Word: gehlen
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DIED. Reinhard Gehlen, 77, legendary German spymaster; of cancer; in Berg, West Germany. The austere, shadowy Gehlen was Adolf Hitler's intelligence chief for the eastern front until his predictions of Soviet triumph prompted the irritated Führer to threaten to send him to an insane asylum. Gehlen fled and surrendered to American forces in May 1945, bringing with him 50 cases of Red Army documents. He later built a network of some 4,000 agents that became the CIA's chief chink in the Iron Curtain throughout the cold war, forecasting the 1956 Hungarian revolt...
Though other intelligence agencies, including the CIA, run public advertisements to recruit technical specialists and other personnel, such candor is a bizarre turnabout for the BND, which has been supersecretive since the postwar days when Reinhard Gehlen organized it out of the ashes of Nazi Germany's military intelligence. The "Gehlen Organization" was as mysterious as its founder, who generally stayed behind the wire-topped, 10-ft. concrete walls at Pullach and refused to be photographed. But the old guard, including Gehlen himself, finally retired; and new recruits for an organization of 5,000 people could no longer...
...Gehlen's successor, Gerhard Wessel, 60, first attempted to remedy his growing staff shortages with blind newspaper ads: "Multinational company with worldwide operations seeks multilingual executive assistant willing to travel." Other multinational companies, however, outbid him with more intriguing ads and better pay. In desperation, Wessel decided to go public. He ordered his small public relations staff, whose major function previously had been to keep the BND out of the news, to thrust it into the limelight instead...
...secret organization to behave. They argue that the BND can now be infiltrated by counterspies armed with nothing more lethal than an application form. One answer to that, of course, is that the BND was unable to keep out double agents even when it was most secretive. To Gehlen's embarrassment, in the 1950s the Soviets stocked his organization with so many former SS intelligence men that Moscow had to do its own personnel work. When too many counterspies became concentrated in certain BND departments, the Kremlin pressured them to seek transfers elsewhere in the organization...
...catered to their sense of sinister conspiracy, then by a more or less relevant act or report relieved the anxiety he had helped create. He predicted the Hungarian revolt, for in stance, and the Israeli-Arab Six-Day War. But these events occurred any way. Sentiment dictates that Gehlen be treated as the last of the Scarlet Pimpernels. He was, in fact, more like the last of the Prussians - a nostalgia the world could hardly afford even in his own time. ·Melvin Maddocks