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Acting in response to Chamberlin's requests, Clay issued sharply worded telegrams that strongly implied a full-scale Soviet military offensive against Western Europe was brewing. “For many months, based on logical analysis, I have felt and held that war [with the Soviets] was unlikely for at least ten years,” Clay cabled to Washington on March 5, 1948. “Within the last few weeks, [however,] I have felt a subtle change in the Soviet attitude … which now gives me a feeling that it may come with dramatic suddenness.…”
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Gehlen's studies of the Red Army provided the intelligence underpinning for Clay's comments, according to the Office of National Estimates (ONE) source; they were the “facts” that supported his argument. Clay's officially top secret telegram was quickly leaked to the U.S. press and was whipped up by the media into a full-blown war scare that is generally recognized today as one of the most important watersheds of the cold war. Policymakers in Washington accepted the contention that 175 fully armed Red Army divisions stood poised in the Soviet-occupied zone, waiting restlessly to attack. Gehlen's central contention that the USSR had not substantially demobilized its troops since the war, while the United States had, was accepted without question at the time and widely regarded as proof of an aggressive Soviet intent toward Western Europe.

Equally revealing, the same troops that the 1946 U.S. Army analysis had described as being tied down with “immediate occupation and security requirements” were now described in Gehlen's estimates (and later in the intelligence summaries of the Pentagon as well) as “a highly mobile and armored spearhead for an offensive in Western Europe,” according to a crucial Joint Chiefs of Staff war plans summary. The U.S. Army's earlier acknowledgment of the transport and logistic problems faced by the Red Army disappeared from the top secret appraisals of Soviet capabilities. Instead, the Russians were said now to be able to launch large-scale offensives in Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East all at the same time.
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¹⁷

“Russia, at this stage, is the world's No. 1 military power,” headlined
U.S. News & World Report
in a feature story on the new crisis. “Russia's armies and air forces are in a position to pour across Europe and into Asia almost at will.” The United States had fewer than a score of divisions to stand guard against this horde and seemed to be losing troops every day because of budget cutbacks and a widespread desire at home to return to normality. The Truman administration's response to this dilemma seemed obvious: Stop the cuts in the military budget, accelerate construction of the atomic weapons that appeared to offer more bang for the buck than conventional forces, and dump millions of dollars into a variety of covert operations and intelligence programs, including
the newly born CIA and its chief client, the Gehlen Organization.

It is clear in hindsight, however, that the estimates of Soviet military power that Gehlen provided to the Americans were simply wrong and grossly overstated both the Soviets' ability and their desire to fight. While it “is still commonly believed that the Soviet Union did not demobilize its ground forces at the end of World War II,” writes Matthew Evangelista in the MIT journal
International
Security
, “[t]his is not the case.… [The] overall manpower strength of the Soviet armed forces was considerably exaggerated in the West during the early postwar years.”
¹⁸
Even Paul Nitze, whose hawkish credentials are well established, suggested recently that only about one-third of the Soviet divisions in Europe at the time were actually full strength. About one-third more were partial-strength forces, Nitze continued, and fully one-third were cadre—that is, paper—forces.
¹⁹

Ironically, it is clear that the Soviets' own extreme secrecy played an important part in reinforcing Gehlen's status within America's growing national security complex. In the decade following the war many of the types of satellite surveillance photos and radio interception now used for keeping track of, say, Soviet bomber production or troop movements did not exist. Instead, the collection of that type of information was done in large part from the human sources in which Gehlen then specialized, like refugees, defectors, and spies.

Stalin's police agencies worked overtime to undermine every independent U.S. avenue to confirm (or disprove) the information that Gehlen's émigré agents were bringing in. While this was apparently viewed in the USSR as a wise security policy, its actual results were clearly negative from the point of view of long-term Soviet—or, for that matter, American—interests. Instead of slowing U.S. arms expansion, which is presumably a goal of Soviet security policy, it had exactly the opposite effect. Faced with the unknown, American military planners assumed the worst. The vacuum of information on Soviet military affairs that was ruthlessly enforced by the Kremlin ended up providing the environment in which America's own paranoia festered.

The dynamics of the process by which intelligence estimates are created also tended to lend credence to Gehlen's alarming assumptions about Soviet capabilities. “You'll never get court-martialed for saying [the Soviets] do have a new weapon and it turns out that they
don't,” Marchetti says. “But you'll lose your ass if you say that they don't have it and it turns out that they do.”
*
²⁰

Gehlen's role in the 1948 crisis was one of the first—and still one of the most important—examples of blowback created by the Nazi utilization programs. His seemingly authoritative intelligence reports played a very real role in shaping U.S. perceptions of the USSR during this pivotal period. Furthermore, the reports became an important ingredient in the domestic American debate over military budgets and defense policy.

In those events, General Chamberlin of army intelligence solicited General Clay's telegram because he knew that once leaked, it would be a potent weapon in budget battles on Capitol Hill. The idea succeeded almost too well. The arrival of Clay's warning on the heels of the collapse of the government in Czechoslovakia and related crises came perilously close to triggering a war itself.

Had Gehlen's role been limited to the preparation of top secret studies for the use of America's own most expert intelligence analysts, it is unlikely that his project would have done much harm during the postwar period, and it might actually have done some good. But that is not how intelligence agencies actually work. In reality, contending factions in the government leak their versions
of events to favored members of Congress or reporters and from them to the public at large. “Secret reports” revealed in this way—especially those that frighten or titillate us—take on a mystique of accuracy that is undeserved. These “secrets” become potent symbols that rally constituencies whose concern is not with the accuracy of a given bit of intelligence but rather with the use to which the leak can be put in the domestic political arena. As time goes on, a self-reinforcing process sets in, each new leak lending credibility to the next, which in turn “confirms” those stories that have already been revealed.

