Operation Paperclip

by Annie Jacobsen

  After the death of Frank Olson, the SO Division continued its LSD mind control schemes. But Sidney Gottlieb, the man who had suggested poisoning Frank Olson at the CIA safe house in Deep Creek Lake, Maryland, was assigned to also work on the CIA’s assassination-by-poison program. Fritz Hoffmann was one of the chemists at the locus of this program. “He was our searcher,” Edgewood laboratory director Dr. Seymour Silver told journalist Linda Hunt. “He was the guy who brought to our attention any discoveries that happened around the world and then said, ‘Here’s a new chemical, you better test it.’ ”

  Hoffmann’s daughter, Gabriella, remembers her unusually tall, soft-spoken father regularly traveling the globe in the late 1950s and early 1960s, always with a military escort, gathering obscure poisons from exotic toads, fish, and plants. “He would send me postcards from places like Japan, Australia and Hawaii,” she recalls. “He always flew military and he was always escorted by military staff. They would pick him up at our house and bring him back home on a Sunday night.” A teenager at the time, Gabriella Hoffmann remembers the unconventional items her father brought home. “He’d unpack his luggage before he would go back to Edgewood on Monday and in his suitcase he’d have all these little jars. They were filled with sea urchins and things. It all seemed very exotic to me.”

  The poisons Fritz Hoffmann sought for the CIA included substances like curare, a South American blowpipe poison that paralyzes and kills people. Curare was the poison that the CIA’s U-2 pilots carried in their flight suit pockets, hidden inside a tiny sheath inserted into an American coin. The SO Division had a Device Branch, which was run by Herb Tanner, co-designer of the Eight Ball. The Device Branch was responsible for the hardware behind the delivery systems, including fountain pens filled with poison projectiles, briefcases that spread bacterial aerosols, poisoned candies, invisible powders, and the “non discernible microbioinoculator,” a high-tech dart gun that injected a tiny, poison-tipped dart into the bloodstream without leaving a mark on the body.

  In other situations it behooved the CIA to locate and weaponize a poison where death came after a delay, sometimes with an incubation period of about eight or twelve hours, sometimes much longer. The SO Division’s Agent Branch worked to find poisons that could make a target mildly ill for a short or long period of time followed by death, very ill for a short or long time followed by death, or any number of combinations, including mild to extreme illness followed by death. The rationale behind assassinating someone with a built-in time delay was to allow the assassin to get away and to deflect suspicion. SO Division targets included Fidel Castro, whose favorite drink, a milkshake, the CIA tried to poison several times.

  Another CIA target was Patrice Lumumba, the first legally elected prime minister of Congo, who the CIA believed was a Soviet puppet. Sidney Gottlieb, the man who poisoned Frank Olson, was assigned the job of assassin. Gottlieb later told congressional investigators that for this job, he needed to locate a poison that was “indigenous to that area [Congo] and that could be fatal.” Gottlieb decided on botulinum toxin. Armed with this toxin concealed inside a glass jar within a diplomatic pouch, Sidney Gottlieb traveled to Congo with the intention of killing Prime Minister Lumumba himself. On September 26, 1960, Gottlieb arrived in the capital, Léopoldville, and headed to the U.S. embassy. There, Ambassador Lawrence Devlin was expecting him.

  Two days prior, Ambassador Devlin had received a Top Secret cable from CIA director Allen Dulles. “We wish give every possible support in eliminating Lumumba from any possiblity [sic] resuming govermental position,” Dulles wrote. Ambassador Devlin knew to be on the lookout for a visitor who would introduce himself as “Joe from Paris.” This was Sidney Gottlieb. Gottlieb’s plan was to inject the botulinum toxin into Lumumba’s toothpaste tube with a hypodermic syringe. Ideally, Lumumba would brush his teeth and eight hours later he’d be dead. But while in Léopoldville, Gottlieb could get nowhere near Prime Minister Lumumba, who was living in a house on a cliff high above the Congo River. Lumumba was constantly surrounded by bodyguards. After several days, the botulinum toxin lost its potency. Gottlieb mixed it with chlorine, tossed it into the Congo River, and left Africa. Patrice Lumumba died in January of the following year, beaten to death—allegedly by Belgian mercenaries.

  “My father understood the risks [of] being a chemist at Edgewood,” Gabriella Hoffmann says. “Because he never spoke of anything he did there is so much that is unknown.” For Gabriella Hoffmann, memories of an unusual childhood include trips to military bases. “Whenever we traveled, me and my mom and dad, it was always to a military installation. We went to White Sands in New Mexico. We went to military bases in California, Arizona, North Dakota, and Dugway, Utah. I remember dad giving a lecture at Dugway Proving Ground.” Hoffmann was a central player in some of the most mysterious and controversial government programs of the 1950s and 1960s, but the record of most of his work was destroyed or, as of 2013, remains classified. Gabriella Hoffmann is in the dark about her father’s legacy, as is most of the rest of the world.

