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

by Annie Jacobsen

In the last five months of war in Japan, American bombers conducted a massive incendiary bombing campaign against sixty-seven Japanese cities that killed nearly a million citizens, most of whom burned to death.

On December 11, 1948, Loucks hosted the first roundtable meeting of Hitler’s chemists in his Heidelberg home, secrecy assured. For the next three months, the chemists met every other Saturday at Loucks’s home.

General Loucks’s secret Saturday roundtable at his house in Heidelberg with the Nazi chemists remained hidden from the public for six decades. Here was a brigadier general with the U.S. Army doing business with a former brigadier general of the Third Reich allegedly in the interests of the United States. It was a Cold War black program that was paid for by the U.S. Army but did not officially exist. There were no checks and no balances. Operation Paperclip was becoming a headless monster.

The CIA’s working relationship with the JIOA and Operation Paperclip had begun within a few months of the Agency’s creation.

In the opinion of the CIA, “the link between scientific planning and military research on a national scale did not hitherto exist.” The result was the creation of the Scientific Intelligence Committee (SIC), chaired by the CIA and with members from the army, the navy, the air force, the State Department, and the Atomic Energy Commission.

Initially, the CIA and the JIOA worked hand in glove inside Germany to thwart Soviet threats, but soon the two agencies would start competing for German scientists and spies. The two agencies worked together inside a clandestine intelligence facility in the American zone informally called Camp King. The activities there between 1946 and the late 1950s have never been fully accounted for by either the Department of Defense or the CIA.

It was here in Oberursel that the CIA first began developing “extreme interrogation” techniques and “behavior modification programs” under the code names Operation Bluebird and Operation Artichoke. The unorthodox methods the CIA and its partner agencies explored included hypnosis, electric shock, chemicals, and illegal street drugs.

A network of former Nazi intelligence agents, the majority of whom were members of the SS, began working out of offices at Camp King side by side with army intelligence officers. Colonel Philp was in charge of overall supervision. By late 1947, the Gehlen Organization had gotten so large it required its own headquarters.

The CIA believed it needed to develop the sharpest sword to create the strongest, most impenetrable shield. Operation Bluebird was just the beginning. Soon the program would expand to include mind control techniques and Nazi doctors recruited under Operation Paperclip.

The premise of the Accelerated Paperclip program was to move “especially dangerous top level scientists” out of Germany in a “modified Denial Program” that needed to be kept away from the Soviets at all costs. The high commissioner’s office began working with army intelligence to “evacuate” 150 of these scientists, code-named the “K” list, from Germany to the United States. A group of American officers called the Special Projects Team would be dispatched to recruit the “K” list scientists. The Joint Chiefs of Staff approved a prodigious $1 million procurement budget to help entice these “especially dangerous top level scientists” to come to America, the equivalent of approximately $10 million in 2013.

With Accelerated Paperclip’s newest policy in place, Class I offenders could now be put on a JIOA list. This included Dr. Schreiber, still serving as post physician at Camp King. Another Class I offender was Dr. Kurt Blome, former deputy surgeon general of the Third Reich and Hitler’s biological weapons expert. The sword and the shield. Finally, there was Dr. Otto Ambros, the war criminal convicted at Nuremberg of slavery and mass murder. In the winter of 1951, Otto Ambros was placed on the JIOA list for Accelerated Paperclip even though he was still incarcerated at Landsberg Prison.

The will and wherewithal to punish Nazi war criminals had faded with the passage of time. “Doctors who had participated in the murder of patients continued to practice medicine, Nazi judges continued to preside over courtrooms, and former members of the SS, SD and Gestapo found positions in the intelligence services,” explains Andreas Nachama, curator of the Nazi Documentation Center in Berlin. “Even some leaders of the special mobile commandos (“Einsatzkommandos”) [paramilitary extermination squads] tried to pursue careers in the public service.”

Blome alluded to the fact that he had already worked on Top Secret germ warfare research for the British, under Operation Matchbox, the British equivalent of Operation Paperclip.

The single most important element governing justification of Accelerated Paperclip/Project 63 was now stated on page one: “Based on available records… Subjects have not been in the past and are not at the present time members of the Communist Party.” The issue of being an ardent Nazi had lost first position and was relegated down to section six.

Operation Bluebird interrogation program at Camp King expanded to include “the use of drugs and chemicals in unconventional interrogation.” Dr. Kurt Blome was Camp King’s post doctor during this period. According to a memo in his declassified foreign scientist case file, Blome worked on “Army, 1952, Project 1975,” a Top Secret project that itself has never been declassified. Blome’s file becomes empty after that.

