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In reply to the discussion: Nine Companies Tied to PRISM, Obama Will Be Smacked With Class-Action Lawsuit Wednesday [View all]JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)intelligence agency.
During the war, Gehlen's organization accumulated a great deal of information about the Soviet Union and the battlefield tactics of the Red Army. When the Iron Curtain descended in 1946, leaving the Western Allies with virtually no intelligence sources in Eastern Europe, Gehlens vast store of knowledge made him very valuable.[2]
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On 22 May 1945, Gehlen surrendered to the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) in Bavaria. He was brought to Camp King and interrogated by Captain John R. Boker near Oberursel. Because of his knowledge and contacts inside the Soviet Union he was very valuable to the Americans. He offered them his intelligence archives and his network of contacts in exchange for his liberty and the liberty of his colleagues imprisoned in American POW camps in Germany. Boker quietly removed Gehlen and his command from the official lists of American POWs and managed to transfer seven of Gehlen's senior officers to the camp. Gehlen's archives were unearthed and brought to the camp secretly, without even the knowledge of the CIC. By the end of the summer Boker had elicited the support of Brigadier General Edwin Sibert, the G2 (senior intelligence officer) of the Twelfth Army Group.[11] General Sibert contacted his superior, General Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower's chief of staff, who then worked with William Joseph Donovan, the former head of OSS and Allen Dulles, then the OSS station chief in Bern, to make suitable arrangements. On 20 September 1945, Gehlen and three close associates were flown to the United States to begin work for them. While there, Gehlen exposed a number of Office of Strategic Services (OSS) officers who were secret members of the US Communist Party.
In July 1946 Gehlen was officially released from American captivity and flown back to Germany,[12] where he began his intelligence work on 6 December 1946 by setting up an organization of former German intelligence officers, first at Oberursel near Frankfurt, then at Pullach near Munich,[2] called the "South German Industrial Development Organization" to mask its true nature as an undercover operation and spy ring. Gehlen handpicked 350 former German intelligence agents to join him, a number that eventually grew to 4,000 undercover agents. This group was soon to be given the nickname the "Gehlen Organization" or simply "the Org."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhard_Gehlen
It was at that point, with the decision to hire Gehlen and then to use his networks of East block spies that we set out on the national security path that has lead us to the national security state in which we live today. There were other factors too, but that was a major one. Perhaps it kept us safe? We will never know what would have happened had we not chosen this route.