"Dear Reinie"

By Melvin Maddocks

THE GENERAL WAS A SPY by HEINZ HOHNE and HERMANN ZOLLING 377 pages. Coward-McCann & Geoghegan. $8.95.

GEHLEN: SPY OF THE CENTURY by E.H. COOKRIDGE 402 pages. Random House. $10.

THE GAME OF THE FOXES by LADISLAS FARAGO 696 pages. McKay. $11.95.

While waiting for further communiques from the nostalgia front--Richard Burton's Mussolini and the return of the crew cut, perhaps--the American public is being deafened by old spies and their chroniclers whispering: "Now it can be told."

An alert literary scavenger named Ladislas Farago dug a tin box of German intelligence papers out of the National Archives, and recycled them into a bestseller: The Game of the Foxes. The book, an almost day-to-day account of German agents at work in Britain and the U.S. during World War II, is a stunning proof of the incredible cost and even more incredible inefficiency of most espionage networks. Of the many Abwehr agents smuggled into England, for example, not one was still operating at the time of the Normandy invasion in 1944.

Diaries are negotiable currency, too. The London Journals of General Raymond E. Lee, 1940-41 (Little, Brown) are bringing $12.50 on the open market, mostly for predicting--you read it here!--that Russia will prove too much for Hitler. So it's "Once more into the attics, fellow soldiers." Even old memos are worth their weight in gold, and that, given the art of military memo writing, is saying something. In 1945 Sir John Masterman, peacetime Oxford don, wartime counterspy, was ordered to write an official report about the remarkable success British intelligence enjoyed turning around German spies in England and deploying them as double agents. Yale University Press has simply reprinted this surprisingly readable document (The Double-Cross System in the War of 1939 to 1945) on the coded doings of Garbo, Tricycle and the rest, and bargain-priced the instant book at $6.95.

The No, No, Nanette of the reprocessed cloak and dagger act, however, promises to be Reinhard Gehlen. How can you upstage a man who was Hitler's favorite intelligence officer, then after the war played "Dear Reinie" to his CIA chief Allen Dulles.

Born in 1902, just too late for World War I, he marked time as an artillery and cavalry officer until World War II brought out his special talents. He was one of those who could put war on paper. Statistics and maps filled him with a passion to organize them. By 1942 he was chief of intelligence on the eastern front. Toward the end, when accuracy meant prognosticating defeat, Gehlen's accurate reports earned him one of Hitler's temper tantrums. But this last-minute fall from favor only helped certify his anti-Nazi posture afterward.

Nothing suggests Gehlen's sublime insolence better than what he did when everything fell apart in 1945. He disguised himself as jolly Dr. Wendland, collected the microfilms of his files, and buried them in a Bavarian mountain meadow. Then he waited for the American troops. Whisked to Washington, the archenemy of only a few months before convinced his conquerors that they should appoint him (and those files) as their primary espionage source against the Soviet Union. The Gehlen Organization, or simply the "Org," set up in what had been an SS model housing development, outside of Munich. To a number of recruits--ex-SS men and Gestapo agents may have run as high as 30%--it was just like home.

The layout cost the United States $3,000,000. During the decade that Gehlen worked exclusively for the CIA, another $200 million in American money funded the Org. By 1948 the Org numbered 4,000 agents and supplied an estimated 70% of the U.S. Government's information on the Soviet military. Once Gehlen had the idea of putting 432 simultaneous wire taps on East Berlin phones. New Jersey Bell Telephone supplied the switch board, courtesy of the CIA, at a total cost of $6,000,000.

When the Org became the official espionage service of West Germany in 1956, Gehlen became a global caterer. He and the END -- the Org's new name -- discreetly contracted themselves out to Tanzania, Afghanistan and the Congo. The secret services of Israel and Egypt alike found occasion to use Gehlen's services.

British Author Cookridge and Germans Hohne and Zolling have compiled dossiers on Gehlen that might satisfy the Org itself. Cookridge, an old agent who makes a living out of spy chronicles like The Truth About Kim Philby, tends a bit to trade on man-in-the-shadows glamour.

Gehlen turned the gentleman's avocation of spying -- Sir John Master man still compares it to cricket -- into big business. But Hohne and Zolling argue that, despite all his thermos-flask cameras and secret, secret ink, he still couldn't keep up with the times. Forced into retirement in 1968, he sat in his study on Lake Starnberg with a death mask of Frederick the Great looking down and wrote his memoirs (due out later this year) rather like Buffalo Bill after the frontier went thataway. For spying, like everything else, has gone automated.

"They expect you to be able to say that a war will start next Tuesday at 5:32 p.m.," Walter Bedell Smith com plained when he was head of the CIA.

While he lasted, Gehlen gave his customers what they thought they wanted.

In the cold war he catered to their sense of sinister conspiracy, then by a more or less relevant act or report relieved the anxiety he had helped create. He predicted the Hungarian revolt, for in stance, and the Israeli-Arab Six-Day War. But these events occurred any way. Sentiment dictates that Gehlen be treated as the last of the Scarlet Pimpernels. He was, in fact, more like the last of the Prussians -- a nostalgia the world could hardly afford even in his own time. .Melvin Maddocks

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.