“Bluebird was rechristened Artichoke,” writes John Marks, a former State Department official and authority on the CIA’s mind control programs. The goal of the Artichoke interrogation program, Marks explains, was “modifying behavior through covert means.”

In 1962, the JIOA was officially disbanded. What remained of the Paperclip program was taken over by the Research and Engineering Department at the Pentagon. Under the DoD Reorganization Act of 1958, this new office had been created to handle the military’s scientific and engineering needs under a scientific director who reported to the Secretary of Defense. The act also gave a home to the Pentagon’s new in-house, cutting-edge science agency—the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA, later renamed DARPA—with a D for defense. The first director of the Research and Engineering Department was the nuclear physicist Herbert York. York also served as the first scientific director of ARPA. He was one of the nation’s leading experts on nuclear weapons and on Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, or ICBMs.

It was President Eisenhower who, in his Farewell Address to the nation in 1961, coined this phrase. Eisenhower cautioned Americans to be wary of “the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” Eisenhower’s famous warning is well known and often paraphrased. But he also delivered a second warning in his farewell speech, not nearly as well known. 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.”

In the mid-1960s, York went to visit Eisenhower at the former president’s winter home, in the California desert. “I asked him to explain more fully what he meant by the warnings, but he declined to do so,” York said. “I pressed this line of questions further by asking him whether he had any particular people in mind when he warned us about ‘the danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.’” York was surprised when Eisenhower “answered without hesitation: ‘(Wernher) von Braun and (Edward) Teller [father of the hydrogen bomb].’” York spent decades considering what the President had told him. “Eisenhower’s warnings[,] which were based largely on his intuition, pointed up very real and extremely serious problems. If we forget or downgrade his warnings, it will be to our peril,” York wrote in his memoir, Arms and the Physicist, in 1995.

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Greene continued his LSD research for the army and the CIA’s psychochemical warfare programs. LSD and other incapacitating agents were tested on thousands of U.S. soldiers and sailors with a questionable degree of informed consent.

Hoffmann’s antiplant work in herbicides was one element of Detrick’s three-part biological weapons division, the other two being antiman and antianimal. Antianimal weapons were aimed at killing entire animal populations, with the goal of starving to death the people who relied on those animals for food.

America’s Cold War biological and chemical weapons programs existed in the shadows, and the majority of the Nazi scientists who worked on them maintained anonymity for decades. Their JIOA case files and OMGUS security reports were classified, as were the programs they worked on. But some of the Operation Paperclip scientists enjoyed the limelight for their work, notably in instances where their work crossed over from weapons projects into space-related endeavors. In this manner, Walter Dornberger, Wernher von Braun, and Hubertus Strughold attained varying degrees of prominence and prestige in the 1950s and 1960s and onward.

In 1958, von Braun and his team launched America’s first successful space satellite, Explorer I, as a quick response to the Soviets’ Sputnik.

In 1960, von Braun and a group of approximately 120 Operation Paperclip scientists, engineers, and technicians were transferred from the army to the newly established National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, with a mandate to build the Saturn rockets designed to take man to the moon. Von Braun was made director of the new NASA facility, the Marshall Space Flight Center, also located at the Redstone Arsenal, as well as chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle, or “superbooster” rocket, as it would become known. Von Braun’s deputy developer on the Saturn program was Arthur Rudolph, the former operations director at the Mittelwerk slave labor facility.

Starting in 1951, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and the Department of Defense conducted aboveground nuclear weapons tests in the Nevada desert, at a facility called the Nevada Proving Ground and later renamed the Nevada Test Site. The experiments were designed to determine how soldiers and airmen would perform on the nuclear battlefield. The AEC and the DoD agreed that subjecting soldiers to blast and radiation effects of various-sized atomic bombs was required to accurately prepare for a nuclear war.

A prolific writer, Strughold authored papers and journals, sometimes more than a dozen in a year. He had contributed a piece about space cabins to the Collier’s magazine series. He created new, space-related nomenclature, including the words “bioastronautics,” “gravisphere,” “ecosphere,” and “astrobiology.”

Albert Speer died in a London hotel room in 1981. He was in town doing an interview for the BBC. “One seldom recognizes when the Devil puts his hand on your shoulder,” Albert Speer told James P. O’Donnell in a New York Times Magazine interview shortly after his release from Spandau. He was referring to Hitler but might have been talking about himself.

There is a broad misconception in America that there exists some kind of automatic declassification system that requires the government to reveal its secret programs after thirty or fifty years. In reality, the most damaging programs often remain classified for as long as they can be kept secret.

Benzinger’s lifelong scientific pursuit was studying entropy—the idea that chaos rules the world and, like ice melting in a warm room, order leads to disorder.