Was Charlie Manson sheep-dipped?

[Jan Klimkowski]

I view Mae Brussell as something of a soothsayer.

She was a meticulous researcher. But she was also blessed with the gift of reading the entrails, of knowing where the skeletons lie.

In January 1984, she published:

The Nazi Connection to the John F. Kennedy Assassination

http://www.maebrussell.com/Mae%20Brussel...ssass.html

It was not until around 1990 that information about the NATO/Gehlen stay behind networks of Operation Gladio started to leak into the public domain.

If Mae's paper above is read in the light of what we now know about Gladio, its prescience is extraordinary.

From Daniele Ganser's PhD manuscript on Gladio:

'The setting up of Stay-Behind organisations of the NATO countries started
already shortly after the end of the Second World War', the official German
governmental report on the stay-behind confirmed in 1990.2 After the defeat of
Germany in 1945 the chaotic post-war conditions were ideal for the United States
to set up a stay-behind. As occupying power the US armies controlled the territory
together with the French, British and the Soviet forces in their respective zones.
Above all the supply of thoroughly anti-Communist men trained in guerrilla warfare
and experienced with arms and explosives was abundant. And thus the United
States secretly recruited former Nazis for the German stay-behind network. In the
midst of the Gladio revelations in 1990 the private TV channel RTL shocked the
German public by revealing in a special Gladio report that former members of
Hitler's dreaded SS, who under Hitler had hunted the Communists, had been part
of Germany's Gladio network.
The US Army General's Staff Top Secret March 28, 1949 Overall Strategic
Concepts highlighted that Germany 'has an excellent potential of trained men for
both underground and Secret Army Reserves [stay-behind units]. Effective resistance
can and should be organized.'3 On the orders of the Pentagon in Washington the
newly created US Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) tracked down German Nazis
and brought them to the Numberg trials, while the CIC also secretly recruited
selected right-wing extremists for the anti-Communist army. This practice of the
Pentagon was revealed only in 1986 when the US Department of Justice in a
large press conference - which had maybe drawn the biggest crowd of journalists
in Washington since the Watergate days - admitted that the CIC had recruited a
high-ranking Nazi in the post-war years. Specifically a 600-page long study,
compiled by Allan Ryan for the US Justice Department, confirmed that SS and
Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie had been recruited by the CIC in 1947, had thereafter
been hidden from the war crimes investigators and had then been spirited out of
Europe to Argentina through a clandestine 'ratline' in 1951.
Barbie was saved not because the United States secret service officers were
impressed with his moral record, but because he was most useful in the setting up
of the German stay-behind network. 'Among those who were recruited and
did some recruiting for the scheme in the first years', the British press reported
during the Gladio revelations, 'were an ex-SS Obersturmfuhrer, Hans Otto, and
other smaller fish. But the prize catch was Klaus Barbie who functioned as a
recruiter for ex-Nazis and members of the fascist Bund Deutscher Jugend
(BDJ).'4 Barbie, during the war known as the 'Butcher of Lyon', had during his
stay in the French town from 1943 to 1944 been responsible for the murder of at
least 4,000 resistance workers and Jews, as well as the deportation of another
15,000 to concentration death camps. Barbie was condemned to death in absentia by
a French court soon after the war for crimes against humanity as witnesses
described him as a sadistic torturer, who terrified men, women and children with
his whip and Alsatian dog.
190
The US Justice Department, during its 1986 press conference did not reveal
the use of Barbie for the stay-behind and wrongly stressed that next to Barbie
'no other case was found where a suspected Nazi war criminal was placed in the
ratline, or where the ratline was used to evacuate a person wanted by either the United
States government or any of its post-war allies'.5 This claim was false as the
most prominent Nazi reunited by the CIC was not the Butcher of Lyon Klaus
Barbie but Hitler's General Reinhard Gehlen. General Gehlen had started his
secret service career under Hitler when in April 1942 he became chief of Fremde
Heere Ost (FHO, Foreign Armies Fast) with the task to combat the Soviet Union.
'Gehlen derived much of his information from his role in one of the most terrible
atrocities of the war: the torture, interrogation, and murder by starvation of some
