Blum, William. Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II. Common Courage, 1995.
Braden, Tom. “I’m Glad the CIA Is Immoral.” Saturday Evening Post, May 20, 1967.
Campbell, Rodney. The Luciano Project: The Secret Wartime Collaboration Between the Mafia and the US Navy. McGraw-Hill, 1977.
Colby, William, and Peter Forbath. Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA. Simon and Schuster, 1978.
Copeland, Miles. The Game of Nations. Simon and Schuster, 1969.
——. Without Cloak or Dagger. Simon and Schuster, 1974.
Corson, William. Armies of Ignorance: The Rise of the American Intelligence Empire. Dial Press, 1977.
Corvo, Max. The OSS in Italy, 1942–1945. Praeger, 1990.
Deacon, Richard. The French Secret Service. Grafton, 1990.
Demaris, Ovid. Lucky Luciano. Monarch Books, 1960.
Dolci, Danilo. Report from Palermo. Viking, 1970.
Domenico, Roy P. Italian Fascism on Trial 1943–1948. Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1991.
Duggan, Christopher. Fascism and the Mafia. Yale Univ. Press, 1989.
Feder, Sid, and Joachim Joesten. The Luciano Story. David McKay Co., 1954.
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Gage, Nicholas. The Mafia Is Not an Equal Opportunity Employer. McGraw-Hill, 1971.
Ginsborg, Paul. A History of Contemporary Italy. Viking, 1990.
Goode, Stephen. The CIA. Franklin Watts, 1982.
Gosch, Martin, and Richard Hammer. The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano. Little, Brown, 1974.
Harper, John Lamberton. America and the Reconstruction of Italy, 1945–1948. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986.
Herlands, William, Commissioner of Investigations. “Report.” Thomas Dewey Papers, University of Rochester. Sept. 1954.
Holt, Robert, and Robert van de Velde. Strategic Psychological Operations and American Foreign Policy. Univ. of Chicago Press, 1960.
Hughes, Stuart. The United States and Italy. Harvard Univ. Press, 1965.
Johnson, Malcom. Crime on the Labor Front. McGraw-Hill, 1950.
Kolko, Gabriel. The Politics of War. Random House, 1968.
Lacey, Robert. Little Man: Meyer Lansky and the Gangster Life. Little, Brown, 1991.
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6
Paperclip: Nazi Science Heads West
In the wake of Gary Webb’s articles, nothing more enraged the CIA’s defenders than the charges that in its dealings with crack entrepreneurs the Agency might have deliberately targeted poor black and Latino communities in the inner cities as a covert attempt at social control. As we have seen, CIA director John Deutch traveled to South Central Los Angeles to face a furious black audience and deny in the strongest terms any such suggestion. Some of the most effective attacks on Webb were couched not in substantive challenges to his account, but in imputations that he was cynically fanning “black paranoia” and engaging in irresponsible conspiracy-mongering.
The bleak truth is that a careful review of the activities of the CIA and the organizations from which it sprang reveals an intense preoccupation with the development of techniques of behavior control, brainwashing, and covert medical and psychic experimentation on unwitting subjects including religious sects, ethnic minorities, prisoners, mental patients, soldiers and the terminally ill. The rationale for such activities, the techniques and indeed the human subjects chosen show an extraordinary and chilling similarity to Nazi experiments. This similarity becomes less surprising when we trace the determined and often successful efforts of US intelligence officers to acquire the records of Nazi experiments, and in many cases to recruit the Nazi researchers themselves and put them to work, transferring the laboratories from Dachau, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, Auschwitz and Buchenwald to Edgewood Arsenal, Fort Detrick, Huntsville Air Force Base, Ohio State, and the University of Washington.
As Allied forces crossed the English Channel during the D-Day invasion of June 1944, some 10,000 intelligence officers known as T-Forces were right behind the advance battalions. Their mission: seize munitions experts, technicians, German scientists and their research materials, along with French scientists who had collaborated with the Nazis. Soon a substantial number of such scientists had been picked up and placed in an internment camp known as the Dustbin. In the original planning for the mission a prime factor was the view that German military equipment – tanks, jets, rocketry and so forth – was technically superior and that captured scientists, technicians and engineers could be swiftly debriefed in an effort by the Allies to catch up.
Then, in December 1944, Bill Donovan, head of the OSS, and Allen Dulles, OSS head of intelligence operations in Europe operating out of Switzerland, strongly urged FDR to approve a plan allowing Nazi intelligence officers, scientists and industrialists to be “given permission for entry into the United States after the war and the placing of their earnings on deposit in an American bank and the like.” FDR swiftly turned the proposal down, saying, “We expect that the number of Germans who are anxious to save their skins and property will rapidly increase. Among them may be some who should properly be tried for war crimes, or at least arrested for active participation in Nazi activities. Even with the necessary controls you mention, I am not prepared to authorize the giving of guarantees.”
