Intelligence Agencies, Technology and Knowledge Production

Data Processing and Information Transfer in Secret Services during the Cold War

Rüdiger Bergien, Debora Gerstenberger, Constantin Goschler, Rüdiger Bergien, Debora Gerstenberger, Constantin Goschler

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000543193
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Categoría: Geheimdienst & Spionage

This volume examines intelligence services since 1945 in their role as knowledge producers.

Intelligence agencies are producers and providers of arcane information. However, little is known about the social, cultural and material dimensions of their knowledge production, processing and distribution. This volume starts from the assumption that during the Cold War, these core activities of information services underwent decisive changes, of which scientization and computerisation are essential. With a focus on the emerging alliances between intelligence agencies, science and (computer) technology, the chapters empirically explore these transformations and are characterised by innovative combinations of intelligence history with theoretical considerations from the history of science and technology and the history of knowledge.

At the same time, the book challenges the bipolarity of Cold War history in general and of intelligence history in particular in favour of comparative and transnational perspectives. The focus is not only the Soviet Union and the United States, but also Poland, Turkey, the two German states and Brazil. This approach reveals surprising commonalities across systems: time and again, the expansion and use of intelligence knowledge came up against the limits that resulted from intelligence culture itself. The book enriches our global understanding of knowledge of the state and contributes to a historical framework for the past decade of debates about the societal consequences of intelligence data processing.

This book will be of much interest to students of intelligence studies, science and technology studies, security studies and International Relations.

1 Compromised cooperation Scholarly experts on Eastern Europe in the service of West German intelligence in the early Cold War

Thomas Wolf

DOI: 10.4324/9781003147329-2

Introduction

In the aftermath of the Second World War, when the Cold War antagonism that would shape the following decades began to emerge more clearly, it became apparent to political decision-makers in the West that sound knowledge about what would henceforth be their most important opponent was lacking. A few months after the end of the war, George T. Robinson, chief of the USSR Division at the wartime intelligence agency Office of Strategic Services (OSS), emphasised that knowledge about the Soviet Union had now become one of the most important foreign policy resources. At the same time, he drew attention to the fact that the level of expertise in this particular field left something to be desired. “Never before,” he worried, “had so many known so little about so much.”¹ Indeed, at the time of writing, the fledgling academic field of American Soviet studies was just beginning to emerge; with the help of government and private sector funding, it gradually gained momentum with the establishment of the “Russian Institute” (RI) at Columbia University in 1946 and the “Russian Research Center” (RRC) at Harvard University in 1948.² In Great Britain and France, the situation was a similar one: despite a longer research tradition, the field of Soviet studies also remained in its infancy and comprised only a small group of scholars.³

The situation in West Germany, on the other hand, was a rather different one. Here, there were long, though problematic, legacies to draw upon. Already before the beginning of the Second World War and then increasingly during the war, various institutions and branches of research in Germany had been involved in the production of knowledge about the Soviet Union and other states of Eastern Europe. The so-called Ostforschung (Eastern studies) rose to particular prominence within this context. Ostforschung⁴ refers to a multidisciplinary research field with Eastern Europe as its object of study. Its scientific contributions were characterised by a heavy emphasis on the historical German influence in these regions, which served as a means to justify the “struggle for Germanisation” within them. Accordingly, Ostforschung has been closely linked to expansionist political programmes from its early beginnings in the 1920s. Numerous scholarly experts on Eastern Europe benefited considerably during the period of National Socialist rule and had, to a large extent, willingly served the regime. Many actively participated in the development and subsequent implementation of the genocidal National Socialist New Order in Eastern Europe with its racist agenda.⁵ Thus, in West Germany after 1945, the problem was less a dearth of contemporary scholarly experts on Eastern Europe (as in the case of the United States) but rather the question to what extent the field and the associated research institutes should draw upon this personnel and continue earlier approaches.

In the United States, good relations and close cooperation with the Armed Forces and the intelligence community were integral to the emergence of Soviet studies. Prior research conducted during the war had been carried out in close coordination with the wartime intelligence service OSS.⁶ In the early Cold War period, when Soviet studies began to take root, the relationship also remained a close one. The newly established academic institutions sought to build and maintain personal relationships, not least for the purpose of securing essential financial resources from state authorities to fund their research. The rise of American Soviet studies was therefore tethered to political interests and those of the intelligence community in particular. Even though the full extent of the relationship with the intelligence services remains unclear due to the limited availability of primary sources, the existence of these connections and their significance for the early history of American Soviet studies are beyond dispute.⁷

This chapter will examine the relationship between intelligence work and Ostforschung in West Germany during the early Cold War from a comparative perspective. There has been speculation for many years about the degree of cooperation between the German foreign intelligence service BND or its forerunner organisation and scholars on Eastern Europe after the end of the war.⁸ However, due to access restrictions in the relevant archives, this relationship could not be examined in detail for a considerable period of time. Only recently, key BND documents have been made available for historical research.⁹ Based on these documents, previously available sources can now be reinterpreted: in particular, the correspondence of scholars can be evaluated in terms of what types of relationships existed between individuals – many of whom can now be clearly identified and named as intelligence officials – and the information that was shared among them. This makes it possible to analyse the extent to which cooperation and exchanges of knowledge took place and, last but not least, gain a deeper understanding of the intellectual legacies of Ostforschung and their influence on the production of knowledge in an intelligence context.

