A Nickel Saved

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More pointlessly convoluted conspiracy tales, step right up into the funhouse.
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The Intelligence Officer's Bookshelf
Intelligence in Recent Public Literature
Compiled and Reviewed by Hayden B. Peake

This section contains brief reviews of recent books of interest to both the 
intelligence professional and the student of intelligence.

James H. Critchfield. Partners at the Creation: The Men Behind Postwar Germany's 
Defense and Intelligence Establishments. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 
2003. 243 pages, bibliography, glossary, photos, index.

In April 1945 Adolph Hitler fired Brigadier General Reinhard Gehlen, his 
intelligence chief on the Russian front, for producing pessimistic estimates. By 
the end of the war, one month later, Gehlen had buried his prolific files on the 
Red Army and soon surrendered to the Americans. He then proposed to make the 
files available to fill the intelligence gap in the Russian order of battle, if 
he and his staff could be put to work as an intelligence organization under the 
US Army. And that is what happened. In 1947, security, funding, and control 
problems prompted the Army to turn the organization, called simply The Org, 
over to the newly formed CIA. Organizationally, the transfer made sense since 
the CIA was concerned with foreign civilian intelligence services. But there was 
a problem: who would be in charge? The CIA officers in Germany thought The Org 
was staffed with Nazis—there were some in the counterintelligence element—and no 
one was "interested in picking up this hot potato," w
rote Richard Helms, the CIA division chief tasked with filling the slot. Helms 
goes on to say, "At the moment I was most desperate, Colonel James Critchfield's 
file crossed my desk."1 A regular Army armor officer, Critchfield had fought 
from Southern France to Bavaria. After the war he spent two years as a staff 
intelligence officer before returning to the States for advanced armor training. 
In school he decided that intelligence was the career he wanted to pursue and 
applied to the CIA. Partners at the Creation is the story of his assignment to 
Germany to make a one month study of The Org that became an eight-year tour. 
It ended only when The Org became the official foreign intelligence service, the 
Bundesnachrichendienst (BND), of Federal Republic of Germany in 1956.

http://tinyurl.com/ysnudq

THE ORIGINS OF THE CIA
Helms went on to work closely with General Reinhard Gehlen, the notorious 
Nazi spymaster who was hired by US intelligence to set up an organization 
within the CIA. The Gehlen Org recruited thousands of Nazi agents to run 
covert operations in Eastern Europe after the war. Gehlen is, of course, 
not mentioned in any of recent news reports on Helms. Neither is the fact 
that the OSS (the US agency that preceded the CIA) had a lot in common 
with the SS. To both, the biggest evil in the word was summed up in one 
word, communism. And to both, the elimination of communists, labour 
activists and other undesirable elements that got in the way of 
corporatism was their chief preoccupation.

http://tinyurl.com/23obhx