How the CIA used Camp King remains one of the Agency’s most closely guarded secrets. It was here in Oberursel that the CIA first began developing “extreme interrogation” techniques and “behavior modification programs” under the code names Operation Bluebird and Operation Artichoke. The unorthodox methods the CIA and its partner agencies explored included hypnosis, electric shock, chemicals, and illegal street drugs. Camp King was chosen as an ideal place to do this work in part because it was “off-site” but mainly because of its access to prisoners believed to be Soviet spies.
When the Americans captured the facility in the spring of 1945, the Nazis had been using it as an interrogation facility for Allied fliers. Camp King’s first commanding officer was Colonel William Russell Philp, and through the fall of 1945, Philp shared the Military Intelligence Service Center at Oberursel with General William J. Donovan, founding director of the Office of Strategic Services. General Donovan oversaw an operation here whereby high-ranking Nazi generals, including those dropped off by John Dolibois, were paid to write intelligence reports on subjects like German order of battle and Nazi Party chain of command. Dolibois, fluent in German, acted as Donovan’s liaison to the Nazi prisoners during this time. General Donovan kept an office at Oberursel until the OSS was disbanded in September 1945, after which he returned to Washington, D.C., and civilian life.
Colonel Philp’s job was to handle the rest of the prisoners. In the months that followed war’s end, the Camp King prisoner population grew to include Russian defectors and captured Soviet spies. There was valuable intelligence to be gained from these individuals, Philp learned, willingly or through coercion. But Philp also found that his officers lacked a greater context within which to interpret the raw intelligence being gathered from the Soviets. Russia had been America’s ally during the war. Now it was the enemy. The Soviets were masters of disinformation. Who was telling the truth? The Nazi prisoners claimed to know, and Colonel Philp began using several of them to interpret and analyze information from Soviet defectors. These Nazis were “experts in espionage against the Russians,” Philp later said. Two of them seemed particularly knowledgeable: Gerhard Wessel, who had been an officer in the German intelligence organization Abwehr, and Wessel’s deputy, Hermann Baun. Philp put the men to work. What started out as a “research project using POWs” became a “gradual drift into operations,” said Philp. He moved the Nazis into a safe house on the outskirts of Camp King, code-named Haus Blue, where they oversaw counterintelligence operations against the Soviets under the code name Project Keystone. Philp found that working with Nazis was a slippery slope, and in a matter of months the Germans had transformed from prisoners to paid intelligence assets of the U.S. Army.
In the summer of 1946 a major event occurred that influenced the CIA’s future role in Operation Paperclip and Camp King. Major General Reinhard Gehlen, former head of the Nazis’ intelligence operation against the Soviets, arrived at Camp King. Gehlen had been in the United States under interrogation since 1945. Here at Oberursel, Army Intelligence decided to make Gehlen head of its entire “anti-Communist intelligence organization,” under the code name Operation Rusty. Eventually the organization would become known simply as the Gehlen Organization. A network of former Nazi intelligence agents, the majority of whom were members of the SS, began working out of offices at Camp King side by side with army intelligence officers. Colonel Philp was in charge of overall supervision. By late 1947, the Gehlen Organization had gotten so large it required its own headquarters. Army intelligence moved the organization to a self-contained facility outside Munich, in a village called Pullach. This compound was the former estate of Martin Bormann and had large grounds, sculpture gardens, and a pool. The two facilities, at Oberursel and Pullach, worked together. Gehlen and Baun claimed to have six hundred intelligence agents, all former Nazis, in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany alone. According to documents kept classified for fifty-one years, relations between Gehlen and Philp declined and became hostile as Philp finally realized the true nature of who he was dealing with. The Gehlen Organization was a murderous bunch, “free-wheeling” and out of control. As one CIA affiliate observed, “American intelligence is a rich blind man using the Abwehr as a seeing-eye dog. The only trouble is—the leash is much too long.”