by Jim Marrs
Hunt uncovered documents showing that even Wernher von Braun, who in 1947 had been described as “a potential security threat” by the military governor, was reassessed only months later in a report stating, “he may not constitute a security threat to the U.S.” Likewise, von Braun’s brother, Magnus, who had been declared a “dangerous German Nazi” by counterintelligence officers, was brought to America and his pro-Nazi record expunged.
“The effect of the cover-up involved far more than merely whitewashing the information in the dossiers,” noted Hunt. “Serious allegations of crimes not only were expunged from the records, but were never even investigated.”
In a 1985 exposé in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Hunt wrote that she had examined more than 130 reports on Project Paperclip subjects—and every one “had been changed to eliminate the security threat classification.” President Truman, who had explicitly ordered no committed Nazis to be admitted under Project Paperclip, was evidently never aware that his directive had been violated. Again, this is evidence of control at a level higher than the president.
By the late 1940s, the now-ascendant Cold War added new impetus. Potential intelligence assets were recruited from all across Europe, many of them zealous Nazis who could be relied upon to be anticommunists. In an effort to avoid the negative publicity that had burdened some of the early Paperclip activities—some Americans just did not think it proper to bring former Nazis to the United States and place them in responsible positions—JIOA officers began bringing Nazis from Argentina, that haven for the Bormann organization.
According to Hunt, all of this activity was almost totally unknown to the public but rested in the hands of certain top-ranking government officials like the Dulles brothers and John J. McCloy. The agenda of the globalists was moving ahead.
Paperclip had several spinoff projects. Expanding on Paperclip, the National Interest program was tightly connected to the new CIA and provided a means of bypassing close scrutiny by anti-Nazi elements within military intelligence. No longer were Nazi scientists the sole objective; recruitment of Nazis now included Eastern Europeans thought to be helpful against the communists, and even convicted Nazi war criminals. Anyone, regardless of their past, was eligible as long as someone within the U.S. government deemed their presence in the national interest. Linda Hunt wrote:
Prevailing myth has it that the first group in National Interest, the German scientists, were employed solely because of their scientific expertise, but there were other reasons as well. First, defense contractors and universities could hire German scientists for substantially less money than they could American employees. Salary statistics show that the Germans signed contracts for approximately $2,000 a year less than their American counterparts received in comparable positions. Of course, the Germans were unaware of the salary discrepancy, since they had earned even less money in West Germany. The JIOA, however, took advantage of the situation by promoting cheap salaries to convince corporations to participate in the project. Second, because of the Joint Chiefs of Staff connection with the National Interest project, German scientists could obtain necessary security clearances more easily than could American scientists. Defense contractors looking for new employees to work on classified projects found this aspect of National Interest to be particularly advantageous. By 1957, more than sixty companies were listed on JIOA’s rosters, including Lockheed, W. R. Grace and Company, CBS Laboratories, and Martin Marietta….
National Interest placed German scientists at major universities in research or teaching positions, regardless of their Nazi pasts. Even the U.S. Office of Education helped JIOA send fliers to universities all over the country touting the advantages of hiring the Germans on federally financed research projects, since they could obtain security clearances more easily than Americans. The University of Texas, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri, and Boston University were among the participants.
It should be noted that Yale University, alma mater of the Bush and Harriman families and home of Skull and Bones, also received Paperclip Nazis as employees.
Another program, code-named simply Project 63, was designed specifically to get German scientists out of Europe and away from the Soviets. “Most went to work for universities or defense contractors, not the U.S. government,” noted Hunt. “Thus the American taxpayer footed the bill for a project to help former Nazis obtain jobs with Lockheed, Martin Marietta, North American Aviation, and other defense contractors during a time when many American engineers in the aircraft industry were being laid off.”
