Operation Paperclip

by Annie Jacobsen

  The air force had already soured on Schieber. At the Pentagon, his case had been reviewed again. The air force now saw Schieber’s Nazi Party history in a wholly different light. In their eyes, Schieber had transformed from a brilliant engineer to a ruthless, greedy war profiteer. “Walther Schieber started his business career at the Gustloff Werke in Weimar, a combine owned by the Nazi Party and comprising five industrial corporations,” read the air force response. “He soon became the leader in the German Cellulose and Rayon Ring, which was the second largest fiber combine in Germany. He founded Thuringische Zellwolle A.G. in Schwarza and subsequently gained control of the French Synthetic Fiber combine,” meaning that with the help of SS officers, Schieber had confiscated Jewish-owned businesses in France and made them the property of the Third Reich. Synthetic fibers were imperative to the Reich, used for everything from soldiers’ uniforms to blankets to parachutes. Photographs of Schieber displaying bolts of synthetic cloth to Hitler, Himmler, and Bormann show all parties smiling with pride.

  “Schieber was appointed by Speer to the position of Chief of the Office for Delivery of Armament Goods in the Ministry for Armaments and Munitions and was named deputy leader of the National Group Industry by [Walter] Funk,” read the air force report. How he went from dealing fabrics to weapons production remained unclear, but his ambition had to have come into play. “Described as a top-ranking figure in the Nazi war economy, he is said to have constantly profited from being a party man,” noted the air force. There was only one conclusion: “Cancel Air Force request for Walter Schieber. Subject considered ineligible Paperclip.”

  United States European Command (EUCOM) headquarters in Frankfurt—various commands had different headquarters—cabled the JIOA office at the Pentagon to let them know that cancellation of the request was an unsound idea: “It is believed here that these considerations outweigh the risk of possible criticism of his being sent to the United States, and if necessary, warrant an exception to present policy. Further, it is considered advisable that for Schieber’s future personal safety and for intelligence reasons, he not be present… when and if official action against him occurs. Therefore it is strongly recommended that reconsideration be given the decision to cancel Schieber’s contract and that he be sent to the United States regardless of the outcome of his appeal.” EUCOM wanted Schieber moved out of Germany and sent to the United States—now. Nothing happened for three months—until Brigadier General Charles Loucks arrived in Heidelberg.

  After the second Schieber call came in to General Loucks’s office, Loucks told his lieutenant to set up a meeting with the man. As of 2013, their official meeting remains classified. But General Loucks wrote regularly in his desk diary, which fills in what the declassified Operation Paperclip case file on Schieber leaves out. On October 14, 1948, Dr. Schieber was invited to attend a roundtable conference at Army Chemical Corps headquarters in Heidelberg. “Classified matters” were discussed, Loucks penned in his journal that night. Schieber told Loucks he had been in on the Reich’s manufacturing of nerve gas “from the beginning.” He appealed to General Loucks’s patriotic side. “I want you to know that if there is anything I can do to help the West I shall do it,” Schieber said. Loucks liked Schieber’s willingness to help the cause so much that he invited Schieber to join him at his house for a drink.

  That evening Loucks recorded his thoughts: “Attended conf. with… Dr. Walter Schieber—classified matters. No particular info but hope for more later, possibly when better acquainted. I’ll try to see him next time he reports in to Div. of Intell. He directed the production of war gases on a rather high echelon so doesn’t have the detailed knowledge that I want, but possibly I can get the names of useful people from him. Took him to the house for a drink.”

  Chemical weapons, like biological weapons, were perceived by some to be “dirty business,” as President Roosevelt once said. But to men like General Loucks and Walter Schieber, to advance a nation’s arsenal of chemical weapons was a challenging and necessary job. It “was more interesting than going down to Paris on weekends,” Loucks wrote in his journal.

  General Loucks asked to meet with Dr. Schieber again, this time to ask Schieber if he could assist with a “problem” the U.S. Army was having producing sarin gas. Schieber was happy to help. He told Loucks that during the war it was the Farben chemists who had produced sarin gas and that he knew all these chemists very well. They were his friends. “They worked with me during the war,” Schieber explained.

  “We wouldn’t expect you to do this for free,” Loucks told Schieber, meaning provide the U.S. Chemical Corps with secrets. The two men arranged to meet again in the following weeks.

  On October 28, 1948, Loucks and his wife, Pearl, hosted a dinner party in their home. Again, Schieber was a guest. Loucks had by now taken an extraordinary liking to Dr. Schieber and wrote his impressions of the man in his diary that night. “Schieber is interesting—an independent thinking, intelligent and very competent man. He related much of his experience with the Russians. A prisoner of war after the 1st World War for a year. He was an honorary (?) Brigade Fuehrer of SS this last war. In confinement in Nuremberg for seven months. Quartered next to Goering until the latter killed himself. Was an admirer of Todt, later worked for Speer, was directed to report to Hitler frequently. He has many anecdotes and is a loyal German. Is willing to do anything for the future of the world and Germany.” Why was General Loucks so willing to overlook SS-Brigadeführer Dr. Walter Schieber’s criminal past and his central role inside the Third Reich? A story that Charles Loucks told an army historian decades later sheds light on this question.

