New Book on Reinhard Gehlen in the works - Printable Version +- Deep Politics Forum (https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora) +-- Forum: Deep Politics Forum (https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/forum-1.html) +--- Forum: Players, organisations, and events of deep politics (https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/forum-32.html) +--- Thread: New Book on Reinhard Gehlen in the works (/thread-16201.html) Pages:
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New Book on Reinhard Gehlen in the works - Peter Lemkin - 17-05-2020 I will not be at liberty to give any more details other than to say that a definitive work on the life, times, intrigue, connections, and consequences of Reinhard Gehlen (concentrating on his end-of-War to end of life development of the BND, with the CIA's and other's help) is in the works. I likely will have a minor role in providing some leads and information to those already at work on this project. It is based on the efforts and work of Carl Oglesby. Carl had fought long and hard via FOIA and long legal battles to pry out and accumulate the largest number of US Govt. documents related to Gehlen as well as about those who made deals with him and his 'Org', putting him in the position to form the BND [basically the 'CIA' of first West Germany and now all of Germany]. Therefore, I wanted to make a new thread devoted to Gehlen, and post both some new things as well as to copy some posts from various older threads about him and things swirling around him and that resulted from his and his Org's work - and the information and often misinformation they fed their sponsors and 'friends' in other Western Intelligence circles. What were Gehlen's real motives and aims; what were the real consequences of his work after the War, up to his death and beyond, etc. Please feel free and invited to post any other information, sources, resources you know about related to Gehlen and the Gehlen Org. - that became the BND. Here is the place to put any material or discussion on Gehlen. Better books, articles, videos, speeches and other materials are all welcome - along with your own thoughts. RE: New Book on Reinhard Gehlen in the works - Peter Lemkin - 17-05-2020 Carl Oglesby - Reinhard Gehlen FOIA CARL OGLESBY, APPELLANT v. THE UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF THE ARMY, ET AL., APPELLEES No. 94-5408 UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT 316 U.S. App. D.C. 372; 79 F.3d 1172; 1996 U.S. App. LEXIS 5326 February 27, 1996, Argued March 26, 1996, Decided PRIOR HISTORY: [**1] Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. (No. 87cv03349). COUNSEL: James H. Lesar argued the cause and filed the briefs for appellant. Sherri L. Evans, Assistant United States Attorney, argued the cause for appellees, with whom Eric H. Holder, Jr., United States Attorney, and R. Craig Lawrence, Assistant United States Attorney, were on the briefs. JUDGES: Before: WALD, WILLIAMS and TATEL, Circuit Judges. Opinion for the Court filed by Circuit Judge WALD. OPINIONBY: WALD OPINION: [*1175] WALD, Circuit Judge: This case marks yet another stage in Carl Oglesby's decade-long effort to retrieve World War II vintage documents about a Nazi general from six government agencies under the Freedom of Information Act, 5 U.S.C. § 552 ("FOIA" or "Act"). Oglesby, a professional writer and lecturer with a special interest in the politics of clandestine services, submitted his original FOIA requests in 1985 to the Department of the Army ("Army"), the Central Intelligence Agency ("CIA"), the Federal Bureau of Investigation ("FBI"), the National Archives and Records Administration ("NARA"), the National Security Agency ("NSA"), and the Department of State ("State"). Dissatisfied with the [**2] responses he received from the agencies, he filed suit in federal court. The district court granted summary judgment for the defendants, but this court vacated that decision in 1990, with instructions for Oglesby to exhaust his administrative remedies. Oglesby v. Dep't of Army, 287 U.S. App. D.C. 126, 920 F.2d 57 (D.C. Cir. 1990). Several years later, having exhausted those remedies without receiving what he considered a satisfactory response, Oglesby returned to the district court, where the judge again ruled in favor of the agencies. Oglesby v. U.S. Dep't of Army, Memorandum Opinion, No. 87-cv-3349 (D.D.C. Nov. 2, 1994) ("Mem. Op."). Once again, Oglesby has appealed to this court, this time challenging one agency's refusal to grant him a fee waiver for his search, and several agencies' allegedly inadequate searches, incomplete Vaughn indices, and impermissible exemption justifications. Oglesby raises three specific claims: (1) that the statute specifically authorizing NARA to set fees for document production is not exempt from FOIA's mandatory fee-waiver provision, and therefore NARA was obligated to waive or reduce the fees for Oglesby's search; (2) that Army, CIA, and NSA failed to submit [**3] adequate Vaughn indices and that Army and CIA also failed adequately to justify the exemptions on which they based their decisions to withhold certain responsive documents; and (3) that Army, CIA, FBI, NSA and State failed to demonstrate that they had conducted adequate searches in response to Oglesby's request. Because we find that Army, CIA, and NSA have failed adequately to justify their withholdings, and Army and CIA have failed to justify the adequacy of their searches, we remand once again for further explanation on these points. With respect to all claims against the other three defendants, we affirm the district court. I. BACKGROUND II. Since the early 1970s, Oglesby has relentlessly pursued the story of General Reinhard Gehlen, who served as chief of a Nazi spy ring during World War II and who allegedly later negotiated an agreement with the United States which allowed his spy network to continue in existence despite post-war de-nazification programs. After World War II, his group, then known as the Gehlen Organization, was reportedly reconstituted as a functioning espionage network under U.S. command. According to Oglesby, control of the Gehlen Organization shifted [**4] back to the newly-sovereign West German Federal Republic as the BND (for Bundesnachrichtendienst, or "the Federal Intelligence Service") after ten years of U.S. control. More than ten years ago, Oglesby submitted FOIA requests to six government agencies, seeking records pertaining to Gehlen and certain post-WWII Nazi organizations. Oglesby sent identical requests to Army, CIA, NSA, State, and NARA. The five requests sought the following information: (a) Records of World War Two German General REINHARD GEHLEN and on his relationship with any United States [*1176] officials during the period 1944 through 1956. (b) Records of the meetings held at Fort Hunt, Virginia, in the summer of 1945 between the aforesaid GEHLEN and American officials including U.S. Army General GEORGE V. STRONG and Office of Strategic Services officer ALLEN WELSH DULLES. © Records of the U.S. Army "Operation Rusty," carried out in Europe between 1945 and 1948. (d) Records of post-war Nazi German underground organizations such as ODESSA, KAMARADENWERK, BRUDERSHAFT, WEREWOLVES and DIE SPINNE. (e) Records of OSS "Operation Sunrise" in 1945. Joint Appendix ("J.A.") 39. The sixth request, submitted [**5] to the FBI, sought only requests (a) and (b) above. J.A. 64. Two years later, dissatisfied with the responses he had received from the agencies, Oglesby initiated legal proceedings, first in the district court, and then in the Court of Appeals. With respect to five of the six defendants, this court held that Oglesby had not exhausted his administrative remedies. Oglesby, 920 F.2d at 65. However, finding that the precise exhaustion procedure required under FOIA had not previously been laid out with sufficient clarity, we permitted Oglesby an opportunity to appeal within each agency and thereafter refile his suit. With respect to the sixth defendant, State, the court reversed the district court's decision that the agency had successfully demonstrated the adequacy of its FOIA search. Id. at 59-60. On remand, Oglesby exhausted his administrative remedies and, still dissatisfied, refiled in the district court. At some point during the proceedings, each of the agencies submitted at least one affidavit regarding the method and results of the search it conducted pursuant to Oglesby's request. These affidavits also describe--with varying degree of detail--the documents the agencies [**6] found but refused to disclose, and the FOIA exemptions on which the agencies based their refusals to release information. Once again, the district court determined that the searches were adequate and the exemptions were justified, and granted summary judgment in favor of the defendants. Oglesby now appeals that decision. II. DISCUSSION The Freedom of Information Act requires agencies to comply with requests to make their records available to the public, unless the requested records fit within one or more of nine categories of exempt material. 5 U.S.C. § 552(a), (b). If a document contains exempt information, the agency must still release "any reasonably segregable portion" after deletion of the nondisclosable portions. Id. § 552(b). Although the Act makes public disclosure of nonexempt material mandatory, it also expressly permits agencies, in many circumstances, to charge certain reasonable fees to help defray the cost of compliance with their FOIA responsibilities. Id. § 552(a)(4)(A). However, in certain instances, where the dissemination of information will benefit the public, FOIA requires the responsive agencies to waive or reduce the fees they charge the requestor. [**7] Id. § 552(a)(4)(A)(iii). This court has held that the Act also requires an agency in possession of material it considers exempt from FOIA to provide the requestor with a description of each document being withheld, and an explanation of the reason for the agency's nondisclosure. See, e.g., King v. DOJ, 265 U.S. App. D.C. 62, 830 F.2d 210, 224 ("The agency affidavits must ... disclose as much information as possible without thwarting the exemption's purpose."); Vaughn v. Rosen, 484 F.2d 820 (D.C. Cir. 1973). The description and explanation the agency offers should reveal as much detail as possible as to the nature of the document, without actually disclosing information that deserves protection. See, e.g., King, 830 F.2d at 223. This requirement serves the purpose of providing the requestor with a realistic opportunity to challenge the agency's decision. In this case, Oglesby first claims that NARA violated the mandates of FOIA when it refused to grant him a fee waiver for his [*1177] search. Second, he alleges that several of the defendant agencies provided him with inadequate descriptions of the responsive documents they had located, and that two agencies further failed to justify their reliance [**8] on certain FOIA exemptions. Finally, Oglesby argues that the agencies have not sufficiently demonstrated that the searches they conducted in response to his request were "reasonably calculated to uncover all relevant documents," as required under FOIA. Truitt v. Dep't of State, 283 U.S. App. D.C. 86, 897 F.2d 540, 542 (D.C. Cir. 1990). A. NARA's Fee Statute and FOIA's Fee Waiver FOIA's fee provision, 5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(4)(A), requires agency regulations to provide for the setting of reasonable charges for document searches, duplication and review. The Act also contains a provision waiving the agency's fees for searches requested for certain noncommercial purposes: Documents shall be furnished without any charge or at a charge reduced below the [reasonable standard charges] if disclosure of the information is in the public interest because it is likely to contribute significantly to public understanding of the operations or activities of the government and is not primarily in the commercial interest of the requester. 5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(4)(A)(iii). However, a few paragraphs later, the Act states: Nothing in [this provision] shall supersede fees chargeable under a statute [**9] specifically providing for setting the level of fees for particular types of records. 5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(4)(A)(vi) ("subsection (vi)"). NARA claims that subsection (vi) works as an exception not only to FOIA's fee provisions, but also to the Act's mandatory fee waiver. Since NARA's own enabling statute specifically provides for the setting of fees, the agency argues, it is therefore exempt from the FOIA waiver requirement. The statute which NARA claims justifies its denial of Oglesby's waiver request authorizes the Archivist to recover the costs for making or authenticating copies or reproductions of materials transferred to his custody. Such fee shall be fixed ... at a level which will recover, so far as practicable, all elements of such costs.... 44 U.S.C. § 2116© ("NARA § 2116"). In response to NARA's claim of exemption, Oglesby argues that NARA's fee provision does not meet the requirements for exemption under subsection (vi) of FOIA's fee provision because NARA § 2116 "neither provides a set formula for the imposition of fees nor mandates the assessment of fees." Appellant's Brief at 19. Although on its face, the fee-waiver exception provision [**10] requires neither a statutorily fixed fee nor a mandatory fee, Oglesby claims that these requirements are implied by the legislative history of FOIA, which provided examples of fee-setting laws which should and should not qualify under the exception. See 132 CONG. REC. H-29618 (daily ed. Oct. 8, 1986). The district court rejected Oglesby's argument, and found that NARA's fee provision was exempt from FOIA's fee-waiver requirement. We find as well that the plain language of the two statutes confirms the district court's determination that the NARA statute is indeed "a statute specifically providing for setting the level of fees for particular types of records," and thus fits comfortably within the exception carved out in FOIA subsection (vi). The legislative history to which Oglesby directs our attention does not convince us that the district court erred. For example, the fact that Congress did not intend 31 U.S.C. § 9701, which generally permits the heads of agencies "to establish the charge for a service or thing of value provided by the agency," to enjoy exempt status has no bearing whatsoever on NARA § 2116. Whereas "a thing of value" clearly does not describe "particular [**11] types of records," Oglesby cannot credibly claim that NARA's statute, which refers to "materials transferred to [the Archivist's] custody," succumbs to the same attack. Although the "types of records" it describes do indeed encompass the vast bulk of material the agency deals with, the material is nonetheless accurately identified. In short, pursuant to the plain language of both provisions, NARA § 2116 qualifies as the [*1178] genre of fee-setting provision not to be "superseded" under FOIA's subsection (vi) exemption. We wish, however, to make it clear that we are in no way ruling on a separate argument which Oglesby failed to raise in a timely fashion. In a motion filed after oral argument, Oglesby pressed the claim that the FOIA subsection (vi) exception excuses a qualified agency only from FOIA's fee-setting requirements, and not from the fee-waiver provision. Oglesby attempts at this point to argue that the legislative history of the fee-waiver and exception provisions suggests that Congress intended by subsection (vi) to allow agencies the freedom to develop their own fee-setting formulae, without also intending to allow those agencies to refuse categorically to provide [**12] waivers in the public interest. However, since Oglesby did not raise this argument in a timely manner, we do not address it on the merits. See, e.g., Charter Oil Co. v. Am. Employers' Ins. Co., 69 F.3d 1160, 1170-71 (D.C. Cir. 1995) (issue waived where not raised until reply brief); McBride v. Merrell Dowell & Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 255 U.S. App. D.C. 183, 800 F.2d 1208, 1211 (D.C. Cir. 1986) ("considering an argument advanced for the first time in a reply brief ... is not only unfair to an appellee but also entails the risk of an improvident or ill-advised opinion on the legal issues tendered.") (citations omitted). n1 We refer to this argument only to emphasize that our narrow ruling today on the argument Oglesby did successfully make is not intended to bar a future challenge on broader grounds. In this case, we hold only that NARA § 2116 fits within the description of fee-setting laws set out in FOIA subsection (vi). - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Footnotes- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - n1 Here, Oglesby did not even raise this argument in his reply brief; he raised it for the first time two weeks after oral argument. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -End Footnotes- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [**13] B. Vaughn Indices and Exemptions In Vaughn v. Rosen, 157 U.S. App. D.C. 340, 484 F.2d 820 (D.C. Cir. 1973), this court outlined the requirements an agency must meet in indexing the documents it has found responsive to a FOIA request. The court explained that it would "simply no longer accept conclusory and generalized allegations of [FOIA] exemptions," but rather would require agencies to offer "a relatively detailed analysis in manageable segments." 484 F.2d at 826. Because FOIA challenges necessarily involve situations in which one party (the government) has sole access to the relevant information, and that same party bears the burden of justifying its disclosure decisions, the courts must require the government to provide as detailed a description as possible--without, of course, disclosing the privileged material itself--of the material it refuses to disclose. Additionally, the agency must determine if any portion of an exempt document contains nonexempt information, and, if so, must disclose that nonexempt portion. "In a large document it is vital that the agency specify in detail which portions of the document are disclosable and which are allegedly exempt." 484 F.2d at 827. If an affidavit [**14] submitted by an agency contains sufficient detail to forge the "logical connection between the information [withheld] and the claimed exemption," Goldberg v. U.S. Dep't of State, 260 U.S. App. D.C. 205, 818 F.2d 71, 78 (D.C. Cir. 1987), then the court will accord that affidavit substantial weight and consider the agency's "unique insights into what adverse effects might occur as a result of public disclosure." Id. In this case, Oglesby challenges the adequacy of the document descriptions offered in the affidavits submitted by Army, CIA, and NSA, which he claims are too sparse to allow an assessment of the various exemptions on which the agencies based their decisions to withhold responsive documents. In an overlapping claim, Oglesby raises specific challenges to Army's and CIA's reliance on FOIA exemptions 1 and 3, even with respect to individual documents described in adequate detail in the affidavits. He criticizes Army for not specifically stating that the supposedly exempt documents had been classified in accordance with the appropriate procedures, and he faults CIA for failing to address specifically the age of the documents and for depending on an allegedly unreliable affiant. [*1179] FOIA exemption [**15] 1, 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(1), protects from disclosure matters that are: (A) specifically authorized under criteria established by an Executive Order to be kept secret in the interest of the national defense or foreign policy; and (B) are in fact properly classified pursuant to that order. Id. The Army and the CIA both withheld information under this exemption. Exemption 3, 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(3), protects from disclosure matters that are specifically exempted from disclosure by statute. The CIA withheld information under this exemption, claiming that two statutes specifically operated to exempt certain responsive information; 50 U.S.C. § 403(d)(3), which requires the CIA to protect intelligence sources and methods from unauthorized disclosure; and 50 U.S.C. § 403g, which provides that the CIA shall be exempt from any other law requiring the publication or disclosure of the organization, functions, names, official titles, salaries, or numbers of people employed by the CIA. Because resolution of the issues raised by Oglesby's appeal depends on a fact-intensive analysis of each of the agencies' searches and declarations, we outline the relevant facts regarding each agency separately. [**16]