  What remains are Gabriella Hoffmann’s memories of the company her father kept. Dr. L. Wilson Greene, the man who coined the term “psychochemical warfare,” lived down the street and was a colleague and family friend. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Greene continued his LSD research for the army and the CIA’s psychochemical warfare programs. LSD and other incapacitating agents were tested on thousands of U.S. soldiers and sailors with a questionable degree of informed consent. To Gabriella Hoffmann, Greene was simply an eccentric neighbor. “I recall [going] to the Greenes’ house to see the amazing train garden, his hobby, that he built in the basement. It [had] hills and towns and little people. Ponds and lights and trains that whistled and chugged along with wisps of smoke. My attention and interest was solely on the trains.” Another unusual neighbor on the same street was Maurice Weeks, from the Directorate of Medical Research at Edgewood. Weeks was chief of the Vapor Toxicity Branch, with expertise regarding “the inhalation toxicity of combustion products,” and spent his time researching how biological and chemical agents became even more deadly when smoke and gas were involved. This picked up where Dr. Kurt Blome’s research left off; it had been discussed by Blome in Operation Paperclip consultations in Heidelberg. “Maurice Weeks was a neighbor of ours,” recalls Gabriella Hoffmann. “His son, Christopher, and I were the best of friends. There were all these monkeys in cages in Christopher’s backyard. Christopher and I would amuse ourselves watching these monkeys for hours on end. Obviously it never dawned on me back then what they were for.” Gabriella only learned the true nature of her father’s job during interviews for this book.

  The strange, tragic thing about Fritz Hoffmann and his legacy in Operation Paperclip is that during the war he was anti-Nazi—at least according to the affidavit written by the wartime American diplomat Sam Woods. And yet here in America, working for the Army Chemical Corps and for the CIA, Fritz Hoffmann’s science projects took on a monstrous life of their own. This includes what his daughter believes was a role in the development of Agent Orange, the antiplant weapon, or defoliant, used by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War.

  “During the Vietnam War, I remember one evening we were at the dinner table and the war was on the news,” Gabriella Hoffmann explains. The family was watching TV. “Dad was usually a quiet man, so when he spoke up you remembered it. He pointed to the news—you could see the jungles of Vietnam, and he said, ‘Wouldn’t it be easier to defoliate the trees so you could see the enemies?’ That’s what he said. I remember it very clearly. Years later I learned one of Dad’s projects was the development of Agent Orange.”

  The army’s herbicidal warfare program during the Vietnam War started in August 1961 and lasted until February 1971. More than 11.4 million gallons of Agent Orange were sprayed over approximately 24 percent of South Vietnam, destroying 5 million acres of uplands and forests and 500,000 acres of food crops—an area about the size of the state of Massachusetts. An additional
8 million gallons of other anticrop agents, code-named Agents White, Blue, Purple, Pink, and Green, were also sprayed, mostly from C-123 cargo planes. Fritz Hoffmann was one of the earliest known U.S. Army Chemical Corps scientists to research the toxic effects of dioxin—possibly in the mid-1950s but for certain in 1959—as indicated in what has become known as the Hoffmann Trip Report. This document is used in almost every legal record pertaining to litigation by U.S. military veterans against the U.S. government and chemical manufacturers for its usage of herbicides and defoliants in the Vietnam War.

  It is the long-term effects of the Agent Orange program that Gabriella Hoffmann believes would have ruined her father, had he known. “Agent Orange turned out not only to defoliate trees but to cause great harm in children,” Gabriella Hoffmann says. “Dad was dead by then and I remember thinking, Thank God. It would have killed him to learn that. He was a gentle man. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  Fritz Hoffmann’s untimely death came like something out of a Special Operations Division’s Agent Branch playbook. He suffered a serious illness that came on quickly, lasted for a relatively short time, and was followed by death. On Christmas Eve 1966, Fritz Hoffmann was diagnosed with cancer. Racked with pain, he lay in bed watching his favorite television shows—“Cowboy westerns and Rod Serling in The Twilight Zone,” Gabriella Hoffmann recalls. One hundred days later, Fritz Hoffmann was dead. He was fifty-six years old.

  “He did try, periodically, to go to work,” Gabriella Hoffmann remembers, “but he was in too much pain. I do have a recollection of a lot of different men in dark suits always coming by the house to talk to him. At the time, Demerol as a painkiller had just come on the market. He had a prescription for it, from a doctor at Edgewood. During the time that [he was dying] there were a lot of questions asked of my mother and [me] that led me to think the FBI or the CIA, or whoever the men in the dark suits were, were worried that my father would start talking about whatever it was that he did. He never did say anything. He was silent until the end.”

  Hoffmann’s antiplant work in herbicides was one element of Detrick’s three-part biological weapons division, the other two being antiman and antianimal. Antianimal weapons were aimed at killing entire animal populations, with the goal of starving to death the people who relied on those animals for food. At the locus of the U.S. antianimal program was Operation Paperclip’s Dr. Erich Traub, Dr. Kurt Blome’s deputy. Traub was recruited into the Accelerated Paperclip program by Dr. Blome’s handler, Charles McPherson, and arrived in America on April 4, 1949.

