BND

BND
Abbreviation	BND
Predecessor	Gehlen Organization
Formation	1 April 1956
Parent organization	Germany
Headquarters	Pullach, Berlin (starting 2014)
Leader	BND/President
Type	intelligence agency
Staff	6,500
Interest of	Aristide Brunello, Richard Christmann, Katherine Horton
Subpage	•BND/President

The Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) is the foreign intelligence agency of Germany.

History

Full article: Gehlen Organization

The BND was formed in 1956 on the basis of the Gehlen Organization controlled by former Nazi General Reinhard Gehlen who remained as head until 1968.

The U.S. army intelligence (CIC) working in Germany 1945 was interested in Gehlen's files which he hid at the end of World War II before contacting CIC. The common enemy was now communist Russia and Gehlen had sensitive information on them. In Operation Rusty the CIC recruited and funded the former German service. One of the many released memos under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act read:

"[...] my meeting with General Gehlen, June, 1945 [...]

Colonel Philip was very favorably impressed with Gehlen's men and their intelligence capabilities. He agreed that they would be a desirable unit working for General Siebert as Theater G-2 [Red Army controlled areas] and thenceforth supported the project to the fullest.

In order to keep up the morale of the Gehlen Group, we arranged that those who were within a day's visit of their family should visit their homes. In the case of those who were further removed, I arranged to have Lt. Landauer make a round trip, taking letters and a few items of American stores to their families.

[...]

General Siebert wanted the men and the documents kept together, and that General Siebert had agreed with my recommendation that we reconstitute the group as far as possible." - John R. Boker, Jr.

In 1946 Gehlen is transferred to the U.S. with part of his staff, another part stays in Germany. In the words of a CIA analyst: after the Nazis' return they work "first under U.S. Army and later CIA trusteeship, then [1956] accepted by Bonn as the BND."

The BND has a permanent residency in Washington and BND personal is regularly briefed by CIA personal. As an example, a typical CIA memo from 1984 notes that BND Department Chief Dr.Rudolf Werner (responsible for Operation Gladio in Germany)

"has been very receptive to encouragement and advice from CIA officers in Munich [HQ of BND in Germany] and Headquarters." Werner "BELIEVED THAT THE EMPHASIS MUST HENCEFORTH BE PLACED ON ACTIVE INTELLIGENCE COLLECTION IN BOTH PEACETIME AND WAR, AS DISTINCT FROM A STAYBEHIND PROGRAM RESERVED FOR ACTIVATION ONLY IN HOSTILITIES. HIS TERM FOR STAYBEHIND ASSETS NOW ON CASCOPE'S (CIA alias for BND) ROLES IS "SLEEPERS."

the declassified memos note.

Pullach

The initial location of the BND headquarter in Pullach (south of Munich) is on the property and in the buildings of the so-called "Sonnenwinkel" (sun angle), which was formerly the estate of Martin Bormann built for him and his staff.

In the autumn/spring of 1968/69, there was a series of mysterious suicides of high-ranking spooks, including Vice President Horst Wendland, who shot himself at the official headquarters in Pullach. A total of 22 people connected to the agency died.

Activities

The BND has been spying on European politicians and enterprises at the behest of the NSA for over a decade. BND workers picked up on this – which had nothing to do with a bilateral US-Germany agreement signed in 2002 to pool efforts to combat "terrorism" – and have been complaining about it since at least 2008.

1956 coup offer

In 1956 Reinhard Gehlen offered to execute a coup if the Social Democrats came to power in a "neutralist" coalition government. If things get this far, Gehlen said to a high-ranking CIA-liaison that he would feel "morally justified to take all conceivable countermeasures - including the formation of an illegal apparatus in the Federal Republic to combat the German supporters of a pro-Soviet policy". Gehlen wanted to discuss such a plan conspiratorially in Washington, in the smallest circle.

