Spies Like Us

Erich Wenger was one notable example of a former Gestapo officer employed by the BFV, although he was totally free of war crimes. Wenger was the operations chief in the BFV's counterespionage department. Of all the West German counterespionage officers with whom I was personally acquainted (and I was acquainted with nearly all of them), he was clearly the most competent. In large part due to Wenger, the BFV built an impressive record of exposing and bringing about the arrest of countless Soviet bloc intelligence agents-something that would have been impossible had the BFV been penetrated by the KGB. Wenger was a career civil servant, but eventually the media learned of his background and set out to destroy him. Finally, he was transferred to a less sensitive job. The BFV's efforts against Soviet bloc espionage suffered significantly as a result.

CLARENCE W. SCHMITZ served on James Critchfield's staff from 1949 to 1954, and was Critchfield's deputy during the last two of those years.

Naftali Replies

Wieck concedes that the Gehlen organization was unsavory and says that a cost-benefit analysis of its operations "remains ... difficult to make." Perhaps. But CIA records show that Gehlen was insubordinate, his organization was insecure, and the entire operation provided intelligence of questionable value. Fifty years later, the German government still refuses to declassify its own records on the subject. Until it does, and unless those documents paint a dramatically new picture of the situation, the account of the Gehlen organization in the early Cold War will remain damning.

Such assertions, it should be noted, are not simply casual opinions, but scholarly conclusions based on analysis of more than 800 "name files," including a multivolume "Gehlen file," released by the CIA from 1999 to 2004, pursuant to the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998. An extensive interpretation of this material can be found in the study "U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis," issued in May 2004 by the Nazi War Crimes and Imperial Japanese Records Working Group, and co-authored by Richard Breitman, Norman J.W. Goda, Robert Wolfe, and myself.

Schmitz's memories, unfortunately, do not square with this extensive documentary record. U.S. intelligence never thought it knew the extent to which Gehlen had hired war criminals. Those interested in the freie mitarbeiter system designed to circumvent de-Nazification of Gestapo officers in the BFV can review the declassified files on Karl Gustav Halswick and Oskar Hein available at the National Archives. Wenger, whom Schmitz cites, was also protected by this system in the early 1950s. Dr. Franz Alfred Six is just one example of a war criminal employed by Gehlen whose identity was disclosed within the BND and whom the CIA investigated for fear that the KGB had blackmailed him. Six headed an Einsatzkommando that killed Jews and communists on the eastern front during the war. He later headed Department H of the BND.

More important, both letters miss the larger point of my essay. I argued that in light of their experiences in postwar Germany, U.S. intelligence officers should think twice before allowing their hunger for immediate human intelligence to justify the rehabilitation of discredited, failed, and criminal intelligence services. There is both a moral and an operational difference between cultivating compromised individuals to penetrate ongoing enemy organizations (such as the Mafia, al Qaeda, or Muqtada al-Sadr's rebels), on the one hand, and helping the jobless bureaucrats of a defeated dictatorship, on the other.

Using Gehlen's organization was not just wrong, it was wrong for U.S. interests. The Nazi intelligence services were arguably the most incompetent of World War II. Wieck asks which other Germans could have provided the United States with solid intelligence in the early Cold War period. Plenty of others, is the answer. There were many pro-democratic, anticommunist Germans to recruit, and there was time enough to train a fresh, untainted generation of German intelligence operators who could have done a much better job with far fewer tradeoffs.