by Ouish » Thu Aug 03, 2006 3:23 am
I just discovered that if you google the title you can find an HTML cache of Carl Oglesby's essay "The Secret Treaty of Fort Hunt." It's also collected in a book, not seen by me, <!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://fleshingoutskullandbones.com" target="top">Fleshing Out Skull & Bones</a><!--EZCODE LINK END-->. It makes a strong case for the importance of the CIA-Nazi connection. I'm quoting it at length, to suggest the basic outline in the author's own words (footnotes omitted), but there's a lot more in the original. It's definitely worth reading in full.<br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Quote:</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><br>Hitler continued to rant of victory, but after Germany's massive defeat in the battle of Stalingrad in mid-January 1943, the realists of the German General Staff (OKW) were all agreed that their game was lost. [...] Apparently inspired by the Soviet victory, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill announced at Casablanca, on January 24, 1943, their demand for Germany's unconditional surrender and the complete de-Nazification of Europe. Within the German general staff two competing groups formed around the question of what to do: one led by Heinrich Himmler, the other by Martin Bormann.<br><br>...But Martin Bormann, who was even more powerful than Himmler, did not accept the premise of the separate-peace idea. Bormann was an intimate of Hitler's, the deputy fuhrer and the head of the Nazi Party, thus superior to Himmler in rank. Bormann wielded additional power as Hitler's link to the industrial and financial cartels that ran the Nazi economy and was particularly close to Hermann Schmitz, chief executive of I.G. Farben, the giant chemical firm that was Nazi Germany's greatest industrial power. With the support of Schmitz, Bormann rejected Himmler's separate-peace strategy on the ground that it was far too optimistic. The Allied military advantage was too great, Bormann believed, for Roosevelt to be talked into a separate peace. Roosevelt, after all, had taken the lead in proclaiming the Allies' demand for Germany's unconditional surrender and total de-Nazification. Bormann reasoned, rather, that the Nazi's best hope of surviving military defeat lay within their own resources, chief of which was the cohesion of tens of thousands of SS men for whom the prospect of surrender could offer only the gallows.<br><br>[...]<br><br>An enormous amount of Nazi treasure had to be moved out of Europe and made safe. This treasure was apparently divided into several caches, of which the one at the Reichsbank in Berlin included almost three tons of gold (much of it the so-called tooth-gold from the slaughter camps) as well as silver, platinum, tens of thousands of carats of precious stones, and perhaps a billion dollars in various currencies. There were industrial assets to be expatriated, including large tonnages of specialty steel and certain industrial machinery as well as blue-prints critical to the domination of certain areas of manufacturing.<br><br>Key Nazi companies needed to be relicensed outside Germany in order to escape the reach of war-reparations claims. And tens of thousands of Nazi war criminals, almost all of them members of the SS, needed help to escape Germany and safely regroup in foreign colonies capable of providing security and livelihoods. For help with the first three of these tasks, Bormann convened a secret meeting of key German industrialists on August 10, 1944, at the Hotel Maison Rouge in Strasbourg. One part of the minutes of this meeting states:<br> <br>The [Nazi] Party is ready to supply large amounts of money to those industrialists who contribute to the post-war organization abroad. In return, the Party demands all financial reserves which have already been transferred abroad or may later be transferred, so that after the defeat a strong new Reich can be built.<br><br>The Nazi expert in this area was Hitler's one-time financial genius and Minister of the Economy, Dr. Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, available to Bormann even though he was in prison on suspicion of involvement in the anti-Hitler coup of 1944. According to a U.S. Treasury Department report of 1945, at least 750 enterprises financed by the Nazi Party had been set up outside Germany by the end of the war. These firms were capable of generating an annual income of approximately $30 million, all of it available to Nazi causes. It was Schacht's ability to finesse the legalities of licensing and ownership that brought this situation about. Organizing the physical removal of the Nazis' material assets and the escape of SS personnel were the tasks of the hulking Otto Skorzeny, simultaneously an officer of the SS, the Gestapo and the Waffen SS as well as Hitler's "favorite commando." Skorzeny worked closely with Bormann and Schacht in transporting the Nazi assets to safety outside Europe and in creating a network of SS escape routes ("rat lines") that led from all over Germany to the Bavarian city of Memmingen, then to Rome, then by sea to a number of Nazi retreat colonies set up in the global south.<br><br>The international organization created to accommodate Bormann's plans is most often called "The Odessa," a German acronym for "Organization of Veterans of the SS." It has remained active as a shadowy presence since the war and may indeed constitute Nazism's most notable organizational achievement. But we must understand that none of Bormann's, Skorzeny's, and Schacht's well-laid plans would have stood the least chance of success had it not been for a final component of their organization, one not usually associated with the Odessa at all but very possibly the linchpin of the entire project.