Dissemmination of Nonsense ad Infinitum: A Historiographical Examination of General Reinhard Gehlen

GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY

DISSEMINATION OF NONSENSE AD INFINITUM:

A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL EXAMINATION OF GENERAL REINHARD GEHLEN

GEST 501: MODERN GERMAN AND EUROPEAN HISTORY

DR. ROGER CHICKERING

BY

SEAN P. MCBRIDE

WASHINGTON, DC

10 DECEMBER 2009

AD MAIOREM DEI GLORIAM

McBride, 1

On April 1, 1942, Lieutenant Colonel Reinhard Gehlen assumed command of the German

General Staff intelligence division, Fremde Heere Ost [Foreign Armies East]. On February 27,

1945, Brigadier General Reinhard Gehlen personally met with Adolf Hitler in the Reich

Chancellery. On July 1, 1946, Herr Reinhard Gehlen and several American intelligence analysts

departed Washington, DC, on a troop transport for Europe. On September 20, 1950, Gehlen met

with Konrad Adenauer at the Koenig Museum in Bonn. On April 1, 1956, Gehlen was

commissioned a Lieutenant General in the newly formed Bundeswehr. As this string of events

suggests, Gehlen continually worked to develop and operate an intelligence network against the

Soviet Union from 1942 until his 1968 retirement from the Bundesnachrichtensdienst [BND or

Federal Intelligence Service]; first for Hitler, but then for the United States and West Germany.

This spymaster’s unusual biography begs several important questions: What sort of person was

Reinhard Gehlen? Why was he employed by the United States and later the West German state

in such an important role given his association with Hitler and the Third Reich? What did this

association mean in light of the subsequent Cold War?

The study of these crucial questions is fundamentally problematic, as historians of

espionage by nature work in oxymoronic territory. Spies covertly seek to uncover and maintain

secrets, and historians overtly seek to research and analyze facts in order to form coherent

narratives. Thus the goal of intelligence history ironically violates the goal of intelligence

organizations. These opposing goals have led to a conflict-ridden modus vivendi between

historians and the intelligence community regarding the acquisition of sources. Because of the

difficulty intelligence historians have at uncovering primary sources, this paper will limit its

historiographical examination of Gehlen to the best-documented period his life: his career from

his 1942 assignment to the Fremde Heere Ost until the 1956 conversion of his intelligence

McBride, 2

organization into the West German BND. Because the Fremde Heere Ost and the U.S.-backed

Gehlen Organization are arguably the best-documented fields of intelligence history due to

recent declassification efforts, this paper will further use the historiographical development of

Gehlen’s narrative to highlight the technical and theoretical difficulties inherent in the

historicization of espionage.

It is absolutely essential to note that the historiography of Reinhard Gehlen is a

historiography of declassification, not of debate. This crucial distinction necessitates a particular

structure for this historiographic investigation. Because of the modus vivendi between historians

and the intelligence community, Gehlen’s historiography must be structured around the halts and

spurts of declassification. For example, Mary Ellen Reese’s 1990 work on Gehlen had little

impact on Timothy Naftali’s 2005 work. Naftali acknowledged Reese’s “expert interviewing”

and successful efforts at obtaining classified materials under the Freedom of Information Act, but

he completely dismissed her analysis with the statement that she “did a good job, but there were

serious gaps in the information she received,” referring to the subsequent declassification of

thousands of CIA documents under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998.1 Because the

declassification of primary sources in this field is so tumultuous, historians have rarely had time

to engage in meaningful analytical debate before their analyses are rendered obsolete by the

declassification of revolutionary new primary sources.

The name Reinhard Gehlen first received public attention in March of 1952, when Sefton

Delmer, who had assisted British Intelligence during World War II, published a whistleblower

article entitled “Hitler’s General now spies for Dollars,” based off a tip from MI6 aimed to

1 Richard Breitman et al, U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005),

376.

