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

by Annie Jacobsen

  For Operation Paperclip, moving a scientist from military custody to immigrant status required elaborate and devious preparation, but in the end the procedure proved to be infallible. Scientists in the southwestern or western United States, accompanied by military escort, were driven in an unmarked army jeep out of the country into Mexico either at Nuevo Laredo, Ciudad Juárez, or Tijuana. With him, each scientist carried two forms from the State Department, I-55 and I-255, each bearing a signature from the chief of the visa division and a proviso from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Section 42.323 of Title 22, signifying that the visa holder was “a person whose admission is highly desirable in the national interest.” The scientist also had with him a photograph of himself and a blood test warranting that he did not have any infectious diseases. After consulate approval, the scientist was then let back into the United States, no longer under military guard but as a legal U.S. immigrant in possession of a legal visa. The pathway toward citizenship had begun. If the scientist lived closer to the East Coast than the West Coast, he went through the same protocols, except that he would exit the United States into Canada instead of Mexico and reenter through the consulate at Niagara Falls.

  It was an international crisis in June of 1948 that finally gave Operation Paperclip its long-term momentum. Early on the morning of June 24, the Soviets cut off all land and rail access to the American zone in Berlin. This action would become known as the Berlin Blockade, and it was seen as one of the first major international crises of the Cold War. “The Soviet blockade of Berlin in 1948 clearly indicated that the wartime alliance [between the Soviets and the United States] had dissolved,” explained CIA deputy director for operations Jack Downing. “Germany then became a new battlefield between east and west.” The CIA presence in Germany was redoubled as its plans for covert action against the Soviets shifted into high gear. The CIA needed to hire thousands of foreign nationals living in Germany to help in this effort—spies, saboteurs, and scientists—many of whom had spent time in displaced-persons camps and interrogation facilities operated by the U.S. Army in the American zone of occupied Germany. 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. Camp King was strategically located in the village of Oberursel, just eleven miles northwest of the United States European Command (EUCOM) headquarters in Frankfurt. Officially the facility had two other names: the U.S. Military Intelligence Service Center at Oberursel and the 7707th European Command Intelligence Center. A small plaque in a park outside the officers’ club explained to visitors the significance of the informal name. Colonel Charles B. King, an intelligence officer, had been in the process of accepting the surrender of a group of Nazis on Utah Beach in June 1944 when he was double-crossed and slain by a “strong and concentrated barrage of enemy artillery fire.” There was tragic irony in the name. Camp King had become home to many well-intentioned American officers trying to make deals with untrustworthy enemies. Many of these American officers would be double-crossed and at least one of them would be killed.

  A lot had changed at Camp King since John Dolibois had personally delivered six Nazi Bonzen here in August 1945. The interrogation facility had become one of the most clandestine U.S. intelligence centers in Western Europe, and for more than a decade it would function as a Cold War black site long before black sites were known as such. Camp King was a joint interrogation center and the intelligence agencies that shared access to prisoners here included Army Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence, Naval Intelligence, and the CIA. By 1948, most of its prisoners were Soviet-bloc spies.

  How the CIA used Camp King remains one of the Agency’s most closely guarded secrets. 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. Camp King was chosen as an ideal place to do this work in part because it was “off-site” but mainly because of its access to prisoners believed to be Soviet spies.

  When the Americans captured the facility in the spring of 1945, the Nazis had been using it as an interrogation facility for Allied fliers. Camp King’s first commanding officer was Colonel William Russell Philp, and through the fall of 1945, Philp shared the Military Intelligence Service Center at Oberursel with General William J. Donovan, founding director of the Office of Strategic Services. General Donovan oversaw an operation here whereby high-ranking Nazi generals, including those dropped off by John Dolibois, were paid to write intelligence reports on subjects like German order of battle and Nazi Party chain of command. Dolibois, fluent in German, acted as Donovan’s liaison to the Nazi prisoners during this time. General Donovan kept an office at Oberursel until the OSS was disbanded in September 1945, after which he returned to Washington, D.C., and civilian life.

  Colonel Philp’s job was to handle the rest of the prisoners. In the months that followed war’s end, the Camp King prisoner population grew to include Russian defectors and captured Soviet spies. There was valuable intelligence to be gained from these individuals, Philp learned, willingly or through coercion. But Philp also found that his officers lacked a greater context within which to interpret the raw intelligence being gathered from the Soviets. Russia had been America’s ally during the war. Now it was the enemy. The Soviets were masters of disinformation. Who was telling the truth? The Nazi prisoners claimed to know, and Colonel Philp began using several of them to interpret and analyze information from Soviet defectors. These Nazis were “experts in espionage against the Russians,” Philp later said. Two of them seemed particularly knowledgeable: Gerhard Wessel, who had been an officer in the German intelligence organization Abwehr, and Wessel’s deputy, Hermann Baun. Philp put the men to work. What started out as a “research project using POWs” became a “gradual drift into operations,” said Philp. He moved the Nazis into a safe house on the outskirts of Camp King, code-named Haus Blue, where they oversaw counterintelligence operations against the Soviets under the code name Project Keystone. Philp found that working with Nazis was a slippery slope, and in a matter of months the Germans had transformed from prisoners to paid intelligence assets of the U.S. Army.

