When the cables continued, the British suspected a Soviet operation but later dismissed that idea upon investigation. Max cables were highly accurate, and amounted to 10,700 cables from 1942-44, causing a British warning – Ultra intercepted the Max cables – to Stalin regarding a high-placed mole in Stavka. Based in Sofia, Max - the Klatt Bureau (Dienststelle Klatt) was led by a Jew, Richard Kauder (Klatt) and included many other Jews as radio operators. Originally an Abwehr creation, Max was one of the primary sources of FHO intelligence on the Soviet Military. Gehlen made great use of cables received from the Max Network. Before the Wehrmacht disasters in the Battle of Stalingrad (23 August 1942 – 2 February 1943), a year into the German war against the Soviet Union, Gehlen understood that the FHO required fundamental re-organization, and secured a staff of army linguists and geographers, anthropologists, lawyers, and junior military officers who would improve the FHO as a military-intelligence organization despite the Nazi ideology of Slavic inferiority. In spring of 1942, Gehlen assumed command of the Fremde Heere Ost (FHO) from Colonel Eberhard Kinzel. Head of FHO The anticommunist espionage networks of the Gehlen Organization remained in place after the Red Army's conquest and the consolidation of Soviet hegemony in the east of Europe. In July 1941, he received a promotion to lieutenant-colonel and was sent to the Eastern Front, where he was assigned as senior intelligence-officer to the Fremde Heere Ost (FHO) section of the Staff. In 1940, he became liaison officer to Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, Army Commander-in-Chief and later was transferred to the staff of General Franz Halder, the Chief of the German General Staff. Gehlen served on the General Staff until 1936 and was promoted to major in 1939.Īt the time of the German attack on Poland (1 September 1939), he was a staff officer in an infantry division. Īfter graduating from the German Staff College in 1935, Gehlen was promoted to captain and assigned to the German General Staff. In 1920, Gehlen made Abitur and joined the Reichswehr. He grew up in Breslau where his father, a former army officer became book publisher for the Ferdinand-Hirt-Verlag, a publishing house specializing in school books. Gehlen was born 1902 into a protestant family in Erfurt. He received the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1968. While this was a civilian office, he was also a lieutenant-general in the Reserve forces of the Bundeswehr, the highest-ranking reserve-officer in the military of West Germany. In 1956, the Gehlen Organization was transferred to the West German government and formed the core of the Federal Intelligence Service, the Federal Republic of Germany's official foreign intelligence service, with Gehlen serving as its first president until his retirement in 1968. Gehlen was instrumental in negotiations to establish an official West German intelligence service based on the Gehlen Organization of the early 1950s. As head of the Gehlen Organization he sought cooperation with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), formed in 1947, resulting in the Gehlen Organization ultimately becoming closely affiliated with the CIA. The organization would employ former military officers of the Wehrmacht as well as former intelligence officers of the Schutzstaffel (SS) and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD). military (G-2 Intelligence) recruited him to establish the Gehlen Organization, an espionage network focusing on the Soviet Union. In late 1945, following the 7 May surrender of Germany and the start of the Cold War, the U.S. He achieved the rank of major general before he was fired by Adolf Hitler in April 1945 because of the FHO's "defeatism", the pessimistic intelligence reports about Red Army superiority. In 1942, he became chief of Foreign Armies East (FHO), the German Army's military intelligence unit on the Eastern Front (1941–45). Gehlen became a professional soldier in 1920 during the Weimar Republic. During the early Cold War, Gehlen sided with the Western Allies as the spymaster of the CIA-funded anti-Soviet Gehlen Organization (1946–56) and the founding president of the Federal Intelligence Service ( Bundesnachrichtendienst, BND) of West Germany (1956–68). He was chief of the Wehrmacht Foreign Armies East military intelligence service on the eastern front during World War II. Reinhard Gehlen (3 April 1902 – 8 June 1979) was a German lieutenant-general and intelligence officer. Grand Cross of the Order pro Merito Melitensi of the Order of Malta (1948) Großes Bundesverdienstkreuz am Schulterband Erfurt, Province of Saxony, Kingdom of Prussia, German Empire
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