Turns out, the Cold War was overblown.

[MadHound]

Going back through some of my papers and came upon a piece I wrote about Reinhardt Gehlen. As always, I am impressed at how a single man, unknown to most people in this country, set the US on the path we continue to trod even now.

Let's begin with the end of WWII. By the time of VE day, Gehlen, and ardent Nazi, fascist and patriot, had been promoted to Brigadier General and had been head of Nazi Germany's Eastern European intelligence division for most of the war, which included the Soviet Union. During the course of his job, Gehlen became directly responsible for the capture, torture and death of four million Soviet citizens. Gehlen knew better than to fall into the hands of the Russians, so he set about to set up a deal. Gehlen and his cohorts converted thousands of pages of information into microfilm, which they then buried in a secret location in the Bavarian Alps. Then Gehlen, along with three of his subordinates went to find the Americans

Find them he did, but even though he found them, he wasn't guaranteed safety. SOP at the time was for officers such as Gehlen to be turned over to the Soviets ASAP. In steps an interesting figure, Capt. John Bokor. Though Bokor wasn't sympathetic to the Nazi philosophy, he did admire Germany and its people, holding them in high regard. Bokor sat on Gehlen, and rather than turning him over to the Soviets, at the first possibility he passed Gehlen on up the line, which ended eventually with "Wild Bill" Donovan and the OSS. Gehlen spilled his guts, made his deal, and became a darling of US intelligence. The files, which he dug up, were gold to US intelligence agencies, but it was Gehlen himself that was the priceless jewel.

You see, despite the ballyhoo and bluster, US intelligence both during and after WWII was really an amateur hour operation. Literally, US intelligence in the war and immediate post war period was run by amateurs, Ivy League graduates who had more brains than common sense. It was a culture, and problem, that would haunt US intelligence even to this day. But Gehlen, he was a professional, and he had what the US desperately needed, an professional, trained intelligence operation that could reach into the Soviet bloc and beyond, into Russia itself.

The US bit, and bit hard. Never mind that Gehlen was still an ardent Nazi, never mind that he had the blood of millions on his hands, Gehlen was quickly installed as the US station head in charge of intelligence about the Soviet Union. From 1946-1958 Gehlen and his men, mostly Ukrainian fascists, were the only conduit for Soviet intelligence. Virtually everything that the US knew about the Soviet Union and its movements came from Gehlen.

Didn't anyone stop and think? Didn't anybody realize that fascists and communists despise each other, that they would rather kill each other than look at each other? While the death and depravities suffered by the Jews were indeed horrific, it seemed as though Nazis saved their "special work" for Soviets, and the Soviets returned the favor in kind (If you want an interesting, chilling first person account of this, I suggest that you read "A Woman in Berlin" a chilling two month account of the Soviet occupation of Berlin).

Apparently the answer is no, nobody thought about these things, and the predictable happened. While Gehlen started out slowly, he quickly started sending back increasingly alarming reports of Soviet military might, reports that nobody could verify because Gehlen's organization was the only one on the ground. These reports soon reached ludicrous levels, with Gehlen reporting in the mid fifties that the Soviet Union had hundreds of nuclear tipped missiles.

Of course these reports drove the predictable reaction, namely the American build up of our own nuclear fleet, as well as the rest of our armed forces. The arms race was on, and it wouldn't stop until one of our countries collapsed. But the really strange thing happened during the late fifties. In 1956 the US launched the first U2 overflight of the Soviet Union, a flight that was followed by many more, flights which criss-crossed the Soviet Union, taking thousands of pictures of Soviet missile sites and Soviet armed might. And what came of the analysis of those pictures? It was found that, contrary to Gehlen's ever alarming reports, the Soviet Union only had a few dozen missiles, and their armed strength was no where near what Gehlen claimed it to be.

But this is where things start to take a real turn for the bizarre. Rather than calling out Gehlen for his obvious and deliberate over inflation of Soviet strength, the US continues to plan and operate like Gehlen's reports are accurate, which means we continued the arms race, spending hundreds of billions of dollars on arms and nukes. Our stance simply doesn't change, but becomes increasingly militaristic towards the Soviet Union, which in turns tries, and ultimately fails, to keep up in this arms race.

