Versions of the truth
Joseph Lee
The Gehlen Memoirs: Reinhard Gehlen and his Spy Ring Heinz Hoehne and Hermann Zolling (Secker and Warburg £3.50) Network: The truth about General Gehlen (Collins £3.50)
General Reinhard Gehlen has done more than any other secret service chief to perpetuate the cloak and dagger image of the spy. Chief of Hitler's eastern intelligence service from 1942, Gehlen transferred his organisation first to the Americans in 1946, desperate for information on their new Russian enemies, and then to the West German government in 1956. His penchant for cover names, dark glasses and silent rubber-soled shoes spun a web of mystery around him that only fantasy, and the Russian secret service, penetrated. His memoirs project a quite contrary image of a peerlessly efficient technician, alert to the innovations in data gathering and processing that have consigned James Bond to Dodoland, a brilliant administrator with a genius for cutting through red tape, a profound political thinker, modestly attributing secret service successes to an " ability to follow historical trends and project them into the future." But the memoirs, unfortunately, merely present him in his latest disguise.
The secret of Gehlen's survival was a consummate capacity for intrigue against potential rivals within the secret service. He was a competent organiser, but his reputation rested initially on the inefficiency of his predecessor before 1942 and the staggering stupidity of the American secret service in eastern European work, and secondly on the exceptional opportunities in central Europe before the withdrawal of the Russians from Austria and the tightening-up of East German security in the mid'fifties. One could hardly go far wrong on East German intentions when one's sources included its vice-president and its prime minister's private secretary! By the late 'fifties Gehlen's sources had been blown and the Russians had penetrated his headquarters, largely through his own carelessness. His indifference to new techniques led, to his chagrin, to the appointment of a vice-president in his organisation to push through changes in this field, and a government inquiry in 1968, just before his retirement, revealed a service top-heavy with bureaucratic inertia and nepotism. The memoirs are patently designed to salvage a foundered reputation by coolly suggesting that Gehlen himself directly inspired the initiatives that his increasing incompetence made necessary.
Gehlen regularly denies, but rarely refutes, the charges contained in Hoehne and Zolling's excellent account, more exciting, more informative and more accurate than his own. They portray him, perhaps, in slightly too sinister a light, for he was nefther genius nor ogre, but a Prussian officer of average intelligence and superior political agility. His crusading anti-communism led him into some questionable internal surveillance activities, but probably to no greater extent than occurs in other western countries. His prized grasp of historical trends, as reflected in his diatribe against Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik, simply consists in groping from banality to banality. The four great blunders in his lifetime in the battle to "defend the western way of life and Christian culture " were, apparently, Hitler's failure to hit Russia sufficiently hard in 1941, the western refusal to send tanks against the embryonic Berlin wall, and the American reluctance to do a Hungary on Cuba and use nuclear weapons against North Vietnam. These views bear familiar witness to the Prussian way to Christ, but they all derive from assumptions
external to his intelligence experience, and exerted no influence on western policy. If Adenauer devoured his briefings, it was only because they told him what he wanted to hear. The main weakness of Hoehne and Zolling's otherwise admirable account is grossly to exaggerate the importance and influence of intelligence work in general. Except where major matters of sabotage or assassination are involved, the struggles between the various secret services belong more to the sports pages than to political columns. Politicians or generals unable to predict the enemy's probable range of moves, and their own contingency reactions, are probably too stupid or irrational to profit from even correct secret service intelligence. Gehlen's two most brilliant coups during the war, for instance, the prediction that the Russians would concentrate their initial thrust at Stalingrad against the Rumanians instead of the Germans, and the warning that the Russians would reinforce the Kursk salient if the Germans delayed their projected assault for two months in 1943, merely confirmed what was self-evident to competent military observers and had, indeed, been predicted independently of Gehlen's work.
Die Zeit was a little harsh in lamenting that "Gehlen whitewashes, glosses things over and angles them." Of course he does, but what on earth else are memoirs for? He does at least light up the grey murkiness of his account with a solitary shaft of humour, reminding readers that the recollections of a secret service chief should never, be taken as a serious source. Reinhard Gehlen's greatest coup was to persuade publishers and editors to part with substantial sums for the rights to these turgid memoirs.
Joseph Lee is a lecturer in History at Peterhouse, Cambridge.
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