The Service: the Memoirs of General Reinhard Gehlen

I'm extremely pleased with the purchase although I didn't read the book yet I do know the events in bits and pieces I'm extremely curious on his assessment on Martin Borman being a Soviet spy. I've been hearing that a lot lately so it's definitely stoking my curiosity. Now getting to the sale delivery time was spot on and condition of book was impeccable

Well written history of the German Army Intelligence Service. Published in 1972, details some of the events discussed in the Paperclip books from another perspective. Excellent read, also covers the German-Russian situation which is where Gehlen is focused during the war and after.

Gen Reinhard Gehlen was an American hire on to the US data collection branch of the our gov't. RG was Hitler's Russian expert. RG misled American intelligence to initiate a cold war production sequence of industrialization to counter the USSR due his need to be more important than he was. His object allowed numerous ex Nazis to escape into the unknown reaches of So America? and else where!He was brilliant and held his position within American intelligence (?) for years.Remember evolution: Promote to inefficiency or until it/you are discovered or consumed!

Gurman Singh Bal's comments about the memoirs of Gen. Gehlen are just ridiculous. Basically he can't get beyond his own subjective biases. The substance of his critique is that he feels Gehlen is arrogant, and he is amazed that Gehlen didn't dwell on the Holocaust. Concerning the arrogance charge, Singh Bal obviously has seen too many Hollywood movies and he can't see beyond his own stereotypes of strutting Nazis. Concerning the Holocaust charge, Gehlen wasn't involved in the Holocaust, he was not part of the bureaucracy that planned or implemented it, so why would any reasonable person expect him to dwell on it in his memoirs? Singh Bal may be surprised to hear that World War 2 was not solely about the Holocaust. The task of German intelligence on the Eastern front was to provide strategic information about the Soviets. Gehlen's memoirs provide a detailed inside look at the complex relationships between the former Nazi intelligence service and the CIA at the end of the war. It is well written, well translated by David Irving, and very insightful.

The book arrived in fast; in excellent conditions…

This was a good read and I can't fault him for fingering Boreman as a Soviet agent since the enigma decrypts were not yet declassified and the fate of Boreman was still unknown.

'Normal' people do not construct elaborate identities, and while some pry into others' lives, they do not attempt to manipulate them, or blackmail, or implicate them in plots. But Gehlen's operatives would, in pursuit of information. At a time when vast armies faced each other across the European plains, they felt any detail might make a difference. To collect those observations, Gehlen tells how he would travel:'I had done all I could to make my organization watertight and security-conscious. In Germany and abroad I traveled under different names, and in each of the three subsections in West Germany [when the Allies had split Germany after 1945] I was known by a different name: in the North it was Dr. Schneider; I had also had an American passport issued in the name of Garner and another identity card in the name of Gross. I felt it better to assume the dignity of "Doctor", since then I could be addressed anonymously as 'Herr Doktor'-- the less use that was made of any name the better. I knew the overall shape of the organization's structure, and from time to time I would be shown area charts of our operations on the other side of the Iron Curtain; but I took care not to learn too much about identities or the minutiae of the organization's undertakings. Probably nobody knows less of the operational incidents which fill the pages of modern spy books than the director of an intelligence agency....' (p. 172) If queried by his Chancellor, was he going to plead ignorance?This sounds more like confessions of a serial philanderer visiting girlfriends on someone else's money. However, this was a memoir of a notorious official of the Third Reich, expert on the USSR. Did he retreat into his own imaginary world of spies, and with help of a few pilfered documents, use them to con Western powers to shelter him from reprisal? This book is Prima Facie evidence that Gehlen was not a spy; spies cannot verify anything in enemy dossiers.While he has sections dealing with the Russia / China split and USSR politics, Gehlen does not make much of the abysmal 'Economic Planning' that bankrupted the Communists. They could threaten other nations, and engage in military adventures, but forced quotas in State Factories did not improve a citizen's standard of living, nor add to GDP. Those records, when revealed, were so wild that we should have known something was wrong and acquired more facts.

Appears to be a Good book , in advertised shape.

An interesting insight into the mind of one of the founders of western intelligence services...