<br><br>This final element of the Odessa was the so-called Gehlen Organization (the Org), the Nazi intelligence system that sold itself to the U.S. at the end of the war. It was by far the most audacious, most critical, and most essential part of the entire Odessa undertaking. The literature on the Odessa and that on the Gehlen Organization, however, are two different things. No writer in the field Of Nazi studies has yet explicitly associated the two, despite the fact that General Reinhard Gehlen was tied politically as well as personally with Skorzeny and Schacht. Moreover, Gehlen's fabled post-war organization was in large part staffed by SS Nazis who are positively identified with the Odessa, men such as the infamous Franz Alfred Six and Emil Augsburg of the Wannsee Institute. An even more compelling reason for associating Gehlen with the Odessa is that, without his organization as a screen, the various Odessa projects would have been directly exposed to American intelligence. If the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) had not been neutralized by the Gehlen ploy, the Odessa's great escape scheme would have been discovered and broken up.<br><br>[...]<br><br>Just as Bormann, Skorzeny, and Schacht were beginning to execute their escape plans, so too was Gehlen: Setting his sights on the Western powers, and in particular on the United States, Gehlen pursued the following strategic rationale: When the alliance between the United States and the USSR collapsed, as it was bound to do upon Germany's defeat, the United States would discover a piercing need for a top-quality intelligence service in Eastern Europe and inside the Soviet Union. It did not have such a service of its own, and the pressures of erupting East-West conflict would not give it time to develop one from scratch. Let the United States therefore leave the assets assembled by Gehlen and the FHO intact. Let the United States not break up Gehlen's relationship with East European fascist groups. Let the United States pick up Gehlen's organization and put it to work for the West, the better to prevail in its coming struggle against a Soviet Union soon to become its ex-ally.<br><br>[...]<br><br>Donovan proposed establishment of a civilian intelligence service responsible directly to the President and the Secretary of State, the chief mission of which would be to support the President in foreign policy. Except for the civilian Secretaries of War and the Navy, Donovan's plan did not even include a place for military representation on the advisory board, and he was careful to specify that the advisory board would merely advise and not control. The new service was to be all-powerful in its field, being responsible for "coordination of the functions of all intelligence agencies of the Government." The Donovan intelligence service, in other words, would directly and explicitly dominate the Army's G-2 and the Navy's ONI.<br> <br>Naturally, therefore, the Donovan plan drew an intense attack from the military. One G-2 officer called it "cumbersome and possibly dangerous." Another referred to the OSS as "a bunch of faggots." Nor was the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover silent. Hoover had fought creation of the OSS perhaps more bitterly than the military and had insisted throughout the war on maintaining an FBI intelligence network in Latin America despite the fact that this was supposed to be OSS turf.<br><br>Certain elements within Army intelligence were not only opposed to Donovan's plan but were also beginning to formulate their own notions of what a post-war intelligence system should be like. Roosevelt sent the Joint Chiefs of Staff ultra-secret copies of Donovan's proposal along with Roosevelt's own draft executive order to implement it. On January 1, 1945, the Chiefs formally reported to Roosevelt their extreme dissatisfaction with this scheme and leaked Donovan's memo to four right-wing newspapers, which leapt to the attack with blaring headlines accusing FDR and Donovan of conspiring to create "a super Gestapo." This attack put the Donovan plan on hold, and the death of FDR on April 12, 1945 destroyed it.<br><br>...It is one of the fascinating conjunctions of this story that Donovan should have left for Nuremberg just as Gehlen was coming down from his mountain. It is one of its riper ironies that Donovan would soon resign from Jackson's staff in a disagreement over trying German officers as war criminals, which Donovan objected to but Jackson and Truman supported. Had Donovan lent his energies to the trial of Nazis within the German officer corps, he might have confronted the very adversaries who would shortly take his place in the American intelligence system, not only militarizing it, but Nazifying it as well.<br><br>[...]<br><br>...Quinn was the first American to whom Gehlen presented his proposal and told of his staff dispersed at several camps in the mountains as well as the precious buried archives of the FHO. Unlike Captain Porter, Colonel Quinn was impressed. He promptly passed Gehlen up the command chain to General Edwin L. Sibert. Sibert later recalled, "I had a most excellent impression of him at once." Gehlen immediately began educating him as to the actual aims of the Soviet Union and its display of military might." As Sibert told a journalist years later, "With her present armed forces potential, he [Gehlen] continued, Russia could risk war with the West and the aim of such a war would be the occupation of West Germany."