Free The Pigeon Tunnel by John le Carré Page B

procurement, rather than its intrinsic worth. In all of which, the BND , to say the least, is not alone.

    We are in Pullach, we have a little time, and my host is giving me the tour of this handsome, rather English-style country house. I am impressed, as I suspect he wishes me to be, by the imposing conference room with its shiny long table, twentieth-century landscapes and pleasing outlook on to an inner courtyard, where sculptures of strength-through-joy boys and girls on plinths strike heroic postures at each other.
    â€˜Doctor Hanning, this is really remarkable,’ I say politely.
    To which, with the faintest of smiles, Hanning answers, ‘Yes. Martin Bormann had pretty good taste.’
    I am following him down a steep stone staircase, flight after flight of it, until we stand in Martin Bormann’s personalized version of Hitler’s Führerbunker , complete with beds, telephones, latrines and ventilation pumps, and whatever else was needful to the survival of Hitler’s most favoured henchman. And all of it, Hanning assures me with his same wry smile as I stare stupidly round me, officially listed as a protected monument under Bavarian state law.
    So this is where they brought Gehlen in 1947, I’m thinking. To this house. And gave him his rations, and clean bedding, and his Nazi-era files, and card indices, and his old Nazi-era staff, while uncoordinated teams of Nazi hunters chased around after Martin Bormann, and the world tried to absorb the indescribable horrors of Belsen, Dachau, Buchenwald, Auschwitz and the rest. This is where Reinhard Gehlen and his Nazi secret policemen were installed: in Bormann’s country residence that he won’t be requiring any time soon. One minute Hitler’s not-very-good spymaster is in flight from the Russian fury, the next he is the pampered favourite of his new best friends, the victorious Americans.
    Well, perhaps at my age I shouldn’t have looked so surprised. And my host’s smile tells me as much. Wasn’t I once in the profession myself? Wasn’t my own former Service energetically trading intelligence with the Gestapo right up to 1939? Wasn’t it on friendly terms with Muammar Gaddafi’s chief of secret police right up to the last days of Gaddafi’s rule – terms friendly enough to pack up his political enemies, even pregnant ones, and see them rendered to Tripoli to be locked up, and interrogated with all the best enhancements?
    It’s time for us to climb back up the long stone staircase for our working breakfast. As we arrive at the top – I think we are in the main hallway to the house, but can’t be sure – two faces from the past greet me from what I take to be Pullach’s wall of fame: Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of Hitler’s Abwehr from 1935 to 1944, and our friend General Reinhard Gehlen, the BND ’s first Präsident. Canaris, a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi but no fan of Hitler, played a double game with Germany’s right-wing resistance groups, but also with British Intelligence, with whom he remained in sporadic contact throughout the war. His duplicity caught up with him in 1945, when he was summarily tried and horribly executed by the SS : a brave and muddled hero of some sort, and certainly no anti-Semite, but a traitor to his country’s leadership for all that. As to Gehlen, also a wartime traitor, it is hard to know in the cold light of history what isleft to admire in him beyond deviousness, plausibility and a con artist’s powers of self-persuasion.
    So is that all of it , I wonder, surveying these two uncomfortable faces? Are these two flawed men the only role models from its past that the BND has to offer to its shiny-eyed new entrants? Think of the treats that await our British new entrants to the secret world! Every spy service mythologizes itself, but the Brits are a class apart. Forget our dismal showing in the Cold War, when the KGB outwitted and