Len Deighton says that Gehlen’s agents in the USSR never missed receiving a payment when US intel took control of Amt 5 with the fall of the Third Reich.
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When we were reading and researching operation paperclip. I read that USA kept the German Intel on Russia as is. Totally independent of USA oversight-all they were supposed to do was to report to USA on Russian Crap. Talk about a deal with the devil.
Shaky, to be sure. We had no intel mechanism at the time to penetrate the SU; civilian intel was non existent and mil intel was chasing escaping Nazis. I suspect it was sort of a lingering General Patton mentality re: the USSR.
As you imply, it was similar to Op Paperclip thinking: we had no missile program and Stalin was grabbing German scientists as fast as he could get them. They were likely stopgap measures until some certain people could rattle Washington's cage to wake up to what was beyond the joy of Victory in Europe... They turned out to be longer programs than stopgap, eh?