sides were able to gain almost full knowledge of one another’s capabili-
ties. Hitler, however, quickly ordered an end to such cooperation, just
as he prohibited German agents from entering Britain in the hope of
fostering closer ties. When the massive Barbarossa offensive began to
stall, it became glaringly clear how much the Fremde Heere Ost (FHO;
Foreign Armies East) had underestimated the strength of Soviet forces.
In a move that would have profound repercussions extending well into
the postwar period, Reinhard Gehlen was appointed head of the FHO
in the spring of 1942 and gained a reputation among his peers for his
skill as an evaluator.
World War II further saw intense activity on the code-breaking
front. Because of the subsequent fame surrounding the breaking of the
Enigma keys at Bletchley Park, there has been a tendency to overlook
German achievements in this area. Not only were many of the French
codes read, but the naval intelligence unit managed to break several
codes used by the British navy, especially those related to the convoy
traffic in the Atlantic. Aided immeasurably by Tyler Kent, German
cryptanalysts had some early success in tapping into American diplo-
matic traffic, but that ended rather quickly and was more than offset by
the compromised dispatches of Hiroshi Oshima back to Tokyo. Prob-
ably the most significant effort on the part of the Germans involved
the detection of the Rote Kapelle (Red Orchestra) by the Funkabwehr
(Radio Security Service).
Although Germany’s intelligence agencies lay in ruins in 1945, the
situation actually provided fertile ground for Gehlen. As relations with
the Soviet Union began to cool rapidly, the United States suddenly real-
ized how little was known about their emerging antagonist. Shrewdly
gaining the confidence of his American captors, Gehlen was able to
provide both a large archive of important documents related to the situ-
ation in the East and a number of experts from his former FHO staff.
This nucleus grew into the Organisation Gehlen (OG) and operated for
the next 10 years—from 1946 to 1956—under the direct control of U.S.
authorities, first the army and then the Central Intelligence Agency.
Especially noteworthy was Operation Hermes—the OG’s massive col-
lection and collation of debriefings of former German prisoners of war
and refugees returning from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
Yet this U.S.-German relationship was not without a certain fric-
tion, and Gehlen heartily welcomed the transition of the OG to the
INTRODUCTION • xxxi