The principal Federal German intelligence agency was established in the Munich suburb of Pullach in April 1956 under the leadership of Gen. Reinhard Gehlen, and he ran the organization until his retirement in May 1968.
During the Cold War, the BND suffered penetration at the hands of the KGB, and in October 1961 Heinz Felfe, Gehlen’s trusted chief of counterintelligence and a former wartime Sicherheitsdienst officer, was convicted of having spied for the previous decade, and another mole, Hans Clemens, was also arrested. At their trial they admitted to having passed films containing more than 15,000 classified documents to their Soviet handlers. In 1998 Dr. Hans-Georg Geiger was replaced as the BND’s president by Dr. August Hanning.