4 million Soviet prisoners of war', US historian Christopher Simpson found in
his detailed account of the US recruitment of Nazis.6 Gehlen was well aware of
the fact that his war crimes had earned him the merit to appear on the blacklist of
the Soviet secret service NKVD. When he realised that Germany was losing the war
he therefore made sure that the Russians would not get him by delivering himself
to the US CIC on May 20, 1945.
General Gehlen was right in assuming that the data which he had collected
during his torture operations on the Soviet Union and its Communists was of
great interest to the United States. Together with a small group of senior Nazi
officers he had therefore at the end of the war carefully microfilmed the extensive
FHO data on the USSR, had packed the films in watertight steel drums and had
secretly buried these in meadows in the Austrian Alps. After several weeks of
CIC internment Gehlen got into contact with US General Edwin Luther Siber to
whom he revealed his secret. The US General was so impressed that he promoted
Gehlen's career in the years to come. He introduced Gehlen to senior US intelligence
officials, including General Walter Bedell Smith, then the highest US Army
intelligence officer in Europe, and later Director of the CIA from 1950 to 1953.
Siber also introduced Gehlen to General William Donovan, chief of the US wartime
secret service Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and Allen Dulles of the OSS,
later chief of the CIA, as well as Frank Wisner of the OSS, later chief of CIA's
OPC which set up the European stay-behind network.7
With Gehlen's help the US dug up the FHO microfilms in Austria and in
August 1945 Siber shipped Gehlen with his data to Washington for debriefing.
President Truman was impressed and named Gehlen, together with a large number
of Gehlen's Nazi network, chief of the first post-war German secret service, tellingly
named Organisation Gehlen (ORG). 'In the end Gehlen', historian Simpson
concludes, 'and several hundred other senior German officers succeeded in making
deals with Britain or the United States... General Gehlen, however, proved to be
the most important of them all.'8 With US financial and material help ORG
headquarters were first erected in Oberursel near Frankfurt, and then moved to
the former Waffen SS training facility Pullach near Munich, still today site of the
headquarters of the German secret service Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND).
Clandestinely CIA and ORG signed cooperation contacts and CIA senior officer
James Criitchfield was deployed to Germany. Called 'Herr Marshall' by the Germans,
Critchfield monitored Gehlen's service and made sure that at all times the names
of Gehlen's top 150 officers were given to him. For each of them the CIA created
a file. So that the German secret service was firmly in US hands.
Erhard Dabringhaus who had worked with the US CIC in Germany from 1948
to 1949 recalled in a documentary on Gladio that he himself had taken part in the
recruitment of Nazis, an activity which he strongly resented. 'In 1948 I was a special
agent with CIC, that's our counterintelligence corps in occupied Germany',
retired Dabringhaus explained. 'I was stationed in Augsberg, and since I spoke
fluent German I was assigned to handle a network of German informants, among
them was Klaus Barbie, and Klaus Barbie was, ehm... later on I discovered that
he was wanted for murder by the French', Dabringhaus explained in front of the
camera, 'and that I reported to my superiors, and they told me to keep nice and
quiet, "He's still valuable, when he's no longer valuable we will turn him over to
the French." I thought that I was gonna get a promotion when I told 'em about
Barbie, and they told me to keep quiet!'9
Former US CIC officer Dabringhaus, who now lives in Florida in the United
States, explained how several German Nazis on US orders had set up the staybehind
arms caches in Germany. 'Colonel Gunther Bernau was an agent, an
informant working for the military intelligence in Stuttgart. We [of the US CIC] had
provided him a home, a safe-house in Ludwisburg, and there I met him three
times a week and he brought us information about Communists and whatever we
wanted to hear he told us.' The aim of the United States was to fight Communism, no
matter the means, Dabringhaus related, although he himself was little impressed
with Bernau: 'He was certainly a very strong Nazi. I sat in his office one day and
opened his album of pictures from the war, and in the middle of the album it
showed a nice picture of Adolf Hitler. Several other high-ranking SS officers
came to visit him in his safe house that we provided, and he told me that if for any
reason he needs help by one telephone call he could contact 200 former SS leaders
