ABSTRACT
Intelligence services have been an integral part the German state organisation since the founding of the Second Reich in 1871.1 Different and often competing services formed the backbone of the Nazi party security apparatus during the Third Reich. After the end of World War Two Germany was divided into two parts, the Soviet controlled zones establishing their own intelligence services as extensions of their larger Soviet counterparts. In the western part the CIA undertook the establishment of a German intelligence services, in the form of the ‘Organisation Gehlen (OG)’, run as a private venture by General Reinhard Gehlen, former head of the Wehrmacht’s military intelligence on the eastern front. Only in the mid-1950s was the OG instituted as an official government body, accountable to the Chancellor, and renamed Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND). In parallel to that, the Federal Republic of Germany established an internal security service (BfV) and a military counter-intelligence arm (MAD). These three organisations were augmented by a nascent military intelligence service only truly established in the late 1980s.
