The Devil's Chessboard

by David Talbot

  Critchfield was the son of a small-town North Dakota doctor and schoolteacher, graduating from North Dakota State University and joining the Army on the eve of the war. He had the thick, wavy hair and dark good looks of a central casting military hero. Critchfield served in North Africa and Europe, rising through the ranks to become one of the Army’s youngest colonels and winning the Bronze Star twice and the Silver Star for gallantry. Crossing the Rhine in the final weeks of the war as the commander of a mobile task force, the young colonel was one of the first American officers to witness firsthand the results of Hitler’s Final Solution. In late April, his unit came across an annex of Dachau. The camp was nearly empty, but there was evidence all around of the horror that had taken place there. At one point, the young Army colonel and his soldiers watched in “shocked silence” as two skeletal camp survivors chased after an escaping SS guard, wrestled him to the ground, and choked him to death.

  Despite his war experiences, Critchfield prided himself on keeping an open mind about the ex-Nazi commanders with whom he later worked. “Gehlen and his senior staff, and their wives (many of whom also worked in Pullach), all impressed us as being unusually intelligent and well educated,” Critchfield observed. “In personal characteristics, apparent values, and thoughts about the future of Germany and Europe, these [ex-Nazi] officers did not seem to me significantly different from my contemporaries in the U.S. Army.”

  Critchfield knew from the beginning of his professional relationship with Gehlen that he was dealing with a “difficult personality.” Gehlen once subjected his CIA supervisor to a three-hour “harangue” against U.S. interference in his spy organization’s affairs. Despite Gehlen’s occasional histrionics, Critchfield expressed admiration for his German colleague’s pragmatic, businesslike style and his welcome habit of “getting right to the point.” If Gehlen had not been rescued by U.S. intelligence authorities after the war, he almost certainly would have been convicted of war crimes at Nuremberg. But Critchfield graciously overlooked Gehlen’s past. “He had a high standard of morality,” Critchfield later observed, without a hint of irony, “with Christian beliefs that were evident and reinforced by his wife Herta and their family.” This simple, trusting American attitude made Critchfield an easy mark for Gehlen and the other quick-witted Nazi veterans whom he supervised.

  Reinhard Gehlen was a man of ratlike cunning. He had managed to work his way up through the Wehrmacht’s intelligence hierarchy; to survive a falling-out with Hitler late in the war over his increasingly dire intelligence reports; and not only to avoid the hangman’s noose at Nuremberg but to persuade the Americans to give him a leading role in their shadow war against the Soviet Union. His overriding goal was to rebuild the Nazi power network and return Germany to a dominant role on the European stage. Gehlen harbored deeply mixed feelings about Germany’s American conquerors; he had a cringing respect for their power and money but was deeply resentful about being forced to answer to them. He often treated his handlers, including Critchfield, more as enemies than allies, keeping them in the dark about his operations and even putting them under surveillance.

  Late in his life, Critchfield admitted to a Washington Post reporter, “There’s no doubt that the CIA got carried away with recruiting some pretty bad people.” In a secret 1954 memo, later declassified, the agency acknowledged that at least 13 percent of the Gehlen Organization was made up of former hard-core Nazis. But, to the end of his life, Critchfield insisted that Gehlen was not one of these “bad people.”

  “I’ve lived with this for [nearly] 50 years,” Critchfield told the Post in 2001. “Almost everything negative that has been written about Gehlen, in which he has been described as an ardent ex-Nazi, one of Hitler’s war criminals—this is all far from the fact.”

  Happily deluded about Gehlen’s true character, Critchfield worked hard to develop a good rapport with the German spymaster throughout their six-year partnership at Pullach. It was Critchfield who arranged the trip to America for Gehlen and his alter ego Heinz Herre in the fall of 1951, highlighted by the final game of the World Series. Gehlen’s CIA caretaker saw the American odyssey—which was scheduled to include high-level meetings in Washington, as well as a train trip west to California—as a way to cement the agency’s relationship with the cagey German and strengthen his bond with America.