from Hamburg to Munich.'
Bernau, according to Dabringhaus, was centrally involved in setting up the
German stay-behind army: 'I remember him taking me to one particular spot
which we uncovered and dug it out and there were rifles, small arms, grenades,
all nicely wrapped in cosmolene and he said "We have thousands of these all over
the country." And that sort of made me a little suspicious and I reported this and they
said, "Well, we know this. They are all working for us in case the Communists come
across the Iron Curtain.'" Senior US officials, according to the need-to-know
principle, did not explain the details of the secret stay-behind army to CIC officer
Dabringhaus, but the latter had learned enough to understand that it was a top-secret
project involving a large number of Nazis: 'A former General, SS General, Paul
Hauser, was a frequent visitor at Bernau's house, and they worked together hand
in gloves about certain programmes which we didn't know anything about, and I
wasn't even asked to find out more about it. Somebody above me must have been
running this network already at that time.'10
When the Gladio scandal erupted in 1990 an unnamed former NATO intelligence
official explained that the covert action branch of the CIA under Frank Wisner in
order to set up the German secret army had 'incorporated lock, stock and barrel
the espionage outfit run by Hitler's spy chief Reinhard Gehlen. This is well
known, because Gehlen was the spiritual father of Stay Behind in Germany and
his role was known to the West German leader, Konrad Adenauer, from the
outset.' According to the unnamed NATO officer, US President Truman and
German Chancellor Adenauer had signed a secret protocol with the US on West
Germany's entry into NATO in May 1955 in which it was agreed that the West
German authorities would refrain from active legal pursuit of known right-wing
extremists. What is not so well known is that other top German politicians
were privy to the existence of secret resistance plans. One of these was the then
German State Secretary and former high-ranking Nazi, Hans Globke.'11
In Germany one of the Nazi-dominated US networks named 'Bund Deutscher
Jugend' (BDJ) and its stay-behind 'Technischer Dienst' (TD) were discovered in
1952. Klaus Barbie had played a leading role in setting up the German staybehind
BDJ-TD.12 But the secret was not kept for long. The New York Times
reported on October 10, 1952 under the somewhat misleading headline 'German
Saboteurs betray US Trust. Wide Investigation Follows Confirmation of Financing
Guerrillas' War Training', that 'Authoritative officials here privately confirmed
today that the United States had sponsored and helped finance the secret training
of young Germans, including many former soldiers, to become guerrilla fighters
in the event of a war with the Soviet Union.' The US newspaper reported that the
'disclosure yesterday in the State Parliament of Hesse and the banner headline
publicity today in the German press have caused the United States Department
and the Army considerable embarrassment', above all because 'it was discovered
that the projected guerrilla group had engaged in political activities. Their
leaders...drew up blacklists of persons who were to be "liquidized", if they were
deemed unreliable in a war against the Russians.' Therefore 'Several joint
German-United States meetings were held' because many acting 'Socialists,
including government officials, were on the list, as well as Communists'.
This early discovery of a part of the German stay-behind caused a major scandal
on both sides of the Atlantic and Newsweek in the United States reported on
October 20, 1952 that the CIA had organised a group of 'stay-behinds' in Germany.
Interestingly enough the German news magazine Der Spiegel on October 29,
1952 correctly reported that stay-behind networks existed next to Germany also
in numerous countries of Western Europe: 'The BDJ affair has caused considerable
worries in the different headquarters of the American secret service in Europe.
Because the "Technischer Dienst" in Germany is but one branch of a partisan
network supported by the United States and spreading over the whole of Europe.'
Specifically, as the Spiegel reported, 'This network is most strongly developed in
France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxemburg, Italy and the Iberian peninsula. In
France this organisation was created already in 1948, with the support of the
leader of the Socialists, [Minister of the Interior] Jules Moch.'
193
What had happened and who had blown the cover? On September 9, 1952
former SS officer Hans Otto had walked after his own personal decision into the
headquarters of the criminal police in the city of Frankfurt in the German state of
Hesse and according to the German governmental records' declared to belong to
