Berlin to Baghdad: The Pitfalls of Hiring Enemy Intelligence
Article Summary and Author Biography
Washington wants to hire ex-Baathists to help rebuild Iraq. The CIA's experience using ex-Nazis to run West Germany's intelligence service should give it pause.
Timothy Naftali is Director of the Presidential Recordings Program at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs and co-author of U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis.
As the United States approached war with Iraq in early 2003, some journalists turned to an 86-year-old retiree for perspective. A decorated World War II Army officer, James Critchfield later joined the CIA and became one of the nation's most influential spies. The journalists called him because of his stint supervising CIA activities in the Middle East in the 1960s, during which he helped arrange the 1963 coup that overthrew General Abd al-Karim Kassem and set in motion the Baath Party's 40-year domination of Iraqi politics. Had they been sharper, they would also have asked about the lessons of an episode from still earlier in his career: his creation of the foreign intelligence service of West Germany from the ashes of the Nazi state.
Critchfield died two weeks after the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad, but, fortunately, he had been able to keep his cancer at bay long enough to finish a detailed treatment of his experiences in postwar Germany. Part memoir and part history, the posthumously published Partners at the Creation tells the story of the men behind West Germany's emergence as a stalwart member of the Atlantic alliance in the 1950s. Its discussion of building new pro-U.S. security services from the remnants of a defeated tyranny could not be more timely: it serves as an uncannily appropriate backdrop to the agonizing dilemmas facing decision-makers in Iraq today.
THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY
Partners at the Creation focuses on Critchfield's mentoring of two of Hitler's former generals, the controversial Reinhard Gehlen and the lesser-known Adolf Heusinger, both of whom would ultimately play large roles in West Germany's national security community. During the war, Gehlen directed the German army's intelligence organization on the eastern front, the Fremde Heere Ost, while Heusinger was wartime chief of the operations division of the German army general staff. Heusinger participated in the resistance movement against Hitler and was jailed for it in 1944; Gehlen did not.
A defender of old-fashioned realpolitik, Critchfield credits U.S. success in occupied Germany to flexibility in handling former enemies, and he uses his own experiences as an example. Washington's relationship with Gehlen began in 1945-46, when the U.S. Army, looking warily at its Soviet counterpart, asked him to reconstitute both his wartime analytical group and the intelligence networks that had fed Berlin information on the Soviet military. Soon, the Gehlen organization ballooned in size (it eventually comprised 4,000 employees), and the Pentagon was looking for help in subsidizing and handling it. So, in 1947, the newly created CIA was brought into the picture, and by 1948 the agency was Gehlen's sole sponsor, with Critchfield in charge as the man on the ground.
Heusinger ran Gehlen's postwar analytical branch and was more pro-U.S. than his colleague. From 1948 on, he believed that Western Europe could not defend itself alone and that any future West German military would have to be closely tied to NATO. (He would go on to become chairman of NATO's military committee in the 1960s.) "Germany's transition from an enemy to an ally of the United States and the West was probably destined by broader forces," Critchfield writes. "But the ultimate success of this pivotal moment in history should be credited in no small part to Reinhard Gehlen and the small circle of former German Army General Staff officers at the center of the Gehlen Organization."
Those in favor of the swift and extensive rehabilitation of former Baathists and high-ranking military officers in Iraq might well cite Critchfield's experiences in West Germany as evidence of how successful such an approach can be. Yet that would not reflect the true balance sheet of U.S. sponsorship of Gehlen and his crew, for even Partners at the Creation hints that the policy had significant flaws, and observers more detached than Critchfield might take a much dimmer view of the compromises involved.
Gehlen and the CIA, for example, never agreed on how much information the Germans were required to reveal to their occupiers and patrons. "I think Gehlen's inclination to be secretive with the Americans about his organization was a major error," writes Critchfield. "When we reached what seemed to be an impasse on agreeing that he would provide essential information, I closed my briefcase and threatened to terminate my visit. Gehlen backed off and reverted to a compromise on these issues that was acceptable, under the circumstances. However, the issue was never entirely resolved." At the end of the book, Critchfield reveals that one of the costs of leaving this issue open was that the CIA could not force Gehlen to improve his group's operational security. As a result, the Soviets found the Gehlen organization easy to penetrate, and Gehlen's own chief of counterespionage against the Soviet bloc, Heinz Felfe, eventually proved to be a KGB agent.
Only this year, in fact, has the public learned the full extent of the moral and operational costs of the U.S. government's marriage of convenience with these former Nazi intelligence officers, and the Felfe case turns out to have been merely the tip of the iceberg.
In accordance with the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, the CIA and the U.S. Army have had to declassify thousands of documents on their relationships with Nazi war criminals. Gehlen himself may never have been indicted for war crimes, but we now know that at least 100 of his employees were former members of the SS.
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