Gehlen Organization
The Gehlen Organization was in June 1946 by U.S. occupation authorities in the American occupation zone of German personnel, consisting of remnants of the 12th Division of the Army General Staff ( FHO ), educated intelligence service. She was the forerunner of the Federal Intelligence Service (BND). Your seat after the foundation was initially Camp King in Oberursel im Taunus, since December 6, 1947, the former imperial settlement Rudolf Hess in Pullach near Munich, which is still the main location of the BND. This date gave the BND headquarters nicknamed "Camp Nicholas ". In the late 1940s, the Gehlen organization comprised around 4,000 people.
Reinhard Gehlen
The head of the Gehlen Organization and later the first President of the Federal Intelligence Service, Major General Reinhard Gehlen, was found shortly after the end of World War II the armed forces of the United States and entered into their services. A few months later he was commissioned and funded by the American occupation authorities, the organization and this helped " Foreign Armies East Division " of the former German General Staff, for the assessment of the enemy situation by collecting and interpreting messages many former employees of previously headed by him was responsible for a new career in the young Federal Republic.
Gehlen's Foreign Armies East ( FHO ) had the reputation of systematically and accurately documenting detail and different - according to Walter Schellenberg - as from other German intelligence services from the time of National Socialism.
Close to National Socialism
It succeeded Gehlen, even if he himself is emphatically denied a large number of the surviving members of his former department to care for the service because they were often provided in her new position with a new identity. Have been set to a large extent the Former SS, the SD, the Gestapo, the defense and especially army officers. A CIA study estimates the early 1950s, the proportion of former SS, SD and SA members to 8%. It is estimated that in the late 1940s around 400 most senior staff had such a background. In 1970 were 25 to 30 percent of the employees of the BND former members of these organizations. From them the first unnamed, in the language known as the Gehlen Organisation intelligence originated in the U.S. occupation zone. The U.S. government was interested in the expertise of the Enlightenment people from the "Third Reich", as their own intelligence possessed at that time, as the Cold War began to emerge, little knowledge about the Soviet military. In addition to the military intelligence and espionage against the Soviet occupation zone and other Eastern Bloc countries, the Gehlen organization should also ward off a possible " communist threat " in the interior of West Germany.
Service of the U.S. Army
The Americans operated the new intelligence initially as a department of the U.S. Army, later, on 1 July 1949 took over him, which was founded in 1947 CIA. The CIA leader in Pullach from November 1948 to 1956 was James H. Critchfield ( code name Kent J. Marshall). At this time the Gehlen Organization was funded with an annual U.S. $ 1.5 million by the United States. The first important for the American operation of the organization was the radio reconnaissance of the Soviet Air Force during the Berlin Airlift. The infiltration of spies and saboteurs in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, however, has had little success.
Renamed BND
As early as 1951, the discussion on the establishment of one or more intelligence agencies at the federal level. According to a report by the Central Intelligence Agency of the Federal Intelligence Service name was first used in August and September 1952 talks in the chancellor's office. At the secret start up conversations that took place in the then Ministerial Council of Charles Gumbel office, attended by Hans Reinhard Gehlen Globke and the Gehlen employee Hans von Lossow, Horst Wendland and Werner Repenning part. One result of the negotiations was that the organization should be funded from the April 1, 1953 all federal funds.
On April 1, 1956, the Gehlen Organization, taken simultaneously with the creation of the Bundeswehr, with her head in the service of the Federal Republic of Germany and was named Federal Intelligence Service. Did not exist a legal basis for the BND long time. A law for the Federal Intelligence Service adopted - until 1990 - triggered by the Census judgment of the Federal Constitutional Court from 1983 to the fact postulated fundamental right to informational self-determination.
The Ministry for State Security of the GDR, with Alfred Spuhler and Gabriele guest to establish long-standing and productive indoor sources in the BND, which were unmasked only after the turn succeeded. Already in the first years of the " Gehlen Organization " of the Soviet KGB had to place with Heinz Felfe a mole in the later BND, which flew in 1961. In the case Felfe the KGB had the involvement Felfes used in Nazi crimes, in order to recruit him before he joined the Organisation Gehlen 1951.