Oglesby sued for release of the undisclosed documents, which prompted Army to submit the affidavit of Robert Walsh, describing the responsive documents and attempting to justify Army's withholdings. The Walsh declaration revealed that the Army initially released seventy pages of Odessa records in their entirety and eighteen in redacted form. Another eleven pages, the Army withheld under exemption 1 (classified information). Aff. of Robert J. Walsh 3 (Apr. 6, 1988) ("Walsh Declaration"); J.A.189. Additionally, Army denied access to an entire 483-page Operation Rusty file, [**17] also on the basis of FOIA exemption 1. Id. at 7; J.A. 193. The Walsh declaration described each of nineteen separate documents Army had identified as responsive to Oglesby's request, and detailed the justifications for any unreleased portions of those documents. In general, the affidavit contained sufficient detail to allow a reviewing court to assess the applicability of the claimed exemptions to the undisclosed information. For example, the Army declared with respect to two documents: c. Document 3 is a cover letter originated by the 971th [sic] Counterintelligence Corps dated 19 May 1947 consisting of one page with one enclosure consisting of three pages. The subject of the cover letter is Organization Coburg, and is currently classified CONFIDENTIAL. Portions of paragraphs 2 and 3 of this cover letter were redacted to exempt classified information relating to intelligence methods and sources and foreign classified matters. The remaining paragraph and all three pages of the enclosure were regraded unclassified on 25 May 1986 and released to plaintiff. f. Document 6 is a one-page letter originated by the 971th [sic] Counterintelligence [**18] Corps, dated 25 November 1946, with subject Organization ODESSA. This document was regraded unclassified on 25 May 1983 and redacted to exempt only the identity of a confidential source. Id. at 4-5; J.A. 190-91. With respect to the 483-page document withheld in full, however, the affidavit offers significantly less detail: o. Document 15 is a complete intelligence operation consisting of 483 pages, entitled Operation Rusty. By letter dated 20 May 1986, plaintiff was advised that this document was properly and currently classified CONFIDENTIAL and was withheld in its [*1180] entirety. The operation concerned gathering positive and counterintelligence information concerning the activities and organizations of an Intelligence Service and activities of various dissident German organizations. The operation involved close coordination and cooperation with foreign and other US intelligence organizations. Release of this information would reveal intelligence activities, sources and methods as well as classified foreign government activities. Id. at 7; J.A. 193. On remand, Army supplemented the Walsh declaration with a 1992 affidavit by William Grayson. Decl. of William [**19] E. Grayson (Aug. 3, 1992) ("Grayson Declaration"); J.A. 177. For each item of information that still had not been turned over to Oglesby, Grayson explained what had been withheld and why. For example, with respect to one document, he wrote: a. Pages 13-17 The information on these pages is from a document dated September 10, 1947 and describes activities of ODESSA and related organizations. We have withheld only the name and other identifying data--aliases, address, date and place of birth, occupation, and physical description--of the individual (apparently a German citizen) who was the confidential source of this information, and we relied upon [FOIA exemption 7] to support our withholding. Although the passage of time and/or the death of confidential sources do not extinguish the protections of [exemption 7], we note that this document indicates that the source was born during the 1920's and therefore would be likely to still be living. Grayson Decl. at 3-4; J.A. 179-80. With respect to the Operation Rusty file, however, the Grayson declaration offered no new information. Grayson provided a similar description to that which appeared in the Walsh declaration, and [**20] concluded that "release of the information would reveal intelligence activities, sources, and methods and also classified foreign government activities" and was therefore not required under exemption 1. Id. at 8; J.A. 184. Grayson also declared that, "considering the nature of the document (which is, in effect, a collection of documents), no one portion could be considered reasonably segregable." Id. at 9; J.A. 185. At the time of the Grayson declaration, nine of 264 pages regarding Gehlen had still not been turned over to Oglesby. Grayson explained these withholdings in paragraph 8 of the affidavit: The remaining 9 pages contain information pertaining to intelligence activities, sources, and methods and also contain classified foreign government information. We cannot describe the material in more detail without revealing classified information. As with the Operation Rusty file, should the Court require further information, we will submit a classified declaration or the full text documents for the Court's in camera, ex parte inspection. Id. at 9-10; J.A. 185-86. Oglesby claims that Army's Vaughn index is inadequate for two reasons: first, because [**21] the Operation Rusty file is not indexed in detail; and second, because the affidavit fails to declare specifically that no portion of the withheld material pertaining to Gehlen was further segregable into exempt and nonexempt portions. Oglesby also claims that Army failed adequately to justify the withholdings it took under FOIA exemption 1, because the affidavits did not specifically assert that the "classified" information had been classified in accordance with the procedure laid out in the appropriate Executive Order. Oglesby's first two complaints merit some attention. The Army provided the district court with relatively little information about a 483-page document it determined was wholly exempt from FOIA disclosure. Although the Army avers that the file is not segregable, the Grayson declaration provides no details justifying that conclusion. In fact, the affidavit describes the file as "in effect, a collection of documents." Id. at 9; J.A. 185. Since Vaughn and its progeny require that an agency itemize each document and explain the connection between the information withheld and the exemption claimed, the Army should be required on remand to provide any [*1181] disclosable [**22] information regarding each document in the Operation Rusty "compilation." The Army has not adequately explained why it cannot provide general information (for example: length, date, author and brief description of each document) which would present Oglesby with a more realistic opportunity to challenge Army's invocation of exemptions. Similarly, Army has failed to offer any useful description of the nine undisclosed pages of Gehlen material. We cannot so easily accept the district court's determination that "the fact that such a tiny percentage of the [264 pages of] documents was withheld, coupled with the Army's evident awareness of the requirement that it disclose reasonably segregable nonexempt portions, leads the Court to the conclusion that the Amy did indeed make such a determination with respect to the Gehlen files." Mem. Op. at 4; J.A. 469. Although it is quite possible that the Army, which released the vast majority of the Gehlen material, was indeed aware of its duties under FOIA to disclose all nonsegregable information, Army has not provided this court with an adequate explanation on which we can rely for that finding. We therefore remand for a description of the specific [**23] documents (or segments) withheld and an explanation of the harm that might result from release of the undisclosed information. Oglesby's third claim against this defendant--that Army failed to justify its reliance on exemption 1 because it did not specifically assert that the "classified" information had been labeled in accordance with the procedure laid out in the appropriate Executive Order--elicits less concern. The Walsh declaration asserts that the material withheld pursuant to exemption 1 "meets the criteria set forth in [the Executive Order] which provides that information concerning intelligence activities, sources, or methods shall be considered for classification protection." Walsh Declaration at 9, 10; J.A. 195, 196. Walsh also stated that he had personally reviewed each of the documents and determined that they were "currently and properly classified, SECRET and CONFIDENTIAL." Id. The district court held--and we agree--that these claims that the information was "classified" encompass both the procedural and substantive aspects of classification. 2. CIA In response to Oglesby's initial 1985 FOIA request, CIA released twenty pages of material it had previously [**24] released to someone else pursuant to a 1983 FOIA request for information on Gehlen and Operation Sunrise. Letter from John H. Wright to Carl Oglesby (Sept. 10, 1985); J.A. 57. The agency then informed Oglesby that it would not conduct a new search on Gehlen or any of the other listed topics unless and until Oglesby wrote back and agreed to pay search fees. Rather than responding to the letter, Oglesby filed suit. In our earlier opinion, we encouraged the Army to reconsider a decision it had made to deny Oglesby a fee waiver, Oglesby, 920 F.2d at 66 n.11, and on remand, both Army and CIA informed Oglesby that his waiver would be granted. CIA then conducted a search, during which it discovered thirty-five responsive documents. The agency disclosed twenty-nine of these documents, and withheld six of them pursuant to various FOIA exemptions. The CIA coordinated its Vaughn declaration with the FBI's, since the FBI had forwarded thirteen responsive documents for CIA review. The CIA submitted the declaration of Lee Carle, dated June 1, 1988, and the FBI submitted an affidavit by Angus Llewellyn, dated May 26, 1988. The Carle declaration described in impressive detail each document [**25] and portion thereof which CIA had located but refused to release. For example, Carle offered the following justification for withholding a one-page memo: This one-page CIA memorandum to Director ... from Deputy Director ... is classified SECRET. This document is denied in its entirety pursuant to FOIA exemptions (b)(1) and (b)(3) as no meaningful segregation can be made for release to Plaintiff. Disclosure of any portion of this information would identify by name a foreign intelligence source of the CIA and specific methods by which CIA collected information on this source. The information [*1182] withheld relates to possible travels and activities of the source during a precise time period. The names of the source's traveling companions are also included in the deleted information. Release of the information itself would immediately reveal specific details relating to activities and travel plans of these foreign intelligence sources, thereby allowing them to be easily identified. Declaration of Lee E. Carle 19-20 (June 1, 1988) ("Carle Declaration"). After our first remand, CIA supplemented the Carle Declaration with a 1993 affidavit by Katherine Stricker. Declaration of [**26] Katherine M. Stricker (Jan. 15, 1993) ("Stricker Declaration"); J.A. 248. In addition to the documents discussed in the Carle Declaration, Stricker addressed two new documents (documents 5 and 6 in her document description index, id. at 4; J.A. 251), which she described in significant detail. For example, Stricker referred to "document 6" as follows: This 78-page document is a chronological accounting of Operation Sunrise. This document is released in sanitized form. The redacted information is withheld pursuant to FOIA exemptions (b)(1) and (b)(3). The information withheld on pages 11, 34, and 35 of this document pertains to a liaison relationship with a foreign government. (See paragraph 17, the Stricker Declaration [explaining that "liaison relationships" are initiated and continued only on the basis of secrecy] ). I have determined that release of this information could reasonably be expected to cause damage to the national security. Therefore, the full-text version of this document is currently and properly classified at the SECRET level. Id. at 17; J.A. 264. Although both Carle's and Stricker's declarations offer sufficient details to allow a court [**27] to assess the propriety of most of the exemptions claimed by the CIA, Stricker's declaration also contains a reference to "additional responsive documents" which the agency nowhere describes or explains. Id. at 4; J.A. 251. Apparently the agency intended to submit a classified index in camera, but for some reason failed to do so. n2 With respect to these documents, which CIA has never described for Oglesby, the agency has clearly failed to meet its FOIA obligation to justify each and every exemption taken. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Footnotes- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - n2 Before oral argument, the defendants moved to dismiss Oglesby's appeal, claiming that the CIA's failure to submit the classified index for in camera review rendered the district court's disposition of this case non-final. Defendants allege that the judge could not have offered a final disposition against every defendant since she had not even seen all of the evidence on which she was to rule. Although the defendants are certainly correct to note that a judge cannot properly find that evidence which she has never seen and which the agency has never described satisfies FOIA's exemption requirements, the impropriety of the ruling does not change the fact that the district court held that "the CIA's exemption 1 claims are justified." J.A. 471. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -End Footnotes- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [**28] Despite CIA's failure either to describe the documents or to submit the classified index in camera, the district court expressly found both that the CIA's Vaughn index was adequate, Mem. Op. at 5; J.A. 470, and that the CIA had described its withheld information and its justifications for the withholdings, "with reasonable specificity, demonstrating a logical connection between the information and the claimed exemption." Id. at 7; J.A. 472. At oral argument, counsel for the defendants conceded the need for a remand on this point. n3 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Footnotes- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - n3 Oglesby correctly notes that even if the CIA had submitted the index as planned, the agency had not created a sufficient public record to justify an in camera review because it had not made public as much information as possible. Lykins v. DOJ, 233 U.S. App. D.C. 349, 725 F.2d 1455, 1463-65 (D.C. Cir. 1984). In Lykins, the court found the government's Vaughn index "clearly insufficient" to support an in camera review where the index provided only the date, the type of document, and a conclusory declaration that the material would be potentially disruptive. The court warned that "a trial court should not use in camera affidavits unless necessary and, if such affidavits are used, it should be certain to make the public record as complete as possible." 725 F.2d at 1465. The CIA has offered far less information here than the agency in Lykins; the public record contains no information except a vague reference to "additional responsive documents." - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -End Footnotes- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [**29] Oglesby challenges the adequacy of CIA's Vaughn index, which we can quickly [*1183] declare insufficient with respect to the undescribed "additional" documents. However, Oglesby also claims that CIA has failed to justify its withholding, under FOIA exemptions 1 and 3, of material it did describe in the affidavits. First, he argues that CIA's failure to explain expressly why the passage of time has not diminished the security concerns with respect to the undisclosed records renders the affidavits inadequate to justify the exemptions. Second, Oglesby charges that the district court should not have relied on the Stricker declaration because Ms. Stricker's credibility had been tarnished by her involvement in a separate proceeding, in which she submitted an affidavit stating that disclosure of certain information, which it was later learned had been released thirty years before without incident, would cause damage to the national security if released. Appellant's Brief at 36. To back his claim that the passage of time has reduced the risk of this information leading to breaches in security, Oglesby points to the CIA's Historical Review Program ("HRP"), pursuant to which the agency systematically [**30] reviews for declassification all records more than thirty years old. See HR 70-14 a.(1); J.A. 333. Although we would not go so far as the district court and deny that CIA's review program "has any relevance" to Oglesby's claim, Mem. Op. at 8 n.4; J.A. 473, neither do we believe that the passage of time alone is enough to discredit an otherwise detailed and persuasive affidavit. Oglesby has not demonstrated that an agency's national security concerns automatically disappear with the passage of time, and therefore has not rebutted the affidavits stating that the material had been reviewed at the time of the request, and had been determined to pose a current threat to national security if released. Nevertheless, we hesitate to describe the existence of the review program as "irrelevant," because if Oglesby could show that withheld information is substantially similar to information the government has declassified because of its age, he might raise a successful challenge to the government's reliance on exemption 1. In this case, however, he has presented no such evidence; he has merely made the naked assertion that the passage of time renders the national security claims questionable. [**31] As long as an agency declares through its affidavits that the responsive material has been reviewed to assure the continuing accuracy of its original classification, and that a determination has been made that the withheld information still poses a security risk if released, the mere passage of time is not a per se bar to reliance on exemption 1. n4 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Footnotes- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - n4 To back his argument that the agency must specifically address the passage of time, Oglesby cites several cases which we find inapposite. The only case from this court, King v. U.S. Dep't of Justice, 265 U.S. App. D.C. 62, 830 F.2d 210 (D.C. Cir. 1987), involved a request for documents which had been classified under an executive order which specifically directed the agency to consider "the passage of time" and which had been reviewed by the agency only for procedural compliance with the executive order. 830 F.2d at 226. In addition to King, Oglesby points to dicta in two nonbinding cases from the Northern District of California which we find uncompelling in this context. In Powell v. U.S. Dep't of Justice, the court found that the government had "manifested a bad faith disregard for plaintiff's rights under FOIA," 584 F. Supp. 1508 at 1513, and supplied only conclusory affidavits claiming that the release of certain information could cause damage to national security, id. at 1517. Likewise, in Dunaway v. Webster, 519 F. Supp. 1059, 1069 (N.D. Cal. 1981), the government had submitted only "conclusory statements" to justify continuing classification under a different executive order which the court determined embodied a "clear policy" of declassification for older documents. Id. [**32] With respect to Oglesby's second challenge--to the credibility of CIA's affiant--we note that the record contains no suggestion that the error Stricker allegedly made in the unrelated case involved any duplicity or intentional misrepresentation. Without any allegation of bad faith, we are unwilling to assume that an agency employee who withholds information that ultimately turns out to be substantially similar to information that has already been released--in short, an employee who makes a mistake--is forever barred from serving as a reliable affiant in the future. Accordingly, we reject Oglesby's claim that the district court should have rejected the Stricker declaration on that basis. [*1184] 3. NSA NSA originally responded to Oglesby's request by informing him that his fee waiver had been denied and that the search would likely cost him $ 900. After Oglesby filed suit for the first time, NSA reversed its original position and granted him a waiver. In 1990, the agency made its "final response" to the request, releasing four documents pertaining to "werewolves" and several others regarding Gehlen. In addition, the agency withheld several documents pursuant to exemptions 1 and 3. [**33] Oglesby appealed the agency's decision to withhold part or all of five separate reports and two letters. The NSA refused to disclose the documents in unredacted form because "release of certain portions of these documents would reveal specific information regarding communications intelligence and cryptologic activities, thereby jeopardizing intelligence sources and methods." Declaration of Michael A. Smith 4 (May 4, 1992) ("Smith Declaration"); J.A. 167. Through the Smith declaration, NSA claimed that some of the withheld information ("such as titles of reference documents used in the preparation of one of the reports at issue, codewords and distribution caveats, and matters of foreign relations") met the criteria for exemption 1, and the rest ("including employee names") was also protected by exemption 3. Id. at 5; J.A. 168. In subsequent affidavits, NSA supplemented the Smith declaration with statements by Boyd Wooton, J.A. 453 ("Wooton Declaration"), and Robert Killen, J.A. 456 ("Killen Declaration"). Wooton described the usual search procedure for NSA, and Killen provided details regarding the actual procedure the agency implemented in conducting Oglesby's search. Killen [**34] ran a new search of the agency's files, entering the terms: Gehlen, Strong, Dulles, Hunt, Rusty, Odessa, Kamaradenwerk, Bruderschaft, Werewolf, Werewolves, Spinne, and Sunrise. Killen Declaration at 2; J.A. 457. In June, 1994, Smith issued a supplemental declaration in which he explained that Killen's search had produced eight new responsive documents. Supplemental Declaration of Michael A. Smith (June 28, 1994) ("Smith Supp."); J.A. 459. Three of these documents were released in full and five were withheld in full. The supplemental affidavit offered no details regarding the five documents, but conclusively stated that they were all currently and properly classified either TOP SECRET or SECRET because "the disclosure of all or any portion of their contents could reasonably be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage and serious damage, respectively, to the national security." Smith Supp. at 3; J.A. 461. Smith also averred that these five documents satisfied the requirements for exemption 3 as well, since they contained classified information concerning communications intelligence activities. Id. at 4; J.A. 462. The affidavit concluded with the sweeping declaration that "it [**35] is not possible to describe further the withheld information in an unclassified declaration because any additional description would itself divulge classified information." Id. Oglesby claims that NSA's Vaughn index inadequately describes the responsive material, and we are inclined to agree with him. With respect to documents located since this case's last visit to the Court of Appeals, NSA's affidavits contain only sweeping and conclusory assertions that the agency withheld the documents because they contained material which could reasonably be expected to cause damage to national security. The affidavits offer no functional description of the documents; NSA has failed to disclose the types of documents, dates, authors, number of pages, or any other identifying information for the records it has withheld. Comparison of these affidavits with the Army and CIA declarations highlight the shortcomings of the NSA statements. Thus we agree with Oglesby that NSA has clearly failed to provide an adequate Vaughn index. On remand, the district court should order NSA to submit an index describing the withheld documents to the greatest extent possible without disclosing information [**36] that must be protected. C. Adequacy of the Searches In addition to attacking the adequacy of the Vaughn indices and exemption justifications [*1185] offered by Army, CIA and NSA, Oglesby challenges the adequacy of the searches conducted by those agencies, as well as by FBI and State. 