Closeness to media

BND had from early on particularly close connections to the influential political news magazine Spiegel. In the 50s, the former SS-Hauptsturmführer Horst Mahnke and the former SS-Obersturmführer Georg Wolff acted as senior editors at the magazine. Mahnke reported extensively from the editorial office to the "Org", from where. The managing editor, later editor-in-chief and publishing director of Spiegel, Hans Detlev Becker, maintained a personal friendship with Gehlen's Hamburg governor, BND Vice President Hans-Heinrich Worgitzky.

In return, the BND helped Spiegel create the myth of a politically "left-liberal" independent magazine, thanks to the 1962 Spiegel affair, in which employees of the news magazine were subjected to an investigation procedure for possible treason due to an article about the West German defense capability. Large sections of the West German public saw this as an attempt to silence an unpopular publication. Rudolf Augstein and Hans Detlev Becker went to prison for press freedom in a PR-effective manner, but were politically not far from the right-wing BND.

Involvement in state terrorism

Full article: Operation Gladio

The BND (alias: CASCOPE in referenced document) runs a stay-behind network subordinated to NATO's Central Planing Committee (CPC). The CPC is a secretive body run by CIA and U.S. Army officials in Brussels.

The stay-behind network consists of paramilitary right-wingers and Nazi Parties with access to weapons and explosives depots. For these other similarly fostered groups over 1000 "issues" are recorded per year in Germany, including murders and bombing campaigns. Control has shifted from the BND to other German services like MAD (military intelligence) and VS (Verfassungsschutz, FBI equivalent).

When the German Nazi Party NPD (Nazionalsozialistische Partei Deutschlands) should be forbidden in 2003, the German High Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) refused to decide on the grounds that the higher echelons of the party are run by secret agents of the VS and the NPD "misses distance to state organs". Ironically, the politicians who first initiated the case would later refuse to tell the court the identities of those agents.

In an interview in Die Zeit, former Chancellor and deep politics insider Helmut Schmidt said:

I have a suspicion that all terrorisms no matter if it is the German RAF, the Italian Brigate Rosse, the French, Irish, Spaniards or Arabs are similar in their contempt for mankind. They are seconded only by certain forms of state terrorism.

Asked what he meant by "state terrorism" he responded: "Let's leave it there. But I really mean what I say."

Iraq

The BND was responsible for briefing the Iraqi defector known as 'Curveball' after he claimed asylum in Germany in 1999. His stories would later form the basis of a claim in George W. Bush's 2003 state of the union address that Iraq had mobile biological weapons labs.

People

Presidents

• Reinhard Gehlen 1956-1968
• Gerhard Wessel 1968-1978
• Dr Klaus Kinkel 1979-1982
• Eberhard Blum 1982-1985
• Heribert Hellenbroich August 1985
• Dr Hans-Georg Wieck 1985-1990
• Konrad Porzner 1990-1996
• Dr Hansjörg Geiger 1996-1998
• Dr August Hanning 1998-2005
• Ernst Uhrlau 2005-

 

Job here

Event	Job	Appointed	End
Trond Johansen	Intelligence liaison	1954	1958

 

Employees on Wikispooks

Employee	Job	Appointed	End	Description
Erich Dethleffsen	Leader of Analysis Section	July 1958	1968
Willi Krichbaum	Head of the General Agency L	1948	1961	Former Deputy Gestapo Chief
Arndt Freytag von Loringhoven	BND/Deputy Director	2007	2010

 

Related Documents

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:Did German bungling lead to Pan Am 103?	Article	24 September 1989	Gavin Hewitt	The blunders of "Operation Autumn Leaves" didn't end with the case of Marwan Khreesat. One of those arrested in the 26 October 1988 sweep was a Palestinian by the name of "Ramzi Diab" which was not his real name, it turned out. That name had been taken from an Israeli passport stolen in Spain. The German police suspect he may actually have transported the Lockerbie bomb.
Document:Privatization for Dummies – The Nuts & Bolts of The World's Biggest Scam	article	21 March 2019	Ronald Thomas West

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