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The second important member of Gehlen's eastern affairs staff was Dr. Emil Augsburg, a former SS
Standartenführer
from Himmler's staff in Poland. Augsburg, like Eichmann, had begun his career in Six's “Ideological Combat” section in the SD, where, according to an account found in SD records, he had become adept at using Jew baiting to smear political opponents within the SS by claiming they had Jewish ancestors.

During the war Augsburg led a murder squad in German-occupied Russia, according to his Nazi party membership records. He obtained “extraordinary results … in special tasks” during the invasion,
¹³
as a recommendation in his personnel dossier puts it. (“Special tasks,” in SS parlance, is generally a euphemism for the
mass murder of Jews.) The SS found him to be an “absolutely trustworthy National Socialist” and appointed him a
Direktor
at Wannsee, overseeing the highly successful index of Soviet personalities used to target intelligence gathering and behind-the-lines assassinations—a job he later did for the Gehlen Organization as well. Augsburg was no mere technician, however. Under Six's and Wannsee Direktor Mikhail Akhmeteli's
*
tutelage, he became recognized as one of the Nazi regime's most influential experts on Eastern Europe. Although never a public figure, Augsburg maintained this reputation among German foreign policy cognoscenti after the war as well.

The Gehlen Organization's ability subtly to manipulate other intelligence agencies is clearly illustrated by Augsburg's career in the first years after the war. In addition to his work for Gehlen, Augsburg was simultaneously employed by the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps; a U.S. military intelligence unit known as the Technical Intelligence Branch (TIB) that was supposedly interested only in German scientists but was actually also recruiting former German intelligence agents; a French intelligence agency; and a private network of ex-SS officers headed by former SS General
Bernau,
¹⁴
all of whom appear to have been aware that Augsburg was a fugitive from war crimes charges.

Augsburg's specialty was the use of émigrés and defectors to collect information on the East. According to top secret U.S. CIC records, the Bernau SS network provided Augsburg with U.S. EEIs (essential elements of information) that served as a shopping list of information the Western Allies were most interested in buying. Augsburg then acted as gatekeeper for exchange of information among groups of informants working for each of his employers, a position that permitted him to promote selected information or to “confirm independently” a report that he himself had placed through another informant network. Theoretically Augsburg's primary loyalty could have been to any one of his employers, to the Soviets, or to anyone else. His subsequent lifelong devotion to the Org, however, makes it clear that he was first and foremost a Gehlen man.

Augsburg's postwar work for Gehlen's organization was an extension of what he had done for the SS at Wannsee: administration of the painstaking compilation of extraordinarily detailed records on the USSR. One specialty was preparation of remarkable cover stories for Gehlen agents scheduled to cross into the Soviet Union on both espionage and covert action missions. These “legends” included not only false documentation, such as travel passes and food ration books, but also carefully prepared stories of families, jobs, and events that appeared genuine but would be impossible for Soviet police officials to check. Details of geography, climate, local culture, even jokes were carefully collected and cataloged to provide realistic cover stories.
¹⁵
Augsburg and Six maintained close relations after the war with the émigré groups that had been supported by Berlin and assisted in the selection of agents that were used by the CIA in behind-the-lines operations in Eastern Europe.

*
Frank Wisner's Special Intelligence Branch staff, which was engaged in work with Gehlen, had more than its share of brilliant operatives who were to leave their marks on the history of U.S. espionage. They included Richard Helms, for example, later to become CIA deputy director for clandestine operations and eventually agency director under Presidents Johnson and Nixon; William Casey, CIA director under President Reagan; Harry Rositzke, soon to become chief of CIA clandestine operations inside the USSR and later CIA chief of station in India; and, of course, Wisner himself, soon to be chief of all American clandestine warfare operations worldwide.

