Blueprints for Battle: Planning for War in Central Europe, 1948-1968

4. Waiting to Be Kissed? NATO, NORTHAG, and Intelligence

55 4 Waiting to Be Kissed? NATO, NORTHAG, and Intelligence Richard J. Aldrich An intelligence chief once remarked, “Intelligence is regarded as a Cinderella service,” and war is what changes Cinderella into the princess.1 This analogy sought to capture the way intelligence had been badly neglected before 1939 and suddenly became critical to operations thereafter. These remarks, however, apply less well to the Cold War, a curious and prolonged period of peace, albeit of a precarious kind, during which intelligence agencies grew at an unprecedented rate. In contrast to the interwar period, intelligence during the Cold War was always big business, and by 1957 the United States was already spending close to $1 billion per year in this area.2 Accordingly, one might look elsewhere for an analogy that will illustrate the relationship of intelligence to NATO’s Northern Army Group (NORTHAG) during the Cold War. This chapter suggests that we might consider that of Sleeping Beauty— or Dornröschen, as she is known in German. NORTHAG was established in 1952 as a NATO wartime multinational “command in waiting” that would assume its full functions with the onset of hostilities. We therefore might liken NORTHAG to the Slumbering Princess , waiting for many years for the magic kiss that would bring her to life. It seems to follow from this analogy that war might be the Handsome Prince that would awaken her. Ideally, however, the Slumbering Princess would be woken not by war, but by timely warning that war was imminent. In other words, in the context of NORTHAG, alerts and warning intelligence took on an important, even heroic role. As we shall see, intelligence, perhaps in 56 Richard J. Aldrich the guise of the Handsome Prince, was central to the NORTHAG story and issues of its deployment. Throughout the Cold War, NORTHAG headquarters (HQ) was the main wartime operational command for the NATO forces defending northern Germany. NORTHAG consisted of four national army corps from Belgium , Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Because the commander of the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR) also served as commander , NORTHAG (COMNORTHAG), the key headquarters functions of NORTHAG and BAOR overlapped and many officers were “double hatted.” BAOR had its peacetime headquarters at Rheindahlen near Mönchengladbach , and on the eve of war it quickly would have reconstituted itself as the core component of a multinational NORTHAG headquarters. The duality between headquarters elements in BAOR and NORTHAG extended to intelligence . For example, the UK staff officer who served as brigadier, General Staff, Intelligence and Security (BGS [Int & Sy]), at BAOR also served as assistant chief of staff G-2 for NORTHAG.3 Although NORTHAG was primarily a wartime entity, limited elements were permitted to exist even in peacetime, providing transport, security, and communications. Typically, five different NATO signal units formed the NORTHAG Signal Group and were permanently assigned. The deputy commander of NORTHAG, often from the Dutch army, had special responsibility for encouraging joint NATO training and exercises. In order to encourage integration further, a single building was constructed at Rheindahlen that housed not only the headquarters of BAOR and NORTHAG but also those of Royal Air Force (RAF) Germany and of the Second Allied Tactical Air Force (2 ATAF).4 This building was conceived in 1952 when the decision was made to situate NORTHAG headquarters to the west of the Rhine. The Rheindahlen HQ project was completed in 1954 and was accelerated by the impending Bonn Convention that brought the Federal Republic fully into being , because that event increased the cost of preexisting headquarters buildings that the United Kingdom previously had freely requisitioned in some of the most pleasant German spa towns.5 For some unknown reason the new headquarters building was soon nicknamed “the Kremlin.” NORTHAG also had an additional rear headquarters in some crumbling underground caves at Maastricht, together with a wartime mobile element at Rheindahlen that would “crash out” on the eve of war to a secret survival location, rumored to be in the vast forests near Aachen. The presumption was that in wartime, HQ BAOR would become HQ NORTHAG by means of adding numerous non-British officers and an in- Waiting to Be Kissed? 57 flux of reserve personnel. On 17 January 1952, General Sir John Harding, commander-in-chief of BAOR, explained that his headquarters had received some training for its new wartime role. It was being reorganized and by October 1952 would be...