McBride, 3

weaken Gehlen, “a man whom they did not trust.”2 Following upon Gehlen’s inauspicious entry

into the public domain, numerous other newspapers picked up the story and began their own

critical investigations of Gehlen throughout the 1950’s. For historians, these sensationalist

exposés have been highly problematic due to their opaque interviews conducted “off the record”

and their highly sensationalized rhetoric. Although anonymity was likely needed to protect the

sources from retribution by counterintelligence agents, these articles have been largely criticized

by historians as “based on sources unavailable to others.”3 This is especially troubling

considering the sensationalized rhetoric of many of these articles. The Berliner Zeitung

exemplified both of these shortcomings in an article from 1956 that cited an unattributed former

Luftwaffe Intelligence Officer who allegedly overheard Gehlen say “Humaneness [is] a pretty

thing for men like Kant and Schopenhauer, but in our work [it is] mere dead weight [ballast].”4

Unable to personally verify the journalist’s confidential sources, historians have been forced to

either ignore the articles or accept their conclusions as given.

In many ways, journalists’ sensationalist tendencies towards Gehlen are understandable.

During World War II, covert organizations such as the Gestapo carried out many heinous acts.

Even in the traditionally professionalized field of military intelligence, the Nazi Party’s SD-

Geheimdienst largely replaced Gehlen’s Fremde Heere Ost as the dominant intelligence service

of the Third Reich. Due to this negative experience with covert German organizations during

World War II, reporters such as Sefton Delmer naturally reacted critically to the news that

“Hitler’s General now spies for Dollars.” Unable to know for sure, reporters assumed the worst

based off the few interviews they could obtain, as exemplified by Delmer’s admission that “I

2 Breitman et al, U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, 407.

3 Breitman et al, U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, i.

4 Julius Mader, Die Graue Hand: Eine Abrechnung mit dem Bonner Geheimdienst (East Berlin: Kongress

Verlag, 1960), 30.

McBride, 4

cannot help sharing the misgivings of another German general, who was most anxious that I

should keep his identity secret for fear of reprisals against him.”5 Unable to disprove their own

suspicions through investigative research, reporters’ sensationalized rhetoric reflected their

common fears of anti-democratic domestic espionage and German revanchism.

Drawing on these journalistic exposés as primary sources, the first published books on

Reinhard Gehlen were the highly polemical and propagandistic works of East Germany. All of

these works, including Die Graue Hand in 1960 and Nicht Länger Geheim in 1966 were written

by the same author: Julius Mader. Mader was one of the principal propagandists of the East

German regime, belonging to the Socialist Unity Party [SED], reporting as a journalist for

several Communist newspapers, earning a doctorate with a dissertation on the “development,

system, and methods” of the “imperialist” German intelligence service, and authoring over ten

highly-critical books on the American and West German intelligence services leading up to the

fall of the Berlin Wall.6

Mader relied heavily on numerous critical newspaper articles from both sides of the Iron

Curtain to substantiate his Marxist demonization of Gehlen, often quoting entire paragraphs or

reprinting entire newspaper clippings from Newsweek, Times, France-soir, and the communist

Freies Volk as a springboard for his own unsubstantiated polemics. After printing a clipping of

the first few paragraphs of a Sefton Delmer article entitled “JOBS for the Gestapo BOYS:

THEY’RE BACK AT THE OLD GAME,” Mader used Delmer’s interview with an anonymous

German general who “believes that Gehlen is using his influence to see that it is the Nazi type of

officer who gains control of the new German army when it is formed” to add Western credibility

5 Mader, Die Graue Hand, 30.

6 Wer war wer in der DDR?, 4th ed., s.v. “Julius Mader.”

McBride, 5

to his characterization of Gehlen as the central policy entrepreneur of the early Cold War. 7

Unsubstantiated by sources, Mader instead turned to literary tropes. Possibly drawing

from Faust, Mader accused the “Fascist General Staff Officer”8 Gehlen of planting “the seed of

Satan” 9

in the Anti-Fascist alliance through his “diabolical plan”10

to “convince some or all of

the Western Allies to cooperate against the Soviets.”11

In other words, the Faustian bargain was

Gehlen’s exchange of intelligence for the mantle of “America's number one Spy in Europe…

without the knowledge of either the US Congress or the American People.”12

The Faust-like

United States thus gained intelligence on the Soviet Union, but at the expense of losing its

democratic Soul, fighting an ideological Cold War with an erstwhile ally, and aiding in the

resurrection of Hitler's General Staff and the rearmament of Germany.

