Page 79 - Gobierno ivisible

Date: 4/5/2011 Page: 79 of 237

Powers testified that he was unable to use the automatic ejection seat because he had been thrown forward in the
cockpit. He said he then decided just to climb out. But after he did, he testified, he was unable to reach back into
the U-2 "so that I could actuate these destructor switches."

A CIA report issued after Powers had been held for twenty-four days and secretly interrogated by the agency, set
forth substantially the same story and stated that "the destruct switches ... take four separate manipulations to set."
The CIA report said Powers lived up to his contract and his "obligations as an American" and would get his back
pay. [18]

At the friendly Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, no one asked Powers whether he had been under a
mandatory order to destroy his plane. It was obvious that the CIA did not relish any close scrutiny of the
fascinating workings of the destructor mechanism.

Some of the weightier political analyses of the confusion in Washington during the U-2 affair have failed to pay
enough attention to the vital business of the destructor unit. The cover stories were based on the assumption that
Francis Gary Powers had actuated those destructor switches. He had not.

Only the CIA knows what would have happened had he done so.

***

1963: Trouble for General Gehlen

Any casual newspaper reader knows that 1963 was a banner year for spy cases, but one of the most significant
received the least attention in the United States, considering that it deeply involved the CIA. On July 11, in a
Karlsruhe courtroom, Judge Kurt Weber sentenced three former West German intelligence agents to prison terms
for spying for the Soviet Union.

Heinz Felfe, forty-five, drew fourteen years. Hans Clemens, sixty-one, got ten years. Erwin Tiebel, sixty, their
courier, got off with three years. The trio had confessed to delivering 15,000 photographs of top-secret West
German intelligence files and twenty spools of tape recordings to Soviet agents in East Berlin.

All three had been employed by the West German Federal Intelligence Agency (FIA), better known as the
"Gehlen organization" for its founder and chief, the mysterious ex-Nazi general, Reinhard Gehlen. The defendants
confessed they had systematically betrayed state secrets from 1950 until their arrest in 1961.

Ironically, their work was so pleasing to both sides, that shortly before their arrest Felfe and Clemens received
citations for ten years of meritorious service from both of their employers. From General Gehlen they received a
plaque bearing an illustration of St. George slaying the dragon. From Alexander N. Shelepin, then Chairman of
the Soviet KGB,* they got a letter of commendation and a cash bonus.

As Judge Weber summed it up succinctly: "For ten years the Soviet intelligence service had two experienced spies
sitting right in the center of the enemy's organization."

Since the Gehlen organization was financed and controlled by the United States Central Intelligence Agency, the
Felfe-Clemens Tiebel case meant nothing less than that the CIA's most vital European subsidiary had been
penetrated at the top, virtually from its inception.