<br> <br>Acting without orders, Sibert listened to Gehlen for several days before informing Eisenhower's chief of staff, General Walter Bedell Smith. Smith and Sibert then continued to develop their relationship with Gehlen secretly, choosing not to burden Eisenhower with knowledge of what they were doing "in order not to compromise him in his relations with the Soviets." Eisenhower in fact had strictly forbidden U.S. fraternization with Germans.<br><br>Gehlen was encouraged to resume contact with his FHO comrades who were still at large in Bavaria, releasing them from their vow of silence. Gehlen was sufficiently confident of his American relationships by this time that he dug up his buried files and, in special camps, put his FHO experts to work preparing detailed reports on the Red Army for his American captors. Well before the end of June he and his comrades were "discharged from prisoner of war status so that we could move around at will." They were encouraged to form a unit termed a "general staff cell" first within G-2's Historical Research Section, then later in the Seventh Army's Intelligence Center in Wiesbaden, where they worked in private quarters and were treated as VIPs.<br><br>Indeed, a partly declassified CIA document recapitulated this story in the early 1970s, noting at this time: Gehlen met with Admiral Karl Doenitz, who had been appointed by Hitler as his successor during the last days of the Third Reich. Gehlen and the Admiral were now in a U.S. Army VIP prison camp in Wiesbaden; Gehlen sought and received approval from Doenitz too.<br><br>In other words, the German chain of command was still in effect, and it approved of what Gehlen was doing with the Americans.<br><br>[...]<br><br>As Gehlen and his six men were en route from Germany to Washington, Donovan's OSS troubles became critical. On August 23, Admiral William Leahy, chief of the JCS, the President's national security adviser and a man who despised Donovan, advised Truman to order his budget director Harold Smith to begin a study of the intelligence question. Stating "this country wanted no Gestapo under any guise or for any reason." Truman may not have known that the Gestapo's Odessa heirs were landing in the lap of the Pentagon even as he spoke. Smith in any case responded to Truman's directive by asking Donovan for his OSS demobilization plans. Now, too late. Donovan tried to fight. The Gehlen party, "Group 6," was checking out its very comfortable accommodations at Fort Hunt at the very moment at which Donovan, writing from a borrowed Washington office, fired back a memo to Smith defending the OSS and its right to live: "Among these assets [of the OSS] was establishment for the first time in our nation's history of a foreign secret intelligence service which reported information as seen through American eyes. As an integral and inseparable part of this service, there is a group of specialists to analyze and evaluate the material for presentation to those who determine national policy."<br><br>[...]<br><br>A momentous relationship was established at Fort Hunt, one that had the profoundest effects on the subsequent evolution of United States foreign policy during an exceptionally difficult passage of world history. The period of the Cold War as a whole, and more especially its early, formative years - from Gehlen's coming aboard the American intelligence service until he rejoined the West German republic in 1955 -- was laden with the peril of nuclear war. On at least one occasion, in 1948, Gehlen almost convinced the United States that the Soviet Union was about to launch a war against the West and that it would be in the U.S. interest to preempt it.<br> <br>Clearly it is important to know who made and authorized the decisions that led to our national dependency on a network of underground Nazis, yet because the relevant documents are still classified this central part of the Gehlen story still cannot be reconstructed.<br> <br>From the handful of published books about the Gehlen affair (none of which cite their sources on this point) we can list only seven Americans who were said to be involved with Gehlen at Fort Hunt:<br><br>Admiral William D. Leahy, chief of staff end Truman's national security advisor.<br><br>Allen Dulles, OSS station chief in Bern during the war.<br><br>Sherman Kent, head of OSS Research and Analysis Branch and a Yale historian.<br> <br>General George V. Strong, head of Army G-2.<br> <br>Major General Alex H. Bolling of G-2.<br> <br>Brigadier General John T. Magruder, first head of the Army's Strategic Services Unit, a vulture of OSS.<br><br>Loftus E. Becker, a lawyer assc. with G-2 and the Nuremberg war-crimes operation; the CIA's first deputy director.<br><br>We do not know if these people were involved as a committee, if they talked with Gehlen and his six aides a lot or a little, separately or all at once, or if they sent their own aides to work out the details. We do not know how a POW-interrogation was transformed into a bargaining process. Above all, we do not know what kind of communication the U.S. participants in the Fort Hunt-Gehlen talks had with the political authorities to whom they were responsible. Leahy is the only one who had obvious contact with President Truman. But there is nothing in the revealed record to indicate that he ever discussed Gehlen or the Fort Hunt deal with Truman, or took the least trouble to explain to Truman the implications of hiring a Nazi spy network. We have no idea, for that matter, how Leahy himself saw it.<br><br>[...]