Access to classified government documents is a rare luxury in the field of intelligence

history. Those interested in Reinhard Gehlen and Axis espionage in World War II benefit from

the total and complete destruction of those regimes in 1945. Upon the end of the war, the Allies

published and microfilmed a significant body of captured government documents. Because

Reinhard Gehlen voluntarily surrendered his meticulously preserved files to the Americans in

1945 in exchange for clemency, the Fremde Heere Ost documents total some 36,852 typescript

pages.13

The publication of these documents led to series of books on the German World War II

intelligence establishment. However, because Gehlen was only responsible for a small part of





11 Julius Mader and Albrecht Charisius, Nicht Länger Geheim: Entwicklung, System und Arbeitsweise des

imperialistischen deutschen Geheimdienstes (East Berlin: Deutscher Militärverlag, 1969), 135. 12

Mader and Charisius, Nicht Länger Geheim, 136 13

E.H. Cookridge, Gehlen: Spy of the Century (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1972), 384.

McBride, 6

just one of the numerous competing intelligence organizations, his presence in these books was

limited. For example, in Gert Buchheit’s 1966 Der deutsche Geheimdienst, Gehlen appeared

only twice. In this brief account, Buchheit portrayed Gehlen as a skilled intelligence officer

locked in a “monstrous game of Cowboys and Indians” against the Nazi Party’s competing

intelligence organ, the SD-Geheimdienst.14

Based on former classified intelligence documents,

Buchheit showed that the SD used its clout within the Nazi Party to convince Hitler’s entourage

that Gehlen’s intelligence reports merely reflected a Soviet bluff, leading Buchheit to conclude

that “it would have been better had Hitler listened more to the Head of… the Fremde Heere Ost

and less to the reports of his SD-Geheimdienst.”15

Buchheit’s work was significant in Gehlen’s

historiography in several regards. First, its conclusions were drawn exclusively from archival

research of the captured German documents. Second, its characterization of Gehlen was much

more nuanced than previous accounts, likely drawing from Buchheit’s own experience as an

intelligence officer during World War II. Although this work did not address Gehlen post 1945,

it formed an influential methodical contrast to the opaque biases of the journalistic exposés and

the propagandistic polemics of Julius Mader.

General Reinhard Gehlen’s retirement from the BND in 1968 precipitated a surge in

media coverage. Much of this coverage initially concerned the role that Willy Brandt’s

Ostpolitik played in the retirement of Germany’s Cold Warrior par excellence, but gradually

media attention reverted to more general speculative and sensationalized accounts in the mold of

Sefton Delmer’s 1952 “Hitler’s General now spies for Dollars.” 1971 became “the climax of the

publicity,” when Der Spiegel featured a fifteen-issue series, which its authors Heinz Höhne and

Hermann Zolling thought “destroyed” the mythic legend which [Gehlen] had so carefully

14

Gert Buchheit, Der deutsche Geheimdienst: Geschichte der militärischen Abwehr (München: List

Verlag, 1966), 435. 15

Buchheit, Der deutsche Geheimdienst, 435.

McBride, 7

preserved for decades” by exposing “the rise, the achievements, the weaknesses and the

mismanagements of the spy-king.”16

Due to substantial response, including Reinhard Gehlen’s

autobiographical counterattack,17

Heinz Höhne and Hermann Zolling published an expanded

account of their Spiegel article entitled The General was a Spy: The Truth about General Gehlen

and his Spy Ring.

