Operation Paperclip
"Just as the majority of them won top military and science awards when they served the Third Reich, so it went that many of them won top U.S. military and civillian awards serving the United States."
Wait, so the dismantling of America’s chemical weapon stockpile cost more than forty billion dollars? That was the price tag for decades of mustard and sarin gas, the accumulated residue of every Cold War fever dream the United States thought it needed. Tabun was not lethal enough. Sarin dissipated too quickly. VX was the prize, persistent enough to strip life from an entire landscape. But apparently you also needed more than thirty thousand nuclear warheads.
Operation Paperclip began earlier as Operation Overcast. It was the snatch-a-Nazi program authorized by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and ultimately President Truman. It was administered by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency who falsified dossiers and scrubbed Nazi records clean. Their job was to acquire as many high-ranking German scientists as possible. And quickly. The Russians were dragging entire research teams into the USSR by force.
This tears a hole straight through the American playground myth of standing up to the bully.
Operation Alsos was created in 1943, about a year and a half before Hitler’s suicide. It started as an atomic intelligence mission designed to determine whether Germany had nuclear capacity. When they found that Germany had no viable delivery system, the mission shifted from hardware to people. Minds and hands capable of preserving American dominance in technology and warfare.
As Germany’s defeat became inevitable, American paranoia accelerated the Paperclip program. The Soviets were not subtle recruiters. They broke teeth during interrogations and weren’t fans of consent. They were a chain-you-to-your-post type of employer.
The Americans went with a gentle touch. Salaries. Visas. Cowboy hats. For the men who hung striking workers from cranes. Who froze prisoners to test hypothermia reversal for Luftwaffe pilots. The same men who oversaw Mittelbau-Dora, where about twenty thousand slave laborers died building V-2 rockets.
Keep your hands off Wernher von Braun though. He’s rocket Albert Einstein. Sure he was an SS officer, the smiling poster boy of the V-2 program who visited the tunnels of Mittelbau and knew where the bodies were stacked. He practically surrendered to American forces with a grin and a bottle of cognac. They scrubbed his record nice and clean, and turned him into a celebrity. He became the face of NASA’s Saturn V program. Disney gave him a television special. He spent the rest of his life under studio lights instead of prison bars.
The bubonic plague guy stayed too. Kurt Blome, the Nazi biological weapons expert who experimented on prisoners and was acquitted at Nuremberg. Hubertus Strughold, the father of space medicine, had ties to Dachau’s high-altitude and freezing experiments.
Some we rerouted to places like Argentina. Others faked credentials to build an American life, true theoretical knowledge of physics. A couple were Russian spies. No one checked too much. Paperclip reveals the difference between power as it is displayed and power as it is wielded.
The Germans tested mescaline as a truth serum on prisoners at Dachau. The U.S. urgently seized the data and hired the people who conducted it.
Albert Hofmann synthesized LSD in 1938 in Switzerland. By the late 1940s, Americans were exploring psychoactive compounds that might fracture the human mind during interrogation. When they learned LSD could not function as a battlefield incapacitating agent, it was fed into the mind control program—MKUltra. Unwitting American citizens became test subjects in the government’s wish to map the architecture of thought and control. The targets change but the ethical frameworks do not.
Paperclip doctors who had overseen lethal human experiments in Europe found themselves adjacent to the U.S. human radiation experiments of the 1940s and 1950s. The government knew exactly who they were. If you experimented on your own countrymen, why would you object to experimenting on Americans?
Then there were the open-air tests. The U.S. crop-dusted farms with chemical stimulants to see how they would drift across Soviet-style terrain. They sprayed American cities with bacterial agents to simulate biological attacks. All of this was funded with almost no congressional oversight.
Chemical weapons expert Jonathan Tucker wrote that only five members of the House Appropriations Committee and fewer than five percent of the entire House were cleared to know anything about chemical and biological weapons programs. That tiny clique shoved secret line items into massive appropriation bills, leaving most representatives voting blind.
Paperclip contains everything. Scientists pulled straight from the Nuremberg trials. Von Braun posing with American generals. Faked resumes and alphabet soup organizations with more power than elected officials. German war criminals trying to adjust to life in Alabama.
Einstein, who escaped Germany in 1933, publicly condemned the program in 1946. So did Jewish organizations and figures like Eleanor Roosevelt. Journalists noticed that the Reich’s butchers were living pleasant American lives. The official line was predictable. A few bad apples. We did not know his background but he was important. And eventually silence. Perhaps the quiet recognition that our modern problems come from the roots we have chosen to plant. The technologies that define modern power often grow from seeds planted in darker soil.
The darker soil is being hit with searchlights which are having trouble with all the shovels trying to keep it buried.
But at least the shovels are being seen.