By being part of a team of covert poisoners, be it out in the Alaskan tundra or inside a safe house at Camp King in Germany, Dr. Frank Olson and his colleagues violated the Nuremberg Code, which requires informed consent. As circumstances would have it, the great tragedy of Frank Olson’s life and death was that his own inalienable right to be protected from harm from his government and his doctor was violated on orders from the very same people to whom he had dedicated his life’s work.
This new war, the Cold War, was now the father of its own dark events.
PART V
“War is the father of all things.”
—Heraclitus
CHAPTER TWENTY
In the Dark Shadows
The Cold War became a battlefield marked by doublespeak. Disguise, distortion, and deception were accepted as reality. Truth was promised in a serum. And Operation Paperclip, born of the ashes of World War II, was the inciting incident in this hall of mirrors.
But in 1952, the heedless momentum of Operation Paperclip began to slow as conflicts emerged between the JIOA and the CIA over policies with the new West German government. German officials warned High Commissioner John J. McCloy that Operation Paperclip violated NATO regulations and even America’s own policies for governance in Germany. On February 21, 1952, McCloy sent a memo to the U.S. Secretary of State expressing his concern that if Paperclip was not curtailed, it could result in a “violent reaction” from officials in West Germany. With McCloy no longer expressing unbridled enthusiasm for Operation Paperclip, the JIOA began to lose its once indomitable grip on the program. But the CIA was not bound to the same NATO policies as were the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and so the CIA continued to do what it had been doing—namely, recruiting Nazi scientists and intelligence officers to act as advisers at Camp King. The five-year partnership between the two agencies began to unravel.
JIOA officials became furious as they watched the CIA poach German scientists and technicians from the Accelerated Paperclip lists. In response, and in spite of McCloy’s requests otherwise, in the winter of 1952 the JIOA prepared to send a twenty-man team to Frankfurt on a recruiting trip. Delegates included JIOA’s new deputy director, Colonel Gerold Crabbe; General Walter Dornberger; and five unnamed Paperclip scientists who were already working in America. When McCloy learned of the trip, he asked the State Department to intervene and cancel it, fearing it would draw the ire of German officials, which it did. The trip happened anyway.
A compromise was reached between U.S. officials and Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s office whereby the JIOA and the CIA agreed to stop recruiting new scientists but could continue to work with the scientists who remained on the original, President Truman–approved, thousand-person list. Official numbers vary dramatically in different declassified record groups, but there were approximately six hundred Paperclip scientists in the United States at this time, meaning some four hundred German scientists were still on the target list. JIOA renamed Paperclip the Defense Scientists Immigration Program, or DEFSIP, and the CIA renamed one vein of its involvement the National Interest program, but most parties still referred to it all as Operation Paperclip.
It was a dwindling empire. In 1956 the CIA ceded control of the Gehlen Organization to the West German government, which renamed it the BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst). The former Nazi general and his men were spies for Chancellor Adenauer’s government now. Then, in 1957, JIOA got a new officer in Lieutenant Colonel Henry Whalen, a man whose actions would have a profound effect on the legacy of the Paperclip program. By 1959 Whalen was promoted to deputy director of JIOA, which meant he had access to highly classified intelligence reports from scientists working on atomic, biological, and chemical weapons. Whalen had an office in the “E” Ring of the Pentagon, reserved for senior officials, and enjoyed direct access to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. During his year-long tenure as JIOA deputy director, no one had any idea that Whalen was working as a Soviet spy. It wasn’t until 1963 that the FBI learned that he had been passing military secrets to Colonel Sergei Edemski, a GRU intelligence agent posing as a military attaché in the Soviet embassy in Washington. By then Henry Whalen had already left the JIOA.