The General was a Spy significantly pioneered several improvements in the collection

and analysis of sources. Regarding newspaper sources, Höhne and Zolling countered Mader’s

parroting of anti-Gehlen articles by developing a more complex system of subjecting newspaper

texts to varying degrees of criticism based off its perceived trustworthiness.18

Regarding oral

accounts, Höhne and Zolling also attempted to strike a balance between scholastic transparency

and the need to “assure their informants that any degree of privacy desired would be respected…

in order that their personal safety would be guaranteed against any possible investigations by

BND officials.”19

The result was the inclusion of vague footnotes, such as “Information from

BND circles,” “statement on oath, in private ownership,” and “conversation between one of the

authors and ‘Hunter,’ 10 September 1969.”20

Although by no means transparent, this approach

16

Heinz Höhne and Hermann Zolling, The General was a Spy: The Truth about General Gehlen and his

Spy Ring (New York: Coward, McCann, and Geoghegan, Inc, 1972), xxiii. 17

Generally, these memoirs were considered a disappointment due to Gehlen’s refusal to leak classified

information. Because this author considers Gehlen’s memoirs a primary source, they will not be treated in

this paper. 18

When Höhne and Zolling cite from Der Spiegel or the Spiegel archives, they list solely that source within

the footnote. When they use facts presented by other Western news publications, they reference at least

two corroborating sources. For example, they use articles from The Times, the Deutsche Zeitung, and the

Süddeutsche Zeitung to corroborate their assessment of East German penetration of the BND. When they

use the arguments, analysis, or rhetoric of other Western newspapers, they typically quote the source

verbatim without explicitly mentioning the source in text, where they directly quote their source’s

assessment that Gehlen “for thirteen years successfully competed with Greta Garbo in his ambition to

remain undetected,” but the reader has to turn to the endnotes to discover that this was quoted from the

Industriekurier. In contrast, when they quote East-Bloc sources (either newspapers or Julius Mader), they

explicitly mention the source in text, when they begin their citation of the Täglich Rundschau with the

comment, “the Tägliche Rundscahu, the official Soviet organ, said…” 19

Höhne and Zolling, The General was a Spy, 335. 20

Höhne and Zolling, The General was a Spy, 336.

McBride, 8

was a vast improvement over previous refusal to even acknowledge that these “off the record”

interviews took place. Regarding documentary sources, Höhne and Zolling adopted

methodology similar to Buchheit to integrate the captured Fremde Heere Ost documents into

their World War II portion of Gehlen’s narrative. Due to these methodological improvements,

The General was a Spy notably advanced the historization of the Gehlen narrative.

Höhne and Zolling’s selection and analysis of primary sources substantially shaped their

characterization of Gehlen. Like Mader, many of their footnotes cited newspaper accounts for

their opaque unattributed sources, but unlike Mader, Höhne and Zolling criticized that a “lack of

information led writers and journalists to produce an increasingly outrageous series of stories

about Gehlen,” leading them to attempt “to penetrate this safety-curtain of calculated legend and

deliberate falsehood.” 21

By combining textual criticism of newspaper sources with oral accounts

and the captured German documents, Höhne and Zolling produced a substantially complex

characterization of Gehlen. During the pre-1945 period when these authors primarily used the

captured German documents, they characterized Gehlen, much like Buchheit, as a pragmatic

intelligence mastermind that could read “communist Russia [like] an open book,” and on whom

“the SS death-ray was… beamed.”22

In contrast, when Höhne and Zolling treated the post-1945

story in the absence of declassified documents, their characterization more closely resembled

that of Julius Mader. Thus, their assertion that Gehlen sought to “commit the US occupier on the

German side” by “exploiting the differences between the United States and the Soviet Union”

closely resembled Mader’s classification of Gehlen as the policy entrepreneur of the Cold War.

Remarkably, this tonal and analytical contrast hinged on the type of source used, highlighting the

significant impact of primary sources on Gehlen’s historiography

21

Höhne and Zolling, The General was a Spy, 4. 22

Höhne and Zolling, The General was a Spy, 29.