a political resistance group, the task of which was to carry out sabotage activities
and blow up bridges in case of a Soviet invasion'. According to Otto, who felt
alienated with the terrorist preparations, 'about 100 members of the organisation
had been instructed at a specific school in politics, trained to use American, Russian
and German arms, and drilled in military tactics. Members of the organisation
were mostly former officers of the Air Force, the Army or the Waffen-SS.' The
official German transcripts record that 'Although officially neo-fascist tendencies
were not required, most members of the organisation featured them. The financial
means to run the organisation had been provided by an American citizen with the
name of Sterling Garwood.' Next to waiting for the Soviet invasion the German
secret army also had domestic subversion tasks: 'As for domestic politics the
tactics of the organisation were aimed at the KPD [Communist Party of Germany]
and SPD [Socialist Party of Germany].'13
The 'organisation' that Otto was talking about was part of the German
stay-behind network, but with all probability did not represent the entire German
network even at the time. The branch was misleadingly labelled BDJ, short for
'German Youth Federation', although the average age of its members was around 42.
Already before Otto's testimony the BDJ had been well known for its extreme
anti-Communism. But what remained unknown was that the BDJ had fronted for
the so-called Technischer Dienst (TD, Technical Service), which was in the topsecret
paramilitary German stay-behind, staffed with former Nazis, paid by the US,
and equipped with weapons and explosives. According to the German statistics
BDJ membership, which spread across the whole of Western Germany, officially
amounted to 17,000 people, whereas according to the German governmental
investigation TD membership counted only around 2,000 people.14
Otto's testimony in 1952 lead to a large-scale police investigation. Near
Waldmichelbach, a small romantic village in the Odenwald forest district of Hesse,
the stay-behind training centre was discovered. The Waldmichelbach centre had
only become operational in June 1951, and before that date, members of the German
stay-behind had been directly trained on the US Army base Grafenwohr in
Germany.15 Called 'Wamiba' by insiders after its location, the training centre
consisted in essence of a house with an underground shooting area and a bunker
close by, all located inconspicuously in a side valley, half a kilometre away from
the country road. Villagers remembered, 'that the Americans used to carry out
shooting exercises or something like that over there'.16
Otto testified to the German authorities that the contact of the BDJ-TD with
the CIA was to a large degree handled by the mysterious American whom he
called Mr Garwood. Garwood, probably of the CIA, regularly instructed the TD
members in the Odenwald and repeatedly insisted that the whole stay-behind was
a top-secret organisation, and that nobody may say anything to anybody at any time.
194
This, it seems, was taken very seriously. For when at one time it was suspected that
a TD member of another German state, Bavaria, 'had filled out a questionnaire
with another resistance organisation', the assassination of that member was
seriously contemplated within the TD, as Otto highlighted with a certain disgust.17
'I do not have the impression that Mr. Garwood had any objections to such methods',
Otto testified to the German authorities. 'He taught us for instance, how to kill
a person without leaving a trace, by simply making him unconscious with
chloroform, put him in his car, and use a pipe to guide the exhausts of the car into
the cabin. He taught us how with certain interrogation techniques, violence could
be used without leaving a trace.' Otto was also instructed in torture techniques:
'One has for instance to blindfold the eyes of the person to be interrogated. Then
a piece of meat must be grilled close to the scene while a piece of ice is being
pressed on selected body parts of the person to be interrogated. The coldness of
the ice, combined with the smell of burnt meat, leaves the interrogated in the
belief, that he is being treated with burning metal.'18
Otto explained that Garwood provided the money and most of the equipment.
Some 130 men were trained in the Wamiba centre, almost all former German
Nazis, in interrogation techniques, shooting, use of explosives, setting up of
traps, wireless communication and assassination methods. Most interestingly TD
member Otto also elaborated on that rarely discussed, but very existential and
central, stay-behind question concerning the willingness of secret soldiers to indeed
stay-behind in case of a Soviet invasion.