  As Critchfield put together the itinerary for Gehlen and Herre, the CIA hierarchy realized that the Germans’ trip was fraught with potential problems. Gehlen remained a controversial figure within U.S. national security circles, where some were still pushing to fire him. An October 1950 CIA report on Gehlen, remarking on his tendency to throw fits and make demands on his American overseers, dismissed the German as “a runt, and, even as runts go, a rather unimpressive one . . . he suffers from a ‘runt complex.’” A flurry of interoffice CIA memos on the eve of Gehlen’s U.S. junket fretted that “his trip can obviously produce a variety of political embarrassments” and predicted that “Gehlen will be somewhat difficult to control on this trip.”

  In the end, the trip was a triumph for Gehlen and his supporters in the CIA. After Gehlen and Herre arrived in New York on September 23, 1951, Critchfield escorted them on their railway tour of America. On their way to the West Coast, they stopped over in Chicago, dropping by a 1930s-era speakeasy one night where, “much to the surprise of all of us,” recounted Critchfield, “we were greeted by a famous member of the Mafia.” As they rolled westward on the rails, the three men shed their business skins and eased into the lazy pace of tourists. But the Germans could not drop all their espionage training. “We looked out on the Rockies from the top of Pike’s Peak and walked among the great redwoods outside San Francisco,” recalled Critchfield. “Gehlen was an insatiable photographer and Herre, like the General Staff officer that he was, equipped himself with maps and sought out the highest observation point for surveying each tourist objective.”

  Returning to Washington, D.C., on October 8, they checked into a suite at the Envoy, an ornate, old-world hotel in the leafy Adams Morgan neighborhood. Dulles arranged for Gehlen and Herre to meet with CIA director Beetle Smith. Dulles hosted a private dinner at the Metropolitan Club for the Germans and several CIA officers with whom they felt comfortable, including Richard Helms, who had run U.S. intelligence operations in Germany after the war.

  The 1951 trip to America sealed the relationship between “UTILITY,” as Gehlen was code-named by the Americans, and the CIA. Over the years, the agency would occasionally wrestle with its conscience over the alliance. But CIA officials invariably suppressed these doubts and moved on. In 1954, an unsigned CIA memo to the chief of the agency’s Eastern Europe division acknowledged that a number of individuals employed by Gehlen “appear from a qualitative standpoint particularly heinous.” By way of illustration, the author of the memo attached biographical summaries on several of Gehlen’s most repellent recruits, including Konrad Fiebig, who was later charged with murdering eleven thousand Jews in Belarus during the war. Nonetheless, the memo concluded, “We feel it is a bit late in the game to do anything more than remind UTILITY that he might be smart politically to drop such types.”

  But the CIA’s intimate relationship with Gehlen came with a price in the global arena. Soviet propagandists made much of the arrangement, and even British intelligence allies vented their outrage. In an August 1955 memo to Dulles, the chief of the CIA’s Eastern European division reported on a diplomatic luncheon in Bonn, during which British officials freely aired their disgust to their American friends. “They were quite blunt in expressing their feelings that the Americans had sold their souls to the Germans because of their frantic and hysterical desire to thwart Soviet military strength,” the CIA official informed Dulles.

  Allen Dulles was unruffled by the controversy that swirled around his German colleague. He airily dismissed concerns about Gehlen’s wartime record. “I don’t know if he’s a rascal,” Dulles remarked. “There are few archbishops in espionage. . . . Besides, one nee
dn’t ask him to one’s club.” But, in fact, Dulles and Helms did invite Gehlen to their clubs—including the Metropolitan and the Chevy Chase Club—whenever the German spymaster visited Washington. Dulles had no reservations about working with such men, so why shouldn’t he also drink and dine with them? Dulles even brought along Clover on those occasions when Gehlen’s talkative wife, Herta, accompanied him to America.

  Dulles went to generous lengths to maintain a congenial relationship with Gehlen, sending him gifts and warm greetings on Christmas and his birthday, and even on the anniversaries of their professional alliance. One of Gehlen’s favorite gifts from Dulles was a small wooden statuette of a cloak-and-dagger figure that the German spymaster described as “sinister” looking, but nonetheless kept on his desk for the rest of his life. Gehlen, in turn, cabled his own chummy messages to the U.S. intelligence chief, and once sent him a gold medallion of St. George slaying the dragon—the Gehlen Organization’s emblem—“as a symbol of our work against bolshevism.”