McBride, 9

E.H. Cookridge’s23

1972 work entitled Gehlen: Spy of the Century failed in its attempt to

break Gehlen’s historiography free from the sensationalized accounts of the press. Cookridge,

who wrote numerous popular accounts of espionage during the Cold War, characterized the

journalistic accounts of Gehlen as “based on guesswork rather than facts” because “even the

most tenacious reporters were unable to discover where he lived, or whether he was married and

had any children.”24

Having decided to “refrain from including” this “speculative tittle-tattle

about Gehlen,”25

Cookridge’s intention was to craft a narrative that only cited details that could

be “fully authenticated and supported by documentary evidence.”26

Cookridge thus spent three

years conducting archival research in West Germany, East Germany, and the Soviet Union

following Gehlen’s 1968 retirement. Unfortunately, lack of available sources made Cookridge’s

goal impossible, instead transforming his post-1945 narrative into a speculative extrapolation

based off the World War II archival records.27

Cookridge’s extensive archival research reflected

his commendable attempt at crafting a narrative free of speculation, but his archival research in

the Soviet Union and East Germany turned out to be relatively fruitless, demonstrating that the

abandonment of speculative journalistic sources could only be achieved through the

declassification of government documents.

Although Cookridge’s characterization of Reinhard Gehlen lacked Höhne and Zolling’s

contradictory pre- and post-1945 divergence of tone, his account cannot be considered any more

historical than previous narratives. Cookridge refused to use newspaper articles, but his

documentation of alternate sources consisted exclusively of vague allusions to “first hand

23

E.H. Cookridge was one of several pseudonyms used by Edward Spiro. Because the pseudonym is more

commonly known, it will be used throughout this paper. 24

Cookridge, Gehlen: Spy of the Century, 8. 25



Cookridge’s chapter on the Gehlen Organization cites only two primary sources, both of which date from

before 1945.

McBride, 10

information from a number of [Gehlen’s] assistants and former officers of the Gehlen

Organization and the [BND],” suggesting that his scholarship was predisposed to the favorable

tone of those close to Gehlen. 28

Additionally, because his documentary evidence consisted

merely of the captured German documents, Cookridge’s characterization of Gehlen greatly

resembled Buchheit, describing Gehlen as “the Spy of the Century,” who “reared in the tradition

of Prussian discipline.., accepted the authority of the State, whatever its political persuasion.”29

In contrast to Mader, Höhne, and Zolling’s argument that Gehlen was the policy entrepreneur of

the Cold War, Cookridge countered with the unsubstantiated assertion that Gehlen was “a

peacemaker” that “prevented… rash action” by sending “urgent reports to Washington stating

that… the Soviet bark would not be followed by a bite.”30

Nevertheless, it is impossible to know

to what degree Cookridge’s characterization of Gehlen was justified due to his to document his

interviews.

In the late 1980s, the journalist and popular historian Mary Ellen Reese dramatically

changed the historiography of Gehlen by triggering the initial declassification of U.S. Army

documents relating to the Gehlen Organization. Reese initially sought a few answers to

questions she had on Reinhard Gehlen, but she concluded that her “answers [were] not to be

found in published accounts” due to the two flaw of being “virtually all German… [with] a

considerable axe to grind”31

and being “distorted” because of “the absence of [primary sources]

28




Her omission of Cookridge’s accout likely related to the transparency of primary sources. Because

Reese was able to personally examine and reinterpret all of the Fremde Heere Ost sources listed in

Cookridge’s bibliography, she did not cite him. In contrast, Reese cited Höhne and Zolling often because

she could not personally examine or reinterpret their numerous facts and quotations derived from the

Spiegel archives and their confidential interviews.

McBride, 11

from the Americans.”32

Because of these perceived flaws, Reese decided to seek out new

American sources in order to write her own impartial narrative. After the CIA refused even

“either to confirm or deny that any relationship between Gehlen and the CIA ever existed,” the

U.S. Army luckily agreed to release “well over a thousand” new intelligence documents on the

1950s Gehlen Organization in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act.33

Because of

the declassification of these Army documents, around two dozen intelligence officers, who were

previously reluctant to divulge classified information, now agreed to Reese’s requests for

interviews, forming a chain of eyewitness accounts that ran from the end of the Gehlen

Organization to the creation of the BND. In contrast to the previous oral interviews preformed

by Höhne and Zolling, Reese openly detailed the identities of the intelligence officials she

interviewed. These two new developments in primary sources allowed Reese to compose the

first narrative extensively supported by transparent and verifiable evidence, suggesting the

opening of a new historiographical chapter.

