I do not care for fictional thrillers, but some years ago a title caught my eye: “The Baltic Affair” - by an Australian writer who churns out formula spy stories, and I bought it. It's background was a Sydney Latvian refugee group: An elegant blonde Latvian woman, a Latvian double-agent and a patriotic Latvian dropped behind the Iron Curtain. I found the story too far fetched and worthless. Nobody would be that mad and go behind the Iron Curtain merely for an adventure.
Then, some more years later I stumbled upon a book that changed everything: “Gehlen - Spy of the Century”, by E. H. Cookridge, (a Corgi Book, 1972).
Reinhard Gehlen was born in Erfurt in 1902 as a son of an army officer. He was a good scholar excelling in Latin and French. He also spoke everyday Polish and loved statistics. He was a smart officer and became Hitler's spymaster, in charge of Nazi espionage against the Soviet Union during WW II.
After the war he sold out, with all of his archives, to the Americans and became the organiser of CIA cloak-and-dagger operations in Pullach, Bavaria. Gehlen also became closely associated with the US Air Force and A-2 Intelligence. He was the initiator of parachute drops of agents into the Soviet territory. The head of the CIA, Allen Welsh Dulles, brother of the Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, happened to believe that Stalin's captive nations would rise against communist suppression, given encouragement through Radio Free Europe. Hence Gehlen had a big say on Radio Free Europe and he directed, by radio, the 1953 Berlin Uprising.
Pullach was a walled and guarded compound full of secret work under the false fronts of various business labels. One of them was Süddeutsche Industries (workshop in Stuttgart), another was Jalousie Vertrieb Zimmerle & Co - manufacturers of venetian blinds ( very few produced in Karlsruhe). All these business fronts were properly registered companies which made fictitious tax returns. Locals thought that behind the walls men, and a few women, were working on some new weaponry for export to the USA.
Pullach was also a spy school for V-men or “collectors” recruiting new agents. One of the most important working formulas was WKW - “Who Knows Who”? There was also Gehlen's unique wartime card index, religiously kept up-to- date, of great help.
Gehlen was also the brain behind the 1955-56 Berlin tunnel for the interception of communist telecommunications from the American sector six hundred yards across the border towards a main junction of telephone cables at a depth of twenty-four feet under the Schoenefeld Chaussee. It worked well for nine months. When the Russians discovered the "Operation Gold" tunnel, they found no living person there. The tunnel had an elaborate alarm system, but on a table in the rear room a coffee perculator was still bubbling!
By the 1950’s the Americans asked Gehlen to provide factual information from the Soviet Union because the Russians excelled in espionage and had at least one thousand agents and several double-agents working in Western Germany. They also dominated their satellite countries. For instance, the Czech officials were all graduates of Soviet spy schools.
Allen Dulles proposed that Gehlen must send agents willing to go to the Soviet Union and procure the vital intelligence required, promising that the CIA would take care of their safe dispatch, possibly by air. Gehlen knew, that there would be no problem finding volunteers among the hundreds of thousands of displaced persons, who had poorly paid labourers jobs in Western Germany and in England.
Thus in the space of two years about five thousand displaced persons were enlisted, assembled in camps at Bad Wiessee, at Kaufbeuren in Bavaria and at the US Amry Hammand Barracks near Mannheim. They were trained by American officers and former German Wehrmacht and Waffen SS NCO's. At the time Gehlen had brought in several high-ranking German officers to help him. Some of them had to be dry-cleaned and given new names.
Among the organisations who began to co-operate with Gehlen in the early 1950s were the Russian National People's Movement, the OUN, the OUNS Ukrainian and Polish exile organisations. Also Latvian, Estonian, Lithuanian and others.
Before the big operation started, Gehlen had dispatched Marius Ozolins with a PH-6 radio transmitter via Finland to Estonia, and for a time he sent signals. One night he reported, that he was being trailed by Soviet security men, and that was the last that Gehlen heard from him. But at the same time the Estonian underground partisans or “forest brothers” had signalled and requested supplies of small arms via Stockholm. Gehlen had dispatched two agents, Werner Hayli and Anthony Kalviainen with a few crates of revolvers, sub-machine guns and ammunition to the Baltic.
Of the earliest volunteers taken to Estonia by a British trawler in the spring of 1952 were Zigurd Krumins and Janis Plos, who did make contact with England from Latvia, and lived with the partisans nearly two years. They were eventually captured and tried by the Soviet military tribunal in Riga in 1955. Both were sentenced to fifteen years of imprisonment.
Of the fairly large number of agents landed in Estonia, Latvia and on the Memel coast, and the islands of Saaremaa and Hiiumaa, thirteen were caught. Among them was a Riga born Heinrich Bromberg and two Estonians, Karl Kukk (Taluots) and Henry Tomla (Järve), who had been trained at Fort Bragg in North Carolina and CIA intelligence school of Poolesville near Washington, DC. The three parachuted from a US Air Force plane near Pärnu and were caught within a few days of their arrival.
Never give up - that was Gehlen's motto. He set up in Stockholm an outpost, to where secret radio agents with portable sets could tune in. One more agent was landed on the Estonian coast south of Pärnu. He was Endel Mumm and was caught, but more agents followed: Harri Vimm, Jan Maltis and Evald Hallik. They established contract with the leader of the Estonian Resistance, Richard Saaliste, and his group. They must have been smart, because Moscow protested to the Soviet authorities in Estonia. They were collected a few months later by the same boats at the same place they had landed, and that in spite of the fact that Russians had double-agents, some of them attractive women.
This book is a veritable handbook of espionage. There are probably a thousand spies listed. It comes in handy when I look up WKW and come across the dirty past of many a famous politician. In 1962 “Der Spiegel” conducted a campaign against then minister of defence, Franz-Josef Strauss. Gehlen had given secret information to the magazine, and for this he was nearly arrested. There was a big scandal. Several editors were charged with treason, but eventually the charges were withdrawn. Strauss was forced to resign. From there on things started to go wrong for Gehlen, and after The Picard affair in 1967-8 Gehlen was forced to retire.
By now the whole army of spies must have retired or died. The names of the brave Estonian patriots I write with pride: Karl Kukk (Taluots), Henry Tomla (Järve), Endel Mumm, Harri Vimm, Jan Maltis and Evald Hallik.
Write their names with pride
Archived Articles | 23 Jul 2003 | I.R. LiscinskiEWR
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