When the Justice Department began investigating Whalen, they seized all of the JIOA records that he had been working with. The FBI learned that Whalen had destroyed or given away thousands of Paperclip files. In 1966, a grand jury was presented with evidence against Whalen behind closed doors. He was indicted and the trial was conducted under a gag order, with the press denied access to what the FBI had learned and to Whalen’s confession. Journalists were prohibited from reporting on the trial, and no one made the connection between Whalen, the JIOA, and Operation Paperclip. The Nazi scientist program had long since faded from public discourse. Whalen was sentenced to fifteen years at a federal penitentiary but was paroled after six years. Most of the FBI’s investigation of Whalen remains classified, which likely explains why so few Paperclip files from that time frame are housed at the National Archives.
In 1962, the JIOA was officially disbanded. What remained of the Paperclip program was taken over by the Research and Engineering Department at the Pentagon. Under the DoD Reorganization Act of 1958, this new office had been created to handle the military’s scientific and engineering needs under a scientific director who reported to the Secretary of Defense. The act also gave a home to the Pentagon’s new in-house, cutting-edge science agency—the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA, later renamed DARPA—with a D for defense. The first director of the Research and Engineering Department was the nuclear physicist Herbert York. York also served as the first scientific director of ARPA. He was one of the nation’s leading experts on nuclear weapons and on Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, or ICBMs.
The ICBM is the “truly revolutionary military offspring” of Hitler’s V-2 rocket, says Michael J. Neufeld, curator of the Department of Space History at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and author of several books and monographs on German rocket scientists. The ICBM is capable of carrying, in its nose cone, a weapon of mass destruction and delivering it to a target almost anywhere in the world. The ICBM became the centerpiece of the Cold War—the ultimate sword. It also became the ultimate shield. “Total war” with the Soviets never happened. The Cold War never became a shooting war. Deterrence prevailed.
Today, the Research and Engineering Department at the Pentagon, renamed the Department of Defense Research and Engineering Enterprise, develops all next-generation weapons and counterweapons of mass destruction—the twenty-first century’s swords and shields. It is as true today as it was when World War II ended that America relies upon the advancement of science and technology—and industry—to prepare for the next war. This relationship is understood as America’s military-industrial complex. It was President Eisenhower who, in his Farewell Address to the nation in 1961, coined this phrase. Eisenhower cautioned Americans to be wary of “the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” Eisenhower’s famous warning is well known and often paraphrased. But he also delivered a second warning in his farewell speech, not nearly as well known. Eisenhower told the American people that, indeed, science and research played a crucial role in national security, “[y]et, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
Herbert York, as both ARPA chief and director of the Research and Engineering Department at the Pentagon, worked closely with President Eisenhower on matters of military science during the last three years of Eisenhower’s presidency. He was deeply troubled by Eisenhower’s words in his Farewell Address. “Scientists and technologists had acquired the reputation of being magicians who had access to a special source of information and wisdom out of reach of the rest of mankind,” said York. In the mid-1960s, York went to visit Eisenhower at the former president’s wint
er home, in the California desert. “I asked him to explain more fully what he meant by the warnings, but he declined to do so,” York said. “I pressed this line of questions further by asking him whether he had any particular people in mind when he warned us about ‘the danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.’ ” York was surprised when Eisenhower “answered without hesitation: ‘(Wernher) von Braun and (Edward) Teller [father of the hydrogen bomb].’ ”
York spent decades considering what the President had told him. “Eisenhower’s warnings[,] which were based largely on his intuition, pointed up very real and extremely serious problems. If we forget or downgrade his warnings, it will be to our peril,” York wrote in his memoir, Arms and the Physicist, in 1995.
