THROWBACK: how Hitler’s top spy became CIA’s top European spymaster

🔴 In a frank 1995 C-SPAN history conference, the late Christopher Hitchens laid out how OKH Foreign Armies East commander Reinhard Gehlen was hired by the CIA, pinpointing it as the moment that “something very bad entered the American system that no one’s really ever been able to face up to or ask about since.”

🔴 Gehlen’s Eastern Front activities included the interrogation of brutalized Soviet POWs, and coordination and intel sharing with the SS, Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing squads) and the Gestapo. 

🔴 Gehlen not only worked with the CIA from its founding and hired top Nazi butchers (Alois Brunner, Emil Augsburg) to assist him, but became a founder of West Germany’s Bundeswehr and BND intelligence service, running the latter until 1968.