  At the end of World War II, after the Japanese surrendered, Colonel Loucks went to Tokyo, where he served as the chief chemical officer for the U.S. Army. Sometimes Loucks took day trips into the countryside. 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. Still, the Japanese refused to surrender, and it took two atomic bombs to end the war. The incendiary bombs dropped on those sixty-seven cities were produced at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal. Colonel Loucks oversaw the production of tens of thousands of them. In Japan, after the fighting was over, and when Loucks took day trips, he often brought his camera along and took photographs of the landscape, the damage, and the dead. When Loucks returned home to America, he compiled these photographs into an album of more than one hundred black-and-white snapshots. One photograph in the album, which is archived at the U.S. Army Heritage Center in Pennsylvania, shows Colonel Loucks standing next to an enormous pile of dead bodies.

  Years later Colonel Loucks explained to the army historian what the photograph meant to him. “Driving one day in a Jeep from Yokohama to Tokyo, I stopped along the side of a road. The incendiary attacks had done their work,” Loucks explained. The area “was all burned out; a wasteland all the way through. We dropped tens of thousands of them [incendiary bombs] on the whole area between Yokohama and Tokyo.”

  Out there in the Japanese countryside, said Loucks, “I noticed a great stack of incendiary bombs—small ones. I went over to take a look at them. They looked like something that we had made at Rocky Mountain. Sure enough, they were. Here in one place they had a great stack of them. They were burned out but the bodies were still there because they didn’t burn. They stacked them up in this big high pile. I had a picture of me standing beside them, because I had been responsible for the manufacturing of them. That was just one of those incidents that didn’t mean anything, but I just happened to see what had happened to some of our incendiary bombs that were over there.”

  In describing the photograph—an enormous pile of dead bodies next to a stack of incendiary bombs—Colonel Loucks expressed a peculiar kind of detachment. To the army historian interviewing him, Loucks made clear that what interested him in the photograph was noting the effectiveness—or in this case ineffectiveness—of the bombs he had
been responsible for manufacturing. Similarly, Loucks expressed detachment as far as Dr. Schieber was concerned, as evidenced in his journal entries. It was as if Loucks could not, or would not, see Schieber in the context of the millions of Jews murdered on the direct orders of Schieber’s closest wartime colleagues. What interested Loucks about Schieber was what an effective chemical weapons maker he was.

  During the next meeting between General Loucks and Dr. Schieber, Loucks got very specific with Schieber in terms of what he was after. “Could you develop the process and put it on paper with drawings, specifications and tables and safety regulations to make Sarin?” Loucks asked, as noted in his desk diary.

  “Yes, I could do that,” Schieber said.

  Loucks recalled the next conversation the two men had. “He said they had a big works outside of Berlin that was just completed when the war was over and made little token amounts but no production. When [the Reich] announced that the Russians were taking over, those engineers and chemists both came West into the American and British occupied zones.” Schieber was lying to General Loucks. The nerve gas production plant outside Berlin to which Schieber referred was Falkenhagen, and it was run by Otto Ambros’s deputy and the man who had stashed the steel drum outside Gendorf, Jürgen von Klenck. By war’s end, the factory at Falkenhagen had produced more than five hundred tons of sarin gas, hardly “little token amounts,” as Schieber claimed. If Loucks had read von Klenck’s OMGUS security report, or any of the CIOS reports written by Major Edmund Tilley, he would have learned that Schieber was lying to him. Instead, General Loucks asked Schieber if he could locate these chemists who knew so much about sarin production and bring them to Heidelberg. He held out to Schieber the promise of a U.S. Army contract. Further, “We will pay all their [the chemists’] expenses and give them something for their work,” Loucks said.

  “Yes, I can do that.” Schieber replied. He said that he knew all of the Farben chemists and could easily get them to tell the Americans everything. He listed their names for Loucks. One of the six Farben chemists on the list was Ambros’s deputy and the man who ran Falkenhagen, Jürgen von Klenck.

  On October 29, 1948, Colonel Loucks wrote a memorandum to the chief of the Army Chemical Corps. The best, fastest way to get German technical information on tabun and sarin gas was to hire Dr. Schieber, Colonel Loucks advised. In his diary, Loucks wrote, “Hope the chief will support us. If he does, we’ll be able to get all of the German CW technical ability on our side and promptly. They know on what side they belong. All we need to do is treat them as human beings. They recognize the military defeat and the political and ideological defeat as well and accept it.”

