The Bormann settlement in Pullach (here an aerial photograph from 1938) became the headquarters of the BND at the end of the 1940s.
Image: BND
Historians have researched the early history of the BND up to the departure of its first president. Apparently he had marketed his organization skillfully, although the intelligence services remained modest.
On October 17, 1949, the former Wehrmacht General Reinhard Gehlen sent Konrad Adenauer, who had just taken office, a memorandum in which he presented his ideas for a new German intelligence service for the first time. In it he falsely claimed that he had already set up an organization “which, under German leadership, was working together with the Americans on the basis of a purely German conception in the intelligence service against the eastern states and in the defense against communism in the interior of West Germany”. Based on the experience that espionage and counter-espionage belong together, “the organization has a good III network [i.e. of counter-espionage], which can be used immediately for the government’s wishes in the field of constitutional protection”.
In fact, what was to become the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) was founded by the United States. First the military secret service CIC, then the newly founded Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) took over parts of the former Foreign Armies East of the Wehrmacht. Reinhard Gehlen had asserted himself as the leading person since 1946, but he was under close supervision – also and especially with regard to contacts with the Adenauer government. However, the Gehlen organization (OG or Org) has built up a network of informants and contacts since its inception, first in Bavaria and then throughout the Federal Republic. She also kept in touch with parties and associations, the Bonn ministries and the Chancellery.