Volume 18, Number 10 · June 1, 1972
Our Man in Pullach
By Neal Ascherson
The Service: The Memoirs of General Reinhard Gehlen
translated by David Irving
World, 400 pp., $10.00
The General Was a Spy
by Heinz Höhne, by Hermann Zolling, translated by Richard Barry
Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 347 pp., $10.00
Gehlen, Spy of the Century
by E.H. Cookridge
Random House, 402 pp., $10.00
When the Third Reich fell, the Allies were able to make use of a lot of Nazi junk. Like the telex machines in the Reuters office in Berlin, which up to a year or two ago still preserved a special key with the double lightning-flash of the SS, much of Hitler's furniture served the conquerors' purposes until equipment built for new requirements could be introduced. General Gehlen was such a piece of junk. Unfortunately, he stayed in service for another twenty-three years. Long after his espionage machinery had become obsolete and unreliable, the Gehlen keys continued to tap out the only message they knew: Bolshevik Russia is the merciless arch-enemy of human civilization, only a right-wing authoritarian state can resist the Red Terror, anyone who doubts either of the above propositions is a 'Staatsfeind.'
Review, 3089 words
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