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

by Annie Jacobsen

If anyone could find and prepare the ideal incapacitating agent for the battlefield, Hoffmann could. He began a broad spectrum of research on everything from well-known street drugs to highly obscure toxins from the third world. There was mescaline, obtained from the peyote cactus and used by Native American Indians, with side effects ranging from divination to boredom. He studied fly agaric, a hallucinogenic mushroom found on the barren slopes of Mongolia and rumored to facilitate contact with the spirit world, and piruri, a toxic vegetable leaf from Australia, used by Aborigines, that was found to suppress thirst. Yaxee and epena, from Venezuela, Colombia, and Brazil, caused people to see things that weren’t really there. It was a drug that for centuries had been “used by primitive tribes to escape the realities of their plight by using hallucinogenic properties.”