*
The Wannsee Institute also provided the setting for the January 1942 meeting in which SS leader Reinhard Heydrich announced the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” to representatives of other branches of the German government. That gathering was the first time that Adolf Eichmann, then an enthusiastic young SS officer, had met quite so many “high personages,” he was to remember. Eichmann's recollections of the Wannsee session—a crucial watershed in the development of the Holocaust—are almost rhapsodic: “[A]fter the conference, [then SS chief] Heydrich, [Gestapo leader] Mueller and your humble servant sat cozily around a fireplace,” Eichmann noted later. “I noticed for the first time that Heydrich was smoking. Not only that, he had cognac.… We sat around peacefully after our Wannsee Conference, not just talking shop but giving ourselves a rest after so many taxing hours.”

*
In 1961 Six gave testimony as a defense witness during Adolf Eichmann's trial for crimes against humanity. Six had retired from the Gehlen Organization by that time and was employed as an agent for Porsche automobiles. Eichmann was a department head for Porsche's rival, Daimler-Benz.

*
Professor Mikhail Akhmeteli was a third noteworthy member of Gehlen's postwar émigré affairs apparatus that had been drawn from the staff of the SS's Wannsee Institute. During the war Akhmeteli led much of the work involved in compiling lists of Soviet officials slated for execution, related strategic counterintelligence operations, and development of Nazi racial theory as it applied to peoples of Eastern Europe. His personal contributions to the latter field included a theory (which Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg eventually adopted) that the Georgians in the south of the USSR were “Russia's Germans” and as such were suitably “superior” SS recruits for use against Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, and other “racially inferior” peoples. It was on the basis of this work that Akhmeteli became one of the very few non-Aryans admitted to the Nazi party—quite an honor in Germany of that time. His party number was 5360858.

Akhmeteli was the son of an oil-rich Georgian family that had been dispossessed during the 1917 Russian Revolution. He helped finance the White Army's resistance to the Bolsheviks for a time but was eventually forced to flee to Germany. There he established an anti-Communist center for Soviet studies at the University of Breslau that eventually emerged as the seat of the most comprehensive collection of materials on the USSR outside the Soviet Union. In time the Breslau collection became the heart of the SS archives on the USSR, complete with a card file index of notable Soviet personalities and an extensive collection of information on Soviet railroads, industry, communications, and other infrastructure.

The Georgian became one of the primary liaisons between the SS team at Wannsee and Gehlen's military intelligence headquarters in the East. After the war Gehlen provided Akhmeteli with a chalet near Unterweilbach purchased with U.S. funds drawn from his discretionary account. Akhmeteli, a restless, stubby figure with deep-set eyes and a fleshy potato of a nose, was one of the very few men welcomed for visits in Gehlen's home.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Eyes and Ears

Of all the networks of former Nazis and collaborators employed by the United States after World War II, it is Gehlen's organization that has left the most substantial imprint on the United States. Gehlen's analysis of the forces that guide Soviet behavior, which were forged in part by his personal defeat at the hands of the Russians during World War II, became widely accepted in U.S. intelligence circles and remain so to this day.

Gehlen's singular error, says Arthur Macy Cox, a career Soviet affairs analyst who has served with both the CIA and the Department of State, is that he presented the
political
threat posed by the USSR as though it were an imminent
military
problem, thus “ingratiating himself,” as Cox puts it, “with the unreconstructed cold warriors in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill.”
¹
Gehlen's influential intelligence and analysis also strongly reinforced the “Communist conspiracy” model of foreign affairs, in which the hand of the Kremlin could be seen in almost every labor dispute and student strike on the Continent.

It is probably impossible to determine with certainty the extent to which Gehlen influenced American policymakers' decisions concerning European affairs during the cold war. The complex, dynamic relationship between information gathering, analysis, and policy-making is difficult to deduce under the best conditions. In Gehlen's case the problem is still more recondite as a result of the
layers of secrecy that surround nearly every aspect of his long relationship with the Americans. Neither the West German nor the U.S. government is known to have released official documentation concerning Gehlen's work on behalf of U.S. agencies, although there have, of course, been leaks. Source material on the subject is often limited to the recollections and memoirs of persons who participated in these events, some of whom have requested anonymity in exchange for cooperation.