Why did we pursue this course? Why did we A: Trust a man whose crimes against and hatred for the Soviet Union should have set off all kinds of red flags in the top echelons of our government, and B: Why did the US continue in its militaristic stance once Gehlen's information proved to be so utterly untrue? I think that the answer partially lies with Eisenhower's warning about the military industrial complex. But I also think that part of the answer lies with the people who were in our government, in charge of key positions at the time. People like Allen Dulles, Averill Harriman and George Kennan, all of whom had supported or were sympathetic with towards Hitler, Nazism and fascism. But that is the grist of another post on another day.

Gehlen went on to become head of the W. German intelligence service, BND, which he retired from in 1968 and died in 1978. He never suffered any repercussions for his crimes, those committed during WWII or those committed after. However his work set the US on a path towards militarism that we have yet to deviate from. Let us hope that we can learn from this lesson, though given our current state and nature, I doubt it.

[valerief]

1. Wasn't the Cold War like any war--a reason to raid the Treasury? nt

[glitch]

7. Yes, but they had a special emotional commitment to it as well, because the commies wanted their $$!

The most important, sacred thing to them. The cold war was a twofer, it filled their emotional need for fear, and it provided the excuse they needed to raid the treasury.
Which is why they had to scramble when it ended.

[Curmudgeoness]

2. They believed it because it fit into their plans. They wanted a

boogieman to keep the people afraid and to have the people want the military expanded. We all do a little of this---believing what fits into our own motives and dismissing everything else. Some do it more than others, and some have more power to be gained.

My mother always said Commie threat and boogieman threat is the same thing.

[KG]

3. US intelligence still is an amateur hour operation.

[Drale]

4. with the cold war

There truely was a chance of total destruction, and hindsight is 20/20. We will never know what would have happened if we had tried to be friends with the Soviets but it doesnt really matter now, the most we can hope for is that we learn of our past and try not to repeat it.

[MadHound]

6. I'm not saying that we should have been friends with the Soviets,

The point that I'm making here is that the Soviet threat was overblown, and people in power knew it and the time. As a consequence we built up a military that we didn't need, that was, in many senses, obsolete before we completed building it. We spent money and resources pursuing a chimera, and consequently set a precedent that is followed to this day.

Our military budget, even prior to this last decade, has dragged down our economy, our society, our country. The Cold War ended, yet there was no peace dividend, we haven't disarmed. Clinton, the "man who destroyed the military" cut two percent, only two percent from the military budget.

Now we are starting to see the severe consequences of war and empire. An economy that is in the ditch, our infrastructure crumbling, our people in need. We spend over half of our national budget on the military, whose budget is greater than the next twenty eight military countries combined. We even have a recent historical example to follow, whose excellent adventures in Afghanistan and attempts to keep up with the US bankrupted and destroyed them. This sort of military spending is simply unsustainable.

And it all traces back to this one incident, putting trust in a man like Gehlen. It isn't as if I'm expressing facts that weren't contemporaneous at the time. The hatred between fascists and communists was well established before Hitler took power. Even in the US there were riots between the Communist party and the German American Bund that made the front page during the thirties.

So the question becomes why, why did they choose to trust this truly compromised man to provide our only intelligence on the Soviet Union? These were bright people, and while everybody makes mistakes, when you continue down the same path after discovering that mistake, well:shrug:

[HughBeaumont]

5. Great analysis and Rec'd. Even our own Spy Museum in D.C. states that the "Cold War" . ..

. . . was more or less inflated to justify the Pentasewer scarfing up education and social tax monies. The Spy Museum also bravely dares to pin some of the blame of Pearl Harbor on crooked-assed J Edgar Hoover (who's FBI building namesake is just down the street from the Spy Museum) and his distrust of spy Dusko Popov, who stated that Japan was planning a winter attack against a Pacific naval base. This especially touches a nerve . . . my grandfather was a Pearl Harbor Survivor.

[MadHound]

8. kick for the morning n/t