1. Army. In a letter to Oglesby dated March 31, 1986, Army explained that it had searched its automated Defense Central Index of Investigations ("DCII") and Investigative Records Repository ("IRR") for records responsive to his FOIA request. Letter from Thomas Conley to Carl Oglesby (Mar. 31, 1986); J.A. 41. According to the letter, DCII "is a computerized index to intelligence investigative records maintained by the Department of Defense" and the IRR "is the Army's official storage facility for all intelligence investigative records." Id. at 1. Oglesby claims that Army has failed to aver that these two indices are the only places pertinent records might be stored. Appellant's Brief at 44 ("The record also does not clarify whether INSCOM maintains other indices of its records, computerized or manual. Discovery is needed to answer these questions."). To back his claim on this issue, [**37] Oglesby cites to a book about Reinhard Gehlen in which the author asserts that Army Intelligence provided her with "well over a thousand documents" about Gehlen in response to her FOIA requests. MARY ELLEN REESE, GENERAL REINHARD GEHLEN: THE CIA CONNECTION xiii (1990); J.A. 342. Although information in the record fails to reveal the precise nature of the FOIA request the book author submitted, and therefore her experience cannot prove that Army's search was inadequate, her claim raises enough of a doubt to preclude summary judgment in the absence of an affidavit describing Army's filing system and decision to search only the DCII and IRR indices. Although Oglesby argues that discovery is needed to answer his questions regarding the adequacy of Army's search, a relatively detailed affidavit addressing the issue could suffice. 2. CIA With respect to the CIA, the district court ruled that the agency had conducted an adequate search, and that CIA's failure to describe its subsequent search which located additional records was "irrelevant." Mem. Op. at 10; J.A. 475. We disagree that the court had sufficient information on which to base its summary judgment determination. Particularly [**38] since the record does not disclose how many additional documents were produced in the subsequent search, or offer any description of the nature of these documents, the court could not properly conclude that the original search (which failed to locate any of these possibly numerous and important documents) was "reasonably calculated to uncover all relevant documents." Truitt v. Dep't of State, 283 U.S. App. D.C. 86, 897 F.2d 540, 542 (D.C. Cir. 1990); see also Founding Church of Scientology v. NSA, 197 U.S. App. D.C. 305, 610 F.2d 824, 837 (D.C. Cir. 1979) ("If, in the face of well-defined requests and positive indications of overlooked materials, an agency can so easily avoid adversary scrutiny of its search techniques, [FOIA] will inevitably become nugatory."). 3. FBI The FBI submitted a detailed affidavit describing each document it found in response to Oglesby's original request, as well as each paragraph or subparagraph deleted from each document. See Declaration of Angus Llewellyn (May 26, 1988) ("Llewellyn Declaration"). Because Oglesby does not attack the adequacy of the FBI's index, we will not detail the documents withheld or the explanations offered to justify the exemptions. Oglesby challenges [**39] only the adequacy of the search conducted by FBI. In response to his initial request, the FBI released a document which suggested to Oglesby that certain Gehlen files might be found in a "section tickler" and that this tickler might contain records responsive to his request. He wrote to the FBI and asked that they search under additional terms and that they search the section tickler. See Declaration of Karlton D. Bolthouse 3 (Sept. 24, 1992); J.A. 229. On August 8, 1991, the FBI responded that it had conducted the additional requested search and had located no additional documents. The letter also informed Oglesby that the reference to a "section tickler" did [*1186] not indicate that any other responsive documents existed. Id. at 4; J.A. 230. The FBI's response to Oglesby described the Bureau's search in sufficient detail to satisfy summary judgment standards. The FBI assured Oglesby that, "the reference to a "section tickler' was not an indication that other responsive records existed," id., and Oglesby has advanced no reason to doubt that allegation. Oglesby seems to believe that common sense dictates the conclusion that a "tickler" necessarily contains documents. We do not [**40] find it so clear that a "tickler" must be a repository for documents, and we will not second-guess FBI's affidavit on this point. 4. State As with the FBI, Oglesby challenges the district court's ruling in favor of State only with respect to the adequacy of the department's search. In a 1992 declaration submitted by Frank Machak, State described its filing system and the search the department conducted in response to Oglesby's request. Declaration of Frank Machak (Mar. 30, 1992) ("Machak Declaration"). According to the affidavit, State organizes its files under three categories: automated document system (files from 1973-present); central foreign policy files (1954-1973); and lot files (described by Machak as "paper files retired by foreign service posts and by Department offices, covering the time period circa 1954-present that are maintained in sealed boxes, known as lots, and arranged according to subject matter and time periods"). Id. at 6; J.A. 155. All State records covering the period prior to 1954 had been accessioned to NARA, and therefore State conducted a search only with respect to the first item on Oglesby's request (records pertaining to Gehlen and his relationship [**41] with U.S. officials). A research specialist determined that any documents responsive to Oglesby's request which had been retained by State would be contained in the central foreign policy files. State apparently did not search the lot files, because "the description of records requested ... was not specific enough to allow for [it]." Id. at 9; J.A. 158. Lot files are organized only by nine broad subject categories (administration, business affairs, consular affairs, economic affairs, military and defense, operations, political affairs, social affairs, and technology & science), and not by individuals' names. Id. Oglesby raises two objections to State's conduct of its search: first, he alleges that the Department's failure to search the lot files rendered the search inadequate; and second, he claims that the court cannot rule on the adequacy of the search based on Machak's declaration because Machak was allegedly involved in an unlawful attempt to expedite an unrelated FOIA request in 1992. Appellant's Brief at 47. The district court rejected these claims, and we affirm that decision. State adequately addressed the first of Oglesby's concerns when it explained that the lot [**42] files are organized by nine broad subject categories and not by individuals' names. J.A. 158. Since State's search only reached the first item on Oglesby's list (because the other items had been accessioned to NARA), the department sought only information pertaining to Gehlen and his relationship with U.S. officials. If, as the affidavit alleges, the lot files cannot be searched for an individual's name, we find that it is reasonable that State would require more specific information in order to search these files. Oglesby's second challenge also lacks merit. The district court found "no reason to doubt Machak's credibility in this case," and we find no reason to challenge that conclusion. Particularly in light of the fact that the judge in the case which Oglesby claims reveals Machak's untrustworthiness ultimately determined that Machak's declaration in that case had been "well grounded in fact," Nation Magazine v. Dep't of State, 92-cv-2302, slip opinion at 29 (D.D.C. Aug. 18, 1995), we find Oglesby's unsupported allegations attacking Machak's credibility insufficient to convince us to reverse the district court's decision. 5. NSA Oglesby claims that the Smith declaration [**43] "contains no information whatsoever [*1187] concerning the nature of the search it conducted." Appellant's Brief at 48. What Oglesby's brief fails to mention is that on remand, NSA submitted additional affidavits that do detail the nature of the agency's search. The Killen declaration explains that Killen personally ran all of the main terms in Oglesby's request through NARA's Archival Information Retrieval System ("AIRS"), "the only system of records ... that could reasonably be expected to contain any archival records responsive to plaintiff's FOIA request." Killen Declaration at 1; J.A. 456. Because Oglesby has put forward no reason to doubt the sufficiency of this search, we affirm the district court's holding that NSA had demonstrated the adequacy of its search. III. CONCLUSION In sum, we affirm the district court in part and reverse in part, holding: (1) that the district court correctly rejected Oglesby's claim that NARA's fee-setting statute was not a "statute specifically providing for setting the level of fees for particular types of records," and therefore did not fall within 5 U.S.C. § 552(a)(4)(A)(vi)'s exemption from FOIA's fee requirements; (2) that Army, CIA [**44] and NSA all submitted inadequate Vaughn indices; (3) that the district court correctly held that FBI, State, and NSA had demonstrated that they had conducted adequate searches; and (4) that Army and CIA have not provided sufficient information to justify the district court's finding that their searches were reasonably calculated to uncover all responsive documents. Thus, we affirm the district court's decision with respect to NARA, FBI, and State, but reverse and remand for further proceedings involving Army, CIA and NSA. So ordered. RE: New Book on Reinhard Gehlen in the works - Peter Lemkin - 17-05-2020 http://bnd-standortpullach.de/en/historie.htm [not much here either.....one should note that the original site of the Gehlen Org. was on the estate of Bormann. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/12...m-d27.html https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/...1_0001.pdf https://aarclibrary.org/the-secret-treat...l-oglesby/ The Secret Treaty of Fort Hunt by Carl Oglesby Page 48, Figure 12 of the Nazi War Crimes & Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group Final Report of April 2007. Click HERE to download the full report. William Shirer closed his 1960 masterpiece, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, with the judgment that the Nazi regime "had passed into history,"1 but we cannot be so confident today. On the contrary, the evidence as of 1990 is that World War II did not end as Shirer believed it did, that Nazism did not surrender unconditionally and disappear, that indeed it finessed a limited but crucial victory over the Allies, a victory no less significant for having been kept a secret from all but the few Americans who were directly involved. The Odessa and its Mission Hitler continued to rant of victory, but after Germany's massive defeat in the battle of Stalingrad in mid-January 1943, the realists of the German General Staff (OKW) were all agreed that their game was lost. Defeat at Stalingrad meant, at a minimum, that Germany could not win the war in the East that year. This in turn means that the Nazis would have to keep the great preponderance of their military forces tied down on the eastern front and could not redeploy them to the West, where the Anglo-American invasion of Italy would occur that summer. Apparently inspired by the Soviet victory, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill announced at Casablanca, on January 24, 1943, their demand for Germany's unconditional surrender and the complete de-Nazification of Europe. 2 Within the German general staff two competing groups formed around the question of what to do: one led by Heinrich Himmler the other by Martin Bormann.3 Himmler was chief of the SS (Schutzstaffel, "protective echelon"), the blackshirted core of the Nazi party that emerged as Hitler's bodyguard in the late 1920s and grew into the most powerful of the Nazi political institutions. After the failure of the attempted military coup of July 20, 1944, which wounded but did not kill Hitler, the SS seized all power and imposed a furious blood purge of the armed services in which some seven thousand were arrested and nearly five thousand executed. 4 The SS was at that point the only organ of the Nazi state. Himmler and Bormann. Himmler's plan for dealing with the grim situation facing Nazism found its premise in Hitler's belief that the alliance between "the ultra-capitalists" of the U.S. and "the ultra- Marxists" of the Soviet Union was politically unstable. "Even now they are at loggerheads," said Hitler. "If we can now deliver a few more blows, this artificially bolstered common front may suddenly collapse with a gigantic clap of thunder."5 Himmler believed that this collapse would occur and that the U.S. would then consider the formation of a new anti-soviet alliance with Nazi Germany. The Nazis would then negotiate "a separate peace" with the United States, separate from any peace with the USSR, with which Germany would remain at war, now joined against the Soviets by the United States. But Martin Bormann, who was even more powerful than Himmler, did not accept the premise of the separate-peace idea. Bormann was an intimate of Hitler's, the deputy fuhrer and the head of the Nazi Party, thus superior to Himmler in rank. Bormann wielded additional power as Hitler's link to the industrial and financial cartels that ran the Nazi economy and was particularly close to Hermann Schmitz, chief executive of I.G. Farben, the giant chemical firm that was Nazi Germany's greatest industrial power. With the support of Schmitz, Bormann rejected Himmler's separate-peace strategy on the ground that it was far too optioptimistic.6 The Allied military advantage was too great, Bormann believed, for Roosevelt to be talked into a separate peace. Roosevelt, after all, had taken the lead in proclaiming the Allies' demand for Germany's unconditional surrender and total de-Nazification. Bormann reasoned, rather, that the Nazi's best hope of surviving military defeat lay within their own resources, chief of which was the cohesion of tens of thousands of SS men for whom the prospect of surrender could offer only the gallows. Bormann and Schmitz developed a more aggressive self-contained approach to the problem of the looming military defeat, the central concept of which was that large numbers of Nazis would have to leave Europe and at least for a time, find places in the world in which to recover their strength. There were several possibilities in Latin America, most notably Argentina and Paraguay; South Africa, Egypt, and Indonesia were also attractive rear areas in which to retreat.7 After the German defeat in the battle of Normandy in June 1944, Bormann took the First external steps toward implementing concrete plans for the Nazis' great escape. An enormous amount of Nazi treasure had to be moved out of Europe and made safe. This treasure was apparently divided into several caches, of which the one at the Reichsbank in Berlin included almost three tons of gold (much of it the so-called tooth- gold from the slaughter camps) as well as silver, platinum, tens of thousands of carats of precious stones, and perhaps a billion dollars in various currencies. 8 There were industrial assets to be expatriated, including large tonnages of specialty steel and certain industrial machinery as well as blue-prints critical to the domination of certain areas of manufacturing. Key Nazi companies needed to be relicensed outside Germany in order to escape the reach of war-reparations claims. And tens of thousands of Nazi war criminals, almost all of them members of the SS, needed help to escape Germany and safely regroup in foreign colonies capable of providing security and livelihoods. For help with the first three of these tasks, Bormann convened a secret meeting of key German industrialists on August 10, 1944, at the Hotel Maison Rouge in Strasbourg. 9 One part of the minutes of this meeting states: The [Nazi] Party is ready to supply large amounts of money to those industrialists who contribute to the post-war organization abroad. In return, the Party demands all financial reserves which have already been transferred abroad or may later be transferred, so that after the defeat a strong new Reich can be built.10 The Nazi expert in this area was Hitler's one-time financial genius and Minister of the Economy, Dr. Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, available to Bormann even though he was in prison on suspicion of involvement in the anti-Hitler coup of 1944. According to a U.S. Treasury Department report of 1945, at least 750 enterprises financed by the Nazi Party had been set up outside Germany by the end of the war. These firms were capable of generating an annual income of approximately $30 million, all of it available to Nazi causes. 11 It was Schacht's ability to finesse the legalities of licensing and ownership that brought this situation about. 12 Organizing the physical removal of the Nazis' material assets and the escape of SS personnel were the tasks of the hulking Otto Skorzeny, simultaneously an officer of the SS, the Gestapo and the Waffen SS as well as Hitler's "favorite commando. "13 Skorzeny worked closely with Bormann and Schacht in transporting the Nazi assets to safety outside Europe and in creating a network of SS escape routes ("rat lines") that led from all over Germany to the Bavarian city of Memmingen, then to Rome, then by sea to a number of Nazi retreat colonies set up in the global south. The international organization created to accommodate Bormann's plans is most often called "The Odessa," a German acronym for "Organization of Veterans of the SS." It has remained active as a shadowy presence since the war and may indeed constitute Nazism's most notable organizational achievement. But we must understand that none of Bormann's, Skorzeny's, and Schacht's well-laid plans would have stood the least chance of success had it not been for a final component of their organization, one not usually associated with the Odessa at all but very possibly the linchpin of the entire project. Enter Gehlen This final element of the Odessa was the so-called Gehlen Organization (the Org), the Nazi intelligence system that sold itself to the U.S. at the end of the war. It was by far the most audacious, most critical, and most essential part of the entire Odessa undertaking. The literature on the Odessa and that on the Gehlen Organization, however, are two different things. No writer in the field Of Nazi studies has yet explicitly associated the two, despite the fact that General Reinhard Gehlen was tied politically as well as personally with Skorzeny and Schacht. Moreover, Gehlen's fabled post-war organization was in large part staffed by SS Nazis who are positively identified with the Odessa, men such as the infamous Franz Alfred Six and Emil Augsburg of the Wannsee Institute. An even more compelling reason for associating Gehlen with the Odessa is that, without his organization as a screen, the various Odessa projects would have been directly exposed to American intelligence. If the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) had not been neutralized by the Gehlen ploy, the Odessa's great escape scheme would have been discovered and broken up. At 43, Brigadier General Reinhard Gehlen was a stiff, unprepossessing man of pounds when he presented himself for surrender at the U.S. command center in Fischhausen. But there was nothing small about his ego. "I am head of the section Foreign Armies East in German Army Headquarters," he announced to the Gl at the desk. "I have information to give of the highest importance to your government." The Gl was not impressed, however, and Gehien spent weeks stewing in a POW compound before an evident Soviet eagerness to find him finally aroused the Americans' attention. 