to abandon well-proven operational procedures in hot pursuit of an allegedly fleeting opportunity has throughout espionage history been responsible for more painful pratfalls than any other professional lapse. In practice, one of the bits of evidence pointing to a possible provocation by an opposing service, or perhaps the presence of a fabricator, is the admonition to respond immediately lest a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to win all the marbles be lost forever. It may be that an occasional windfall has been lost because of too long a look before leaping. If so, the molehill of losses must be measured against the mountain of haste-makes-waste disasters.

  Even in the early days, detecting fraud involving material that could be laboratory tested was relatively simple—the bit of ore was uranium or not; the stoppered and wrapped test tube of “nerve gas” was lethal or benign. Unfortunately, offers involving intangible and ephemeral data on political schemes, military planning, or intelligence activity were more difficult to evaluate.

  The fabricators soon lear
ned that a single basic report could be tailored to appeal to various American and other Western buyers. Throughout the American occupation zones in Germany and Austria, the Army, Air Force, and Navy each maintained diverse, more or less independent, intelligence offices, each striving to make its reputation. Similar situations existed in the British and French intelligence establishments. Although efforts were made to effect coordination and stamp out duplicated effort, more often than not the situation appeared to be beyond the ability of the bureaucracy to solve. The sellers’ intelligence market soared.

  The proliferation of reports ostensibly from widely different sources but presenting roughly similar fabricated data made false confirmations a constant threat. At one point it was estimated that some 50 percent of the information on file in the West on the USSR and Eastern Europe had come from such sources. The notion that pitched battles were being fought by Russian or Ukrainian resistance forces and the Red Army, and other such apparently sensational scoops, was smothering our modest reports showing how the USSR was consolidating its grip on the occupied areas. Until sound data bases could be established, evaluation and analysis of nonscientific data were all but impossible.

  We soon found that the study of the operational mechanism that allegedly produced the reports was far more effective than attempting to evaluate the actual intelligence product. Case officers with wartime operations and interrogation experience readily adapted these skills to postwar activity. Unfortunately these experienced officers and equally practiced operations analysts and desk officers—usually women in those days—were scarce.