.....................


After the organisation was discovered, immediate arrests and confiscations
followed on September 18, 1952', Prime Minister Zinn told his parliament. 'But
on October 1, the High National Prosecutor [Oberbundesanwalt] ordered that the
suspects be released, as the organisation had been created on the orders of United
States agencies', whereupon a roar went through the parliament with many
parliamentarians, according to the original transcripts, shouting 'Hear! Hear!', or
'Incredible!' As the parliamentarians calmed down Zinn continued: 'According
to the testimony of a senior member of the TD, liquidations were also planned',
whereupon an even greater roar went through parliament, with members shouting
'Hear! Hear! That's how far we have come already again!' Zinn continued:
'A training centre was set up in Waldmichelbach in Odenwald' and 'The members of
the organisation were mostly former officers of the Air Force, the Army and the
SS.' Again the parliament was in agitation, for all present had lived through the
Second World War and now shouted: 'Listen to this! Incredible!'
Zinn explained that the agents were between 35 and 50 and 'The organisation
received very generous funding, confiscated documents suggest that it received
about 50,000 DM a month'. Whereupon a parliamentarian shouted: 'Where did the
money come from!?' Zinn related that 'The money came from faked orders of an
allegedly US agency to the TD' and went on to explain that 'The same organisation
had a domestic task... According to the testimony of a leading member selected
"unreliable" people should be eliminated in case X', which sent a new storm of
criticism through the parliament with voices shouting 'Killed, that means!
Incredible!' Zinn was well aware of the storm he caused and solemnly continued
that 'interestingly there were 15 sheets of paper on Communists, but 80 pages on
leading Social Democrats... SPD Interior Minister Heinrich Zinnkann of Hesse
was suspected of Communist connections', which next to criticism was commented
with laughter in parliament. 'According to testimonies, much secret material had
been destroyed, some material has been collected by a US official, now therefore
also inaccessible. The money and the weapons were provided by an American, who
supervised the training' leaving parliamentarians once again shouting 'Hear! Hear!'
Zinn had not yet finished: 'What is very important, is to realise, that such secret
organisations outside all German control are the starting base for illegal domestic
activities, this is sad experience our people has had to make already three decades
ago, and these features were manifest also with this organisation', a fierce criticism
which was applauded by parliament with voices shouting 'Correct! That's right!'
198
'Mr. Reeber of the United States this morning', Zinn continued, 'agreed with me,
that such organisations are the starting point for domestic terror... expressed his
most sincere regret and condemned the organisation sharply... He promised not
only his full support to clarify the entire affair completely and uproot all rests of
the organisation, but also to prevent the phenomena from reoccurring.'28
Of course the German Gladio was not dissolved, as the discoveries in 1990
showed. Traces were destroyed whenever possible. Former US High Commissioner
McCloy in October 1952 insisted that the United States were not rearming
the Nazis and that 'during all those years, that I have spent in Germany, our aims
and efforts have been directed towards the aim of strengthening all democratic
forces in Germany, and to fight both the Communists, as well as Neo- and Pro
Nazis'. McCloy emphasised that 'It is therefore unthinkable, that a responsible
American would have supported such activities, as they have been reported by
Prime Minister Zinn. This fact must be expressed clearly, for the sake of truth and
friendship.'29
Despite these assurances the parliament of Hesse decided to have the phenomena
fully investigated by the Interior Minister of Hesse who in a solid democratic
performance in 1953 presented an impressive three-volume long report.30
Four decades later former CIA officer Thomas Polgar, who retired in 1981
after a 30-year long CIA career, well remembered the German Gladio scandal for
he had been stationed in Germany in the early 1950s and in the early 1970s had
come back to the country to replace Ray Cline as the Chief of the German CIA
station. 'The "Bund Deutscher Jugend" was a right-wing political organisation
loosely affiliated with one of the political parties in the state of Hesse in Germany
and it was deemed that these people have the motivation and the willingness to
service part of the underground should the Soviet army indeed overrun all or part
of West Germany', Polgar related in the 1990s. 'When the story broke there
was a considerable flap, and it was deemed desirable that [US] General Truscott
should personally explain to the people involved what had happened and we
explained the situation first to Konrad Adenauer of Germany.' This, as seen above
did not solve the problem and Polgar remembers that 'then we explained it to
General Matthew Ridgeway, who was then the commander-in-chief of NATO,
and finally, and most importantly, we explained it to Prime Minister Georg Zinn
of Hesse, who himself was on that list, and Truscott explained to the Hessian Prime
Minister that this was an unauthorised activity, to be sure only a paper exercise,
but of which he was unaware and it certainly shouldn't be interpreted as in any
way casting aspersions on our confidence in Prime Minister Zinn'.31
That clandestine German stay-behind cells existed not only in the state of
Hesse, but also in other parts of Germany was confirmed by Dieter von Glahn
after the Gladio revelations in 1990. 'Our mission and our organisation were
identical with what is now known about Gladio', Glahn explained.32 An ambiguous
figure of the militant German anti-Communist scene Glahn had fled from a Soviet
prisoner-of-war camp during the Second World War and after the war had joined
the stay-behind secret army as a BDJ-TD member in the northern German state of
Bremen. 'At the time of the Korean war', Glahn explained in his autobiography
199
in 1994, 'the Americans were very worried, that something similar could also
happen in Germany'. Thus 'the Americans decided to recruit and set up a reliable
German unit for day X, the invasion of the Red Army. The unit was to be trained