The legacy of some of the Operation Paperclip scientists as individuals parallels the heritage of many of the Cold War weapons programs they participated in. The biological and chemical weapons programs can now be looked back upon as distinct failures and the product of vague and often wrong intelligence. So it was with the Chemical Corps’ relationship with former SS–Brigadier General Dr. Walter Schieber. Declassified files reveal that Schieber was double-crossing the Americans from the moment he began working for the U.S. Army in Germany, including the entire time he worked for Brigadier General Charles Loucks on the sarin gas project at Loucks’s private home in Heidelberg. It took military intelligence until 1950 to determine that something about Hitler’s trusted servant was untoward, and even longer to fully realize the extent to which Speer’s Armaments Supply Office chief was deceiving them. Almost immediately after Schieber was released from Nuremberg, he began using his old Nazi contacts to sell heavy weapons to at least one enemy nation through a Swiss intermediary. In 1950, military intelligence intercepted a four-page letter addressed to Schieber, sent from Switzerland. There was no return address on the envelope and only an illegible signature inside. The letter writer discussed with Schieber the sale of weapons to a third party, describing the buyer as “A Prince of the Royal House,” which military intelligence surmised was a code name. “They are looking for everything, tanks, aircraft, etc., weapons, ammunitions in short everything that pertains to armament. I can’t write all that in a telegraph,” stated the author, who requested “PAK anti-tank guns… willing to pay $5,000 a piece; 75 mm weapons at $3,000-$4,000 a piece, and 50mm (about $2,000.00).” This was a “first class business deal if we could arrange it,” the intermediary promised.
Special Agent Carlton F. Maxwell, commander of a CIC Team in Heidelberg, was assigned the task of analyzing the letter and the situation. Maxwell quickly determined that the letter was legitimate and its implications dangerous. “Dr. Schieber, described as an extremely valuable scientist in the employ of the Chemical Division, EUCOM, where he possibly has access to Chemical Corps information of a highly classified nature, appears to be one person whom the United States can ill afford to have involved in any sort of international scheme of the nature which the letter seems to imply,” Maxwell wrote. “Subject’s connections during the Nazi regime with the armament industry, in his capacity as Armaments Supply Chief under Dr. Albert Speer, would make him valuable as a consultant and intermediary in any sort of plan involving illegal sales and shipments of arms.” It is remarkable that despite many warning signs, the U.S. Army placed so much trust in Schieber in the first place, and that General Loucks was allowed to make back-door deals with him.
Special Agent Maxwell worried that “in light of recent indication of revival of right-wing activity it is not impossible to image that these arms might be used in a possible German monarchist coup.” Schieber needed to be watched closely, Maxwell advised. The Counter Intelligence Corps put a tail on him and followed him into the Soviet zone. In four months’ time, CIC confirmed, “Schieber has contacts with a Swiss Import-Export Agency in a dubious transaction involving the sale and shipment of arms to a foreign power.” But there was even worse news for U.S. national security. The CIC also learned that Schieber was working for Soviet intelligence. “Subject is in some way involved with the MGB [Ministerstvo Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti, or the Ministry of State Security, a forerunner of Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti, or the KGB] in Weimar,” Maxwell learned.
Maxwell advised his superiors that it appeared Schieber was a Soviet mole and summarized the dangers involved. Schieber had been cleared to work with highly classified material for the U.S. Chemical Corps, including but not limited to tabun and sarin nerve gas. He had worked on classified design projects involving underground bunker systems for the U.S. Air Force, ones that would supposedly protect the U.S. government’s greatest military assets in the event of a nuclear attack. And now he was meeting with Soviet agents who were connected to the intelligence service. Maxwell was told to notify the CIA. The response from the Agency was surprising. “Just forget it,” the CIA told Maxwell, and he was instructed to share this message with his colleagues inside the Counter Intelligence Corps. According to declassified memos in Schieber’s file, in addition to working for the Chemical Corps, Schieber was also working for the CIA. The Agency told Special Agent Maxwell that they had Schieber under their control. Whether that meant that Schieber was spying on the Soviets as part of an Agency plan or that he was double-crossing both nations remains a mystery. Either way, he was also working on an illegal arms deal. According to a declassified memo in Schieber’s foreign scientist case file, he remained on the Operation Paperclip payroll until 1956.