14 Gehlen became chief of the Third Reich's Foreign Armies East (FHO), on April 1, 1942. He was thus responsible for Germany's military intelligence operations throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. His FHO was connected in this role with a number of secret fascist organizations in the countries to Germany's east. These included Stepan Bandera's "B Faction" of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN/B),15 Romania's Iron Guard, 16 the Ustachis of Yugoslavia, 17 the Vanagis of Latvia18 and, after the summer of 1942, "Vlassov's Army, "19 the band of defectors from Soviet Communism marching behind former Red hero General Andrey Vlassov. Later on in the war, Gehien placed one of his top men in control of Foreign Armies West, which broadened his power; and then after Admiral Wilhelm Canaris was purged and his Abwehr intelligence service cannibalized by the SS, Gehien became in effect Nazi Germany's over-all top intelligence chief. The Great Escape In December 1943, at the latest, Gehlen reached the same conclusion about the war that had come upon Bormann, Schacht, Skorzeny, and Himmler. Germany was losing and could do nothing about it. Several months later, Gehlen says, he began quietly discussing the impending loss with a few close associates. As he writes in his memoir: "Early in October 1944 I told my more intimate colleagues that I considered the war was lost and we must begin thinking of the future. We had to think ahead and plan for the approaching catastrophe. "21 Gehlen's strategic response to Gotterdammerung was a kind of fusion of Himmler's philosophy with Bormann's more pessimistic Odessa line: "My view," he writes, "was that there would be a place even for Germany in a Europe rearmed for defense against Communism. Therefore we must set our sights on the Western powers, and give ourselves two objectives: to help defend against Communist expansion and to recover and reunify Germany's lost territories. "22 Just as Bormann, Skorzeny, and Schacht were beginning to execute their escape plans, so too was Gehien: "Setting his sights on the Western powers," and in particular on the United States. Gehien pursued the following strategic rationale: When the alliance between the United States and the USSR collapsed, as it was bound to do upon Germany's defeat, the United States would discover a piercing need for a top-quality intelligence service in Eastern Europe and inside the Soviet Union. It did not have such a service of its own, and the pressures of erupting East-West conflict would not give it time to develop one from scratch. Let the United States therefore leave the assets assembled by Gehien and the FHO intact. Let the United States not break up Gehlen's relationship with East European fascist groups. Let the United States pick up Gehlen's organization and put it to work for the West, the better to prevail in its coming struggle against a Soviet Union soon to become its ex-ally. Gehlen brought his top staff people into the planning for this amazing proposal. Together, during the last months of the war, while Hitler was first raging at Gehlen for his "defeatist" intelligence reports, then promoting him to the rank of brigadier general, then at last firing him altogether (but promoting into the FHO directorship one of Gehlen's co-conspirators), Gehlen and his staff carefully prepared their huge files on East Europe and the Soviet Union and moved them south into the Bavarian Alps and buried them. At the same time, Gehlen began building the ranks of the FHO intelligence agents. The FHO in fact was the only organization in the whole of the Third Reich that was actually recruiting new members as the war was winding down. 23 SS men who knew they would be in trouble when the Allied forces arrived now came flocking to the FHO, knowing that it was the most secure place for them to be when the war finally ended. 24 When Gehlen's plans were complete and his preparations all concluded, he divided his top staff into three separate groups and moved them (as Skorzeny was doing at the same time) into prearranged positions in Bavaria. Gehlen himself was in place before the German surrender on May 7, hiding comfortably in a well-stocked chalet in a mountain lea called Misery Meadow. Besides Gehlen, there were eight others in the Misery Meadow group, including two wounded men and three young women. For three weeks, maintaining radio contact with the two other groups, Gehlen and his colleagues stayed on the mountain, waiting for the American army to appear in the valley far below. "These days of living in the arms of nature were truly enchanting," he wrote. "We had grown accustomed to the peace, and our ears were attuned to nature's every sound. "25 Destruction of the OSS Gehlen was still communing with nature when William Donovan, chief of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), arrived in Nuremberg from Washington, dispatched by the new president to assist Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson. Harry S. Truman had made Jackson the United States's chief prosecutor with the International Military Tribunal (IMT), established to try the Nazis' principal military leaders. Donovan's OSS was to function as an investigative arm of the IMT. By the last half of the war if not before, President Roosevelt and Donovan were convinced that the U.S. needed a permanent intelligence service and that this service, like the OSS, should be civilian rather than military. They were convinced too that the OSS should be its foundation. On October 31, 1944, Roosevelt directed Donovan to prepare a memo on how such a service should be organized. 26 William Joseph ("Wild Bill") Donovan (January 1, 1883 February 8, 1959) was an American soldier, lawyer, intelligence officer and diplomat. Donovan is best remembered as the wartime head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency, during World War II. He is also known as the "Father of American Intelligence" and the "Father of Central Intelligence". "The Central Intelligence Agency regards Donovan as its founding father," according to journalist Evan Thomas in a 2011 Vanity Fair profile. Donovan consulted on this assignment with his colleague Allen Dulles, a force unto himself as wartime chief of OSS operations in Bern. Dulles advised Donovan to placate the military by proposing that the new agency be placed automatically under military command in time of war.27 Donovan's proposal incorporated this idea, 28 but only in order to state all the more strongly the case for civilian control and for making the OSS the basis of the new organization. As he wrote in his memo to Roosevelt of November 18, 1944, "There are common-sense reasons why you may desire to lay the keel of the ship at once…. We now have [in the OSS] the trained and specialized personnel needed for such a task, and this talent should not be dispersed. "29 Donovan proposed establishment of a civilian intelligence service responsible directly to the President and the Secretary of State, the chief mission of which would be to support the President in foreign policy. Except for the civilian Secretaries of War and the Navy, Donovan's plan did not even include a place for military representation on the advisory board, and he was careful to specify that the advisory board would merely advise and not control. The new service was to be all-powerful in its field, being responsible for "coordination of the functions of all intelligence agencies of the Government." The Donovan intelligence service, in other words, would directly and explicitly dominate the Army's G-2 and the Navy's ONI. 30. Naturally, therefore, the Donovan plan drew an intense attack from the military. One G-2 officer called it "cumbersome and possibly dangerous. "31 Another referred to the OSS as "a bunch of faggots. "32 Nor was the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover silent. Hoover had fought creation of the OSS perhaps more bitterly than the military and had insisted throughout the war on maintaining an FBI intelligence network in Latin America despite the fact that this was supposed to be OSS turf. 33 Certain elements within Army intelligence were not only opposed to Donovan's plan but were also beginning to formulate their own notions of what a post-war intelligence system should be like. Roosevelt sent the Joint Chiefs of Staff ultra-secret copies of Donovan's proposal along with Roosevelt's own draft executive order to implement it. On January 1, 1945, the Chiefs formally reported to Roosevelt their extreme dissatisfaction with this scheme and leaked Donovan's memo to four right-wing newspapers, which leapt to the attack with blaring headlines accusing FDR and Donovan of conspiring to create "a super Gestapo." This attack put the Donovan plan on hold, and the death of FDR on April 12, 1945 destroyed it. 34 In early May 1945, president for less than a month, Truman made the OSS the American component of the investigative arm of the IMT. It is one of the fascinating conjunctions of this story that Donovan should have left for Nuremberg just as Gehlen was coming down from his mountain. It is one of its riper ironies that Donovan would soon resign from Jackson's staff in a disagreement over trying German officers as war criminals, which Donovan objected to but Jackson and Truman supported. 35 Had Donovan lent his energies to the trial of Nazis within the German officer corps, he might have confronted the very adversaries who would shortly take his place in the American intelligence system, not only militarizing it, but Nazifying it as well. Gehlen Makes his Move Gehlen had been on the mountain for exactly three weeks and the war had been over for almost two weeks when he decided on May 19 that it was time to make contact. He left the three women and the two wounded men at Misery Meadow and with his four aides began the decent to the valley town of Fischhausen on Lake Schliersee. On the same day Soviet commissioners far to the north at Flensburg demanded that the United States hand over Gehlen as well as his files on the USSR. This was the first the U.S. command had heard of Gehlen. 36 Gehlen and company took their time, staying three days with the parents of one of his aides and communicating by radio with those who had remained at Misery Meadow. On May 22, Gehlen at last decided the moment was right. He and his aides marched into the Army command center and represented themselves to the desk officer, a Captain John Schwarzwalder, to whom Gehlen spoke his prepared speech: "I am head of the Section Foreign Armies East in German Army headquarters. I have information to give of the highest importance to your government." Schwarzwalder had Gehlen and his group jeeped to Miesbach where there was a[n] OSS detachment. There Gehlen once again gave his speech, this time to a Captain Marian Porter: "I have information of the greatest importance for your supreme commander." Porter replied, "So have they all," and shunted him and his cohorts off to the prison camp at Salzburg. Gehlen's disappointment at this reception was keen and his biographers all say he never forgot it, "lapsing," as one puts it, "into near despair" as he "presented the strange paradox of a spy-master thirsting for recognition by his captors. "37 Recognition was inevitable, however, since the CIC was trying to find him. By mid June at the latest, his name was recognized by a G-2 officer, Colonel William H. Quinn, who had Gehlen brought to Augsburg for his first serious interrogation. Quinn was the first American to whom Gehlen presented his proposal and told of his staff dispersed at several camps in the mountains as well as the precious buried archives of the FHO. Unlike Captain Porter, Colonel Quinn was impressed. He promptly passed Gehlen up the command chain to General Edwin L. Sibert. Sibert later recalled, "I had a most excellent impression of him at once." Gehlen immediately began educating him as to the actual aims of the Soviet Union and its display of military might." As Sibert told a journalist years later, "With her present armed forces potential, he [Gehlen] continued, Russia could risk war with the West and the aim of such a war would be the occupation of West Germany."38 Acting without orders, Sibert listened to Gehlen for several days before informing Eisenhower's chief of staff, General Walter Bedell Smith. 39 Smith and Sibert then continued to develop their relationship with Gehlen secretly, choosing not to burden Eisenhower with knowledge of what they were doing "in order not to compromise him in his relations with the Soviets. "40 Eisenhower in fact had strictly forbidden U.S. fraternization with Germans. Gehlen was encouraged to resume contact with his FHO comrades who were still at large in Bavaria, releasing them from their vow of silence. Gehlen was sufficiently confident of his American relationships by this time that he dug up his buried files and, in special camps, put his FHO experts to work preparing detailed reports on the Red Army for his American captors. Well before the end of June he and his comrades were "discharged from prisoner of war status so that we could move around at will. "42 They were encouraged to form a unit termed a "general staff cell" first within G-2's Historical Research Section, then later in the Seventh Army's Intelligence Center in Wiesbaden, where they worked in private quarters and were treated as VIPs. 43 Indeed, a partly declassified CIA document recapitulated this story in the early 1970s, noting at this time: Gehlen met with Admiral Karl Dognitz, who had been appointed by Hitler as his successor during the last days of the Third Reich. Gehlen and the Admiral were now in a U.S. Army VIP prison camp in Wiesbaden; Gehlen sought and received approval from Doenitz too!44 In other words, the German chain of command was still in effect, and it approved of what Gehlen was doing with the Americans. Gehlen's biographers are under the impression that it took six weeks for someone in European G-2 to notice and recognize Gehlen in the POW cage, that Sibert did not tell Smith about finding him until the middle of August, and that it was much later still before Sibert and Smith conspired to circumvent Eisenhower to communicate their excitement about Gehlen to someone at the Pentagon presumably associated with the Joint Chiefs of Staff.45 But documents released in the 1980s show that this part of Gehlen's story raced along much more quickly. Already on June 29, in fact, the Pentagon had informed Eisenhower's European command that the War Department wanted to see Gehlen in Washington. 46 It was a fast time. By no later than August 22, one of Gehlen's top associates, Hermann Baum was forming what would become the intelligence and counterintelligence sections of Gehlen's new organization. Gehlen himself, with retinue, was departing for Washington in General Bedell Smith's DC-3 for high-level talks with American military and intelligence officials. And the whole concept of the deal he was about to offer his conquerors had been approved by a Nazi chain of command that was still functioning despite what the world thought and still does think was the Nazis' unconditional surrender.47 Gehlen arrived in Washington on August 24 with six of his top FHO aides and technical experts in tow. 48 World War II had been over about a week, the war in Europe about three and a half months. The Secret Treaty of Fort Hunt As Gehlen and his six men were en route from Germany to Washington, Donovan's OSS troubles became critical. On August 23, Admiral William Leahy, chief of the JCS, the President's national security adviser and a man who despised Donovan, advised Truman to order his budget director Harold Smith to begin a study of the intelligence question. Stating: "this country wanted no Gestapo under any guise or for any reason. "49 Truman may not have known that the Gestapo's Odessa heirs were landing in the lap of the Pentagon even as he spoke. Smith in any case responded to Truman's directive by asking Donovan for his OSS demobilization plans. Now, too late,. Donovan tried to fight. The Gehlen party, "Group 6," was checking out its very comfortable accommodations at Fort Hunt at the very moment at which Donovan, writing from a borrowed Washington office, fired back a memo to Smith defending the OSS and its right to live: "Among these assets [of the OSS] was establishment for the first time in our nation's history of a foreign secret intelligence service which reported information as seen through American eyes. As an integral and inseparable part of this service, there is a group of specialists to analyze and evaluate the material for presentation to those who determine national policy."50 Much more significant than the question of the adequacy of U.S. intelligence on the Soviet Union, however, was the question of civilian versus military control of the intelligence mission. Germany and England had fought this battle in the 19th century, the military capturing the intelligence role in Germany and the civilians maintaining a position in England. Throughout the summer and fall of 1945, this same battle raged in the U.S. government. 51 The battle for intelligence control was indeed the background for the arrival of Gehlen and his six aides at Fort Hunt, where Gehlen's party was housed and Gehlen himself provided with an NCO butler and several white-jacket orderlies. 52 Battery Mount Vernon, Fort Hunt Park, Fairfax County, VA. A momentous relationship was established at Fort Hunt, one that had the profoundest effects on the subsequent evolution of United States foreign policy during an exceptionally difficult passage of world history. The period of the Cold War as a whole, and more especially its early, formative years from Gehlen's coming aboard the American intelligence service until he rejoined the West German republic in 1955 was laden with the peril of nuclear war. On at least one occasion, in 1948,53 Gehlen almost convinced the United States that the Soviet Union was about to launch a war against the West and that it would be in the U.S. interest to preempt it. Clearly it is important to know who made and authorized the decisions that led to our national dependency on a network of underground Nazis, yet because the relevant documents are still classified this central part of the Gehlen story still cannot be reconstructed. From the handful of published books about the Gehlen affair (none of which cite their sources on this point) we can list only seven Americans who were said to be involved with Gehlen at Fort Hunt: Admiral William D. Leahy, chief of staff end Truman's national security advisor. Allen Dulles, OSS station chief in Bern during the war. Sherman Kent, head of OSS Research and Analysis Branch and a Yale historian. General George V. Strong, head of Army G-2. Major General Alex H. Bolling of G-2. Brigadier General John T. Magruder, first head of the Army's Strategic Services Unit, a vulture of OSS. Loftus E. Becker, a lawyer assc. with G-2 and the Nuremberg war-crimes operation; the CIA's first deputy director. We do not know if these people were involved as a committee, if they talked with Gehlen and his six aides a lot or a little, separately or all at once, or if they sent their own aides to work out the details. We do not know how a POW-interrogation was transformed into a bargaining process. Above all, we do not know what kind of communication the U.S. participants in the Fort Hunt-Gehlen talks had with the political authorities to whom they were responsible. Leahy is the only one who had obvious contact with President Truman. But there is nothing in the revealed record to indicate that he ever discussed Gehlen or the Fort Hunt deal with Truman, or took the least trouble to explain to Truman the implications of hiring a Nazi spy network. We have no idea, for that matter, how Leahy himself saw it. What we do know is the outlines of the Gehlen deal itself, however it was hammered out and however it was or was not ratified by legal, political authority. That is because Gehlen himself laid out its terms in his autobiography, The Service. Gehlen says in this work (which has been attacked for its inaccuracies) that the discussion ended with "a gentleman's agreement," that the terms of his relationship with the United States were "for a variety of reasons never set down in black and white." He continues, "Such was the element of trust that had been built up between the two sides during this year of intensive personal contact that neither had the slightest hesitation in founding the entire operation on a verbal agreement and a handshake. "54 According to Gehlen, this agreement consisted of the following six basic points. His language is worth savoring. "I remember the terms of the agreement well," he wrote: "1. A clandestine German intelligence organization was to be set up. using the existing potential to continue information gathering in the East just as we had been doing before. The basis for this was our common interest in a defense against communism." "2. This German organization was to work not for' or under' the Americans, but jointly with the Americans." "3. The organization would operate exclusively under German leadership, which would receive its directives and assignments from the Americans until a new government was established in Germany." "4. The organization was to be financed by the Americans with funds which were not to be part of the occupation costs, and in return the organization would supply all its intelligence reports to the Americans." (The Gehlen Organization's first annual budget is said have been $3.4 million. 55)" "5. As soon as a sovereign German government was established, that government should decide whether the organization should continue to function or not. But that until such time the care and control (later referred to as the trusteeship') of the organization would remain in American hands." "6. Should the organization at any time find itself in a position where the American and German interests diverged, it was accepted that the organization would consider the interests of Germany first. "56 Gehlen acknowledges that the last point especially might "raise some eyebrows" and make some think that the U.S. side "had gone overboard in making concessions to us." He assures his readers that actually "this point demonstrates better than any other Sibert's great vision: he recognized that for many years to come the interests of the United States and West Germany must run parallel. "57 Gehlen and his staff left Fort Hunt for Germany on July 1, 1946, having been in the United States for almost a year. They were temporarily based at Oberursel then settled into a permanent base in a walled-in, self-contained village at Pullach near Munich. Gehlen set up his headquarters in an estate originally built by Martin Bormann.58 There a start-up group of 50 began to turn the "gentlemen's agreement" of Fort Hunt into reality. The first order of business being staff, Gehlen's recruiters were soon circulating among the "unemployed mass" of "former" Nazi SS men, the Odessa constituency, to find more evaluators, couriers and informers. 59 Gehlen had "solemnly promised in Washington not to employ SS and Gestapo men, "60 although it will be noted that Gehlen includes no such provision in his list of terms. There is not the least question that he did recruit such men, supplying them with new names when necessary. Two of the worst of them were Franz Six and Emil Augsburg. Six was a key Nazi intellectual, and both Six and Augsburg were associated with the Wannsee Institute, the Nazi think-tank in Berlin where SS leader Reinhard Heydrich, in January 1942, announced "the Final Solution to the Jewish Question." Both of them had commanded extermination squads roving in East Europe in pursuit of Jews and communists, and both had gone underground with the Odessa when the Third Reich crumbled. Augsburg hid in Italy, then returned in disguise when Gehlen called. Six was actually captured by Allied intelligence, tried at Nuremberg and imprisoned, only to be sprung to work with Augsburg running Gehlen's networks of East European Nazis. 61 From the edge of total defeat Gehlen now moved into his vintage years, more powerful, influential and independent than he had been even in the heyday of the Third Reich. Minimally supervised first by the War Department's Strategic Services Unit under Fort Hunt figure Major General John Magruder, and then by the SSU's follow-on organization, the Central Intelligence Group under Rear Admiral Sidney Souers,62 the Org grew to dominate the entire West German intelligence service. Through his close ties to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's chief minister, Hans Globke, Gehlen was able to place his men in positions of control in West Germany's military intelligence and the internal counterintelligence arm. When NATO was established he came to dominate it too. By one estimate "some 70 percent" of the total intelligence take flowing into NATO'S military committee and Allied headquarters (SHAPE) on the Soviet Union, the countries of East Europe, the rest of Europe, and indeed the rest of the world was generated at Pullach.63 Not even the establishment of the CIA in 1947 and the official transfer of the Pullach operation into the West German government in 1955 (when it was retitled the Federal Intelligence Service, BND) lessened the reliance of American intelligence on Gehlen's product.64 From the beginning days of the Cold War through the 1970s and beyond, the United State's, West Germany's, and NATO's most positive beliefs about the nature and intentions of the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact, and world communism would be supplied by an international network of utterly unreconstructed SS Nazis whose primary purposes were to cover the escape of the Odessa and make the world safe for Naziism. The Cost of the Fort Hunt Treaty Gehlen's story has many branchings beyond this point. These include several spy scandals that exposed his operation as dangerously vulnerable to Soviet penetration. They include the pitiful spectacle of U.S. CIC agents pursuing Nazi fugitives on war- crimes charges only to see them summarily pardoned and hired by Gehlen. They include the dark saga of Klaus Barbie, the SS "Butcher of Lyon" who worked with the Gehlen Organization and boasted of being a member of the Odessa. They include assets of Operation Paperclip, in which right-wing forces in the U.S. military once again savaged the concept of de-Nazification in order to smuggle scores of SS rocket scientists into the United States. They include continuation of the civilian-vs. -military conflict over the institution of secret intelligence and the question of politically motivated covert action within the domestic interior. They include above all the story of the enormous victory of the Odessa in planting powerful Nazi colonies around the world in such countries as South Africa where the enactment of apartheid laws followed; or several countries in Latin America that then became breeding grounds for the Death Squads of the current day; and indeed even in the United States where it now appears that thousands of wanted Nazis were able to escape justice and grow old in peace. In making the Gehlen deal, the United States did not acquire for itself an intelligence service. That is not what the Gehlen group was or was trying to be. The military intelligence historian Colonel William Corson put it most succinctly, "Gehlen's organization was designed to protect the Odessa Nazis. It amounts to an exceptionally well-orchestrated diversion. "65 The only intelligence provided by the Gehlen net to the United States was intelligence selected specifically to worsen East-West tensions and increase the possibility of military conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. It was exactly as the right-wing pairs had warned in 1945 when they were aroused by Donovan's proposal for a permanent intelligence corps, warning their readers that a "super spy unit" could "determine American foreign policy by weeding out, withholding or coloring information gathered at his direction. "66 It was exactly as Truman had warned when he demobilized the OSS with the observation that the U.S. had no interest in "Gestapolike measures." The fact that this lively concern for a police-state apparatus should have been focused on the relatively innocuous OSS while at the same time the red carpet was being rolled out for Gehlen's gang of SS men must surely count as one of the supreme wrenching ironies of the modern period. Another dimension of the cost the Gehlen deal is the stress it induced within American institutions, weakening them incalculably. The Gehlen Organization was the antithesis of the Allied cause, its sinister emergence on the scene of post-war Europe the very opposite of what the western democracies thought they had been fighting for. Perhaps at least we can say that, despite Gehlen and despite the military, the United States did after all finally wind up with a civilian intelligence service. The National Security Act of 1947 did embody Donovan's central point in creating a CIA outside the military. But in fact the Gehlen Org substantially pre-empted the CIA's civilian character before it was ever born. The CIA was born to be rocked in Gehlen's cradle. It remained dependent on the Org even when the Org turned into the BND. Thus, whatever the CIA was from the standpoint of the law, it remained from the standpoint of practical intelligence collection a front for a house of Nazi spies. The room in the "little red schoolhouse" in Reims, France, where Germany signed the Instrument of Surrender that ended the Second World War in Europe, May 7, 1945. | Ralph Morse, Life Magazine The Org was not merely military, which is bad, not merely foreign, which is much worse, and not merely Nazi, which is intolerable; it was not even professionally committed to the security of the U.S. and Western Europe. It was committed exclusively to the security of the Odessa. All the Gehlen Org ever wanted the U.S. to be was anti- communist, the more militantly so the better. It never cared in the least for the security of the United States, its Constitution or its democratic tradition. It is not the point of this essay that there would have been no Cold War if the Odessa had not wanted it and had not been able, through the naive collaboration of the American military Right to place Gehlen and his network in a position that ought to have been occupied by a descendant of the OSS. But it was precisely because the world was so volatile and confusing as of the transition from World War II to peacetime that the U.S. needed to see it, as Donovan put it in his plaintive appeal to Truman in the summer of 1945, "through American eyes." No Nazi eyes, however bright, could see it for us without deceiving us and leading us to the betrayal of our own national character. Second, there was no way to avoid the Cold War once we had taken the desperate step of opening our doors to Gehlen. From that moment on, from the summer of 1945 when the Army brought him into the United States and made a secret deal with him, the Cold War was locked in. A number of Cold War historians on the left (for example D.F. Fleming and Gabriel Kolko) have made cogent arguments that from the Soviet point of view the Cold War was thrust upon us by an irrational and belligerent Stalin. The story of the secret treaty of Fort Hunt exposes this "history" as a self-serving political illusion. On the contrary, the war in the Pacific was still raging and the United States was still trying to get the Soviet Union into the war against Japan when General Sibert was already deep into his relationship with Gehlen. The key point that comes crashing through the practical and moral confusion about this matter, once one sees that Gehlen's Organization was an arm of the Odessa, is that, whether it was ethical or not, the U.S. did not pick up a Gift Horse in Gehlen at all; it picked up a Trojan Horse. The unconditional surrender the Germans made to the Allied command at the little red schoolhouse in Reims was the surrender only of the German armed services. It was not the surrender of the hard SS core of the Nazi Party. The SS did not surrender, unconditionally or otherwise, and thus Nazism itself did not surrender. The SS chose rather, to seek other means of continuing the war while the right wing of the United States military establishment, through fears and secret passions and a naivete of its own, chose to facilitate that choice. The history that we have lived through since then stands witness to the consequences. * * * * * * * * * * References: Carl Oglesby is the author of several books, notably The Yankee and Cowboy War. He has published a variety of articles on political themes. In 1965 he was the President of Students for a Democratic Society. He is the director of The Institute for Continuing de- nazification. For information on the Institute write to: 294 Harvard Street, #3, Cambridge. MA 02139. William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960), p. 1140. Ibid., p. 1033 fn. Enunciation of this policy surprised and upset some U.S. military leaders who feared it would prolong the war. See, for example, William R. Corson (USMC ret.), The Armies of Ignorance: The Rite of the American Intelligence Empire (New York: Dial Press, 1977), pp. 8-10. William Stevenson, The Bormann Brotherhood: A New Investigation of the Escape and Survival of Nazi War Criminals (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973). Op. cit. n. 1, p. 1072. Ibid., pp. 1091-92 This discussion of Bormann's strategy is based mainly on Glenn B. Infield, Skorzeny: Hitler's Commando (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981); and op. cit., n. 3. My summary of the Nazi survival plan is based on op. cit., n. 3; Infield, op. cit., n. 6; Ladislas Farago, Aftermath: Martin Bormann and the Fourth Reich (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974); Charles Higham, American Swastika (New York: Doubleday, 1985); Brian Bunting, The Rise of the South African Reich (New York: Penguin, 1964); and Simon Wiesenthal, The Murderers Among Us (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967). On "neo- Nazi" colonies in the Near and Middle East and South America, see Wiesenthal, pp. 78- 95. Infield, op. cit., n. 6. p. 192. Ibid., p. 179; and Wiesenthal, op. cit., n. 7. pp. 87-88. Wiesenthal, op. cit., n. 7, p. 88. Also quoted in Infield, op. cit., n. 6, p. 183. Infield, op. cit., n. 6, p. 183. Schacht, who had lost favor with Hitler in 1938, was acquitted of war-crimes charges by the Nuremberg Tribunal. He was later convicted of being a "chief Nazi offender" by the German de-Nazification court at Baden-Wurttemberg, but his conviction was overturned and his eight-year sentence lifted on September 2, 1 948. Infield, op cit., n. 6. Infield, op cit., n. 6, p. 16. Heinz Hohne and Hermann Zoliing, The General Was A Spy (New York: Richard Barry, Coward McCann & Geoghegan, 1973), p. 54; and E.H. Cookridge, Gehlen, Spy of the Century (New York: Random House, 1971), p. 120. Christopher Simpson, Blowback (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988), p. 160 ff. Simpson's is the best book on the Gehlen matter so far published. Ibid., pp. 254-55. Ibid., pp. 180, 193. Ibid., pp. 10, 207-08. Ibid., pp. 18-22. Also see Hohne and Zoliing, op. cit., n. 14, pp. 35-37; Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, pp. 56-58. Cookridge op. cit., n. 14, p. 79. Reinhard Gehlen, The Service (New York: World, 1972), p. 99. Ibid., p. 107. Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, pp. 103, 106. I do not know of an estimate of the size of the Foreign Armies East (FHO) as of the end of the war. Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p. 161, says that by 1948, when the Gehlen Organization was probably back up to war-time speed, its key agents "exceeded four thousand." Each agent typically ran a net of about six informants, Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p. 167. Thus, the total Gehlen net might have numbered in the range of 20,000 individuals. Op. cit., n. 21 , p. 1 15. Corson, op. cit., n. 2, pp. 6, 20; Anthony Cave Brown, The Last Hero, Wild Bill Donovan (N.Y.: Vintage Books, 1982), p. 625; U.S. Senate, "Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities," Book IV, Supplementary Staff Reports on Foreign and Military Intelligence (known as, The Church Report), p. 5. Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p.130. Brown, op. cit., n. 26, p. 626. Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p. 131. William M. Leary, ed., The Central Intelligence Agency: History and Documents (Atlanta: University of Atlanta Press, 1984), pp. 123-25; Corson, op cit., n. 2, pp. 214-17; Brown, op. cit., n. 26, p. 625. Brown, op. cit., n. 26, p. 627. Ibid., p. 170. Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (New York: Pocket Books, 1 981 ), p. 31 . Ibid. Brown, op. cit., n. 26, p. 744. This account of Gehlen's surrender is based on Hohne and Zoliing, op. cit., n. 14, pp. 52-56; Cookridge, op cit., n. 14, pp. 118-21; op. cit., 3, pp. 89-90; op cit., n. 15, pp. 41- 43; and the BBC documentary, Superspy: The Story of Reinhard Gehlen, 1974. There are many trivial discrepancies in these four accounts but they are in perfect agreement as to the main thrust. Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p. 120. Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, p. 58. As to breaking orders, Gehlen is effusive in his praise of "Sibert's great vision…. I stand in admiration of Sibert as a general who this this bold step in a situation fraught with political pitfalls of taking over the intelligence experts of a former enemy for his own country…. The political risk to which Sibert was exposed was very great. Anti-German feeling was running high, and he had created our organizations without any authority from Washington and without the knowledge of the War Department." Op. cit., n. 21, p. 123. Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, p. 58. Ibid., pp. 58-59. Op. cit., n. 21 , p. 120. Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, p. 58. Undated CIA fragment with head, "Recent Books," apparently published circa 1972, partly declassified and released in 1986 in response to a Freedom of Information (FOIA) suit. Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, pp. 56, 58-59. U.S. Army document SHAEF D-95096, September 15, 1946, declassified FOIA release. The routing of this cable through SHAEF HQ raises a question as to whether Eisenhower was really kept in the dark about Gehlen. As Gehlen was about to leave for the United States, he left a message for Baun with another of his top aides, Gerhard Wessel: "I am to tell you from Gehlen that he has discussed with [Hitler's successor Admiral Karl] Doenitz and [Gehlen's superior and chief of staff General Franz] Haider the question of continuing his work with the Americans. Both were in agreement." Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, p. 61. There is variance in the literature concerning how many assistants Gehlen took with him to Washington. John Ranelagh, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), p. 92; Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p. 125; and op. cit., n. 15, p. 42, say it was three while Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, p. 61, say four. A U.S. Army note of August 28, 1945 (a 1986 FOIA release) refers to "the 7 shipped by air last week" and that no doubt is the correct number. Another FOIA release, an unnumbered Military Intelligence Division document dated September 30, 1945, originated at Fort Hunt, labels the Gehlen party as "Group 6" and names seven members: Gehlen, Major Alberg Schoeller, Major Horst Hiemenz, Colonel Heinz Herre, Colonel Konrad Stephanus, and two others whose rank is not given, Franz Hinrichs and Herbert Feukner. The number is important for what it says about the nature of Gehlen's trip, Three might be thought of as co-defendants but six constitute a staff. Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p. 125, says Gehlen made the trip disguised in the uniform of a one-star American general, his aides disguised as U.S. captains. Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, pp. 60-61, inflate the rank to two stars but then call the story spurious. Gehlen's memoir says nothing about it. Corson, op. cit., n. 2, p. 239. Ibid., p. 240. Ranelagh, op. cit., n. 48, p. 102ff. BBC documentary, Superspy, op. cit., n. 36. Corson, in an interview with the author, said the butler and the orderlies must have been CIC agents. Still, the detail rankles. Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, 203; op. cit., n. 15. p. 1 36. Op. cit., n. 21 , p. 1 21 . Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 1 4. p. 64, say that the details of this "gentlemen's agreement" were put into writing by the CIA in 1949. Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, p. 65. Op. cit., n. 21 , p. 122. Ibid., pp. 122-23. Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, p. 119; Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p. 155, BBC documentary, Superspy, op. cit., n. 36. Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, p. 67. Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p. 144. Op. cit., n. 15, pp. 17, 46-47, 166, 225; Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, pp. 242-43. Hohne and Zolling, op. cit., n. 14, p. 133. Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p. 218. Ibid., p. 128. Author's interview with Corson, May, 1986. Cookridge, op. cit., n. 14, p. 131. (This article was originally from CovertAction Information Bulletin, Fall, 1990) RE: New Book on Reinhard Gehlen in the works - Peter Lemkin - 17-05-2020 RE: New Book on Reinhard Gehlen in the works - Peter Lemkin - 17-05-2020 [TABLE="width: 100%"] [TR] [TD][TABLE="width: 100%"] [TR] [TD][/TD] [/TR] [TR] [TD]Gen. Reinhard Gehlen persuaded the U.S. Army and then the CIA to sponsor his intelligence network even though he employed numerous former Nazis and known war criminals.[/TD] [/TR] [/TABLE] [/TD] [TD="width: 100%"] The CIA and Nazi War Criminals
[/TD]National Security Archive Posts Secret CIA History Released Under Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 146 Edited by Tamara Feinstein February 4, 2005 [/TR] [/TABLE] [TABLE="width: 100%"] [TR] [TD][TABLE="width: 100%"] [TR] [TD] [/TD] [/TR] [/TABLE] [/TD] [TD="width: 100%"] Washington D.C., February 4, 2005 - Today the National Security Archive posted the CIA's secret documentary history of the U.S government's relationship with General Reinhard Gehlen, the German army's intelligence chief for the Eastern Front during World War II. At the end of the war, Gehlen established a close relationship with the U.S. and successfully maintained his intelligence network (it ultimately became the West German BND) even though he employed numerous former Nazis and known war criminals. The use of Gehlen's group, according to the CIA history, Forging an Intelligence Partnership: CIA and the Origins of the BND, 1945-49, was a "double edged sword" that "boosted the Warsaw Pact's propaganda efforts" and "suffered devastating penetrations by the KGB." [See Volume 1: Introduction, p. xxix]The declassified "SECRET RelGER" two-volume history was compiled by CIA historian Kevin Ruffner and presented in 1999 by CIA Deputy Director for Operations Jack Downing to the German intelligence service (Bundesnachrichtendienst) in remembrance of "the new and close ties" formed during post-war Germany to mark the fiftieth year of CIA-West German cooperation. This history was declassified in 2002 as a result of the work of The Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group (IWG) and contains 97 key documents from various agencies.This posting comes in the wake of public grievances lodged by members of the IWG that the CIA has not fully complied with the mandate of the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act and is continuing to withhold hundreds of thousands of pages of documentation related to their work. (Note 1) In interviews with the New York Times, three public members of the IWG said:
The documentation unearthed by the IWG reveals extensive relationships between former Nazi war criminals and American intelligence organizations, including the CIA. For example, current records show that at least five associates of the notorious Nazi Adolf Eichmann worked for the CIA, 23 other Nazis were approached by the CIA for recruitment, and at least 100 officers within the Gehlen organization were former SD or Gestapo officers. (Note 2) The IWG enlisted the help of key academic scholars to consult during the declassification process, and these historians released their own interpretation of the declassified material last May (2004) in a publication called US Intelligence and the Nazis. The introduction to this book emphasizes the dilemma of using former Nazis as assets: "The notion that they [CIA, Army Counterintelligence Corp, Gehlen organization] employed only a few bad apples will not stand up to the new documentation. Some American intelligence officials could not or did not want to see how many German intelligence officials, SS officers, police, or non-German collaborators with the Nazis were compromised or incriminated by their past service… Hindsight allows us to see that American use of actual or alleged war criminals was a blunder in several respects…there was no compelling reason to begin the postwar era with the assistance of some of those associated with the worst crimes of the war. Lack of sufficient attention to history-and, on a personal level, to character and morality-established a bad precedent, especially for new intelligence agencies. It also brought into intelligence organizations men and women previously incapable of distinguishing between their political/ideological beliefs and reality. As a result, such individuals could not and did not deliver good intelligence. Finally, because their new, professed 'democratic convictions' were at best insecure and their pasts could be used against them (some could be blackmailed), these recruits represented a potential security problem." (Note 3) The Gehlen organization profiled in the newly posted CIA history represents one of the most telling examples of these pitfalls. Timothy Naftali, a University of Virginia professor and consulting historian to the IWG who focused heavily on the declassified CIA material, highlighted the problems posed by our relationship with Gehlen: "Reinhard Gehlen was able to use U.S. funds to create a large intelligence bureaucracy that not only undermined the Western critique of the Soviet Union by protecting and promoting war criminals but also was arguably the least effective and secure in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. As many in U.S. intelligence in the late 1940s had feared would happen, the Gehlen Organization proved to be the back door by which the Soviets penetrated the Western alliance." (Note 4) The documents annexed in the CIA history posted today by the Archive echo the observations of Professor Naftali. While placing much of the blame on the Army Counterintelligence Corps' initial approach to Gehlen, this history emphasizes the CIA's own reluctance to adopt responsibility for Gehlen's organization, yet the documents show the CIA ultimately embracing Gehlen. Some of the highlights from this secret CIA documentary history include:
"This secret CIA history is full of documents we never would have seen under the Freedom of Information Act, because Congress in 1984 gave the CIA an exemption for its 'operational' files, on the grounds that such files were too sensitive ever to be released," commented Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive. "The Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act has proven this assumption false. Release of these files has done no damage to national security, has provided information of enormous public interest and historical importance, and however belatedly, has brought a measure of accountability to government operations at variance with mainstream American values." Documents Note: Many of the following documents are in PDF format. You will need to download and install the free Adobe Acrobat Reader to view.Note: The following CIA history has been split into separate pdf files for each separate document or volume introduction, due to its large size. It includes relevant documents from the CIA, Army Intelligence, and CIA predecessor organizations. Forging and Intelligence Partnership: CIA and the Origins of the BND, 1945-49. Edited by Kevin C. Ruffner for CIA History Staff, Center for the Study of Intelligence, and European Division, Directorate of Operations. 1999. Released May 2002. Volume 1: Introduction Volume 1: Part I - Firsthand Accounts Document 1: Statement of Gerhard Wessel on Development of the German Organization [undated] Document 2: Statement of General Winder on the History of the Organization [undated] Document 3: Statement of Hans Hinrichs on Early History of the Organization [undated] Document 4: Statement of Heinz Danko Herre. April 8, 1953. Document 5: Statement of General Gehlen on Walter Schellenberg Story (Post Defeat Resistance) [undated] Document 6: Report of Initial Contacts with General Gehlen's Organization by John R. Boker, Jr. May 1, 1952. Document 7: Statement of Lt. Col. Gerald Duin on Early Contacts with the Gehlen Organization [undated] Document 8: Report of Interview with General Edwin L. Sibert on the Gehlen Organization. March 26, 1970. Document 9: Debriefing of Eric Waldman on the US Army's Trusteeship of the Gehlen Organization during the Years 1945-1949. September 30, 1969. Volume 1: Part II - Stunde Null Document 10: Seventh Army Interrogation Center, "Notes on the Red Army-Intelligence and Security." June 24, 1945. Document 11: Headquarters, Third Army Intelligence Center, Preliminary Interrogation Report, Baun, Hermann. August 16, 1945. Document 12: Captain Owen C. Campbell, Evaluation Section, to Lt. Col. Parker, Enclosing Interrogation Reports No. 5724 and 5725. August 29, 1945. Document 13: Crosby Lewis, Chief, German Mission. October 25, 1945. Volume 1: Part III - The Vandenberg Report Document 14: SAINT, AMZON to SAINT, Washington, "Russian Experts of German Intelligence Service." January 8, 1946. Document 15: Headquarters, US Forces European Theater (USFET), Military Intelligence Service Center (MISC, "Operation of the Blue House Project." May 11, 1946. Document 16: Headquarters, USFET, MISC, CI Consolidated Interrogation Report (CI-CIR) No. 16, "German Methods of Combating the Soviet Intelligence Service." June 3, 1946. Document 17: Headquarters, USFET, MISC, Lt. Col. John R. Deane, Jr. to Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2, USFET, "Plan for the Inclusion of the Bolero Group in Operation Rusty." July 2, 1946. Document 18: Lewis to Chief, Foreign Branch M (FBM), "Operation KEYSTONE." September 9, 1946, enclosing Lewis to Brigadier General Sibert, G-2, September 6, 1946. Document 19: Maj. Gen. W.A. Burress, G-2, to Lt. Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg, Director of Central Intelligence, "Operation RUSTY - Use of the Eastern Branch of the former German Intelligence Service." With attachments. October 1, 1946. Document 20: Lewis to Richard Helms, Acting Chief of FBM, October 8, 1946, enclosing Lewis to Donald H. Galloway, Assistant Director for Special Operations, September 22, 1946. Document 21: Draft to Deputy A, "Operation Rusty." October 16, 1946. Document 22: Galloway to DCI, "Operation Rusty," October 17, 1946, enclosing Heidelberg Field Base to Chief, IB, "Agent Net Operating in the Bamberg Area," with attachment, September 17, 1946. Document 23: DCI to Maj. Gen. Stephen J. Chamberlin, Director of Intelligence, War Department, "Operation Rusty-Use of the Eastern Branch of the Former German Intelligence Service," November 20, 1946, enclosing Burress to Vandenberg, "Operation RUSTY-Use of the Eastern Branch of the Former German Intelligence Service," October 1, 1946. Document 24: Col. W.W. Quinn to Galloway, "Operation RUSTY," December 19, 1946. Document 25: Helms, Memorandum for the Record, "Operation RUSTY." December 19, 1946. Volume 1: Part IV - The Bossard Report Document 26: Cable, Special Operations to [excised]. January 31, 1947. Document 27: Cable, SO to [excised]. February 10, 1947. Document 28: Lt. Col. Deane to the German Chief of Operation RUSTY, "Assignment of Responsibilities," February 25, 1947. Document 29: Cable, SO to Frankfurt. March 6, 1947. Document 30: Cable, Heidelberg to SO. March 11, 1947. Document 31: Report, "Operation KEYSTONE." March 13, 1947. Document 32: Cable, SO to Heidelberg. March 14, 1947. Document 33: Samuel Bossard to [Galloway]. March 17, 1947. Document 34: Memorandum to Helms, "American Intelligence Network," with attachment. March 18, 1947. Document 35: Bossard to [excised] Chief, German Mission. March 20, 1947. Document 36: Cable, Heidelberg to SO, March 21, 1947. Document 37: Report, "American Intelligence in Bavaria." March 29, 1947. Document 38: SC, AMZON to FBM for SC, Washington, "KEYSTONE: LESHCINSKY." March 31, 1947. Document 39: Memorandum to [Galloway] and Bossard, "Evaluation of RUSTY CI Reports," with attachments. April 1, 1947. Document 40: Cable, Heidelberg to SO. April 8, 1947. Document 41: [Bossard] to [Galloway]. May 5, 1947. Document 42: Bossard to DCI, "Operation Rusty." May 29, 1947. Document 43: Galloway to DCI, "Operation RUSTY," June 3, 1947, enclosing Bossard to DCI, "Operation Rusty," with annexes, May 29, 1947. Document 44: Memorandum for [unspecified], "Operation RUSTY," with attachment, [undated] Document 45: DCI to Secretary of State, et al, "Opertation Rusty," [undated], enclosing "Memorandum on Operation RUSTY," June 6, 1947. Document 46: Cable, Central Intelligence Group to ACS, G-2, European Command, June 5, 1947. Document 47: Cable, EUCOM to CIG, June 6, 1947. Document 48: Galloway, Bossard, Memorandum for the Record, June 20, 1947. Document 49: Brig. Gen. E.K. Wright, Memorandum for the Record, June 20, 1947. Document 50: Galloway, Bossard, Helms, "Report of Meeting at War Department 26 June 1947." June 26, 1947. Document 51: Bossard, "Recommendations drawn up at request of Gen. Chamberlin for the attention of Gen. Walsh." June 27, 1947. Document 52: Cable, SO to Heidelberg, June 27, 1947. Document 53: Cable, SO to Heidelberg, June 27, 1947. Document 54: Cable, Heidelberg to SO, July 25, 1947. Document 55: Chief of Station, Heidelberg to FBM, "RUSTY." October 1, 1947. Document 56: Headquarters, First Military District, US Army, General Orders Number 54, "Organization of 7821st Composite Group." December 1, 1947. Volume 2: Introduction Volume 2: Part V - The Critchfield Report Document 57: Chief of Station; Heidelberg to Chief, FBM, "Russian Newspaper Attack on American Intelligence Activities," with attachment. February 6, 1948. Document 58: Memorandum to Helms, "Operation RUSTY," March 18, 1948. Document 59: Helms to ADSO, "Rusty," March 19, 1948. Document 60: Chief, Foreign Broadcast Information Branch to ADSO, "PRAVDA Report of US Spy Group in USSR Zone of Occupied Germany." March 30, 1948. Document 61: Chief, FBIB to ADSO, "PRAVDA Report of US Spy Group in USSR Zone of Occupied Germany." March 31, 1948. Document 62: Chief, Munich Operations Base to Acting Chief of Station, Karlsruhe, "Rusty." July 7, 1948. Document 63: Acting Chief, Karlsruhe Operations Base to Chief, FBM, "RUSTY." August 19, 1948. Document 64: DCI to Chamberlin, August, 31, 1948. Document 65: Chief of Station, Karlsruhe to Chief, FBM, "RUSTY." October 15, 1948. Document 66: Cable, SO to Karlsruhe, October 27, 1948. Document 67: [Helms] to COS, Karlsruhe, "RUSTY." November 2, 1948. Document 68: [excised] to COS, Karlsruhe, "RUSTY." November 18, 1948. Document 69: Chief, MOB [Critchfield] to Chief, FBM, "Bi-Weekly Letter," (excerpts), December 4, 1948. Document 70: Cable, SO to Karlsruhe, December 14, 1948. Document 71: Cable, Karlsruhe to SO, December 17, 1948. Document 72: Chief, MOB [Critchfield] to Chief, OSO, "Report of Investigation-RUSTY," with annexes, (excerpts), December 17, 1948. Document 73: Galloway to DCI, "Recommendations in re Operation Rusty." December 21, 1948. Document 74: Cable, SO to Munich, Karlsruhe. December 22, 1948. Document 75: Chief, FBM to COS, Karlsruhe, "Operation Rusty." December 24, 1948. Document 76: Chief, FBM to COS, Karlsruhe, "Operation Rusty," December 28, 1948, enclosing DCI to Maj. Gen. William E. Hall, USAF, "Operation Rusty." December 22, 1948. Volume 2: Part VI - A Year of Decisions Document 77: Maj. Gen. S. LeRoy Irwin to DCI, "Operation 'RUSTY.'" January 19, 1949. Document 78: Helms, Memorandum for the Files, "Operation Rusty." February 1, 1949. Document 79: Chief, FBM to COS, Karlsruhe, "[Gehlen Organization]," February 2, 1949. Document 80: Cable, SO to Karlsruhe. February 8, 1949. Document 81: Cable, SO to Karlsruhe. February 9, 1949. Document 82: Chief, FBM to COS, Karlsruhe, "[Gehlen Organization]," February 9, 1949. Document 83: Chief, FBM to COS, Karlsruhe, [untitled], February 10, 1949, enclosing Alan R McCracken, ADSO, to Irwin, "Operation Rusty." February 9, 1949. Document 84: [Critchfield] to Chief, FBM, "Letter to General Hall," with enclosures, February 10, 1949. Document 85: [Critchfield] to Chief, FBM, "[Gehlen Organization]: Procedure for Handling Funds. March 14, 1949. Document 86: Cable, SO to Karlsruhe, March 16, 1949. Document 87: [Critchfield] to Chief, FBM, "[Gehlen Organization]: Current Financial Situation." March 21, 1949. Document 88: Executive Officer to Chief of Operations and Chief, FBM, "[Gehlen Organization]," April 1, 1949. Document 89: [Critchfield] to Chief, FBM, "[Gehlen Organization]: Current Situation." April 18, 1949. Document 90: Robert A. Schow, ADSO to Director, CIA, "EUCOM Support for the 7821 Composite Group (Operation Rusty)," April 21, 1949. Document 91: [Critchfield] to COS, Karlsruhe, "Organization and Individual Security Problems [Gehlen Organization] Staff," May 4, 1949. Document 92: Headquarters, EUCOM to Chief of Staff, US Army Director of Intelligence, June 6, 1949. Document 93: [Critchfield] to Chief, FBM, "Basic Agreement with [Gehlen Organization]," June 13, 1949. Document 94: [Critchfield] to Chief, FBM, "[Gehlen Organization] General Policy," with enclosures, July 7, 1949. Document 95: [Critchfield] to Chief, FBM, "Basic Considerations in Reviewing the Concept and Mission of [Gehlen Organization]," September 21, 1949. Document 96: [Critchfield] to Chief, FBM, "[Gehlen Organization] - Schneider's Negotiations with Third Parties," September 22, 1949, enclosing [Critchfield] to Dr. Schneider, "The Coordination and Control of Negotiations with German Political and Economic Circles and Representatives of Western European Intelligence Services," September 20, 1949. Document 97: [Critchfield] to Chief, FBM, "Dr. Schneider's Reply to Recent Policy Guidance Letters," with enclosures, October 12, 1949. Notes1. Douglas Jehl, "CIA Said to Rebuff Congress on Nazi Files," New York Times, January 30, 2005. 2. Richard Breitman, Norman Goda, Timothy Naftali, and Robert Wolfe, U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, (Washington, DC: National Archive Trust Fund Board, 2004), 377. 3.Ibid, 8-9. 4. Ibid, 406. 5. Ibid, 8. [/TD] [/TR] [/TABLE] RE: New Book on Reinhard Gehlen in the works - Peter Lemkin - 17-05-2020 Assassination as a Tool of Fascism Quote:Quote:[The following is a transcript of a talk given by John Judge at a one-day conference entitled The Fourth Reich in America. A transcript of the entire conference, `The Fourth Reich in America,' is available from Flatland Books, P.O. Box 2420, Fort Bragg, CA 95437.] RE: New Book on Reinhard Gehlen in the works - Peter Lemkin - 17-05-2020 Quote: [size=undefined]1940-1945: The Nazi Connection to Dallas:
General Reinhard Gehlen[/size] Quote: The sparrow-faced man in the battle uniform of an American general clambered down the steps of the U.S. Army transport plane upon its arrival at Washington National Airport. It was August 24, 1945, two weeks after the surrender of Japan, three months after the German capitulation. The general was hustled into a van with no windows and whisked to Fort Hunt outside the capital. There he was attended by white-jacketed orderlies and, the next morning, fitted with a dark-grey business suit from one of Washington's swankiest men's stores.
Quote: When the curtain fell on the war, McCloy helped shield Klaus Barbie, the "butcher of Lyons," from the French. Barbie and other vicious dogs from Hitler's kennel were hidden out with the 370th Counter Intelligence Corps at Obergamergau. One of their keepers was Private Henry Kissinger, soon to enter Harvard as a McCloy protege.
Quote: In 1952 Otto Skorzeny, who had been released from American custody in 1947, moved to Madrid. He created what is known as the International Fascista. The CIA and the Gehlen BND dispatched him to "trouble spots." On his payroll were former SS agents, French OAS terrorists and secret police from Portugal's PDID. PDID are the same initials as the Los Angeles police intelligence unit, Public Disorder Intelligence Division. The California PDID was exposed on May 24, 1983 as spying on law abiding citizens at an expense of $100,000, utilizing a computerized dossier system bought by the late Representative Larry McDonald's "Western Goals." (McDonald was a national leader of the John Birch Society, which was exceedingly active in Dallas preceding the Kennedy assassination. Western Goals has offices in Germany run by Eugene Wigner that feed data to the Gehlen BND.) RE: New Book on Reinhard Gehlen in the works - Peter Lemkin - 17-05-2020 Quote: RE: New Book on Reinhard Gehlen in the works - Peter Lemkin - 17-05-2020 From Kennedysandking.com Monday, 16 July 2018 23:26 Through a Glass Darkly: An MK-ULTRA Primer Written by Michael Le Flem Tracing the history of mind-control experimentation by the US and its allies from World War II onward, Michael Le Flem reveals the depth and extent of human behavioral programming undertaken for more than two decades by the CIA, which, as has come more and more to light, nearly certainly furnishes the backdrop against which we should understand Sirhan's actions on June 5, 1968.
“What is heroic in combat is criminal in peace. Just as combat sanctions physical violence, so espionage grants license to moral violence. It is trite but true to say that they did what they did for the good of their country. Unfortunately, it is also true that it frequently didn’t work out that way.”
~David C. Martin, Wilderness of Mirrors
Origins
If I were to tell you that the United States government has performed—and is likely still performing—bizarre, mind-altering experiments on its own unwitting citizens, whose results are often catastrophically damaging and sometimes fatal, with the goal of creating pawns for its intelligence chess board, I would expect you to stop listening to me. That’s what most people do in any case. And yet the United States has a long and storied history of medical and scientific abuses against its own population which bear repeating to place its later mind-control experiments in context. Following is a cursory overview culled from a 2002 Health News Net post entitled “A History of Secret Human Experimentation”:
In 1931, Dr. Cornelius Rhoads, under the auspices of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Investigations, infected human subjects with cancer cells. He later established the U.S. Army Biological Warfare centers in Maryland, Utah, and Panama. Rhoads was also responsible for a battery of radiation exposure experiments perpetrated on American soldiers and civilian hospital patients.
In 1932, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study began in segregated Alabama. Two hundred black men diagnosed with syphilis were never told about their condition, were denied treatment, and were subjected to a covert longitudinal study on the effects of the disease that lasted forty years until a local newspaper broke the story. They all subsequently died from syphilis, and their wives and children, who also became infected, were never told that they could have been treated.
In 1935, after millions of individuals died from Pellagra over a span of two decades, the U.S. Public Health Service finally acts to stop the disease. The director of the agency admitted that researchers had known for at least twenty years that Pellagra was primarily caused by a niacin deficiency, but failed to address this since most of the deaths occurred in poverty-stricken black populations.
