The Gehlen plotters surrendered to American military intelligence (G-2, War Department).16 Gehlen’s operation was allowed to continue using the retrieved archives. Gehlen’s group, which included his immediate staff of 350 men, moved to Pullach, a suburb of Munich, and became known as the Gehlen Organization. On Gehlen’s request, thousands of Abwehr, SD and SS officers were released from internment camps in violation of the de-Nazification program and joined Gehlen’s staff, which reached nearly 3,000 men. Hans Schmalschläger, former head of Stab Walli and Walli III within it, headed the Nuremberg branch of the Gehlen Organization.17
The Organization worked under CIA control and was its main source of information on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In 1956, it became the main part of the newly formed Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND or Federal Intelligence Service) of West Germany. Gehlen headed the BND until 1968.
Hermann Baun, former head of Walli I, got his own facility, and his network reached 125 agents in Western Germany.18 Over a few years Baun completed about 800 reports on the Soviet military. In 1947, he organized a successful secret transfer of the family of Gustav Hilger, former Nazi Foreign Office official and a specialist on Russian affairs who now worked for the Americans, from the Soviet Zone to West Berlin, despite the MGB’s surveillance of the family. But because Baun recruited a number of shady people and con men, he was dismissed and died in 1951. His group was included in the Gehlen Organization.
Gehlen’s use of high-level Abwehr and SS war criminals as staff members compromised the BND. The hiring of Wilhelm Krichbaum, the former Field Police Chief, was especially devastating. He had already been a Soviet agent when, in 1951, he recruited another double agent, Heinz Felfe, the former SD officer who worked for both the British and the Soviets.19 In November 1961, Felfe was arrested on spying charges, tried, and sentenced to a 14-year imprisonment. In 1969, he was exchanged for eighteen West German and three American agents imprisoned in the USSR.20 Gehlen retired in 1968, and for the next ten years Gerhard Wessel, Gehlen’s former deputy, headed the BND.
One Who Escaped SMERSH
Boris Smyslowsky, a former White Army officer, was, quite possibly, the most successful—and the luckiest—Russian who served in the Abwehr. Smyslowsky created a very efficient intelligence organization made up of Russian émigrés, and he was one of the few high-ranking Russian military collaborators not caught by SMERSH.
Smyslowsky was born in 1897 near St. Petersburg, into an officer’s family.21 After graduating from a military school in 1915, he participated in World War I and then in the Civil War, serving in the White troops under the command of General Anton Denikin. Later Smyslowsky lived in Poland and became a Polish citizen. In 1928, he moved to Germany, where he attended military courses. In 1939, after the German occupation of Poland, Smyslowsky became head of the Warsaw office of the White Russian military organization ROVS, which was called the Association of Russian Military Unions in Nazi Germany.
At the beginning of the war with the Soviet Union, Smyslowsky joined the Abwehr under the alias ‘von Regenau.’ In July 1941, the 1st Russian Foreign Educational Battalion attached to the Army Group North was organized under his command.22 After a few months, it became the Northern Group that eventually comprised twelve Russian battalions. The new Russian recruits from White emigrants and new POW volunteers were trained in the Abwehr school in Warsaw.
In March 1942, the Northern Group became the Sonderstab R (Special Staff Russia) with headquarters in Warsaw under the cover name of the Eastern Construction Company ‘Gilgen.’ It was attached to the Referat IX of Walli I and was supervised by Hermann Baun, head of Walli I. The Sonderstab R consisted of 20 high-ranking White Russian officers and a few hundred young men from Abwehr schools and intelligence groups. It collected intelligence mostly on partisans and the NKVD. The whole Soviet-occupied territory was divided into five (subsequently reduced to four) regions with staffs in the cities of Simferopol, Kiev, Chernigov, Minsk, and Pskov (later Vyru, in Estonia). There were also local representatives within each region. All units of the Sonderstab R’s network had cover names of building and supply organizations.
The net obtained information from informers recruited among local Communist Party members, members of the Komsomol, and former Soviet functionaries. They were usually forced to work for the Sonderstab R under threat of being arrested or sent to Germany as slave laborers. Agents were sent to partisan detachments as well.
The units sent their reports to Warsaw by couriers and collaborated with the SD and the German Field Police. It wasn’t until August 1944 that Soviet counterintelligence (NKGB) collected enough information to draw a general chart of the Sonderstab R organization.23
In 1943, Smyslowsky’s intelligence net was renamed Sonderdivision R (Division for Special Task Russia) and became part of the Wehrmacht.24 Later, regional detachments were reorganized, and the center in Warsaw became a directorate made up of the Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian departments, which consisted of intelligence and partisan sections. Sonderdivision R collected information on Soviet troops and the situation in both unoccupied Soviet territory and the territory liberated by the Red Army. For the latter purpose, numerous agents were left behind the front line, and in 1943, SMERSH and NKGB discovered and arrested up to 700 such agents. On the basis of information collected by the partisan sections, the FHO published a classified book, Proceedings of the Partisan War, detailing the organization, tactics, and propaganda work of Soviet partisans.
At the end of 1943, the Gestapo arrested Smyslowsky on charges of alleged support of the anti-Nazi Polish Home Army (Armija Krajowa) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), and the Sonderdivision R was disbanded.25 Smyslowsky ended up being acquitted and even given an award after intervention on his behalf by Admiral Canaris and Reinhard Gehlen, but the Germans lost the best intelligence net they had ever had at the Eastern Front.
Later Smyslowsky headed the Staff for Special Tasks attached to the OKH, which continued doing intelligence work. Finally, in February 1945, his 1st Russian National Division was renamed first the Green Army for Special Tasks and then the 1st Russian National Army; in addition, he was promoted to Major General. To confuse Soviet intelligence and counterintelligence, Smyslowsky changed his name to Artur Holmston. Formally, his army was an independent ally of the Wehrmacht and maintained neutrality toward the United States and England. However, it was not a real army because it consisted of only one battalion of about 600 men. Major Yevgenii Messner, a former White officer who was appointed head of the propaganda department in Smyslowsky’s army, recalled that half of the battalion’s men were dressed in civilian clothes and only a quarter of the battalion had rifles. He added: ‘Holmston was always absent while being occupied with the intelligence work and was not involved in the organization of the corps and its HQ.’26
By April 1945, Smyslowsky had moved his army to the Austrian town of Feldkirch, where Grand Duke Vladimir Kirillovich, head of the Imperial Family of Russia, and his court joined Smyslowsky while escaping the Red Army. On May 2–3, Smyslowsky and a group of his 494 men and women crossed the border with Liechtenstein. This group was the only Russian unit that had fought against the Red Army that was not handed over to SMERSH or the NKVD by the Western Allies. However, neither Liechtenstein nor Switzerland issued the Grand Duke an exit visa and he went to Spain.