Somewhere in West Germany last week, two of the free world's top intelligence chiefs met in secret conference. One was pipe-smoking Allen Dulles, head of the U.S.'s Central Intelligence Agency. The other: shadowy Reinhard Gehlen, 58, head of West Germany's Federal Intelligence Service and a man who has been giving the Communists fits for nearly 20 years.
Under Cover Names. The Communists have tried hard to eliminate Gehlen. In a 1953 ambush on a lonely road near Munich, Gehlen escaped death only because his windshield was of bulletproof glass. Attempts to get at his wife and four children have been narrowly frustrated. Gehlen travels under a variety of cover names, and has not been photographed since the war years. Unable to do him bodily harm, the Communists scream that Gehlen is the high priest of a revived Naziism (he never joined the Nazi Party); the current Red line is that Gehlen is plotting the rescue of Mass Murderer Adolf Eichmann from the Israelis.
As a career officer in the Wehrmacht, Gehlen had charge of intelligence on the bloody Eastern front. Late in 1944 he reported that the Russians were planning a huge winter offensive, accurately predicted that it would crush the Nazis' Eastern armies. Hitler raged that Gehlen's report was "the greatest bluff since Genghis Khan," shouted that he should be sent to a lunatic asylum. Replied Chief of Staff Heinz Guderian: "Then send me there with him."
As the Allies closed in, Gehlen looked to the future. Deciding that the U.S. and Russia would be the next antagonists, he selected 50 cases of important documents from his files, hid them in Bavaria. Then he ordered 30 key officers of his staff to go underground and wait for word from him. He himself holed up in a mountain chalet, and several weeks later marched down, surrendered himself to U.S. authorities.
At the same time, he made them a proposition: he would make his hidden files and his staff men available to provide intelligence on the Soviet Union. The U.S. agreed, set up Gehlen and his men in a closely guarded compound outside Frankfurt. Exactly what Gehlen and his men did during the following years is still closely veiled, but a U.S. official says: "They were mostly useful in squelching various alarms; they knew a lot more about the Russians than anyone we had."
Sliding Doors. After West Germany became a sovereign state in 1955, the new government took over Gehlen's operation. For the past 13 years Gehlen has been established in the village of Pullach, some five miles from Munich, in a tree-shaded compound on the banks of the Isar River. Surrounded by a 10-ft. concrete wall, the compound looks like a housing development, with neat lawns and flower beds, lace-curtained villas and administration buildings. At each entrance are electrically operated sliding doors of steel mesh, with sentry boxes manned by armed and uniformed guards. Gehlen's own headquarters are separately enclosed by a steel fence, and his paneled, second-floor office contains only one symbol of his profession: a box of cigars labeled Geheimdienst (Secret Service). (In Washington, Allen Dulles also keeps a gag prop on his desk—a plaster statuette of a man with a cloak and dagger.)