Gehlen's impact on the course of the cold war was subtle, but real. Self-avowed pragmatists in the U.S. intelligence services have consistently argued that the otherwise questionable employment of Gehlen and even of unrepentant Nazis through the Org was justified by their significant contributions to fighting a powerful and ruthless rival: the Soviet Union. “He's on our side,” CIA Director Allen Dulles later said of Gehlen, “and that's all that matters.”

During the first decade following the war the United States spent at least $200 million and employed about 4,000 people full-time to resurrect Gehlen's organization from the wreckage of the war, according to generally accepted estimates.
²
The Org became the most important eyes and ears for U.S. intelligence inside the closed societies of the Soviet bloc. “In 1946 [U.S.] intelligence files on the Soviet Union were virtually empty,” says Harry Rositzke, the CIA's former chief of espionage inside the Soviet Union. “Even the most elementary facts were unavailable—on roads and bridges, on the location and production of factories, on city plans and airfields.” Rositzke worked closely with Gehlen during the formative years of the CIA and credits Gehlen's organization with playing a “primary role” in filling the empty file folders during that period.
³

Intelligence gathered by the Org was “essential to American interests,” asserts W. Park Armstrong, the longtime head of the Office of Intelligence and Research at the Department of State. “Our German ally's contribution to knowledge of the Soviet military was at times a standard against which we measured our own efforts.”

During the first years of the CIA under Rear Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter's administration, according to a retired executive of the CIA's Office of National Estimates, Gehlen's reports and analyses were sometimes simply retyped onto CIA stationery and presented to President Truman without further comment in the agency's morning intelligence summaries. Gehlen's organization “shaped what we knew about the Soviets in Eastern Europe and
particularly about East Germany,” he continued. Heinz Höhne, an internationally recognized historian and senior editor at
Der Spiegel
magazine, asserts that “seventy percent of all the U.S. government's information on Soviet forces and armaments came from the Gehlen organization” during the early cold war. While any such precise number is bound to be arbitrary, the thrust of Höhne's comment is certainly accurate.
⁴

Contrary to the accepted wisdom, however, U.S. dependence on Gehlen's organization for intelligence on the Soviet military was quite likely a blunder from a strictly practical point of view. For one thing, enlisting Gehlen was in itself a substantial escalation of the cold war that undermined what little hope was possible for East-West cooperation during the pivotal years of 1945 to 1948. Once on board, Gehlen's Nazi-tainted operatives often gave the Soviets an easy target for denunciations of war criminals being sheltered by the West. This has since become a highly successful Soviet propaganda theme—in part because there is some truth to it—that is replayed regularly to this day as a means of undermining U.S. and West German relations with Eastern Europe. Financing Gehlen's organization also appears to have made infiltration of Western intelligence by Soviet spies easier, not more difficult, as will be seen. Most important, Gehlen's operatives and analysts strongly reinforced U.S. intelligence's existing predilection toward paranoia about communism and the USSR, contributing significantly to the creation of a body of widely believed misinformation about Soviet behavior.

“Gehlen had to make his money by creating a threat that we were afraid of,” says Victor Marchetti, formerly the CIA's chief analyst of Soviet strategic war plans and capabilities, “so we would give him more money to tell us about it.” He continues: “In my opinion, the Gehlen Organization provided nothing worthwhile for understanding or estimating Soviet military or political capabilities in Eastern Europe or anywhere else.” Employing Gehlen was “a waste of time, money, and effort, except that maybe he had some CI [counterintelligence] value, because practically everybody in his organization was sucking off both tits.”
⁵
In other words, Gehlen did not produce the reliable information for which he was employed, but careful monitoring of the Org might have produced some clues to Soviet espionage activity because the group had been deeply penetrated by double agents, thus giving the United States a vastly
expensive and not very efficient means of keeping up with Soviet spies.