Henry Hecksher (c. 1911 - March 28, 1990) was a career United States intelligence officer who served in both the OSS and CIA.
Hecksher was born in Hamburg, Germany.1 He emigrated to the United States in 19342 or 1938.1 He joined the United States Army, achieving the rank of captain. Hecksher took part in the Normandy invasion, and was wounded in Antwerp.
He later became an intelligence officer with the Army and interrogated some of the top Nazi leaders, including Julius Streicher. He joined the OSS and in 1946 became head of its counterintelligence section in Berlin. Later, this section would become the CIA's Berlin Operating Base, also known as BOB. Hecksher would eventually work under CIA station chief William Harvey at BOB.
Hecksher had, according to one of two opposed statements, the idea to found the Untersuchungsausschuß Freiheitlicher Juristen (UFJ) (codename CADROIT). According to David Murphy, chief of the Berlin Operation Base, Hecksher has recruited Horst Erdmann, a lawyer in Belzig, to establish the organisation.3 Horst Erdmann published a magazin in West-Berlin writing articles about the SBZ under the pseudonym Dr. Theo Friedenau. There is no debate in regards to the fact that the UFJ was financed at least in the first years entirely with means of the CIA4 5 and was running a paramilitary organization for wartime use under the codename CADROWN from 1952 to 1955 that was established in East Germany.
Alongside CIA officers like Harvey and David Atlee Phillips, Hecksher became heavily involved in CIA covert operations, including the Berlin Tunnel project. He was CIA Station Chief in Santiago, and was involved in covert actions in the period before the coup d'etat owhich overthrew Chilean president Salvador Allende Gossens in 1973. Accusations persist that Hecksher, the CIA and the US Government were instrumental in the coup.
In reporter Dick Russell's 1992 biography of Richard Case Nagell, "The Man Who Knew Too Much," Nagell referred to Hecksher as "Bob."
In 1990, Hecksher died from complications of Parkinson's disease in Princeton, New Jersey.1
- 1 a b c Alfonso A. Narvaez, "Henry Hecksher, 79; Served O.S.S. in War And Later the C.I.A.," New York Times, March 29, 1990, https://web.archive.org/web/20160307043647/http://www.nytimes.com/1990/03/29/obituaries/henry-hecksher-79-served-oss-in-war-and-later-the-cia.html.
- 2Jonathan Haslam, The Nixon Administration and the Death of Allende's Chile (London, Verso, 2005), 62.
- 3George Bailey, Sergej A. Kondrašev, David E. Murphy, Die unsichtbare Front: der Krieg der Geheimdienste im geteilten Berlin (Berlin: Propyläen, 1997), 159.
- 4Frank Hagemann, Der Untersuchungsausschuss Freiheitlicher Juristen 1949-1969, Dissertation, Universität Kiel, 1994, p. 36.
- 5Karl Wilhelm Fricke and Roger Engelmann, Konzentrierte Schläge: Staatssicherheitsaktionen und politische Prozesse in der DDR 1953-1956, Ch. Links Verlag, 1998, p. 90.