The Project 63 effort to import Nazis grew so public—in 1952, JIOA deputy director Air Force colonel Gerold Crabbe and a gaggle of military officers, Paperclip members, and civilians journeyed to West Germany on a recruitment drive—that even McCloy expressed concern over a “violent reaction” by West German officials. West Germans complained to U.S. ambassador James Conant, demanding that Paperclip be ended. Conant appealed to then secretary of state John Foster Dulles to shut down Paperclip “before we are faced with a formal complaint by the West German government against a continuing U.S. recruitment program which has no parallel in any other Allied country.” But the project was not stopped. As usual, there was simply a name change. Paperclip became the Defense Scientists Immigration Program (DEFSIP). Conant may not have realized his appeal was aimed at one of the architects of the very program he was trying to end.
As the Paperclip project began to lose momentum, yet another stimulus arose. On October 4, 1957, the Russians launched Sputnik I into orbit around the Earth and the space race was on. The Nazi scientists were in demand more than ever.
Paperclip again began to grow. Specialists were imported from Germany, Austria, and other countries under Project 63 and National Interest and gained positions at many universities and defense contractors, including Duke University, RCA, Bell Laboratories, Douglas Aircraft, and Martin Marietta. “Information about the number of defectors and other individuals brought in by the CIA and military intelligence agencies is unknown, since JIOA records concerning them were either shredded or pulled during the FBI’s investigation in 1964,” noted Hunt, adding, “It had taken the greatest war in history to put a stop to an unspeakable evil, and now the cutting edge of that nightmare was being transplanted to America.”
Interestingly, even as we were bringing foreign defectors into the USA, we discovered a traitor within our own government. Lieutenant Colonel William Henry Whalen, who from 1957 served as deputy director of JIOA, the agency that commanded Paperclip, became the highest-ranking American ever recruited as a mole by the Soviet intelligence service. Only four months after he began spying for the Soviets, Whalen was promoted to the directorship of JIOA. When arrested in 1962, Whalen was an intelligence adviser, which permitted him access to any information pertaining to the Joint Chiefs of Staff planning and allocation of military forces, including communications and electronic intelligence-gathering.
Whalen, who suffered from alcoholism and debt, was recruited by the Soviets in the mid-1950s by Colonel Sergei Edemski, a loquacious Soviet military attaché in Washington, D.C. Although it became publicly known that Whalen admitted providing the Communists with our utmost secrets concerning U.S. nuclear weaponry and strategies, his connection with Paperclip was not revealed. Yet, author Hunt raised a relevant question about Whalen by asking, “Did he use blackmail to recruit a spy or saboteur from among the approximately 1,600 Paperclip specialists and hundreds of other JIOA recruits brought to this country since 1945? It certainly is clear from the evidence that many of them had a lot to hide.” Though charged with espionage, in 1966 Whalen made a deal with the Justice Department, in which he pled guilty to a lesser charge in exchange for his cooperation. Federal judge Oren Lewis, while accusing Whalen of “selling me and all your fellow Americans down the river,” nevertheless sentenced the spy to a mere fifteen years in prison. He was paroled after serving only six years.
But it was not just homegrown spies like
Whalen who were slipping information out of Paperclip. Imported Nazis had every opportunity to pass national security information out of the country. According to Hunt, there was no further army surveillance over the Nazi Paperclip specialists after just four months of their signing a contract with the U.S. government. Furthermore, anyone receiving any more than 50 percent support from a Paperclip specialist constituted a “dependent,” according to their contracts. “The large number of so-called dependents—including mistresses and maids—brought to Fort Bliss [Texas] as a result of [this situation] were subject to no off-the-post surveillance, even though it was assumed that they had access to at least some classified information because of their close contact with Paperclip personnel,” wrote Hunt.
Incidents of information being passed out of Paperclip were presented to authorities, yet nothing was done. A Fort Bliss businessman reported Paperclip engineer Hans Lindenmayr to the FBI, claiming the German had been using his business address as an illegal letter drop. According to Hunt, at least three other Nazis maintained illegal mail drops in El Paso, “where they received money from foreign or unknown sources and coded messages from South America.” It was also learned that many Paperclip Nazis received cash from foreign sources. “Neither Army CIC not FBI agents knew where that money came from, and by all appearances, no one cared to know how more than a third of the Paperclip group suddenly were able to buy expensive cars,” noted Hunt.