  In the summer of 1946 a major event occurred that influenced the CIA’s future role in Operation Paperclip and Camp King. Major General Reinhard Gehlen, former head of the Nazis’ intelligence operation against the Soviets, arrived at Camp King. Gehlen had been in the United States under interrogation since 1945. Here at Oberursel, Army Intelligence decided to make Gehlen head of its entire “anti-Communist intelligence organization,” under the code name Operation Rusty. Eventually the organization would become known simply as the Gehlen Organization. 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. Army intelligence moved the organization to a self-contained facility outside Munich, in a village called Pullach. This compound was the former estate of Martin Bormann and had large grounds, sculpture gardens, and a pool. The two facilities, at Oberursel and Pullach, worked together. Gehlen and Baun claimed to have six hundred intelligence agents, all former Nazis, in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany alone. According to documents kept classified for fifty-one years, relations between Gehlen and Philp declined and became hostile as Philp finally realized the true nature of who he was dealing with. The Gehlen Organization was a murderous bunch, “free-w
heeling” and out of control. As one CIA affiliate observed, “American intelligence is a rich blind man using the Abwehr as a seeing-eye dog. The only trouble is—the leash is much too long.”

  The army became fed up with the Gehlen Organization, but there was no way out. Its operatives were professional double-crossers and liars—many were also alleged war criminals—and now they had the army over a barrel. Decades later it would emerge that General Gehlen was reportedly earning a million dollars a year. In late 1948, CIA director Roscoe Hillenkoetter met with army intelligence to discuss the CIA’s taking charge of the Gehlen Organization. The two parties agreed, and on July 1, 1949, the CIA officially assumed control of Gehlen and his men.

  That same summer, the CIA created the Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI), and its first director, Dr. Willard Machle, traveled to Germany to set up a program for “special interrogation methods” against Soviet spies. The CIA had intelligence indicating that the Soviets had developed mind control programs. The Agency wanted to know what it would be up against if the Russians got hold of its American spies. In an attempt to determine what kinds of techniques the Soviets might be using, the CIA set up a Top Secret interrogation program at Camp King. The facility offered unique access to Soviet spies who had been caught in the Gehlen Organization’s web. Revolutionary new interrogation techniques could be practiced on these men under the operational code name Bluebird.

  A limited number of official CIA documents remain on record from this program. Most were destroyed by CIA director Richard Helms. Initially the CIA envisioned Operation Bluebird as a “defensive” program. Officers from Scientific Intelligence were “to apply special methods of interrogation for the purpose of evaluation of Russian practices.” But very quickly the Agency decided that in order to master the best defensive methods it needed to first develop the most cutting-edge offensive techniques. This sounded like doublespeak and was indicative of the Cold War mind-set that was taking hold in intelligence circles and also in the military. 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.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Hall of Mirrors

  In the fall of 1948, in Germany, one of the most unusual press conferences of the Cold War took place. Major General Walter Schreiber, the former surgeon general of the Third Reich, had last been seen on the stand at Nuremberg testifying against fellow members of the Nazi high command. Then, on November 2, 1948, he reappeared at a press conference. After three years, five months, and three days in Soviet custody, Schreiber had allegedly “escaped” from his Soviet captors. Now the vaccine specialist said he had important news to share with the free world. The press conference opened with Schreiber delivering a brief statement about what had happened to him—he’d been a prisoner of the Soviets since the fall of Berlin and had recently escaped—followed by a lengthy question-and-answer period with an American official acting as translator. The first question asked by a reporter was, How did Schreiber manage to escape?

  Schreiber said he had “broken free” of his Communist guards in “a life or death situation” but hesitated to say more. With him now, in the safety of U.S. protective custody, he said, were his wife, Olga, his fourteen-year-old son, Paul-Gerhard, and one of his two grown daughters.

  “How was it possible the Russians let him get out?” asked another member of the press, a question on everyone’s mind. In the two years since General Schreiber’s stunning testimony at Nuremberg, he’d been made starshina, or elder, in the Soviet military. It was almost inconceivable that a major player like Schreiber simply slipped away from his Soviet guards. Yet here he was.

  “I’m not asking the details,” the reporter clarified, “but how was it possible he was able to escape?”

  In November 1948, Berlin was a city under psychological and physical siege. For more than four months now, the Soviets had blocked all rail, canal, and road access between East and West Berlin. To feed the civilians in the western zone, the Americans were flying in airplanes full of food. Schreiber’s “escape” happened during the height of the Berlin Blockade.