The chapter is divided into three sections: the first section focuses on the major players at the nexus of academic research and intelligence work. Who were the scholars in the employ of the intelligence service? What were the intentions behind their employment? What were their actual missions? In a second section, the re-emerging scientific landscape comes into view, along with questions pertaining to the influence of the BND and its predecessor on the establishment of research institutes after the Second World War. Did the intelligence services actively contribute to the institutional (re-)establishment of a research landscape, as it had been the case in the United States? Finally, in the third section, the specific processes of exchange are examined: what kind of knowledge about Eastern Europe circulated between intelligence services and Ostforschung? What types of obstacles were encountered, and where did synergistic effects come into play?

Scholars of Eastern Europe in the service of the Gehlen Intelligence Organization, 1946–1949

The relationship between scholars and the intelligence community is typically shrouded in secrecy. This also applies to the relationship between the research field of Ostforschung and the Gehlen Intelligence Organization (which later became the Bundesnachrichtendienst, or BND) in the Federal Republic of Germany. The intelligence gathering agency based in Pullach was staffed with former Wehrmacht officers and a considerable number of former members of the SS, in addition to individuals who had previously served in other organisations belonging to the security and terror apparatus of the National Socialist regime. It was established by the US Army in 1946, turned over to the CIA in 1949 and then recast into the Federal Intelligence Service, the BND, in 1956.

To put the early relations between the Gehlen Organization and scholars of Eastern Europe into perspective, it is first necessary to briefly outline the prehistory of this cooperation: As already mentioned, Ostforschung and politics had entered into an ominous liaison before and during the Second World War when various academics involved themselves in the development and implementation of National Socialist war aims and annihilation policies. Particularly in the military intelligence service, the so-called Abwehr, scholars found an institutional focal point to contribute with their concepts and have put them into practice. Agricultural experts and academics, including Theodor Oberländer, Hans Koch, Werner Markert and Otto Schiller, participated in the preparation of plans for the occupation of Eastern European and also witnessed first-hand their subsequent execution.¹⁰ Oberländer, for instance, had already been working for the Abwehr since 1937, and during the war he served on the staff of the Ukrainian “Nachtigall Battalion,” a volunteer unit accused of participating in the Lviv massacre in 1941.¹¹ Church historian Hans Koch provides another case in point: a professor of East European history at Königsberg, Breslau and Vienna, Koch worked for German military intelligence during the war and utilised his contacts to the right-wing extremist Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) to mobilise Ukrainian collaborators for the German war effort.¹²

After the war, during the formative years of the Federal Republic of Germany, both West German research on the East and the foreign intelligence service exhibited a considerable degree of continuity in terms of their personnel. This raises the question of whether the cooperation continued in the altered political landscape of the early Cold War era, and, if so, how extensive this cooperation was and what kinds of objectives were pursued.

In 1946, a group of economists, historians and social scientists began working for the Gehlen Organization. Known among their contemporaries within the organisation as the “professors’ group,” these scholars were tasked with providing analyses on the economy and population of Soviet Bloc countries. In large part, this group consisted of scholars who had already worked for military intelligence during the war, such as Oberländer, Schiller, Markert and Koch. Professional or academic credentials were not the decisive criterion for inclusion in the group. What mattered, first and foremost, was that the researchers were acquainted with each other – some were related, while others had served together during the war.¹³

The “professors’ group” was headed by Peter-Heinz Seraphim. In addition to authoring a racist and anti-Semitic book on Judaism in Eastern Europe, he also held various important positions in the field of Ostforschung during the period of National Socialist rule. Among other things, he was a prominent contributor of publications for the Institut für Deutsche Ostarbeit (IDO, Institute for German Work in the East), a research centre founded by the National Socialists in occupied Kraków, which was called into existence to help assert German rule in Poland. He was also editor of the in-house journal of the Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage (Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question) in Frankfurt (Main), which was the most important anti-Semitic research centre established in Germany during the war.¹⁴ Seraphim had been taken to the United States in 1945, whereupon he wrote reports for the US military and intelligence agencies. Seraphim himself described his work for the Americans as a “scientific activity in my eastern specialty,” which, in his view, also found “some resonance” among the authorities who had commissioned these reports.¹⁵

Most of the members of the “professors’ group” had thus been connected with the intelligence service in various contexts prior to 1945, and now, as a kind of “brain trust”¹⁶ for the Gehlen Organization, they came to revive these former ties. In the service of the Gehlen Organization, however, their assignment now changed in qualitative terms. Instead of complex issues and expertise pertaining to practical measures, they were tasked with preparing concise studies on various economic and demographic subjects relating to the USSR. For this purpose, they mainly...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• The knowledge of intelligence agencies in the Cold War world: an introduction
• 1 Compromised cooperation: scholarly experts on Eastern Europe in the service of West German intelligence in the early Cold War
• 2 Dogma versus progress: KGB’s technological and scientific (in-)capacities from the 1960s to the 1980s
• 3 Sublimation without domination: exploring the knowledge of U.S. strategic intelligence during the Cold War
• 4 American security databases and the production of space, 1967–1974: enhancing or obscuring patterns?
• 5 Knowledge transfer and technopolitics: the CIA, the West German intelligence service and the digitisation of information processing in the 1960s
• 6 Information technology is power: the intelligence service’s grab for the IT sector in Brazil
• 7 The computer as document shredder: video terminals and the dawn of a new era of knowledge production in Brazil’s Serviço Nacional de Informações
• 8 Turkish intelligence, surveillance and the secrets of the Cold War: blocked modernisation?
• 9 Solid modernity: data storage and information circuits in the communist security police in Poland
• 10 Eliminating the human factor? Perceptions of digital computers at the German domestic intelligence service
• 11 Global war academies: intelligence schools during the civil-military dictatorship in Brazil
• 12 Intelligence for the masses: the annual reports on the protection of the constitution in West Germany between Cold War propaganda and government public relations
• Conclusion
• Index