Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America

by Annie Jacobsen

The following month, JIC intelligence report 250/4 (the fourth report in the JIC 250 series) warned the Joint Chiefs that “eight out of ten leading German scientists in the field of guided missiles” had recently gone missing from Germany, had most likely been captured by the Soviets, and were now at work in the USSR. Similarly threatening, noted the report, two German physics institutes had been seized by the Red Army and reassembled in the USSR—not just the laboratories and the libraries but the scientists as well. JIC 250/4 warned of “intensive Soviet scientific research programs” under way across Russia, all of which threatened the West. It was from within this environment of intense suspicion that the JIOA was created. The Nazi scientist program was an aggressive U.S. military program from the moment the JIOA took control, just a few weeks after two atomic bombs ended the war with Japan. The employment of German scientists was specifically and strategically aimed at achieving military supremacy over the Soviet Union before the Soviet Union was able to dominate the United States.