Henry Hecksher

Henry Hecksher was a career United States intelligence officer who served in both the OSS and CIA.

Hecksher was born in Hamburg, Germany. He emigrated to the United States in 1934. [ Jonathan Haslam, The Nixon Administration and the Death of Allende's Chile. (London, Verso, 2005), p. 62.] 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 aka "BOB." Hecksher would eventually work under CIA station chief William Harvey at "BOB."

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. [http://www.cjr.org/issues/2003/5/chile-kornbluh.asp] [http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB8/ch05-01.htm]

In reporter Dick Russell's 1992 biography of Richard Case Nagell, "The Man Who Knew Too Much", Nagell referred to Hecksher as "Bob".

Hecksher died in 1990 from complications of Parkinson's disease.

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