  “For reasons of security, [I] would not like to answer this question,” Schreiber said.

  “I don’t want to ask any details,” repeated the newsman. “But is it possible for others who are in the same position to get out?”

  “The question was answered,” said Schreiber.

  Pressed further, Major General Dr. Schreiber reconstructed some of the events in his tale of escape. He’d been in Soviet Russia until the summer, he said. There, he and a group of other former Nazi generals lived together in a villa outside Berlin. In July or August, six of the generals, including Schreiber, were unexpectedly transported to a country house on the German-Polish border, near Frankfurt on the Oder, east of Berlin (not to be confused with Frankfurt on the Main, located in the American zone, southwest of Berlin). With regard to this mysterious journey and its greater purpose, Major General Schreiber said, “We were not asked, but we were told that we were going to join the police.” Only then, Schreiber explained, did he learn he had been “appointed Chief Medical officer for the newly formed [East] German police.” Schreiber said he was offered “food, clothing, housing, furniture… for advantages.”

  Four of the Nazi generals agreed to take the job. Schreiber said he objected. He was a scientist, not a policeman, he claimed to have told his Soviet handlers. The group of generals was transported to a home in Saxony, close to the Czechoslovakian border. Finally, “The last day of September, the four [generals] who had agreed were sent to Berlin in order to start their jobs,” Schreiber said. He and another general, who had by this time also voiced objection, remained “guarded by police.” Two days later Schreiber was sent to Dresden, in the Soviet zone. “There we were very well received, and I was offered the chance to become professor at the University of Leipzig,” Schreiber told the press corps. “I demanded the University of Berlin. I had special reason for this demand. That was denied of me. For this reason, I made myself free.”

  So that was that. A chorus of West German reporters wanted more details. How does one simply make oneself free of Soviet military police, especially if one is the former surgeon general of the Third Reich? For the Soviets, turning high-ranking Nazi generals into Communist officials was an immense propaganda coup in the early days of the Cold War. One had to assume that Soviet military intelligence (Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye, or GRU) was keeping a watchful eye on each of the generals through their transition from Soviet Russia into the East German zone. The GRU’s notorious official emblem featured an omnipotent bat hovering above the globe. The GRU kept radarlike track of people. They had eyes in the night. To allow Dr. Schreiber to get away sounded implausible.

  “[I] took off alone, by express train, on the railroad, from Dresden to Berlin—and it was a trip of life and death,” Schreiber said. And that was all he was going to say about it.

  Next, Schreiber began to lecture his audience on the Soviet threat. He singled out a former colleague, Vincenz Müller, to blame, not unlike what he had done with Dr. Blome before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Lieutenant General Vincenz Müller was a dangerous man, exclaimed Schreiber. Now that he’d gone over to the Russian side, he was a threat to world peace. Lieutenant General Müller had recently been installed by the Soviet government as the new police leader in Berlin, Schreiber said. “He is a fanatical communist,” promised Schreiber, “completely devoted to the Russians. This is all the more astonishing as Müller comes from a very devout Catholic family.” The Russians had plans to arm Müller’s new Berlin police force with “heavy weapons, tanks, [and] artillery.” The Soviets had only one goal, Schreiber promised, and that was world domination. It was beginning right now with the rearmament of East Berlin.

  “Can you give us the names o
f the four other generals, outside of General Vincenz Müller?” a news reporter asked.

  “I don’t think it is necessary in the scope of this press conference to give those names,” said Schreiber.

  “Could the Russians be selling you a bill of goods?” asked another reporter.

  “The Russians are animated by the idea of world revolution,” Schreiber said. He explained that in Russia, most people believe “the revolution is coming.”

  Another news reporter asked, “Were you wearing your [Soviet] uniform” when you escaped? It was a good question. If Schreiber had been wearing his Soviet uniform, then clearly he would have been noticed by border patrol guards, stopped, and questioned as he passed from the Soviet zone to the American zone of occupation. If Schreiber had not been wearing his Soviet uniform, then the obvious next question was, Why not? Schreiber’s answer was convoluted. His Soviet uniform happened to be at the tailors’ shop on the day of his escape, he said, getting new shoulder straps and embroidery on the collar. To emphasize his point, Schreiber even went so far as to re-create a conversation between himself and his Soviet handler—a man named “Fisher”—regarding the missing uniform. “Fisher said [to me], ‘You are going to get [your uniform] later. For the time being, this is not yet possible.’ ”

  The explanation seemed implausible to at least one newsman. “Why didn’t you get your uniform tailored [earlier]?” the reporter asked.

  Schreiber said that his measurements had been taken for the new uniform, but the tailoring was delayed.

  When Schreiber’s American handler moved to change the subject, another reporter asked for more information about the human experiments Dr. Schreiber had spoken of during the Nuremberg trial. “How did the Doctor obtain knowledge of experiments on human beings?” he queried.