In 1940, 400 prisoners in Chicago were purposely infected with malaria in order to study the effects of new and experimental drugs to combat the disease. Ironically, Nazi doctors later on trial at Nuremberg cite this American study to defend their own actions during the Holocaust.
The United States of the late 1940s and 1950s was a product not only of unprecedented postwar power and security afforded the nation in the wake of the German and Japanese defeats, but also of the scientific proclivities of the time. We forget, I feel, just how jarringly different society was only seventy years ago. Much of the nation was still segregated, with anti-miscegenation laws firmly in place to prevent interracial couples from marrying; the sick and infirm, particularly those with mental deficiencies, were often viewed with disdain. Indeed, the words “moron” and “idiot” were both official psychiatric terms of mental competence from the postwar American eugenics movement, which remained a popular field of study among the psychological circles of the white elite. Books like B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two, published in 1948, were quite popular among America’s social planners. Preaching a rejection of any immanent extra-material element to consciousness and human emotion, Skinner believed that once certain environmental factors were correctly manipulated, human beings, and by extension, whole cultures, might be fundamentally changed. In this utopian novel, the characters behaved much the way Skinner’s rats did in his predictable laboratory experiments.
This reductionist worldview was a major contributing factor, in my opinion, to both the prevalence and the tacit acceptance of what amounts to decades of crimes perpetrated against both domestic and foreign target populations. Figures like Skinner, Aldous Huxley, and later Robert Shockley, the Stanford professor and Bell Labs inventor of the transistor—who as late as the early 1970s was calling for a concerted reduction of the African-American population due to their “dysgenic” makeup—held the imagination of policy planners and the power elite. As Hank Albarelli Jr. notes:
Here it should be emphasized that inevitably lurking within, near, and around all of the CIA’s early mind-control experiments was a strong element of racism that generally manifested itself through the Agency’s principle objective of establishing control over the perceived “weaker” and “less intelligent” segments of society. That the CIA’s initial mind control activities show a close kinship with many prominent characters within the racist and anti-immigration eugenics movement is no coincidence.
Iterations and Victims
From as early as WWII, “programmed operatives” had been an objective (though limited) of military and government intelligence agencies for a variety of reasons. Initially, from available evidence, much of which still remains redacted, we see that during the Allied struggle against Hitler’s Germany, the OSS and British intelligence were both interested in the potential to send “programmed” agents into occupied Europe. These agents, both witting and unwitting, would then deliver a predetermined message which could only be unlocked by their receiver upon the specifically encoded posthypnotic verbal or visual cue: I touch my right temple or say a phrase, and my subject divulges the message, only to then possess entirely no memory of the exchange. This ensured both that any intercepted agent placed under torture or interrogation would have no “real” memory of their intended communiqué or mission beyond their ostensible one. It also removed the threat of telegraphic or radio-transmitted communications being intercepted by Axis listening posts.
Clark Hull, a Yale hypnosis expert, described such a process in his 1933 book, Hypnosis and Suggestibility:
A youth of eighteen or nineteen years is brought in by my assistant. He has consented to act as subject in a research project. I stand before him and look directly into his eyes. As he tilts his head backward to look into my eyes I observe as usual the sign of considerable emotional disturbance in the beating of his carotid artery … I direct him to look steadily into my eyes and to think of nothing but sleep, to relax his muscles all over, even so much that his knees bend a little and his legs scarcely hold him up. After three or four minutes his eyes close, his head nods forward, and his breathing becomes heavy. I say, ‘Now you are falling toward me, you can’t help yourself … I catch him when well off his balance. Upon inquiry he states, in a drowsy tone, that he could not help falling forward but that he isn’t sound asleep ‘because I know everything that is going on.’
I suspect that he is mistaken and employ the following objective test. I give him a posthypnotic suggestion that after waking he shall pick up and examine a book on my desk when I sit down in a chair, but that he won’t recall anything about why he did it. I wake him as usual with a snap of my finger … A few minutes later I sit down in the chair. He casually walks over to my desk, picks up the book, and after glancing at its title lays it down. I say, ‘Why did you look at the book?’ He answers that he just happened to notice it lying there and wondered what it was about. (Hull, Hypnosis and Suggestibility, p. 32)
Early pioneers of this form of hypnosis included the esteemed Dr. George Estabrooks, chair of Colgate University’s department of psychology, whose 1943 book Hypnosis remains worth reading for anyone interested in the technical mechanisms whereby human beings can be unwittingly placed in a post-hypnotic suggestive state. As Estabrooks notes, there are five basic steps to the process:
Dr. Estabrooks also devised a means by which an individual’s personality might be altered, going so far as to insist he could warp someone’s entire convictions and political leanings for a desired result:
We will use hypnotism to induce multiple personality. Hypnotism is the means to an end, though the technique would be impossible did we not have hypnotism at our disposal. In his normal waking state, which we will call Personality A, or PA, this individual will become a rabid communist. He will join the party, follow the party line and make himself as objectionable as possible to the authorities.
Then we develop Personality B (PB), the secondary personality, the unconscious personality … is rabidly American and anti-communist. It has all the information possessed by Personality A, the normal personality, whereas PA does not have this advantage. My super spy plays his role as a communist in the waking state, aggressively, consistently, fearlessly. But his PB is a loyal American, and PB has all the memories of PA. As a loyal American, he will not hesitate to divulge these memories. (Estabrooks, p. 200)
While these WWII dabblings proved interesting to those observing their curious results, it wasn’t until the early days of the Cold War that the United States government, and specifically the Central Intelligence Agency, became truly interested in the potential of harnessing the minds of both its assets and soldiers, and often its private citizenry. The United States Navy had already, as early as 1947, begun its own Project Chatter, which lasted for six years and which involved subjecting “volunteer” sailors, along with animals, to substances like the incredibly dangerous scopolamine, whose effects range from permanent dissociation and vivid recurring night terrors to complete submission to the commands and whims of a subject’s controller. As naval intelligence personnel got wind of the Nazi experiments on Jewish captives at places like the Dachau concentration camp, which involved heavy doses of mescaline and other mind-bending substances, they sought to both replicate the studies and push the investigations of their former enemies, who only two years earlier had surrendered to the Allies in the summer of 1945.
Headed by Dr. Charles Savage, a graduate of both Yale and the Pritzker Medical School of the University of Chicago, the team used LSD procured by Swiss manufacturer Sandoz in attempts to induce psychic transformations. As Prince Ray notes in his book, Project Chatter and the Betrayal of My Father, “In one experiment Savage used five “normal” persons and fifteen depressed patients. In his report, LSD-25 a Clinical-Psychological Study (1951), he provided detailed descriptions: Case II was a 20-year-old man who was admitted to the hospital with depression. He tearfully told psychologists that his mother was going to lose her home, his sister would lose her job, and he felt useless because he couldn’t help them. He was given LSD, the dosage increased to 100 mcg.; the end result was that the patients suffered from a “schizophrenic reaction.”
In late 1945, Operation Paperclip, the United States’ covert importation of Nazi war criminals, scientists, medical researchers, and intelligence operatives, provided a treasure trove of first-hand experience with such matters. Some were brought directly into the CIA’s payroll, like war-criminal Reinhard Gehlen, chief of the Wehrmacht’s Foreign Armies East (FHO) military intelligence unit, whose knowledge of Soviet intelligence services was sought by figures like Allen Dulles. Quite remarkable is the fact that Gehlen—who met with both President Truman and “Wild Bill” Donovan, the former head of the OSS during WWII—was instrumental in convincing the United States to pass the National Security Act of 1947, whose charter essentially laid the groundwork for the surveillance state we currently maintain. In its clauses, clandestine activities were allowed to begin without the approval of Congress or even the President, and reporting and evaluations were permitted to be indefinitely withheld if such disclosure could potentially compromise “national security.” In effect, it gave the newly christened CIA, and related agencies, almost unlimited freedom of action and partial legal immunity. And it gave Gehlen and his Nazi consorts access to millions of dollars, United States military support, and sustained their desperate hopes of finally destroying their dreaded Bolshevik nemesis, the Soviet Union. I would argue that the creation of the Cold War was in many ways as much an extension of unfulfilled Nazi aims, as it was a pragmatic Allied reaction to the realities of the postwar Manichean divide between capitalism and communism. We now know, for example, that Gehlen’s intelligence was almost entirely worthless; he vastly exaggerated Soviet intentions, underestimated their agents’ ability to penetrate West German intelligence, and personally helped escalate tensions between the burgeoning NATO countries and the Eastern bloc.
While Gehlen and others were smuggled across the Atlantic, both by the US intelligence agencies and the Vatican—who disguised many high-level Nazi party members as Catholic priests for safe exit to places like Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina—others remained in Europe, with many setting up shop in West Germany. At these early black sites, as author Annie Jacobsen notes:
… the CIA teamed up with Army, Air Force and Naval Intelligence to run one of the most nefarious, classified, enhanced interrogation programs of the Cold War. The work took place inside a clandestine facility in the American zone of occupied Germany, called Camp King. The facility’s chief medical doctor was … Dr. Walter Schreiber, the former Surgeon General of the Third Reich. The activities that went on at Camp King between 1946 and the late 1950s have never been fully accounted for by either the Department of Defense or the CIA. (Lazar Berman, “CIA techniques developed by ex-Nazi doctors, author claims,” Times of Israel, 3/12/2014)
Evolutions
The Central Intelligence Agency, which itself had only emerged as an autonomous organization in 1947 from the remains of the OSS, didn’t waste much time in getting on the mind-altering bandwagon. In an April, 1950 memo to Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, then Director of the CIA, Sheffield Edwards, Chief of the Inspection and Security Staff Sheffield Edwards stressed, “In view of the extreme sensitivity of this project and its covert nature, it is deemed advisable to submit this document directly to you, rather than through the channel of the Projects Review Committee.” He continues:
The immediate purpose of the program (Project Bluebird) is to provide interrogation teams using the cover of polygraph interrogation to provide bona fides of high potential defectors and agents, and also for the collection of incidental intelligence from such projects. A team is to be composed of three persons consisting of a doctor/psychiatrist, a polygraph/hypnotist, and a technician. (Sheffield Edwards, “Office Memorandum, Subject: Project Bluebird,” CIA-RDP83-01042R000800010003)
Hearing rumors in the early 1950s that American prisoners of war who had returned to the United States from the Korean War were allegedly subjected to Chinese and Soviet brainwashing, the CIA was concerned that some of their nation’s military and strategic secrets could be revealed under interrogation. While much of this was anecdotal, and driven to near-hysterical levels in this height of the McCarthy Era and the Red Scare, a genuine curiosity about human nature and the limits of the mind seemed to drive some of the officers of the Central Intelligence Agency. It should be noted that later congressional probes determined this rationale was largely a cover should the program ever be exposed to the public. (“Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations, U.S. Senate, April 1976”) Like the Navy’s Project Chatter, team members of Bluebird frequently subjected their human guinea pigs to acid trips, mescaline dosing, and amphetamine overloads to test the limits of the human will. One of their favorites was a combination of hallucinogens and amphetamines they nicknamed “Smasher.”
Morse Allen was one of these initial pioneers of the CIA’s exploits in psychic investigations. While pharmaceutical applications had their place, officers like Morse were interested in more esoteric means by which the human will could be bent. From 1951 onward, he took it upon himself to survey the OSS’s remaining files from the Second World War. Securing funding for a four-month crash course in the field from his superiors in the CIA’s SRS (Security Research Section). He began his apprenticeship with figures around New York like Milton Erickson, a famous stage hypnotist. Bluebird was renamed Artichoke (after the street-handle of New York gangster Ciro Terranova, the “Artichoke King”), and from August 1951 onward, this program’s controllers began testing their hypno-suggestive procedures on some of the CIA’s volunteer support staff. Walter Bedell-Smith, Eisenhower’s trusted Chief of Staff and aide de camp in WWII and now the Director of the CIA, signed off on it, along with Dr. H. Marshall Chadwell, the CIA’s Scientific Intelligence Director. Morse Allen remained in de facto control of day-by-day operations. Most, if not all, of his early test subjects were women. Hypnotizing secretaries and female aides, the architects of Artichoke were quick to extend their bizarre methods into sexually abusive favors, going so far in some cases as hypnotizing these women and post-hypnotically suggesting that they perform sexual acts on complete strangers in Washington D.C. hotel rooms and CIA office suites. (H. Albarelli Jr., A Secret Order, chapter 7) In one encounter, Morse Allen hypnotized his personal secretary and programmed her to pick up a pistol and shoot another secretary. When she came out of her hypnosis and Allen gave the post-hypnotic cue, she picked up his service pistol on his desk, turned to the other girl, without expression, and fired. The receiver slammed home with a sharp click; the gun was of course unloaded. Allen was thrilled with the potential for this exciting new technique.
Begun officially in 1953, while Artichoke was fully operational, the CIA’s MK-ULTRA/MK-DELTA was the brainchild of Richard Helms, and served as yet another tentacle of the mind-control octopus that had gripped the imaginations of our nation’s intelligence officers. Its ostensible goals were the harassment, intimidation, and coercion of domestic (ULTRA) and foreign (DELTA) populations through the use of sociology, anthropology, radiation exposure, graphology, chemical triggering, paramilitary means, and psychiatry. (Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations, U.S. Senate, April 1976) Helms appointed the CIA’s notorious chief chemist, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, as head of field operations. Gottlieb was nicknamed the Black Sorcerer by colleagues because of his obsession with concocting a plethora of exotic poisons, delivery devices, and other murderous schemes to eliminate world leaders and rival military figures. Gottlieb crafted the tube of poisoned toothpaste sent to the CIA’s station chief Larry Devlin in Leopoldville when President Eisenhower ordered the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the progressive anti-colonial leader of the Congo. Instead, the CIA ended up kidnapping him, with the aid of Belgian intelligence and local rebels. He was later shot and dissolved in sulfuric acid. Gottlieb also designed the exploding cigars and explosive seashells which were unsuccessfully deployed—amid the dozens of other plots—to kill Fidel Castro as he partook in his two favorite leisure activities, puffing on Cohibas and free-diving on shallow reefs. As Castro once said, “If surviving assassination attempts were an Olympic event, I would win the gold medal.” (Patrick Oppmann, “Fidel Castro survived 600 assassination attempts, officials say,” CNN, 11/26/2016)
Canada also played a tertiary role in the CIA’s burgeoning MK-ULTRA research. The CIA-sponsored and Rockefeller-funded Allen Memorial Hospital in Montreal, Quebec, was the home of one Dr. D. Ewen Cameron, and his Subproject-68. Cameron was the one-time President of both the American Psychiatric Association and the Canadian Psychiatric Association, and eventually held the title of President of the World Psychiatric Association. He delivered addresses to a global audience, was a lecturer at numerous universities and medical schools, and was considered a preeminent authority on the human psyche. Cameron was present at the Nuremberg trials, and wrote a treatise which surmised that the inherent personality of the German people was incapable of submitting to defeat and incapable of living peacefully in a post-war environment. He called for a social reconditioning of their collective psyche in order to transform their next generation into a more docile group. In a strange twist, the anecdotal testimony of former CIA pilot and intelligence officer L. Fletcher Prouty notes that Cameron later became personally acquainted with numerous Nazi exiles, whose brains he picked for medical and psychiatric advice. (Marshall Thomas, Monarch: The New Phoenix Program, chapter 16)
Receiving personal funding from the CIA and Allen Dulles through their front organization, the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, Cameron became infamous for his “psychic driving” sessions. These consisted of unwitting mentally distraught patients—many were innocent housewives and children sent in for treatment of depression—being sedated and strapped into isolated gurneys on a secure upper floor of the facility, where they were not told for how long they were being detained. Then the doctor went to work in earnest; Cameron describes the process in his essay, “The Effects Upon Human Behavior of the Repetition of Verbal Signals:”
Cameron’s goal was to attempt a full swipe of a patient’s memory, resulting in a blank slate, which only in physical form bore any resemblance to the former person. Initially, “psychic driving” was intended to erase the memories of incurable schizophrenic patients, but the CIA saw its potential in the intelligence world and ended up paying Cameron $69,000 to further their ends from 1957-1964. In one especially severe case, a woman who was released had to be taught how to use the toilet and tie her shoes, even though she was a formerly accomplished thirty-something mother of three. She never regained her memory and only realized what had happened and who was responsible when she saw a picture of Dr. Cameron in a library book decades later, which triggered a post-traumatic breakdown and an eventual lawsuit.