<br><br>Gehlen and his staff left Fort Hunt for Germany on July 1, 1946, having been in the United States for almost a year. They were temporarily based at Oberursel then settled into a permanent base in a walled-in, self-contained village at Pullach near Munich. Gehlen set up his headquarters in an estate originally built by Martin Bormann. There a start-up group of 50 began to turn the "gentlemen's agreement" of Fort Hunt into reality. The first order of business being staff, Gehlen's recruiters were soon circulating among the "unemployed mass" of "former" Nazi SS men, the Odessa constituency, to find more evaluators, couriers and informers. Gehlen had "solemnly promised in Washington not to employ SS and Gestapo men," although it will be noted that Gehlen includes no such provision in his list of terms. There is not the least question that he did recruit such men, supplying them with new names when necessary. Two of the worst of them were Franz Six and Emil Augsburg. Six was a key Nazi intellectual, and both Six and Augsburg were associated with the Wannsee Institute, the Nazi think-tank in Berlin where SS leader Reinhard Heydrich, in January 1942, announced "the Final Solution to the Jewish Question." Both of them had commanded extermination squads roving in East Europe in pursuit of Jews and communists. and both had gone underground with the Odessa when the Third Reich crumbled. Augsburg hid in Italy, then returned in disguise when Gehlen called. Six was actually captured by Allied intelligence, tried at Nuremberg and imprisoned, only to be sprung to work with Augsburg running Gehlen's networks of East European Nazis.<br><br>From the edge of total defeat Gehlen now moved into his vintage years, more powerful, influential and independent than he had been even in the heyday of the Third Reich. Minimally supervised first by the War Department's Strategic Services Unit under Fort Hunt figure Major General John Magruder, and then by the SSU's follow-on organization, the Central Intelligence Group under Rear Admiral Sidney Souers, the Org grew to dominate the entire West German intelligence service. Through his close ties to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's chief minister, Hans Globke, Gehlen was able to place his men in positions of control in West Germany's military intelligence and the internal counterintelligence arm. When NATO was established he came to dominate it too. By one estimate "some 70 percent" of the total intelligence take flowing into NATO's military committee and Allied headquarters (SHAPE) on the Soviet Union, the countries of East Europe, the rest of Europe, and indeed the rest of the world was generated at Pullach. Not even the establishment of the CIA in 1947 and the official transfer of the Pullach operation into the West German government in 1955 (when it was retitled the Federal Intelligence Service, BND) lessened the reliance of American intelligence on Gehlen's product. From the beginning days of the Cold War through the 1970s and beyond, the United States', West Germany's, and NATO's most positive beliefs about the nature and intentions of the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact, and world communism would be supplied by an international network of utterly unreconstructed SS Nazis whose primary purposes were to cover the escape of the Odessa and make the world safe for Naziism.<br><br>Gehlen's story has may branchings beyond this point. These include several spy scandals that exposed his operation as dangerously vulnerable to Soviet penetration. They include the pitiful spectacle of U.S. CIC agents pursuing Nazi fugitives on war-crimes charges only to see them summarily pardoned and hired by Gehlen. They include the dark saga of Klaus Barbie, the SS "Butcher of Lyon" who worked with the Gehlen Organization and boasted of being a member of the Odessa. They include assets of Operation Paperclip, in which right-wing forces in the U.S. military once again savaged the concept of de-Nazification in order to smuggle scores of SS rocket scientists into the United States. They include continuation of the civilian-vs.-military conflict over the institution of secret intelligence and the question of politically motivated covert action within the domestic interior. They include above all the story of the enormous victory of the Odessa in planting powerful Nazi colonies around the world -- in such countries as South Africa where the enactment of apartheid laws followed; or several countries in Latin America that then became breeding grounds for the Death Squads of the current day; and indeed even in the United States where it now appears that thousands of wanted Nazis were able to escape justice and grow old in peace.<br><br>In making the Gehlen deal, the United States did not acquire for itself an intelligence service. That is not what the Gehlen group was or was trying to be. The military intelligence historian Colonel William Corson put it most succintly, "Gehlen's organization was designed to protect the Odessa Nazis. It amounts to an exceptionally well-orchestrated diversion." The only intelligence provided by the Gehlen net to the United States was intelligence selected specifically to worsen East-West tensions and increase the possibility of military conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. It was exactly as the right-wing papers had warned in 1945 when they were aroused by Donovan's proposal for a permanent intelligence corps, warning their readers that a "super spy unit" could "determine American foreign policy by weeding out, withholding or coloring information gathered at his direction." It was exactly as Truman had warned when he demobilized the OSS with the observation that the U.S. had no interest in "Gestapolike measures." The fact that this lively concern for a police-state apparatus should have been focused on the relatively innocuous OSS while at the same time the red carpet was being rolled out for Gehlen's gang of SS men must surely count as one of the supreme wrenching ironies of the modern period.... <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=ouish@rigorousintuition>Ouish</A> at: 8/3/06 1:45 am<br></i>