In America, Dr. Walter Schieber left an indelible mark on the future of the U.S. Chemical Corps. After he and his team of Farben chemists provided General Loucks with the secret of sarin gas, the United States began stockpiling the deadly nerve agent for use in the event of total war. The program was fast-tracked at the start of the Korean War. On October 31, 1950, Secretary of Defense George C. Marshall authorized $50 million (roughly $500 million in 2013) for the design, engineering, and construction of two separate sarin production facilities, one in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and another inside the Rocky Mountain Arsenal. Most information on biological and chemical weapons was classified, and no one outside a core group of senior congressmen who portioned out money for these programs had a need to know about them. “Only five members of the House Appropriations Committee, and no more than 5 percent of the entire House of Representatives, were cleared for information on chemical and biological weapons,” writes chemical weapons expert Jonathan Tucker. “As a result, a small clique of senior congressmen was able to allocate money for these programs in secret session and then bury the line items in massive appropriations bills that were brought to the floor for a vote with little advance notice, so that few members had time to read them.”
Sarin production took off at a frenzied pace. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, the two plants cranked out thousands of tons of sarin nerve agent each year. The facility at Rocky Mountain Arsenal, code-named Building 1501, was a windowless five-story blockhouse designed to withstand a 6.0 earthquake and 100-mph winds. It was the largest poured concrete structure in the United States, and for years, no one in America without a need to know had any idea what went on inside. The Chemical Corps also fast-tracked its chemical warfare munitions program, developing state-of-the-art weapons with which to deliver deadly nerve agents in battle. At the Rocky Flats munitions loading plant, sarin was fitted into artillery shells, aerial bombs, rockets, and warheads for missiles, with the preferred method of delivery being the M34 cluster bomb, a 1,000-pound metal cylinder with 75 sarin-filled mini-bombs sealed inside.
Shortly after the Korean War ended with an armistice on July 27, 1953, the Chemical Corps began releasing public service announcements to educate Americans about chemical warfare. In November 1953, when Collier’s magazine published “G-Gas: A New Weapon of Chilling Terror. We Have It—So Does Russia,” the public learned for the first time that World War III with the Soviets would most likely involve nerve agents. Journalist Cornelius Ryan presented the i
nformation about sarin in the starkest of terms. “Right now, you and your family—all of us—are unprotected against the threat of a terror weapon which could prove more deadly than an atomic bomb.” The army described sarin as “an odorless, colorless, tasteless nerve gas designed to destroy people with paralyzing suddenness” and warned Americans of a possible “Pearl Harbor–type attack.” Ryan described for readers a scenario wherein a Russian strategic bomber, the Tu-4, carrying seven tons of sarin bombs, would drop its load on an American city, killing every unprotected human in a 100-square-mile radius within four minutes of the attack. The chief of the Chemical Corps, Major General E. F. Bullene, promised the nation that the only defense was offense. “At this time the only safe course is to be prepared to defend ourselves and ready to use gas in overpowering quantities.” Brinkmanship—the practice of pushing dangerous events to the edge, or brink, of disaster—was the new Cold War mentality.
In 1957, after years of producing sarin and filling munitions around the clock, the Chemical Corps finally fulfilled the Defense Department’s stockpile requirement. Later that same year, Edgewood chemists found an even more lethal killer, “a toxic insecticide that penetrated the skin like snake venom,” explains Jonathan Tucker. This nerve agent was code-named VX (the V stood for venomous)—a battlefield killer that was three times more toxic than sarin when inhaled and one thousand times more lethal when it came in contact with the skin. Ten milligrams of VX could kill a man in fifteen minutes. VX would be much more effective on the battlefield than sarin ever would be; sarin dissipated within fifteen or so minutes, but when VX was sprayed, it stayed on the ground for up to twenty-one days. Now, in 1957, the Chemical Corps began producing VX by the thousands of tons. Operation Paperclip scientist Fritz Hoffmann moved over from synthesizing tabun at Edgewood to working on VX munitions. But Fritz Hoffmann’s more haunting legacy lies in the work he performed for the CIA’s Special Operations Division and the Chemical Corps’ antiplant division. Antiplant agents include chemical or biological pathogens, as well as insects, that are then used as part of a program to harm crops, foliage, or other plant life.
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