When word was passed that Nazi scientists working for the French were suspected of receiving orders from Germany to work toward a reemergence of the Reich, army intelligence officers finally began to take a closer look at Paperclip. Amazingly, the biggest catch was Wernher von Braun. It was revealed that at the end of the war, the rocket scientist had been caught sending a map overseas to General Dornberger and concealing information from U.S. officials. Further investigation revealed that Paperclip specialists were allowed to make unsupervised trips off base and even out of town, the only requirement being that they report when they arrived at their destination. Several had their own telephones that were never monitored.
President Truman was once notified by the CIA that the Nazi scientists working for the Soviets were using a postal address in the U.S. sector of West Germany as a cover for communications with the Paperclip scientists in America. One General Electric manager working with Paperclip specialists told the FBI that the Army’s lax security at White Sands Proving Grounds bordered on “criminal neglect,” especially since about 350 of the Germans’ former coworkers were serving the Russians. He believed that it was reasonable to assume that friendly contacts between the two groups still existed.
Apparently, overseas communication between the Nazis in America and the Nazis in Russia continued unabated, which has raised the possibility of a parallel space race controlled or manipulated by the very globalists who had created and financed both communism and the Third Reich.
ALMOST EVERYONE WHO was of age in 1969 recalls vividly the pride and excitement of the U.S. Apollo mission’s moon landing on July 20. It is difficult then for them to seriously consider the many contradictions and anomalies of the six moon landings. What may be even more difficult is to consider that the space race was never a true competition between the United States and the former Soviet Union; rather, it was a combined space program run by Nazi scientists and controlled by high-level globalists.
As the Allies closed in on Nazi Germany in the spring of 1945, top American commanders were given orders to leave all the rockets and their plans at the Nazi facility at Nordhausen for the Russians. However, some commanders unofficially absconded with about a hundred V-2s, along with a large collection of plans, manuals, and other documents. According to one American officer, “We gave the Russians the key to Sputnik.…[F]or ten weeks, the American army had in its hands the rocket plant that gave the Russians their head start in the missile race.” Here was more evidence of the collusion taking place at the level of the globalists who were already directing activities that would lead to the Cold War.
After the war, at NASA’s George C. Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, the Nazi rocket scientists established nearly a carbon copy of their organization at the wartime secret Nazi rocket facility at Peenemunde. According to Linda Hunt, James Webb, NASA administrator during the Kennedy years, complained that the Nazi scientists were circumventing the system to the extent of attempting to build their own Saturn V rocket in-house at the Marshall Center.
“…the Germans dominated the rocket program to such an extent that they held the chief and deputy slots of every major division and laboratory. And their positions at Marshall and the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, were similar to those they had held during the war,” wrote Hunt. “The Peenemunde team’s leader, Wernher von Braun, became the first director of the Marshall Space Center; Mittlewerk’s head of production, Arthur Rudolph, was named project director of the Saturn V rocket program; Peenemunde’s V-2 flight test director, Kurt Debus, was the first director of the Kennedy Space Center.”
Rudolph, who gained American citizenship after entering the USA with his boss von Braun under the program that was to become Paperclip, was credited with helping to place Americans on the moon. He retired with a NASA pension in 1979 but was stripped of his American citizenship in 1983, after he conceded to the Justice Department that he had “participated under the direction of and on behalf of the Nazi government of Germany, in the persecution of unarmed civilians because of their race, religion, national origin, or political opinion.” However, a West German investigation of Rudolph stated there was no factual basis for charging him with war crimes and granted him German citizenship. Several Americans, including Lieutenant Colonel William E. Winterstein Sr., who was commander of the Technical Service Unit at Fort Bliss, Texas, which supported the German scientists, claimed Rudolph was railroaded by the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, some members of which “had the full cooperation of the Soviet Union; therefore, close coordination with the KGB.”