But this presidential veto was a dead letter even as it was being formulated. Operation Overcast was certainly under way by July 1945, approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to bring into the US 350 German scientists, including Werner Von Braun and his V2 rocket team, chemical weapons designers, and artillery and submarine engineers. There had been some theoretical ban on Nazis being imported, but this was as empty as FDR’s edict. The Overcast shipment included such notorious Nazis and SS officers as Von Braun, Dr. Herbert Axster, Dr. Arthur Rudolph and Georg Richkey.
Von Braun’s team had used slave labor from the Dora concentration camp and had worked prisoners to death in the Mittelwerk complex: more than 20,000 had died from exhaustion and starvation. The supervising slavemaster was Richkey. In retaliation against sabotage in the missile plant – prisoners would urinate on electrical equipment, causing spectacular malfunctions – Richkey would hang them twelve at a time from factory cranes, with wooden sticks shoved
into their mouths to muffle their cries. In the Dora camp itself he regarded children as useless mouths and instructed the SS guards to club them to death, which they did.
This record did not inhibit Richkey’s speedy transfer to the United States, where he was deployed at Wright Field, an Army Air Corps base near Dayton, Ohio. Richkey went to work overseeing security for dozens of other Nazis now pursuing their researches for the United States. He was also assigned the task of translating all of the records from the Mittelwerk factory. He thus had the opportunity, which he used to the utmost, to destroy any material compromising to his colleagues and himself.
By 1947 there was enough public disquiet, stimulated by the columnist Drew Pearson, to require a pro forma war crimes trial for Richkey and a few others. Richkey was sent back to West Germany and put through a secret trial supervised by the US Army, which had every reason to clear Richkey since conviction would disclose that the entire Mittelwerk team now in the US had been accomplices in the use of slavery and the torture and killing of prisoners of war, and thus were also guilty of war crimes. The army therefore sabotaged Richkey’s trial by withholding records now in the US and also by preventing any interrogation of Von Braun and others from Dayton: Richkey was acquitted. Because some of the trial materials implicated Rudolph, Von Braun and Walter Dornberger, however, the entire record was classified and held secret for forty years, thus burying evidence that could have sent the entire rocket team to the gallows.
Senior officers of the US Army knew the truth. Initially the recruitment of German war criminals was justified as necessary to the continuing war against Japan. Later, moral justification took the form of invoking “intellectual reparations” or as the Joint Chiefs of Staff put it, as “a form of exploitation of chosen rare minds whose continuing intellectual productivity we wish to use.” Endorsement for this repellent posture came from a panel of the National Academy of Sciences, which adopted the collegial position that German scientists had somehow evaded the Nazi contagion by being “an island of nonconformity in the Nazified body politic,” a statement that Von Braun, Richkey and the other slave drivers must have deeply appreciated.
By 1946 a rationale based on Cold War strategy was becoming more important. Nazis were needed in the struggle against Communism, and their capabilities certainly had to be withheld from the Soviets. In September 1946 President Harry Truman approved the Dulles-inspired Paperclip project, whose mission was to bring no less than 1,000 Nazi scientists to the United States. Among them were many of the vilest criminals of the war: there were doctors from Dachau concentration camp who had killed prisoners by putting them through high altitude tests, who had freezed their victims and given them massive doses of salt water to research the process of drowning. There were the chemical weapons engineers such as Kurt Blome, who had tested Sarin nerve gas on prisoners at Auschwitz. There were doctors who instigated battlefield traumas by taking women prisoners at Ravensbrück and filling their wounds with gangrene cultures, sawdust, mustard gas, and glass, then sewing them up and treating some with doses of sulfa drugs while timing others to see how long it took for them to develop lethal cases of gangrene.
Among the targets of the Paperclip recruitment program were Hermann Becker-Freyseng and Konrad Schaeffer, authors of the study “Thirst and Thirst Quenching in Emergency Situations at Sea.” The study was designed to devise ways to prolong the survival of pilots downed over water. To this end the two scientists asked Heinrich Himmler for “forty healthy test subjects” from the SS chief’s network of concentration camps, the only debate among the scientists being whether the research victims should be Jews, gypsies or Communists. The experiments took place at Dachau. These prisoners, most of them Jews, had salt water forced down their throats through tubes. Others had salt water injected directly into their veins. Half of the subjects were given a drug called berkatit, which was supposed to make salt water more palatable, though both scientists suspected that the berkatit itself would prove fatally toxic within two weeks. They were correct. During the tests the doctors used long needles to extract liver tissue. No anesthetic was given. All the research subjects died. Both Becker-Freyseng and Schaeffer received long-term contracts under Paperclip; Schaeffer ended up in Texas, where he continued his research into “thirst and desalinization of salt water.”
