Word: gehlen
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...layout cost the United States $3,000,000. During the decade that Gehlen worked exclusively for the CIA, another $200 million in American money funded the Org. By 1948 the Org numbered 4,000 agents and supplied an estimated 70% of the U.S. Government's information on the Soviet military. Once Gehlen had the idea of putting 432 simultaneous wire taps on East Berlin phones. New Jersey Bell Telephone supplied the switch board, courtesy of the CIA, at a total cost...
When the Org became the official espionage service of West Germany in 1956, Gehlen became a global caterer. He and the END - the Org's new name - discreetly contracted themselves out to Tanzania, Afghanistan and the Congo. The secret services of Israel and Egypt alike found occasion to use Gehlen's services...
British Author Cookridge and Germans Hohne and Zolling have compiled dossiers on Gehlen that might satisfy the Org itself. Cookridge, an old agent who makes a living out of spy chronicles like The Truth About Kim Philby, tends a bit to trade on man-in-the-shadows glamour...
...Gehlen turned the gentleman's avocation of spying - Sir John Master man still compares it to cricket - into big business. But Hohne and Zolling argue that, despite all his thermos-flask cameras and secret, secret ink, he still couldn't keep up with the times. Forced into retirement in 1968, he sat in his study on Lake Starnberg with a death mask of Frederick the Great looking down and wrote his memoirs (due out later this year) rather like Buffalo Bill after the frontier went thataway. For spying, like everything else, has gone automated...
While he lasted, Gehlen gave his customers what they thought they wanted...