  Dulles knew that Gehlen was a devoted family man. The German intelligence chief closely managed the affairs of his extended family, installing a number of them in positions with “the firm,” as his organization was known by its employees. In late 1954, when Dulles heard that Gehlen was seeking to get his oldest daughter, Katharina, into a good U.S. college, the CIA director immediately began making inquiries on her behalf. Radcliffe, where his own daughter Joan had gone, made it clear that it was not inclined to give the daughter of a former Nazi commander special treatment. But Katharina Gehlen did win admission to Hunter College in New York City.

  She later followed family tradition and went to work for her father, acting as a junior spy on occasion and carrying confidential packages across borders. Gehlen proudly confided to American colleagues that on one such mission, Katharina had the foresight to hide her diplomatic pouch “below a layer of soiled feminine niceties” in her suitcase when crossing the border. In those more decorous times, the inquisitive customs official promptly terminated his inspection as soon as he came to the young woman’s dirty underwear.

  In 1955, as the CIA prepared to transfer the Gehlen Organization to the West German government, the agency generously continued to back Gehlen, giving him enough money to buy a lakeside estate near Pullach, where he enjoyed sailing his boat on weekends. Critchfield claimed that Gehlen bought the manor with a modest interest-free loan of 48,000 deutsche marks (about $12,000) from the CIA, which Gehlen himself insisted he repaid in full. But reports in the Soviet bloc press characterized the estate as a gift from Dulles that was worth as much as 250,000 DM.

  Gehlen was deeply grateful to Dulles, whom he code-named “The Gentleman,” for his unflagging support. “In all the years of my collaboration with the CIA, I had no personal disputes with Dulles,” Gehlen wrote in his memoir. “He pleased me by his air of wisdom, born of years of experience; he was both fatherly and boisterous, and he became a close personal friend of mine.”

  Despite the deep affection he had for Dulles, Gehlen felt free to air his complaints about U.S. government policy whenever he suspected that America’s Cold War vigilance was softening. The Gehlen Organization saw the Cold War as the final act of the Reich’s interrupted offensive against the Soviet Union. In August 1955, after Eisenhower’s tentative peace efforts at the Geneva summit, a CIA memo reported that “UTILITY was blunt in his criticism of the U.S. position at Geneva. He expressed the opinion that in the realm of international politics one should never tell a Russian that one will not shoot him, and should under no circumstances be as convincing in this position as President Eisenhower was at Geneva.”

  Western leaders negotiated with Moscow at their own peril, Gehlen firmly believed. The Soviet Union enticed you with this and that, but underneath its skirt, “one will see the cloven hoof of the devil,” he said.

  Gehlen kept up his martial drumbeat throughout his intelligence career. Thomas Hughes, who served as director of foreign intelligence in the Kennedy State Department, recalled an evening early in the Kennedy presidency when Dulles gave Gehlen a platform for his militarism. “Allen Dulles had a soft spot in his heart for the ‘good Germans,’ expansively defined,” said Hughes. “One of my first social events in the Kennedy administration’s intelligence community was a dinner given by Allen Dulles one night at the Chevy Chase Club in honor of Gehlen, who was visiting from his Munich headquarters. Gehlen led the discussion, advising us how to deal with ‘the Bear,’ his term for the Soviet menace. J. Edgar Hoover, sitting next to me, kept murmuring, ‘The Bear, the Bear. That’s it. The Bear.’”

  Gehlen liked to say that his cold-steel view of the Soviet adversary came from his hard-won experience on the eastern front. But it was also calculated to please American hard-liners, particularly his masters, the Dulles brothers. Some critics in Western security circles attacked the ideological bias of the Gehlen Organization’s intelligence reports, which exaggerated the Soviet bloc’s military strength and nuclear capability. But the “cooked” intelligence served the Dulleses by giving them more ammunition for their militant Cold War stance.