AS RECENTLY RELEASED files from behind the Iron Curtain have revealed, many of the scientists in Paperclip as well as some on the Manhattan Project indeed were spying for the Soviet Union. Their motivations were many. Some spied for pay, some for ideology, but all were manipulated by intelligence chiefs far above them.
The flow of information between the scientists in the Soviet Union and the United States has led some researchers to suspect that a covert space program—a third program—was in effect. Joseph P. Farrell, who holds a doctorate degree in patristics (the study of early Christian writers and their work) from the University of Oxford, also has researched ancient history and physics, to include the space program. In his 2004 book Reich of the Black Sun, Farrell wrote, “[I]t is perhaps significant that some contemporary observers of the American space program and its odd thirty-year-long ‘holding pattern’ and tapestry of inconsistencies, lies and obfuscations have long suspected that there are indeed two space programs inside the U.S. government, the public NASA one, and a quasi-independent one based deep within covert and black projects.”
This idea is somewhat supported by the fact that the space programs of Russia and America moved along different paths. At the start, the Russians proved more capable of attaining space flight than the Americans. Under the leadership of their brilliant engineer Sergei Korolev, the Russians produced giant heavy-lift rockets while their American counterparts were busy developing the internal technology for guidance and control.
The Soviet Russians were first to launch a satellite, Sputnik, into Earth’s orbit (1957); to orbit a man, Colonel Yuri Gagarin, and return him safely (1961); to place a live animal, the dog Laika (1957), and Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman into orbit (1963); to land unmanned vehicles on the moon (1970); to conduct an extravehicular “space walk” by cosmonauts; and to place nuclear warheads on Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM).
Both nations used captured Nazi V-2 rockets to begin their space
programs. A common joke in the 1950s involved an argument between a Russian and an American. “Our German scientists are better than your German scientists,” they shouted at each other.
Yet, the evidence indicates that the American rocket scientists were indeed placed into a holding pattern while their Soviet counterparts caught up with their technology. William E. Winterstein Sr., a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel and one of the rocket engineers on NASA’s Apollo team, noted in his 2002 book Gestapo USA, “The space history of this country reveals that during the 1950s, the von Braun team had developed a multistage rocket by adding solid propellant rocket stages to a Redstone rocket as booster. In 1956, such a rocket with two solid stages made successful high-speed rocket reentry tests with model warheads covered with ablative heat protection. With three solid stages, such a rocket could have placed a satellite into orbit more than a year before the U.S. was defeated by Sputnik. However, and almost unbelievably, the von Braun team was given direct orders from Washington to stop further development. The team was restricted to the development of rockets whose range was less than 200 miles. It was only after President Kennedy announced the lunar mission in 1961 that the German rocket team was finally released from agonizing bureaucratic blunders from Washington, and was given a free hand, and even orders, to accomplish von Braun’s lifelong goal to travel into space.”
It has been argued that a primary incentive of the German scientists was the sheer desire to continue their work. “Some of these would stop at nothing, even resorting to duping their colleagues and superiors in order to ensure the continuance of their research,” commented British authors Mary Bennett and David S. Percy. However, in some cases, such as that of von Braun, the connection between the work and the Nazis was close and continuous. Von Braun, the son of a well-connected Prussian minister who founded the German Savings Bank, was brought into Germany’s rocket program by Luftwaffe general Walter Dornberger, who, although charged as a war criminal for the rocket attacks on London and Antwerp, was never brought to trial. Instead, he came into the United States as part of Project Paperclip. Likewise, von Braun, revered as the father of the U.S. space program, was found to have been a Nazi Party member, a member of the SS with the rank of major, a friend to SS Reichsfuehrer Heinrich Himmler, and, according to Linda Hunt, was accused by survivors of the rocket factories at Mittlewerk and Peenemunde of at least once ordering the execution of slave laborers. Kurt Debus, who became the first director of the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, was both a member of the Nazi SS and the SA. According to documents obtained by Hunt, in 1942 Debus turned a colleague over to the Gestapo for making anti-Hitler remarks.