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In 1948, the military and the CIA decided to settle their differences and take a hard look at the Gehlen group. In stepped Critchfield, who'd just been recruited into the CIA after an outstanding record as an Army commander during the war, during which he led units in Western Europe and North Africa. A farmer's son and ROTC cadet from North Dakota State University, Critchfield became the youngest colonel in the conflict.

As the new guy in an organization dominated by former OSS people, Critchfield was assigned to head to the Gehlen complex in Bavaria and make a recommendation on its future.

"I was very charmed by these East Coast lawyers and such," he said. "And they, without any briefing, sent me to investigate the Gehlen organization. I spent four weeks there and recommended that they keep it together."

Critchfield argued that the Gehlen organization could be instrumental not just as a continued intelligence asset, but as a force for influencing whatever Germany would become. Gehlen had been a member of the German Army's General Staff, which in the moral relativism embraced by soldiers, spies, and politicians, was considered far less evil than Nazi creations such as the SS and the Gestapo.

Critchfield says that Gehlen was an opportunist who realized early in the war that the world would be divided between the United States and the Soviet Union, and had begun preparing himself for Hitler's downfall. Hitler, in fact, fired Gehlen in the closing days of the war because of his bleak assessments of Germany's ability to hold off the Soviets on the Eastern Front.

Gehlen had prepared for an Allied victory months before the war's end and, with a group of confidantes, had been burying Soviet intelligence in the mountains of Bavaria. He even offered his services to the British, but was spurned.

"Gehlen's mission was to have his little packet of information and wait for the Allies, and use that little package to create a German intelligence," Critchfield said. "I didn't think that it was a Nazi organization."

Critchfield says the Gehlen people were instrumental in getting West Germany into the new North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In fact, when West Germany's first post-war chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, visited the United States during those talks in 1954, the military raised the Gehlen issue.