with American arms, equipped from arms caches, and designed to go under
ground immediately in case of an attack.' Glahn related that 'the BDJ was but the
cover, something like the official arm of an anti-Communist organisation. The
unofficial arm Technischer Dienst, or "Organisation Peters", as it was also called
after its leader, was the real combat core' and existed in numerous parts of Germany.
'The TD thus became an important part of the US-German anti-Soviet defence.
The Americans were mainly interested in former members of the German army'
including himself. 'As my anti-Communist attitudes were well known, I was
recruited. Officially I now was leader of the BDJ in the city of Oldenburg/Ostfriesland.
Unofficially I was the leader of the TD for the entire area Oldenburg
and Bremen-Ostfriesland [northern Germany].'33
Glahn proudly related in his memoirs that the German 'FBI', the Bundesamt
fur Verfassungsschutz (BfV), knew of the secret stay-behind armies and covered
them. T worked very closely together.,. with Neubert of the BfV', Glahn recalled the
anti-Communist battle which united them. At 'nights we regularly hung up posters,
and covered the posters of the Communists... and exposed some Oldenburger
businessmen, who collaborated with the Communists. In this there were often
violent clashes.' It was at 'that time I founded many subgroups of the BDJ in my
area' with support of the CIA who trained in Waldmichelbach and the US base
Grafenwohr. T myself have taken part in such trainings several times. Members
received a brownish US combat dress, were only allowed to communicate by first
name, came from all over Germany, but were forbidden to tell the others where
they lived. Practically we were completely isolated from the world there for four
weeks.' Gladiators received 'extensive training for day X. At that time secret
American arms caches were erected in all parts of Western Germany. In my area
only my deputy and I knew the exact location of the arms cache... our cache was
well buried in a little forest.'34
Not only the German stay-behind network, but also the German secret service
ORG and its staff survived the 1952 discovery of parts of the German Gladio
almost without a scratch due to the protection of the powerful CIA. General
Reinhard Gehlen remained in charge and in 1956 the 'Organisation Gehlen'
changed its label to 'Bundesnachrichtendienst' (BND). When CIA Director Allan
Dulles was once asked whether he did not feel ashamed to cooperate with Nazi
Gehlen the former replied: 'I don't know if he is a rascal. There are few archbishops
in espionage... Besides, one needn't ask him to one's club.'35 When even the
German government, under Conservative chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger and
Socialist vice-chancellor and Foreign Minister Willy Brandt, started to distrust
its compromised secret service BND the latter was investigated in detail for the
first time in its history.
The ensuing 'Mercker Report' allegedly was 'a horror document for the
BND, which is kept under lock and key until today', the German press reported
200
still in 1995. 'Its shattering conclusion on the BND: " A corrupt organisation".'
36 Reinhard Gehlen, sharply attacked by the governmental investigation,
was not even allowed to read the report. And the Germann Socialists who with
Willy Brandt, for the first time after the war, had entered the government were
so embarrassed by the top Nazi within the executive that upon receiving the
Mercker report they sacked Gehlen after a remarkably long career of more than
20 years at the head of the German secret service on worker's day May 1, 1968.
In order not to upset the While House Gehlen was replaced by Gerhard Wessel
who had served as West Germany's military attache in Washington after 1945
and ever since cultivated close links with the CIA and the US national security
establishment.
It is unknown whether the classified Mercker report also contained data on the
stay-behind activities of the ORG and the BND, but evidence which surfaced
during the 1990 Gladio investigations suggests that it does. The short report of
the German government on the BND and its stay-behind of December 1990,
claims that a legal basis for the German stay-behind had been created in December
1968, thus only a few months after the Mercker report had been completed:
'In December 1968 the Chief of the Chancellors Ministry had explicitly stated in
article 16 of the "General Directives for the BND" that preparations for a defence
situation shall be taken.' Presumably the government at the time had decided to
continue to run the stay-behind but wanted to back the operation with a legal
basis: 'That directive reads: "The BND carries out the necessary preparations and
planning for the defence case, in general questions upon agreement with the chief
of Chancellor's Ministry."'37 German journalist and Gladio author Leo Muller
wondered in 1990 'how much anti-democratic secret organisations substance was
also contained in the later stay-behinds of the German secret service, which were
discovered in October 1990?'38
Whether the removal of Gehlen and the introduction of the new law reduced
the dominant role of the CIA in the German stay-behind remains doubtful.
Former German Gladio member Glahn in his book makes it a point that ultimately
the CIA was in charge: 'I intentionally write of "secret services" in the plural,
because we were later united with the secret service Organisation Gehlen on the
orders of the Americans.' Glahn relates that although Gehlen was the key player in
the German stay-behind, overall command rested with the US: 'This organisation
had been named after its founder, General Gehlen... He set up an excellent secret
service centre in Pullach close to Munich', Glahn relates and stressed that "The
Technische Dienst TD was in constant contact with the residents of the Gehlen
Organisation. The military task, however, for day X, remained firmly in the
hands of the Americans.'39 When the cover of the German secret army was
blown in 1952 Gehlen and others had been offered an exile in the United States in
order to protect them from further German investigations. 'I was offered to be
flown to the United States, as other members of the TD, which were involved
in a criminal trial. I have discussed this with my wife at length... but decided
that I did not want to be an emigre. My place was here in Germany.'40
201