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

by Annie Jacobsen

Hiring dedicated Nazis was without precedent, entirely unprincipled, and inherently dangerous not just because, as Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson stated when debating if he should approve Paperclip, “These men are enemies,” but because it was counter to democratic ideals.

it is important first to understand that the program was governed out of an office in the elite “E” ring of the Pentagon.

The Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA)

The JIOA was a subcommittee of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC),

U.S. Army Ordnance believed that the V-2 rocket could help win the Pacific war,

Peace and prosperity were, in principle, sound ideas. But there was big business in war.

The result was an alarming Top Secret analysis. The report’s conclusion was made clear in the introduction: “Soviet leaders believe that a conflict is inevitable between the U.S.S.R. and the capitalist states, and their duty is to prepare the Soviet Union for this conflict.”

The Russians were developing atomic weapons, guided missiles, a strategic air force, and biological and chemical weapons programs.

America may have won the war with the mighty atomic bomb, but biological weapons were the poor man’s nuclear weapon. Biological weapons could be made by just about any country “without vast expenditures of money or the construction of huge production facilities.”

Operation Paperclip was now officially a “denial program,” meaning that any German scientist of potential interest to the Russians needed to be denied to the Russians, at whatever cost.

DoD Reorganization Act of 1958,

It is as true today as it was when World War II ended that America relies upon the advancement of science and technology—and industry—to prepare for the next war. This relationship is understood as America’s military-industrial complex.

Eisenhower told the American people that, indeed, science and research played a crucial role in national security, “[y]et, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

Arms and the Physicist,

The Secret of Huntsville: The True Career of Rocket Baron Wernher von Braun.

It was now no longer possible for the government to uphold the myth that Paperclip was a program peopled solely by benign German scientists, nominal Nazis, and moral men.

In 1998, Congress passed the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, which required various U.S. government agencies to identify and release federal records relating to Nazi war criminals that had been kept classified for decades.

U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis,