He led the Gehlen Organization, which worked with the CIA from its founding, employing former SS and Wehrmacht officers, and later became the first head of West Germany's Federal Intelligence Service (BND).

He achieved the rank of major general before he was dismissed by Adolf Hitler in April 1945 because of the FHO's alleged "defeatism"[2] and accurate but pessimistic intelligence reports about Red Army military superiority.

Gehlen received an assignment at the cavalry school in Hanover in 1926, where spent two years before requesting a transfer, and in 1928 he was sent to back to his original unit in Schweidnitz.

That same year in October, Gehlen began attending the "Commander Assistants Training," the equivalent of the German staff college during the Weimar Republic, and in June 1935 he graduated as second in his class.

[19] In late 1939 he was transferred to the staff of General Franz Halder, the Chief of the Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH), the Army High Command.

[20] As Operation Barbarossa began and the Red Army continued to fight despite its losses, Halder became upset at his intelligence department for not informing him of the true extent of Soviet military capabilities.

[23] Before the Wehrmacht disasters in the Battle of Stalingrad (23 August 1942 – 2 February 1943), a year into the German war against the Soviet Union, Gehlen understood that the FHO required fundamental re-organization, and secured a staff of army linguists and geographers, anthropologists, lawyers, and junior military officers who would improve the FHO as a military-intelligence organization despite the Nazi ideology of Slavic inferiority.

Kauder was sent initially to collect intelligence on the Bulgarian Air Force, but reported that he made contact with anti-communist Ukrainian emigre groups, who still had vast connections in Ukraine and southern Russia.

Otto Wagner, The initial supervisor of Kauder, was not trusted by the secretive Canaris and was not read in on the Japanese connection and how a Jew came to be implausibly working for the Nazis.

[48] On May 6, 1940, Kauder brought two of his Ukrainian contacts, namely Prince Anton Turkul[49] and Ira Longin (Ilya Longa)[50] [51] to meet the Abwehr officers.

[55] Gehlen's cadre of FHO intelligence-officers produced accurate field-intelligence about the Red Army that frequently contradicted Nazi Party ideological perceptions of the eastern battle front.

[56] The FHO collection of both military and political intelligence from captured Red Army soldiers assured Gehlen's post–WWII survival as a Western anticommunist spymaster, with networks of spies and secret agents in the countries of Soviet-occupied Europe.

[58] Meanwhile, as of 1946, when Joseph Stalin consolidated his absolute power and control over Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe as agreed at the Potsdam Conference of 1945 and demarcated with what became known as the Iron Curtain, the Western Allies of World War II, the U.S, Britain, and France had no sources of covert information within the countries in which the occupying Red Army had vanquished the Wehrmacht.

On 22 May 1945, Gehlen surrendered to the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) of the U.S. Army in Bavaria and was taken to Camp King, near Oberursel, and interrogated by Captain John R. Boker.

[17] Boker removed his name and those of his Wehrmacht command from the official lists of German prisoners of war, and transferred seven former FHO senior officers to join Gehlen.

Gehlen initially selected 350 ex-Wehrmacht military intelligence officers as his staff; eventually, the organization recruited some 4,000 anticommunist secret agents.

Further operations by the Gehlen Org produced detailed reports about Soviet construction and testing of the MiG-15 jet-propelled aircraft, which United States airmen flying F-86 fighters would soon to face in aerial combat during the Korean War.

The network employed hundreds of former Wehrmacht military intelligence and some SS officers, and also recruited many other agents from within the massive anti-Communist ethnic German, Soviet, and East European refugee communities throughout Western Europe.

They were accordingly able to develop detailed maps of the railroad systems, airfields, and ports of the USSR, and the Org's field agents even infiltrated the Baltic Soviet Republics and the Ukrainian SSR.

Among the Org's earliest counterespionage successes was Operation Bohemia, which began in March 1948 after Božena Hájková, the sister in law of Czechoslovak military intelligence officer Captain Vojtěch Jeřábek, defected to the American Zone and applied for political asylum in the United States.

[70] On 1 April 1956, 11 years after World War II had ended, the U.S. Government and the CIA formally transferred the Gehlen Organization to the authority of what was by then the Federal Republic of Germany, under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer (1949–63).

[71] The end of Gehlen's career as a spymaster resulted from a confluence of events in West Germany: the exposure of a KGB mole, Heinz Felfe, (a former SS lieutenant) working at BND headquarters;[72] political estrangement from Adenauer, in 1963, which aggravated his professional problems; and the inefficiency of the BND consequent to Gehlen's poor leadership and continual inattention to the business of counter-espionage as national defence.

[citation needed] According to Der Spiegel journalists Heinz Höhne and Hermann Zolling, the premature end of the German colonial empire in 1918 placed West Germany's new foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst at a considerable advantage in dealing with the newly independent governments of post-colonial Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

[74] The fact that the BND could score certain successes despite East German Stasi interference, internal malpractice, inefficiencies and infighting, was primarily due to select members of the staff who took it upon themselves to step up and overcome then existing maladies.

[75] Only slowly did the younger generation then advance to substitute new ideas for some of the bad habits caused mainly by Gehlen's semi-retired attitude and frequent holiday absences.

[75] Gehlen was forced out of the BND due to "political scandal within the ranks", according to one source,[citation needed] He retired in 1968 as a civil servant of West Germany, classified as a Ministerialdirektor, a senior grade with a generous pension.

The authors of the book A Nazi Past: Recasting German Identity in Postwar Europe (2015) stated that Reinhard Gehlen simply did not want to know the backgrounds of the men whom the BND hired in the 1950s.

Among them were Adolf Eichmann’s deputy Alois Brunner, who would go on to die of old age despite having sent more than 100,000 Jews to ghettos or internment camps, and ex-SS major Emil Augsburg....

Critchfield added that Gehlen hired the former Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service of the Reichsführer-SS) men "reluctantly, under pressure from German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to deal with 'the avalanche of subversion hitting them from East Germany'".

The CIA review also discusses another book, Gehlen, Spy of the Century, by E. H. Cookridge, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1971, and claims that it is "chock full of errors".