Becker-Freyseng was given the responsibility of editing for the US Air Force the massive store of aviation research conducted by his fellow Nazis. By this time he had been tracked down and brought to trial at Nuremberg. The multivolume work, entitled German Aviation Medicine: World War II, was eventually published by the US Air Force, complete with an introduction written by Becker-Freyseng from his Nuremberg jail cell. The work neglected to mention the human victims of the research, and praised the Nazi scientists as sincere and honorable men “with a free and academic character” laboring under the constraints of the Third Reich.
One of their prominent colleagues was Dr. Sigmund Rascher, also assigned to Dachau. In 1941 Rascher informed Himmler of the vital need to conduct high-altitude experiments on human subjects. Rascher, who had developed a special low-pressure chamber during his tenure at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, asked Himmler for permission to have delivered into his custody “two or three professional criminals,” a Nazi euphemism for Jews, Russian prisoners of war and members of the Polish underground resistance. Himmler quickly assented and Rascher’s experiments were under way within a month.
Rascher’s victims were locked inside his low-pressure chamber, which simulated altitudes of up to 68,000 feet. Eighty of the human guinea pigs died after being kept inside for half an hour without oxygen. Dozens of others were dragged semi-conscious from the chamber and immediately drowned in vats of ice water. Rascher quickly sliced open their heads to examine how many blood vessels in the brain had burst due to air embolisms. Rascher filmed these experiments and the autopsies, sending the footage along with his meticulous notes back to Himmler. “Some experiments gave men such pressure in their heads that they would go mad and pull out their hair in an effort to relieve such pressure,” Rascher wrote. “They would tear at their heads and faces with their hands and scream in an effort to relieve pressure on their eardrums.” Rascher’s records were scooped up by US intelligence agents and delivered to the Air Force.
The US intelligence officials viewed the criticism of people like Drew Pearson with disdain. Bosquet Wev, head of JOIA, dismissed the scientists’ Nazi past as “a picayune detail”; continuing to condemn them for their work for Hitler and Himmler was simply “beating a dead horse.” Playing on American fears about Stalin’s intentions in Europe, Wev argued that leaving the Nazi scientists in Germany “presents a far greater security threat to this country than any former Nazi affiliation they may have had or even any Nazi sympathies which they may still have.”
A similar pragmatism was expressed by one of Wev’s colleagues, Colonel Montie Cone, head of G-2’s exploitation division. “From a military point of view, we knew that these people were invaluable to us,” Cone said. “Just think what we have from their research – all of our satellites, jet aircraft, rockets, almost everything else.”
The US intelligence agents were so entranced with their mission that they went to extraordinary lengths to protect their recruits from criminal investigators at the US Department of Justice. One of the more despicable cases was that of Nazi aviation researcher Emil Salmon, who during the war had helped set fire to a synagogue filled with Jewish women and children. Salmon was sheltered by US officials at Wright Air Force Base in Ohio after being convicted of crimes by a denazification court in Germany.
Nazis were not the only scientists sought out by US intelligence agents after the end of World War II. In Japan the US Army put on its payroll Dr. Shiro Ishii, the head of the Japanese Imperial Army’s biowarfare unit. Dr. Ishii had deployed a wide range of biological and chemical agents against Chinese and Allied troops, and had also operated a large research center in Manchuria, where he conducted bio-weapons e
xperiments on Chinese, Russian and American prisoners of war. Ishii infected prisoners with tetanus; gave them typhoid-laced tomatoes; developed plague-infected fleas; infected women with syphilis; and exploded germ bombs over dozens of POWs tied to stakes. Among other atrocities, Ishii’s records show that he often performed “autopsies” on live victims. In a deal hatched by General Douglas MacArthur, Ishii turned over more than 10,000 pages of his “research findings” to the US Army, avoided prosecution for war crimes and was invited to lecture at Ft. Detrick, the US Army bio-weapons research center near Frederick, Maryland.
Under the terms of Paperclip there was fierce competition not only between the wartime allies but also between the various US services – always the most savage form of combat. Curtis LeMay saw his new-minted US Air Force as certain to prompt the navy’s virtual extinction and thought this process would be speeded if he were able to acquire as many German scientists and engineers as possible. For its part, the US Navy was equally eager to snare its measure of war criminals. One of the first men picked up by the navy was a Nazi scientist named Theordore Benzinger. Benzinger was an expert on battlefield wounds, expertise he gained through explosive experiments conducted on human subjects during the waning stages of World War II. Benzinger ended up with a lucrative government contract working as a researcher at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland.
Through its Technical Mission in Europe, the navy was also hot on the trail of state-of-the-art Nazi research into interrogation techniques. The Navy’s intelligence officers soon came across Nazi research papers on truth serums, this research having been conducted at Dachau concentration camp by Dr. Kurt Plotner. Plotner had given Jewish and Russian prisoners high doses of mescalin and had watched them display schizophrenic behavior. The prisoners began to talk openly of their hatred of their German captors, and to make confessional statements about their psychological makeup.
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