In the dangerous underground game of Cold War espionage, the Communists have a built-in advantage: an estimated 10 million party members in over 60 different countries, all of them potential agents. The West has many more potential friends —the oppressed inside the Communist empire—but since most of them are inaccessible or terrorized by the police, Western strategists rely most heavily on professional intelligence outfits—the U.S.'s CIA, Britain's Military Intelligence, France's Deuxième Bureau, etc. Last week West Germany covertly confirmed what had long been widely suspected: Bonn, too, has its own apparatus of anti-Communist spies. Büro Gehlen, as the Germans call it, is now to become an official arm of the West German government.
Anonymous Prussian. Mere mention of the name Gehlen is enough to make U.S. intelligence chiefs in Germany clam up and try to look blank. For years both Washington and Bonn refused to confirm that the organization existed. But since the Communists themselves took to blaming "Gehlen agents" for acts of sabotage throughout Eastern Europe, enough facts have leaked out to suggest that Büro Gehlen not only exists, but that it may be one of the best intelligence networks in the business.
Something like 4,000 Gehlen agents, some of whom served as German spies in World War II, are at work in Europe and Russia. Some range as far afield as Cairo, Istanbul and Madrid. Their chief, former Brigadier General Reinhard Gehlen, 52, is a slight, tight-lipped Prussian with a passion for anonymity. A Wehrmacht regular, Gehlen rose in World War II to become head of the "Enemy Army-East," the super-secret intelligence staff that evaluated the reports of a vast network of German agents ranging the Eastern front from Leningrad to the Caucasus. Because his realistic appraisals of Soviet strength clashed with Hitler's wish-thinking, Gehlen often drew the Führer's fire. Once, the story goes, Hitler read a Gehlen paper and exploded angrily: "What fool dug out this nonsense?" But events proved Gehlen's gloomy reports right.
No Picture. When the Red army smashed into the Reich, Gehlen fled west, taking his files with him. He made three copies of each of his records and deposited them at three different addresses. Later, when the Cold War came, U.S. intelligence officers found the Gehlen files invaluable. Gehlen was flown to Washington and returned to Germany with the secret understanding that he would rebuild his intelligence apparatus and set it to work for both the U.S. and Western Germany. Reportedly, his terms included that he never would have to operate against the "German interest," and he himself would be the judge of that interest.