Gehlen that they had flown him to Fort Hunt Maryland, the HQ of the OSS (the forerunner of the CIA), wined and dined him, then offered him the chance to run his own former spy-ring in countries now Soviet-dominated. Known as “the Org”, Gehlen’s Bavarian-based intelligence operation was funded by the CIA to the tune of a cool $200 million.
So successful was the Org in tapping into networks of Nazi sympathizers in Eastern Europe that it became NATO’s main source of intelligence there. (Although, in retrospect, this was not an exactly miraculous achievement, given that Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary had all been fascist before the war.)
The CIA under Allen Dulles was so wholly keen on using ODESSA and the Org to fight the Cold War against the Soviet Bloc that it was quite prepared to payroll indicted war criminals as “intelligence operatives”. Said Dulles of Gehlen, “He’s on our side, and that’s all that matters,” in what effectively was the CIA’s motto concerning erstwhile Nazis. Thus Klaus Barbie, the infamous SS “Butcher of Lyon”, happily worked for Gehlen after the war. Neither was the usefulness of former fascists limited to spying in the Cold War. Under Project Paperclip the War Department secretly imported Nazi scientists into the US to work in the weapons industry.
Employing ex-Nazi Gehlen as NATO’s master spy may well have been a pact with the devil. In his book
It gets dodgier. The Org was so penetrated by Soviet agents that the CIA and Western intelligence was hampered for years. Effectively, Reinhard Gehlen had sabotaged the very security of the free West he had sought to defend.
Which raises the interesting question: was Gehlen’s Org playing a double game? Conspiracy theorist Carl Oglesby asserts that Gehlen’s Org was actually the cover for ODESSA, which was rather more than a shadowy escape outfit, but a full-blown underground movement headed by Martin Bormann with the intention of preserving the Third Reich. Oglesby’s prime piece of evidence is a declassified CIA document which reports that while Gehlen was waiting in a POW camp in Wiesbaden, Germany, he sought permission to do his deal with the Americans from Admiral Karl Donitz. The admiral was Hitler’s appointed successor. “The German chain of command was still in effect,” Oglesby concludes, “and it approved of what Gehlen was doing with the Americans.”
What can be said for sure is that the Nazis once again found themselves in a position of power in Germany. Gehlen’s Org was officially incorporated into West Germany’s state intelligence department, the
Carl Oglesby, “Reinhard Gehlen: The Secret Treaty of Fort Hunt”,
Christopher Simpson,
OPERATION BLACK DOG
On his DeepBlackLies website, conspiracist David Guyatt claims to have “The Gulf War story that no one would publish”. This is Operation Black Dog, by which a US Navy Viking plane was flown off a carrier in the Red Sea on 25 February 1991 and hit an Iraqi chemical and biological weapons plant with a bio-warfare bomb of its own (“numerous deaths resulted”). On the homeward flight, the Viking was shot down, and a bio bomb on board split and spilled its bacteriological agent. Near the downed craft, later recovered by the Americans, were a number of dead Iraqis, who had presumably inhaled the bio agent leading to death by internal drowning. While the op was done in Navy colours, it was actually a CIA project.
Guyatt’s source for the story was “B”, about whom Guyatt mentions zilch, save for their meeting in a “seamy pub” in England. (Handy, that. No one challenges the story of a man with no name and no background.) After nine months of research, Guyatt took his info on Black Dog to a member of the House of Lords, Countess Mar who, with former Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe, met with the MoD in 1997. In Guyatt’s account, “The meeting was acrimonious. The result was that the MOD official could neither confirm nor deny the operation…”
Black Dog, if Guyatt is to be believed, was the CIA’s successor attack to Black Cat, the dropping of a chemical XV nerve bomb from a B52 on the Republican Guard. To hide this underhand, immoral, illegal action— which would put the American military in the same evil bracket as Saddam Hussein—the US Air Force then dropped fuel air bombs, which rid the ground of incriminating traces. Handy, that.
Without corroborating evidence, Black Dog looks like a Black Lie.
OPERATION NORTHWOODS
After the failure of the CIA to get Fidel Castro, the US military decided it was their turn to remove the bearded being from the face of the earth. Not for Army officer Lyman Lemnitzer such penny ante stuff as exploding cigars and “invasions” by half-trained exiles. No. Lemnitzer thought big. His idea was to manipulate public opinion into supporting a full-scale war against Cuba by organizing a fake Cuban attack on American people or territory. Among the “false-flag” scenarios Lemnitzer conjured were blowing up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay, attacks on the Cuban exile community in Florida, the shooting down of passenger planes by “Cuban” fighters, the planting of bombs in Miami and Washington and, if anything should go accidentally wrong with John Glenn’s Apollo space mission, fabricating electronic interference from Cuba to prove Castro guilty. As a further refinement, Lyman Lemnitzer suggested committing an outrage against one of the Commonwealth states in the Caribbean, such as Jamaica or Trinidad and Tobago, so Great Britain could be persuaded to join in.
Lemnitzer was no maverick soldier. He was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. All the above proposals were official plots outlined in the Operation Northwoods memo sent by General Lemnitzer and his fellow top brass to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and President Kennedy in March 1962. McNamara and Kennedy vetoed the idea.
The existence of Operation Northwoods was confirmed after author James Bamford sued the National Security Agency for documents on the Cuban missile crisis.
Only two words are necessary to say to those who do not believe in government conspiracies: Operation Northwoods.
James Bamford,
DOCUMENT: “JUSTIFICATION FOR U.S. MILITARY INVOLVEMENT IN CUBA” FROM THE JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF TO SECRETARY OF DEFENSE MCNAMARA, 13 JUNE 1962
