COVERT LEGIONS: U.S. Army Intelligence in Germany, 1944-1949
Published by Center of Military History United States Army Washington, D.C., 2022
by Thomas Boghardt
Germany was ground zero of the early Cold War. From 1944 to 1949, the U.S. Army, along with America’s allies, occupied the defeated nation, and the Army’s intelligence services guided and executed U.S. policy in central Europe. Covert Legions tells the dramatic story of America’s secret soldiers as they battled Nazi resistance, built democracy, and monitored the Soviet threat. Covert Legions is based on official intelligence records, including many documents declassified especially for this volume
Thomas Boghardt was born in the Rhineland and grew up in Hamburg, Germany, and Venice, Florida. From 1990 to 1991, he served with the 183d Panzerbataillon of the German army. He received his master’s degree in history from the University of Freiburg in 1996, and his Ph.D. in modern European history from the University of Oxford in 2002. Dr. Boghardt taught history at the University of Management Sciences in Lahore, Pakistan, in 2002 before joining Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service as the Fritz Thyssen Fellow from 2002 to 2004. For the next six years, he worked as a historian at the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. In 2010, he joined the U.S. Army Center of Military History as a senior historian.
Dr. Boghardt has published numerous articles and books on intelligence in the twentieth century, and he lectures frequently on this subject.
From the Introduction:
This volume provides a comprehensive organizational and operational history of Army Intelligence in Germany from the time U.S. forces entered the country in September 1944 to the end of the military occupation five years later. Although it seeks to address all facets of this subject, it does so through the prism of the changing relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. The U.S.-Soviet rivalry turned Germany into the principal battleground of the early Cold War. As such, it became the dominating factor of the American occupation and affected virtually every aspect of U.S. intelligence operations in central Europe.
The book is can be downloaded as a .pdf file at
