Books: Dear Reinie

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.