As long as conflict with Russia is framed as an existential clash of values, no peace is possible. From Alastair Crooke at strategic-culture.su:
This Ukrainian identitarian ‘play’ has a crucial part in the story of why sustained peace with Russia is foreclosed.
Few people even know the name ‘Gehlen’, yet Reinhart Gehlen and his SS men not only shaped politically the newborn OSS and CIA, but also, to a significant extent, determined post-war American attitudes toward Russia. A zeitgeist that has remained largely intact to this day, Gehlen – ‘man of light and dark’; both Führer loyalist and traitor – long before Hitler finally fired him. Sometimes it is necessary to look into deep history to identify the roots of contemporary issues.
Gehlen was adept in persuading Hitler how weak were the opposing Russian forces: When General Paulus’s Sixth Army was surrounded by Russian armies which methodically crushed everything inside the cauldron, Gulen reassured that “the enemy troop concentrations remained much too weak for far-reaching operations”. And whilst the Sixth Army of 300,000 German soldiers was being crushed, and Paulus’s last Panzer tanks had been lost, Gehlen sent Hitler old intelligence showing no indication at all of Soviet troop movements. Finally, just as Stalingrad was falling, and Paulus about to surrender, Gulen admitted to Hitler that “the situation of Stalingrad might very well be serious”.
It seems that underestimating Russia has a storied history …
Yet, in an astonishing chameleon-like transformation, as the Third Reich crumbled, Reinhart Gehlen – the head of Nazi intelligence for the Eastern Front – grabbed his trove of intelligence files on the Soviets and surrendered to Counter Intelligence Corps of the U.S. Army.
He brokered a deal by which he and a select group of his men would establish a secret intelligence service for the Allied Occupation. For the avoidance of confusion, in a 2001 CIA affidavit, the latter stated that “General Gehlen himself is not considered an alleged Nazi war criminal”.