Reese’s characterization of Gehlen drew directly from the newly declassified sources and

expert interviews. In terms of Gehlen’s abilities as an intelligence officer, her characterization

matched Buchheit and Cookridge, largely due to the consistent treatment of Gehlen in both the

captured World War II documents and the newly declassified U.S. Army documents. However,

her interviews with Eric Waldman, one of the Army officers who she classified as having helped

Gehlen throughout the period of the Gehlen Organization, led her to a full rebuttal of Gehlen as

either Mader, Höhne, and Zolling’s Cold War policy entrepreneur or Cookridge’s peacemaker.

Instead, she treated Gehlen as a pragmatist that sought to shape “the position and role of postwar

Germany in a new Europe whose political landscape he knew would be dominated by the

32

Mary Ellen Reese, General Reinhard Gehlen: The CIA Connection (Fairfax: George Mason University

Press, 1990), xii. 33

Reese, The CIA Connection, xiii.

McBride, 12

relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States.”34

Due to the declassification of

Army documents and the corroboration of expert witnesses, Reese offered the first realistic

glimpse at the historical Reinhard Gehlen.

Gehlen’s historiography suggested to varying degrees that the Gehlen Organization hired

former intelligence officers from the Nazi Party’s SD-Geheimdienst. In the light of events such

as the 1986 election of Kurt Waldheim in Austria, the 1988 publication of freelance journalist

Christopher Simpson’s Blowback35

, and the 1995 Swiss debate about stolen Jewish gold,

pressure increased on the U.S. Congress to declassify the CIA documents relating to the possible

employment of war criminals and former Nazis within the CIA-backed Gehlen Organization.36

The outcome of this pressure was the passage of the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act,

which resulted in the declassification of 8 million pages of U.S. government records, including

thousands of new documents on Gehlen.37

Soon after its passage, four of the consulting

academic historians for the Nazi War Criminal and Imperial Japanese Records Interagency

Working Group decided to co-author a book entitled U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis.

In one of the chapters of this book, Timothy Naftali used the newly declassified

documents to analyze “the origins, implication, and results of the U.S. government’s postwar

sponsorship of Reinhard Gehlen, and of the organization that became the [BND].”38

As

suggested by his aforementioned characterization that Reese “did a good job, but [that] there

were serious gaps in the information she received,” Naftali’s primary purpose was to fill in those

34

Reese, The CIA Connection, xiii. 35

Christopher Simpson’s Blowback was a sensationalized account that “examined U.S. recruitment of still

other former SS men, Nazis, and collaborators” and the “unexpected… negative effects at home.”

Christopher Simpson, Blowback (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988), 5. 36

Jens Wegener, Die Organisation Gehlen und die USA: Deutsch-amerikanische

Geheimdienstbeziehungen 1945-1949 (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2008), 5. 37

Breitman et al, U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, i. 38

Breitman et al, U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, 376.

McBride, 13

gaps with the newly declassified CIA documents. Citing documents from CIA analysts that had

previously analyzed Gehlen’s operations through Ultra, he concluded that the Gehlen’s unit

“preformed only marginally better than the average German intelligence unit in World War II.”39

Naftali similarly traced an active campaign by a group of CIA analysts against the U.S. Army’s

sponsorship of the Gehlen Organization due to “Gehlen’s careless employment of Nazi war

criminals.” 40

Like Reese, Naftali portrayed Gehlen as a pragmatist that sought to help Germany,

but his portrayal greatly emphasized the negative elements of this pragmatism, such as Gehlen’s

willingness to play the U.S. Army and the CIA off one another and to hire former members of the

Nazi Party’s SD-Geheimdienst.