  The covert Cold War in the West was, to an unsettling extent, a joint operation between the Dulles regime and that of Reinhard Gehlen. The German spy chief’s pathological fear and hatred of Russia, which had its roots in Hitler’s Third Reich, meshed smoothly with the Dulles brothers’ anti-Soviet absolutism. In fact, the Dulles policy of massive nuclear retaliation bore a disturbing resemblance to the Nazis’ exterminationist philosophy—a link that would be darkly satirized in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, with its Führer-saluting doomsday scientist. No other cultural artifact of the period captures so perfectly the absurd morbidity of the Cold War, and its Wagnerian lust for oblivion. We live “in an age in which war is a paramount activity of man,” Gehlen announced in his memoir, “with the total annihilation of the enemy as its primary aim.” There could be no more succinct a statement of the fascist ethos.

  In the months leading up to the CIA’s transfer of the Gehlen Organization to the government of West Germany, there was another flurry of debate about Gehlen in Washington and Bonn, which grew so heated that it spilled into the press. At the same time, the Federal Republic of Germany, under the rigid leadership of the elderly, conservative Catholic Konrad Adenauer, was also involved in delicate negotiations with the United States over West Germany’s proposed entry into NATO. In October 1954, during a visit by Adenauer to Washington, General Arthur Trudeau, chief of U.S. Army intelligence, met privately with the chancellor to discuss the Gehlen problem, telling the German leader that he did not trust “that spooky Nazi outfit at Pullach.” Trudeau advised Adenauer to clean house before Germany was admitted into NATO.

  All hell broke loose in Washington when Dulles learned that Trudeau had trespassed on his turf. Although the Joint Chiefs of Staff continued to back their man, it soon became clear (if it wasn’t already) who was running the intelligence show under Eisenhower. Trudeau found himself transferred out of military intelligence to a remote post in the Far East, and a few years later he quietly retired from his country’s service.

  During this turbulent, transitional period in West German affairs, Reinhard Gehlen was confronted with a strong domestic challenger for his espionage throne. In fact, Otto John—the head of BfV, West Germany’s internal security organization (the equivalent of the FBI)—was the only serious rival Gehlen would face during his long reign at Pullach. British intelligence saw Otto John as a far superior alternative to Gehlen. As a survivor of the ill-fated Valkyrie plot against Hitler, John lacked Gehlen’s unsavory baggage. After the coup failed, John narrowly escaped with his life to London, where he worked with British MI6 for the remainder of the war, returning to Germany after Hitler’s defeat to assist with the prosecution of Nazi war criminals.

  A self-described liberal, John worried about the “re-Nazification” of Germany, as he witnessed the growing power of Gehlen and the many other former Third Reich officials who were fin
ding key positions in Bonn. High among these officials was Chancellor Adenauer’s right-hand man, Hans Globke, who had helped draft the notorious Nuremberg Laws, the racial identification system that served as the basis for the extermination of German Jews.

  A CIA comparative analysis of Gehlen and Otto John unsurprisingly found that “John is the more moral of the two.” But, the report continued, John was “no match for UTILITY in the knock-about of German intelligence politics”—as was soon to be revealed.

  In May 1954, John flew to the United States to meet with Eisenhower officials and discuss his democratic vision for postwar Germany. Dulles invited him to lunch at his Georgetown house, and afterward they walked and chatted in his garden. Dulles was eager to hear John’s thoughts on the rearmament of West Germany, a hotly debated issue at the time that Cold Warriors like Dulles strongly supported. John assured the CIA director that he, too, favored rearmament, but only if it was done in a grassroots, democratic way by forming local defense units, instead of “from the top downwards,” which would further empower the militaristic types from Germany’s past. Dulles was not pleased with what he heard. “My whole impression of John,” he wrote in a memo later that year, “was that he was not a very serious character.”

  Dulles was predisposed against John to begin with. Gehlen had filled the CIA director’s ears with venomous reports about his German intelligence rival, calling him “unsteady and rootless,” professionally inexperienced, and even prone to alcoholism. What Gehlen clearly found most disturbing about John, however, was his heroic past as an anti-Nazi resister. His moral stature, particularly among the British allies, made him a powerful threat to Gehlen.