“The agency [CIA] loved Gehlen because he fed us what we wanted to hear,” Marchetti concludes. “We used his stuff constantly, and we fed it to everybody else: the Pentagon; the White House; the newspapers. They loved it, too. But it was hyped up Russian boogeyman junk, and it did a lot of damage to this country.”
²¹

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As late as 1950 fully half of the Soviets' transport for their standing army was horse-drawn. This actually had some advantages in the trackless frozen north, where Russian ponies were useful long after tanks and trucks had frozen up or bogged down in snowdrifts. Western Europe, however, was quite a different place.

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Some measure of Grombach's personal approach to the question of Soviet capabilities may be gleaned from his later published writings. In 1980 Grombach cited wartime Abwehr records as proof that “the Panama Canal giveaway … is the direct result of its definite selection by the USSR and Stalin as the first priority domino along with Cuba in the Communist play for world domination as far back as … 1942.” Soviet efforts throughout the decades leading up to this supposed Russian victory were said to have been helped along by “criminal subversion [and] naive stupidity … in Washington,” Grombach continued, including squads of Communist agents inside the State Department, CIA, and the Pentagon intelligence staffs.

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The U.S. war contingency plans of 1949 are a vivid illustration of the degree of self-deception that had taken hold among U.S. intelligence analysts at the time, in part as a result of the efforts of the Gehlen Organization. According to a top secret estimate declassified as a result of a Freedom of Information Act action by the author, U.S. military planning was based on the following “conclusions as to the strategic intentions of the Soviet Union in the event of war in 1949.” It is worth noting that these same “conclusions” were also used to justify Defense Department budget requests.

The following would be undertaken [by the USSR] simultaneously, according to the intelligence estimate:

(1) A campaign against Western Europe (including Italy and Sicily, but not the Iberian Peninsula initially) to gain the Atlantic seaboard in the shortest possible time and to control the Central Mediterranean;

(2) An aerial bombardment against the British Isles;

(3) A campaign to seize control of the Middle East, including Greece and Turkey, and the Suez Canal area;

(4) A campaign against China, and South Korea, and air and sea operations against Japan and the United States bases in Alaska and the Pacific, insofar as the Soviet Union can support such operations without prejudice to those in other areas;

(5) Small scale one-way air attacks against the United States and Canada, and possibly small scale two-way air attacks against the Puget Sound area;

(6) A sea and air offensive against Anglo-American sea communications;

(7) Subversive activities and sabotage against Anglo-American interests in all parts of the world;

(8) A campaign against Scandinavia and air attacks on Pakistan may also be undertaken concurrently with the foregoing, or as necessary;

(9) On successful conclusion of the campaign in Western Europe (and possible Scandinavia) a full-scale air and sea offensive would be directed against the British Isles;

(10) The Soviet Union will have sufficient armed forces to undertake campaigns simultaneously in the theaters indicated and still have sufficient armed forces to form an adequate reserve.

The strategic estimate went on to report that the Soviet capabilities in 1956–57 were projected to be the same as those in 1949, with the exception that “South Korea and a large portion of China will have been absorbed into the Soviet orbit.”

The British chiefs of staff also approved this estimate for their own military and intelligence planning, apparently at U.S. insistence. In an official communication with the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, the British commented that the American estimate of Soviet capabilities “is probably an overestimate, [but] little purpose would be served in re-examining [it].”

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Gehlen also played a role in the creation of the famous missile gap of the 1950s. “Gehlen provided us [the CIA] with specific reports on the Soviet ICBM program,” Victor Marchetti says. “He said, ‘We have two reliable reports confirming this,' and they [the Soviets] have just installed three missiles at that site,' et cetera, claiming that he had contacts among the German scientists captured by the Russians at the end of the war.” The intelligence reports were transmitted to the Pentagon through interagency channels, and word about the alarming new development eventually leaked from there into the press.

Walter Dornberger added fuel to this fire in 1955 by publishing alarming speculations that the Soviets might attack from the sea, using shorter-range missiles deployed in floating canisters off the coast of the United States. He was deeply involved in the United States' own ICBM program at this point, and his opinions were given considerable weight in public discussions.

The CIA soon dispatched some of the first of the revolutionary new U-2 surveillance planes on secret missions inside Soviet airspace to gather more data. “We figured that if the Soviets had ICBMs before the U.S., that could be damn serious,” Marchetti continues. “We also figured if they had them, they'd have to move them by railroad, particularly to Siberia, where they would be most useful against the United States. So we sent out Frank Powers and the U-2s and they plotted the whole [Soviet] rail network. U-2s scoured the Trans-Siberian Railroad, every railroad spur, and every missile R and D station. And nothing was found that remotely resembled the implementation of an ICBM [capability] at that time.… It was all bull.”

By that time, however, the missile gap story had already taken on the status of a fact, one which appeared to be backed up by authoritative leaks from the Pentagon. The issue subsequently played a major role in debates over the defense budget and in several election campaigns.

CHAPTER SIX

CROWCASS

Regardless of the high-level intrigues involving scientists and the Gehlen Organization, the United States Army was often an exemplary institution when it came to pursuit and prosecution of Nazi war criminals. Army investigators captured more suspects, conducted more interrogations, secured more evidence, and contributed to the prosecution of more war criminals than any other institution in the world, with the possible exception of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. And unlike the NKVD, the U.S. Army made much of the war crimes data it had gathered available to the entire world. Repositories of evidence and investigative files originally created or financed in large part by the U.S. Army, such as the Berlin Document Center and the records of the international team of prosecutors at Nuremberg, have provided the foundation for thousands of war crimes prosecutions by more than a dozen countries.