In another “treatment,” Phyllis Goldberg, a charming, attractive young nurse of nineteen, who was admitted to the Allen Memorial and Dr. Cameron, suffered an irreversible trauma that friends and family say utterly destroyed her life:
“When she would be with us, on weekends and so on, she didn’t communicate. She laughed for no reason. Her gait was very different,” Levenson explained. “She couldn’t dress herself—she couldn’t do anything for herself.” Small moments of affection—a pat on the head between aunt and niece, for example—elicited painful reactions from Goldberg. “When you went to pat her, just as a gesture, she would cringe,” Levenson said. “That bewildered me—not realizing, or understanding, she had electric shock equipment put on her head so many times that it [remained] in her subconscious.” (Lindsay Richardson, “Their Lives were Ruined: Families of MK-ULTRA survivors planning class-action lawsuit,” Montreal CTV, 5/20/2018)
As things progressed and more funding was secured, even stranger experiments unfolded, some bordering on the absurd. From 1955 to the mid 1960s, the CIA, using its own agents as well as assets from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, dosed unknowing subjects in San Francisco brothels and clubs—notably in the Telegraph Hill area near North Beach—with LSD-laced cocktails. Codenamed Midnight Climax, the project was one of the dozens of subprojects under the MK-ULTRA umbrella. As part of this operation the CIA sent agent George White, who used the name “Morgan Hall” when interacting with neighbors, to San Francisco and set him up in a duplex near the bay, at 2250 Chestnut Street. They paid for him to furnish the apartment with French erotic art, lurid posters, and other enticing trinkets, and tasked him with finding a suitable accomplice to lure men in for observation. An alcoholic who kept a pitcher of martinis in his refrigerator, Hall then hired a local electronics firm to install audio bugs in the electrical outlets to complete his voyeuristic suite. “For hours Hall would sit perched on a portable toilet watching behind a two-way mirror while his employee, a drug-addicted prostitute, entertained unsuspecting visitors and slipped each one an exotic chemical or biological agent.” (John Jacobs and Bill Richards, “The Bizarre Tale of a CIA Operation,” Washington Post, 8/26/1977)
Another notable case was the 1951 “Pont St. Esprit Incident.” Here, in a quaint French country village near the Swiss border, hundreds of people went completely insane, with an onset that was both rapid and violent. One man tried to drown himself, screaming that snakes were eating his belly. An 11-year-old tried to strangle his grandmother. Another man shouted: “I am a plane”, before jumping out of a second-floor window, breaking his legs. He then got up and carried on for 50 yards. Another saw his heart escaping through his feet and begged a doctor to put it back. Many were taken to the local asylum in straight jackets. Time Magazine wrote at the time: “Among the stricken, delirium rose: patients thrashed wildly on their beds, screaming that red flowers were blossoming from their bodies, that their heads had turned to molten lead.” (Henry Samuel, “French bread spiked with LSD in CIA experiment,” Daily Telegraph, 3/11/2010)
Officially, the narrative involved a contaminated batch of baguettes from Roch Briand, the local bakery. Ergot, a hallucinogenic mold that develops when rye spoils—and which had been used as far back as the Eleusinian Mysteries ritual at Delphi in Ancient Greece—was blamed. Curiously, however, Pont St. Esprit was only a few miles from the world’s only manufacturing plant that produced high-grade LSD at the time: Sandoz. And also curious is a memorandum that was discovered, dating to 1975 during the Rockefeller Commission’s review of the CIA’s clandestine abuses, and which read, “Re: Pont-Saint-Esprit and F. Olson Files. SO Span/France Operation file, inclusive Olson. Intel files. Hand carry to Belin—tell him to see to it that these are buried.” (Mike Thomson, “Pont-Saint-Esprit poisoning: Did the CIA spread LSD?” BBC News, 8/23/2010)
Frank Olson headed the CIA’s overseas experiments involving mind-altering substances. And of course “Belin” refers to David Belin, the high-profile attorney who sat on both the Warren and Rockefeller Commissions. In 1953, a CIA agent dosed Olson’s cocktail at a local bar with LSD. Two days later, Olson “jumped or fell” out of a window on the thirteenth-floor of his Manhattan hotel suite. (David Remnick, “25 Years of Nightmares,” Washington Post, 7/28/1985) Author and former Canadian Liberal Party leader, Michael Ignatieff, among others, like Olson’s son, believe Allen Dulles and Richard Helms ordered his murder, since Olson had voiced reservations about and objections to the ethics of his missions.
Of no small concern is the fact that “since early 1954, following the death of Olson, a secret agreement between the CIA and the U.S. Department of Justice had been put in place whereby the violation of “criminal statutes” by CIA personnel would not result in Department of Justice prosecutions, if “highly classified and complex covert operations” were threatened with exposure. The agreement had been struck between CIA Chief Counsel Larry Houston and Deputy Attorney General William P. Rogers in February 1954, not long after Frank Olson’s death, and still remained solidly in place.” (H. Albarelli Jr., “Cries from the Past: Torture’s Ugly Echoes,” Truthout.org, 5/23/2010) With this agreement essentially sealing the agency from any remaining legal responsibilities following the creation and signing of the National Security Act of 1947, they were now totally exempt from oversight, and during the late 1950s and early 1960s, branched out into even weirder fields of inquiry and research. Their inquiries into the pure occult and spiritual realms of human consciousness were perhaps the most bizarre iteration of the mind-control explorations. MK-OFTEN, a still-secret and barely traceable sub-file buried in the MK-ULTRA files, mentions the Department of Defense’s use of mediums, clairvoyants, and even voodoo and Satanism. As researcher Peter Levenda notes:
Initially, Operation MK-OFTEN was a joint CIA/Army Chemical Corps drug project, based out of Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland and using inmates of the Holmesburg State Prison in Philadelphia as test subjects. It came under the aegis of the CIA’s Office of Research and Development (ORD), which was concerned with parapsychology and the application of supernatural powers for military purposes. Later, OFTEN would become a kind of grab bag of CIA investigations into the paranormal, and would include everything from séances and witchcraft to remote viewing and exotic drugs. (Levenda, Sinister Forces, chapter 4)
MKNAOMI, the CIA’s joint venture with the Army’s biological warfare division at Fort Detrick, which ran roughly from 1958 to the early 1970s, was the MK-digram’s final major iteration. In this program, scientists and technicians honed their abilities to deliver exotic and untraceable toxins and biological agents to unknowing victims, with a focus on agricultural poisoning, some of which likely was intended for Operation Mongoose, the CIA’s terror campaign against Cuba.
The Agency was estimated to have spent over 3 million dollars. Items developed ranged from attaché cases rigged to disseminate an agent in the air, a cigarette rigged to disseminate an agent when lighted, a fountain pen dart launcher, an engine head bolt designed to release an agent when heated, a fluorescent light starter to activate the light and then release an agent, etc. (“Cryptonym: MKNAOMI,” Mary Ferrell Foundation)
While Richard Nixon banned biological testing in November 1969, it is purported that substantial amounts of stockpiled neurotoxins and aggressive nerve agents were stashed away in secure facilities for years after MKNAOMI was officially terminated. (AP, “US Continues Defensive Germ Warfare Research,” New York Times, 9/7/1982)
Revelations and Implications
The late 1970s saw the rise of more Congressional probing into the clandestine activities of American intelligence agencies in the wake of the tumultuous 60s and the Vietnam War. When Seymour Hersh broke the story to the nation in 1975 that James Angleton’s counterintelligence outfit at the CIA had been routinely mass-surveilling American citizens’ mail, people were outraged. In the context of such probes as the Church Committee (1975), the Rockefeller Commission (1975), the House Select Committee on Assassinations (1976) and other notable, if problematic and incomplete investigations, Americans finally got a peek at the dirty deeds of their flagship intelligence agency. As the New York Times noted:
There seemed to be nothing the Central Intelligence Agency had not considered: lobotomies, powerful drugs, hypnosis, mental telepathy, deprivation of sleep and food, subliminal suggestion, isolation, ultra-sonic sound, flashing stroboscopic lights. The agency even considered magicians and prostitutes.” (Joseph Treaster, “CIA Mind Probes Now More Benign,” New York Times, 8/71977)
Little came of these probes, besides sensational headlines and James Angleton’s forced “retirement.” No one, to my knowledge, was charged with anything appropriate to the crimes committed, and the nation, while briefly outraged, moved on, as if they were watching a dramatic but ultimately irrelevant soap opera. In many ways, the Watergate break-in overshadowed the decades of abuse the CIA had been accused of.
MK-ULTRA shut down “officially” in 1972. No one knows how many total victims were abused or killed, because in 1973, then-Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms ordered all files pertaining to MK-ULTRA shredded after getting tipped off of a coming congressional interest in the project. A few boxes were not located in time, and are the sole sources we have for review. Shortly thereafter, Helms was appointed as the U.S. Ambassador to Iran, where he served for four years, only returning reluctantly in 1977 to further testify—and commit perjury—to the CIA’s role in overthrowing the government of Chile and installing the brutal dictator Augusto Pinochet. Sydney Gottlieb, MK-ULTRA’s field-coordinator, also left the United States; he took up a humanitarian position in rural India, studying leprosy among the destitute.
The relevance of these revelations should be clear to anyone seriously interested in the Robert Kennedy assassination—to name but one bizarre case that continues to puzzle those unfamiliar with the facts surrounding the mind-control saga. Indeed, with Robert Kennedy Jr.’s now-public admission that he does not endorse the official story surrounding his father’s murder, the Washington Post recently published a piece whose headline ran, “The assassination of Bobby Kennedy: Was Sirhan hypnotized to be the fall guy?” It only took the MSM fifty years to consider this, but I suppose any progress is a positive thing in cases this sensitive.
The official story has Senator Kennedy giving his June 5th, 1968 primary victory speech in the Embassy Room of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He was then escorted through a hallway offstage and hurried into a large kitchen pantry to make his way into an adjacent room for a press conference. As he finished shaking hands with a busboy, 24-year old Jordanian national, Sirhan Sirhan, emerged from beside a steam-table in a crowded corner and fired a .22 caliber pistol at the senator, mortally wounding him before being restrained and arrested. He was sentenced to death, but because California overturned the death penalty, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
The problem with the story, of course, is that when Thomas Noguchi, the chief coroner for L.A. county, performed his autopsy, he determined that all four shots that struck Kennedy (one passed through his suit jacket without hitting him) came from behind, at sharp upward angles. None came from the front, which is where every single witness places Sirhan. Similarly, the fatal shot, which entered just below and behind his right ear—due to tell-tale powder burn patterns—could only have been fired from between one to a maximum three inches from the senator. This is demonstrably provable and incontrovertibly invalidates the eventual verdict of the court, which of course was based on the fact that Sirhan’s hapless defense attorney—perhaps compromised by the CIA—chose to avoid an actual examination and stipulated to the prosecution’s deeply flawed evidence. Sirhan was never closer to RFK than three feet. When he was detained, LAPD officers noted his strange calm, his glassy, placid eyes, and inability to recall anything that had just transpired. Later, during his prison visits by psychiatrists who attempted to hypnotize him, they noticed that he ranked with the most extreme strata of persons susceptible to both auto-suggestive and trance states, and would immediately become hypnotized. In one instance, he was given the posthypnotic command to climb the prison bars like a monkey once the cue was given. When awoken, and cued, he did just that, to the astonishment of his psychiatrist.
Sirhan is not alone in the short but fascinating cases involving wrongfully accused, post-hypnotically activated victims. I will conclude with the notorious, sensational, but factually proven case involving one Palle Hardrup. Hardrup was a thirty-year old Danish man who walked into a bank in Copenhagen, robbed the teller at gunpoint, shot him when he refused to hand over the money, shot the bank manager, then:
stood staring at his victims for a few moments as if trying to puzzle out what he had done. After putting his gun into his raincoat pocket, he unhurriedly sauntered out of the bank and rode his bicycle to his aunt’s house where he sat waiting for the police. (Perrot Phillips, “Now Go Out and Kill,” from Out of This World, vol. 6, 1978, pp. 74-5)
The author then notes that, “The case would have ended there—if it had not been for police psychiatrist Dr. Max Schmidt. Hardrup, in his opinion, did not really fit into the accepted pattern of a murder-mad gunman. He was a weak man, certainly, and a man who could easily be led. But he did not have a strong enough killer instinct to have murdered the two men at the bank—not unless he had been influenced by some other, unknown, factor.” Dr. Schmidt pursued his investigation and discovered that Hardrup had robbed another bank for $2,000 that he had given to a man by the name of Bjorn Nielsen, who Hardrup referred to as his “guiding spirit”. Nielsen had told Hardrup that he needed the money to fund a new Danish Nazi Party.
Nielsen was a ruthless confidence trickster who was known to have dabbled in hypnotism and the occult. He denied knowledge of Hardrup’s bank raids. But Schmidt was suspicious. Dr. Schmidt eventually administered a truth serum to Hardrup and an amazing story began to unfold. Suddenly Hardrup was describing in great detail how Nielsen had taken possession of him by hypnosis and had then manipulated him into murder. It happened that Nielsen and Hardrup had shared a cell together sometime after the end of WWII. In the spartan privacy of their cell he [Nielsen] subjected Hardrup to hypnosis and so started turning him into a robot.
But without a confession by Nielsen it would be difficult to prove in court. Dr. Paul Rieter, chief of the psychiatric department of Copenhagen City Hospital, eventually told investigators that, in his view, Hardrup had behaved in “an abnormal, insane-like condition while deprived of his own free will by hypnotic suggestive influence.” He added, “The impulse of the criminal acts came from without.”
To prove to the jury that this could actually happen, Dr. Rieter set up an amazing demonstration. He selected “a perfectly ordinary and gentle married woman—one of the last people who could be suspected of being capable of any crime of violence. Then, with permission from her and from the court, Rieter hypnotized her and showed the jury how it was possible to turn her into a “killer”. He kept his voice soothingly soft as he told her that her marriage was being destroyed because her husband was having an affair with another woman. But he kept repeating that her husband was in no way to blame, that he had been tricked and seduced by a viciously perverted woman.
Dr. Rieter continued to suggest to the hypnotized woman that she would be doing a great service to the world if she eliminated this evil woman and that it would not be considered a crime at all. Rieter even suggested that the hypnotized woman would be helping to protect other innocent people from the harm done by this evil woman. Also in the courtroom was another volunteer—a woman who had agreed to act as the “evil seductress”. Rieter told his guinea pig where to find her, and he handed her a gun loaded with blanks. “You know what to do and why you have to do it,” he said. “So now wake up …”
When the woman awoke from the trance she was obviously bewildered. She immediately stood up and searched the rows of people until she spotted the woman she had been told was the “evil seductress”. She walked over to the woman, raised the gun and fired. If the gun had been loaded with real bullets the “seductress” would have been dead.
The jury was convinced. Nielsen was sentenced to life in prison and Hardrup was sent to a “home for psychopaths.” After a few years he was released.” (Phillips, vol. 6)
As Lisa Pease notes in her masterful essay, “Sirhan and the RFK Assassination, Part I: The Grand Illusion”:
Have you ever seen a master magician? Have you found yourself gasping in amazement asking half-aloud, “How did he do that?” You see a man step into a box on a hollow platform immediately hoisted into the air. Within seconds, the man you saw get into a box that still hangs in front of you appears from behind you in the audience, walking down the aisle. Your eyes have convinced you this is not possible, because you saw the man get into the box. Yet there he is, the impossible made real. The assassination of Robert F. Kennedy is also a carefully constructed illusion, designed to confuse and obfuscate. Imagine what the eyewitnesses in the crowded pantry saw. Robert Kennedy had obviously been shot, and Sirhan was firing a weapon. Sirhan must have killed Kennedy. And yet, the physical evidence does not support this conclusion. Sirhan cannot have killed Kennedy any more than the magician could be both in the box and in the audience.
Without belaboring the point and reiterating what many have surmised, it seems almost beyond argument at this juncture in the research that Sirhan was programmed to serve as a distraction for the real assassin(s) of Senator Kennedy. Multiple eyewitnesses saw him throughout the night with the suspicious girl in the polka-dot dress, who lured him into the pantry just moments before Kennedy arrived. She was also sighted with him on numerous occasions at local gun ranges, and famously fled the scene in a hysterical giddy state with another man, shouting, “We shot him! We shot Senator Kennedy!” To this day, Sirhan continues to state he has no memory of the act, with his last conscious recollection being following the woman into the pantry and her pinching him sharply before he entered “range mode”. There, he claims, individual faces and bodies morphed into paper targets. Then he goes blank. As Pease notes, it’s possible Sirhan was firing blanks, since numerous witnesses observed burnt wads of paper being expelled from his gun and hanging in the still air.
Thane Eugene Cesar, a young employee for Lockheed who had ties to Robert Maheu—Howard Hughes’ CIA liaison and Vegas manager—was hired only weeks before the event by Ace Security, and left in January of 1969, a month before Sirhan’s trial began. Cesar was an avowed racist and George Wallace supporter who believed Kennedy was “giving the country over to the blacks”, to paraphrase his eerie interview with Ted Charach in the 1970s. He also owned a nine-shot .22 caliber Harrington and Richardson revolver, which he falsely claimed he sold before the assassination, but which was recovered in a muddy Arkansas pond years later and matched to his receipt of sale dated after the RFK murder. (Bill Turner and Jonn Christian, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, p. 166) What is remarkable about this piece of evidence is that the man who purchased the gun, Jim Yoder, told the LA police this exact story, namely that Cesar had the .22 model after the Kennedy murder, during a re-inquiry by the LAPD in 1974. In other words, the security guard following the senator into the pantry, and positioned to his right and rear, holding his arm, owned a gun almost identical to Sirhan’s. And he had misrepresented that fact. (ibid, p. 167)
As to the other assassins, or perhaps a third gun, it is anyone’s guess. Twenty-one year old “memorabilia collector” Michael Wayne, who possessed ultra-right wing California Minuteman Keith Gilbert’s business card when later interrogated, is a person of interest. (An already-incarcerated Gilbert coincidentally had Wayne’s business card when his prison effects were examined.) As are a few other individuals who lurked in the Ambassador that day. But it’s irrelevant to the main revelation that one of the CIA’s dirty tricks from its MK-ULTRA days very likely changed the course of world history that fateful night. And the people truly behind Robert Kennedy’s death were never identified, let alone prosecuted.
Most of the American population has never considered that night as a transformative and disturbing episode in U.S. political history. They are content to believe that, well, only crazy people who’ve watched silly movies like Conspiracy Theory and The Manchurian Candidate and even Zoolander (“Kill the Prime Minister of Malaysia Derek!”) believe in hypno-programmed assassins and mind control. If that really took place, we’d hear about it on CNN or the Rachel Maddow Show. Which truly goes to show that in the end, the nation’s own self-reinforcing ignorance has been the CIA’s supreme accomplishment. No one really needs to be implanted with electrodes or “psychically driven” these days, so complete is the deception, so smooth and without discernible facets or seams. Today, the wholesale vertical integration of the military-industrial-psychosocial control apparatus has become as polished as a diamond. In a way, the pioneers in social engineering gave the American public far too much credit; it turns out that if you give the average citizen a cell phone that lights up and beeps every half hour, a Facebook feed, and an endless stream of sensational headlines and celebrity drama, you can get away with anything, up to and including the complete and utter erosion of our democracy.
RE: New Book on Reinhard Gehlen in the works - Peter Lemkin - 17-05-2020 Quote: |