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biffvernon wrote:Aurora on PS

RenewableCandy wrote:Perhaps LB3 writes news-digests for a living?

The predecessor of the BND is the German eastern military intelligence agency during WWII, the Abteilung Fremde Heere Ost or FHO Section in the General Staff, led by Wehrmacht Major General Reinhard Gehlen. Its main purpose was to collect information on the Red Army. In 1946 Gehlen set up an intelligence agency informally known as the Gehlen Organization or simply "The Org" and recruited, initially quite modestly, some of his former co-workers, operatives of Wilhelm Canaris' Abwehr, but he also recruited from the former Sicherheitsdienst, SS and Gestapo.[2] The organization worked almost exclusively for the CIA, which contributed funding, equipment, cars, gasoline and other materials. On 1 April 1956 the Bundesnachrichtendienst was created from the Gehlen Organization, and transferred to the West German government. Reinhard Gehlen became President of the BND and remained its head until 1968.[3]

Anticipating the defeat of the Third Reich, Reichsleiter Martin Bormann set up 750 corporations in neutral countries, primed as vehicles to receive the liquid wealth of Germany in addition to patents and other proprietary industrial information. An organizational genius and the real power behind Hitler, Bormann, known as the "Brown Eminence", successfully fled Europe for South America and administered a "Reich in Exile" in the years following the war.

With remnants of the SS as an enforcement arm, former Gestapo chief General Heinrich Mueller as security director, the 750 corporations as a base of economic power and the willing silence and cooperation of the Western Allies, Bormann guided his organization to a position of consummate power.

One banker quoted by Manning termed the Bormann Organization, the "world's most important accumulation of money power under one control in history". Controlling Germany's major corporations, the Federal Republic itself and much of Latin America, the Bormann Organization also maintained a formidable circle of influence in the United States. Paul Manning has written the definitive text on the Bormann Organization.

was an American broadcast journalist. He worked closely with Edward R. Murrow during World War II as a correspondent for CBS Radio, and with the Mutual Broadcasting System later on in the war.