Approved for Release: 2013/06/25
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Secret NOFORN
Chapter 1
2
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By 1949 the Soviet Union and the states of Eastern Europe had been effectively curtained off from the outside world, and the Soviet military carried out its planning, production, and deployment activities with the utmost secrecy. All Soviet strategic capabilities—bomber forces, ballistic missiles, submarine forces, and nuclear weapons plants—were concealed from outside observation. The Soviet air defense system, a prime consideration in determining US retaliatory policies, was also largely an unknown factor.
Tight security along the Soviet Bloc borders severely curtailed the movement of human intelligence sources. In addition, the Soviet Union made its conventional means of communication—telephone, telegraph, and radio-telephone—more secure, thereby greatly reducing the intelligence available from these sources. The stringent security measures imposed by the Communist Bloc nations effectively blunted traditional methods for gathering intelligence: secret agents using covert means to communicate intelligence, travelers to and from target areas who could be asked to keep their eyes open and report their observations later, wiretaps and other eavesdropping methods, and postal intercepts. Indeed, the entire panoply of intelligence tradecraft seemed ineffective against the Soviet Bloc, and no other methods were available.
Early Postwar Aerial Reconnaissance
Although at the end of World War II the United States had captured large quantities of German photos and documents on the Soviet Union, this material was rapidly becoming outdated. The main source of current intelligence on the Soviet Union’s military installations was interrogation of prisoners of war returning from Soviet captivity. To obtain information about Soviet scientific progress, the intelligence community established several programs to debrief German scientists who had been taken to the Soviet Union after the end of the war but were now being allowed to leave.²
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² At the end of World War II, the British had established Project DRAGON to gain information from German scientists who had worked on the Peenemunde rocket project, and the term DRAGON later was used to refer to individuals possessing scientific or technical information. In 1948 the US Air Force set up Project WRINGER in Germany to gather intelligence on the Soviet Union from defectors and refugees; this project was later absorbed into the combined armed forces/CIA Defector Reception Center (DRC), which began operations in February 1951. In October 1951, a separate organization to exploit individuals with scientific or technical backgrounds, especially German scientists who had worked inside the Soviet Union, came into existence. This organization was known as the Returnee Exploitation Group (REG) and was located in Frankfurt. By 1958 the flow of scientists was so small that the REG merged with the DRC.
*The Defector Reception Center Germany, 1951 to 1967, Clandestine Service Historical Series CSHP-41 (CIA: History Staff, 1972), pp. 5-6, 29-30 (S).*
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Secret
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Approved for Release: 2013/06/25