Word: gehlen
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With some 125 East-bloc agents arrested every month in their divided country, Germans are blasé about spy stories. But the case that unfolded in a Karlsruhe courtroom last week proved that Bonn's vaunted Gehlen intelligence service had been infiltrated for ten years by the Reds, and that the organization had knowingly hired former Nazis. All three of the men on trial, longtime employees of Gehlen, were also longtime employees of the Soviet Union. By all odds, it was the most embarrassing spy scandal to hit West Germany since...
...Hate Americans." Ex-Wehrmacht General Reinhard Gehlen, who is as secretive as any of his 5,000 men (his last known photograph dates from 1944), set up his outfit in 1947 with the cooperation of the CIA. It was staffed largely with veteran agents who got their training under the Nazis, although Gehlen himself had never joined the Nazi party. In 1955 the Gehlen apparatus was turned over from CIA control to the West German government; it reports directly to the Chancellor's office, has a top secret budget. Yet in court, the three men who penetrated its walled...
Back in Germany after the war, he met a Colonel "Max" of Soviet intelligence, who suggested that he get a job with the Gehlen organization. It proved easy. The motive he gave for becoming a double agent for the Reds seemed like an old propaganda broadcast. "I hate Americans like the plague," he said in court, recalling that after American air raids on Dresden he had sworn, "I shall repay them doubly and triply...
...hired to work for the Soviets. The deal was clinched at a dinner at Max's villa, where the table "was piled high with food and champagne poured in streams." Not long afterward, thanks to a recommendation from his friend Clemens, Felfe was offered a job in the Gehlen service. "Now," he said, "I was to dance at two weddings, with the Russians and with Gehlen." Felfe danced up fast in Gehlen's ranks, and by the time of his arrest in 1961 had become a department head in the counter-espionage division, specializing in anti-Soviet work...
...merely served as courier for Felfe and Clemens. The spies transmitted their information by microfilm hidden in food cans sent to East Germany, by drops along the Autobahn, and by frequent trips on U.S. Air Force courier flights to Berlin, which they boarded under the pretext of being on Gehlen business. The three got a total of $78,000 from Moscow. For the investment, the Soviets got 15,000 microfilm photographs of West German intelligence documents, 20 spools of tape recordings, numerous verbal and radio reports, including the identity of many West German agents working behind the Iron Curtain...