Due to the large-scale declassification efforts that accompanied the Freedom of

Information Act and the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, the German Intelligence services of

World War II and the 1950s are now the best-documented sectors in all of intelligence history.

As a result, the first decade of the 21st century has seen a veritable German-language boom on

West and East German espionage in the early Cold War. The most significant author of this

boom is the young PhD candidate Jens Wegener. Possibly due to the inability of graduate

students to actively chase down classified documents and evade counterintelligence agents,

Wegener does not claim to have uncovered new primary sources, but instead has simply focused

on reinterpreting the analytical elements of the Gehlen narrative. Although his dissertation is

still under work, his 2008 Magisterarbeit entitled Die Organisation Gehlen und die USA

promisingly reinterpreted the existing sources on the Gehlen Organization using the lens of the

transatlantic relationship. Despite the fact that Wegener’s characterization of Gehlen differed

little from Naftali, his scholarship significantly suggests that Gehlen’s historiography might have

39

Breitman et al, U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, 378. 40

Breitman et al, U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis, 406.

McBride, 14

reached a point where analytical debate has surpassed the declassification of primary sources as

the dominant element of historiographical discourse.

Due to the lack of meaningful analytical debate between historians, the reader may judge

this paper to be a failed attempt at historiographical analysis. The author believes that this failure

is itself quite instructive. Intelligence history is commonly criticized as ahistorical. For

example, a declassified CIA report entitled “Intelligence in recent public literature” (which was

presumably written by an agent with access to classified knowledge on Gehlen) classified all of

the books then available (including those by Julius Mader, Heinz Höhne, Herman Zolling, and E.

H. Cookridge) as “based largely on speculation… and… a great deal of proven nonsense,”

predicting that the ongoing historiography of Reinhard Gehlen would be “the dissemination of

nonsense… ad infinitum, as each successive writer draws on his predecessor.” 41

This criticism

cuts back to the problem of sources. Hard sources that can be printed, verified, and openly

discussed are typically a nonentity in intelligence history. Instead, historians have often had to

take numerous leaps of faith by accepting the information presented by unnamed sources or

allegedly leaked documents. In concrete terms, this means that most footnotes refer to

unverifiable facts presented in newspaper articles, memoirs, interviews, and other historical

literature. To transform this shaky foundation into a coherent narrative, a large degree of

speculation is required. Specifically regarding Gehlen’s historiography, these general

characterizations accurately reflect the situation that authors encountered prior to Mary Ellen

Reese’s success in obtaining new declassified documents. Just as prehistory describes the period

prior to recorded history, prehistoriography describes the period prior to documentary evidence.

Scholarship on Gehlen prior to 1990 is therefore best considered prehistoriographic.

41

Central Intelligence Agency. Intelligence in recent public literature: Four books on the chief of the West

German intelligence service. Book Review, 1972.

McBride, 15

For examinations of Gehlen prior to the 1956 formation of the BND, the era of

prehistoriography is at an end. This does not imply that declassification is over, but rather that

declassification will no longer occur at the expense of analytical debate between historians. This

shift is clear in the ongoing doctoral work of Jens Wegener and the 1993 formation of the

International Intelligence History Association, which seeks to promote “interdisciplinary

research and teaching in the field of intelligence history.”42

As intelligence history continues to

become a respectable field of scholarly research, the historiography of Reinhard Gehlen will

continue to evolve. As historians continue to replace reporters, the emphasis of Gehlen’s

historiography will shift from methodological problems associated with primary sources towards

academic debate focusing on analytical and philosophical perspectives. The way forwards is

clear. Historians must counter the cynical CIA prediction of “dissemination of nonsense… ad

infinitum” and continue the difficult historization of intelligence history.

42

International Intelligence History Association; available from <http://www.intelligence-history.org/>;

accessed 10 December 2009

McBride, 16

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Dissemmination of Nonsense ad Infinitum: A Historiographical Examination of General Reinhard Gehlen

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