Free The Pigeon Tunnel by John le Carré Page A

Hanning is waiting for me on the doorstep of his handsome white house. Though I have never been here, I know, like anyone else, the bare bones of the BND ’s history: how General Reinhard Gehlen, chief of Hitler’s military intelligence staff on the Eastern Front, had at some unclear point towards the end of the war spirited his precious Soviet archive to Bavaria, buried it, then cut a deal with the American OSS , forerunner of the CIA , whereby he handed over his archive, his staff and himself in return for instatement as head of an anti-Soviet spying agency under American command, to be called the Gehlen Organisation or, to the initiated, the Org.
    There are stages in between, naturally, even a courtship of sorts. In 1945 Gehlen is flown to Washington, still technically a US captive. Allen Dulles, America’s top spy and founding Director of the CIA , looks him over and decides he likes the cut of his jib. Gehlen is treated, flattered, taken to a baseball match, but preserves thattaciturn and remote image that in the spy world passes all too easily for inscrutable depth. Nobody seems to know or care that, while spying for the Führer in Russia, he fell for a Soviet deception plan that rendered much of his archive valueless. It’s a new war, and Gehlen is our man. In 1946, now presumably no longer captive, he is installed as chief of West Germany’s embryonic overseas intelligence service under the protection of the CIA . Old comrades from Nazi days form the core of his staff. Controlled amnesia relegates the past to history.
    In arbitrarily deciding that former or present Nazis were loyal by definition to the anti-communist flag, Dulles and his Western allies had of course deluded themselves on the grand scale. As every schoolchild knows, anyone with a murky past is a sitting duck for blackmail. Add now the smouldering resentment of military defeat, the loss of pride, unspoken outrage at the Allied mass bombing of your beloved home town – Dresden, for instance – and you have as potent a recipe for recruitment as the KGB and Stasi could possibly wish for.
    The case of Heinz Felfe speaks for many. In 1961, when he was finally arrested – I happened to be in Bonn at the time – Felfe, a son of Dresden, had spied for the Nazi SD , Britain’s MI 6, East Germany’s Stasi and the Soviet KGB in that order – oh, and of course for the BND , where he was a prized player in games of cat-and-mouse against the Soviet intelligence services. And well he might be, since his Soviet and East German paymasters fed him any spare agents they had on their books for their star man inside the Org to unmask and claim the glory. So precious indeed was Felfe to his Soviet masters that they set up a dedicated KGB unit in East Germany solely to manage their agent, process his intelligence and further his brilliant career inside the Org.
    By 1956, when the Org acquired the grand title of Federal Intelligence Service, or Bundesnachrichtendienst, Felfe and a fellow conspirator named Clemens, also a son of Dresden and a leading player in the BND , had supplied the Russians with the BND ’s entireorder of battle, including the identities of ninety-seven field officers serving under deep cover abroad, which must have been something like a grand slam. But Gehlen, always a poseur and something of a fantasist, contrived to sit tight until 1968, at the end of which time 90 per cent of his agents in East Germany were working for the Stasi, while back home in Pullach sixteen members of his extended family were on the BND payroll.
    Nobody can do corporate rot more discreetly than the spies. Nobody does better mission creep. Nobody knows better how to create an image of mysterious omniscience and hide behind it. Nobody does a better job of pretending to be a cut above a public that has no choice but to pay top price for second-rate intelligence whose lure lies in the gothic secrecy of its