  One week later, General Loucks told Schieber that he had been authorized to pay him 1,000 marks a month for consulting work. Schieber gave Loucks the contact information for the six chemists and technicians who would join him in his efforts to explain precisely how to produce sarin gas. 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. There, they created detailed, step-by-step reports on how to produce industrial amounts of sarin gas. They drew charts and graphs and made lists of materials and equipment required. Years later, Loucks reflected, “One of the team [members] was a young engineer who had an excellent command of English which helped greatly and was his major contribution [and that was] Jurgend [sic] von Klenck.”

  When the work was finally compiled and sent to Edgewood, the results were the perfect recipe for the deadly nerve agent. According to General Loucks, without Hitler’s chemists, the American program had been a failure. With them, it was a success. “That’s when we built the plant out in Rocky Mountain Arsenal,” Loucks explained. The incendiary bombs that Colonel Loucks oversaw at Rocky Mountain Arsenal during World War II would now be replaced by M34 cluster bombs filled with sarin gas. The Top Secret program was code-named Gibbett-Delivery.

  A friendship between two brigadier generals, Loucks and Schieber, had been solidified. The following summer, Schieber sent Loucks a thank-you note and a gift, not identified in the records but described by Schieber as a piece of “equipment… that once stood at the beginning of the same work group.” The unknown item had been used by Schieber during the Nazi era, when sarin gas was first developed for Hitler. Over the next eight years the two brigadier generals exchanged Christmas cards.

  In January 1950, General Loucks was called to Washington, D.C., for several meetings at the Pentagon. According to Loucks’s desk diary, during his first meeting there he was reprimanded by a Pentagon official for cultivating friendly relationships with Hitler’s chemists.

  “ ‘I don’t like this,” Loucks wrote that his superior had informed him. “ ‘I don’t want to be made a fool of over this. Everyone seems to have cut them [the Nazis] off their list. To be friendly with them seems bad form.’ ”

  But General Loucks noted in his diary that he had every intention of defying this superior’s request. He had become good friends with the German chemists. He regularly had meals with Walter Schieber and Richard Kuhn, and, on at least one occasion, Schieber had spent the night at Loucks’s house. “I’ll see them anyhow,” he wrote, in a diary entry dated February 1, 1950. The following day, Loucks was called back in to the Pentagon. “Went to Pentagon,” he wrote, “long session with H.Q. Int. [headquarters, intelligence] people… seemed interested in what we are doing [in Heidelberg]—would give me money necessary to exploit the Germans for scientific and technical intelligence.” In other words, what some at the Pentagon refused to condone, others were willing to support through covert means.

  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. Within the CIA, Paperclip was managed inside the Office of Collection and Dissemination, and one of the first things requested by its administrator, L. T. Shannon, was “a photostatted copy of a set of files compiled by Dr. Werner Osenberg and consisting of biographical records of approximately 18,000 German scientists.” By the winter of 1948, hundreds of memos were going back and forth between the JIOA and the CIA. Sometimes the CIA would request information from the JIOA on certain scientists, and sometimes the JIOA would ask the CIA to provide it with intelligence on a specific scientist or group of scientists.

  Also in the first three months of the CIA’s existence, the National Security Council issued Directive No. 3, dealing specifically with the “production of intelligence and the coordination of intelligence production activities within the intelligence community.” The National Security Council wanted to know who was producing what intelligence and how that information was being coordinated among agencies. 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. “Very early in its existence the SIC undertook to define scientific intelligence, delineate areas of particular interest and establish committees to handle these areas,” wrote SIC chairman Dr. Karl Weber, in a CIA monograph that remained classified until September 2008. “Priority was accorded to atomic energy, biological warfare, chemical warfare, electronic warfare, guided missiles, aircraft, undersea warfare and medicine”—every area involving Operation Paperclip scientists. Eight scientific intelligence subcommittees were cre
ated, one for each area of warfare.

  Despite the urgency, the JIOA’s plan to make Operation Paperclip over into a long-term program was still at a standstill. By the spring of 1948, half of the one thousand German scientists bound for America had arrived, but not a single one of them had a visa. Troublemaker Samuel Klaus was gone from the State Department, but the JIOA could still not get the visa division to make things happen fast enough. On May 11, 1948, military intelligence chief General Stephen J. Chamberlin, the man who had briefed Eisenhower in 1947, took matters into his own hands. Chamberlin went to meet FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to enlist his help with visas. Cold War paranoia was on the rise, and both men were staunch anti-Communists. The success of Operation Paperclip, said Chamberlin, was essential to national security. The FBI had the Communists to fear, not the Nazis. Hoover agreed. Paperclip recruits needed the promise of American citizenship now more than ever, Chamberlin said, before any more of them were stolen away by the Russians. Chamberlin asked Hoover to put pressure on the State Department. J. Edgar Hoover said he would see what he could do. What, if anything, Hoover did remains a mystery. Three months later, the first seven scientists had U.S. immigrant visas. Now it was time to put the transition process to the test.

  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.