  Traub worked on virological research at the Naval Medical Research Institute, in Bethesda, Maryland. Almost all of Traub’s work remains classified as of 2013. At the Naval Medical Research Institute, Traub became friendly with the Luftwaffe physiologist and explosive decompression expert Dr. Theodor Benzinger, whose early work for the navy also remains classified. In addition to working for the navy, Traub worked at Camp Detrick on antianimal research. The agents and diseases being studied by Detrick researchers at this time, meant to decimate a specific animal population, included rinderpest, hoof-and-mouth disease (also called foot-and-mouth disease), Virus III disease of swine (likely African swine fever), fowl plague, Newcastle disease, and fowl malaria. All of Traub’s Camp Detrick work remains classified as of 2013.

  In 1948, Congress had approved a $30 million budget for antianimal weapons research (roughly $300 million in 2013), but because this work was so dangerous, Congress mandated that it needed to take place outside the continental United States, on an island and not connected to the nearest mainland by a bridge. Plans moved forward and the army chose Plum Island, a 1.3-square-mile land parcel located off the coast of Connecticut in the Long Island Sound. The obvious choice for a director was the world’s expert on antianimal research, Dr. Erich Traub. But the plan to activate Plum Island for biological weapons research languished for several years.

  Traub received his immigrant visa on September 7, 1951, and he worked on classified programs for three more years. Then, under mysterious circumstances, in 1954, he resigned his position as medical supervisory bacteriologist at the Naval Medical Research Institute and asked to be repatriated to Germany. He told the navy he’d accepted a position with the West German government, as director of the Federal Institute for Virus Research. This move alarmed the JIOA. “Dr. Traub is a recognized authority in certain fields of virology, particularly in hoof and mouth disease of cattle and in Newcastle disease of poultry,” read a declassified report. “It can be anticipated that this institution in Germany [where Traub was going] will become one of the leading research laboratories of the world in virological research.” In view of the “recognizable military potentialities in possible application of his specialty, it is recommended that future surveillance in appropriate measure be maintained after the specialist’s return to Germany.” Traub needed to be kept under surveillance, likely for the rest of his life.

  In Germany, throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, U.S. military intelligence spied on Dr. Traub at his new home on Paul-Ehrlich-Strasse, in Tübingen. Agents stopped by the home of Traub’s colleague and friend Dr. Theodor Benzinger, in Maryland, to ask whether Benzinger knew “of any associations retained by Dr. Traub outside the United States.” Benzinger said he did not. Whenever Traub traveled outside Germany, military intelligence kept a watchful eye on him.

  Dr. Traub was a man experienced in the illegal trafficking of deadly pathogens. During World War II, he was the trustworthy scientist chosen by Heinrich Himmler to travel to Turkey to obtain samples of rinderpest to weaponize on Riems. And after the war, when Traub fled the Russian zone at great risk of personal harm, he managed to smuggle deadly cultures with him out of the Eastern bloc, which he then stashed at an intermediary laboratory in West Germany until he was able to locate an appropriate buyer. In the mid-1960s, according to Traub’s FBI file, Traub moved from Germany to Iran, with a new permanent address at the Razi Institute for Serums and Vaccines, in Hesarak, a suburb of the city of Karaj. When Traub traveled from Iran to the Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C., for a meeting with unknown persons, FBI agents watched him. What they learned about the mysterious Dr. Traub remains classified as of 2013.

  Through the lens of history, it is remarkable to think that U.S. biological warfare and chemical warfare programs grew so quickly to the size they did. But the Pentagon was able to keep the scope and cost of these weapons programs secret from Congress in much the same way that it was able to keep the damaging details of Operation Paperclip secret from the public. Everything was classified.

  It took President Richard Nixon to realize that playing chicken with the Russians, using a huge arsenal of biological and chemical weapons, was pure madness. On November 25, 1969, Nixon announced the end of all U.S. offensive biological warfare research and ordered that America’s arsenal was to be destroyed. “I have decided that the United States of America will renounce the use of any form of deadly biological weapons that either kill or incapacitate,” Nixon said. His reasons were simple and self-evident. The use of biological weapons could have “uncontrollable consequences” for the world. “Mankind already carries in its hands too many of the seeds of its own destruction,” said Nixon. After twenty-six years of research and development, America’s biological weapons programs came to an end. For the first time during the Cold War, a president decided that an entire group of weapons was going to be unilaterally destroyed.

  The end of America’s chemical weapons program was not far behind. Nixon reinstated the “retaliation-only” policy, which meant no new chemical weapons would be developed and produced. Over the next few years, Congress worked with the military to determine the best way to destroy this entire group of weapons. The original plan was to dispose of some twenty-seven thousand tons of chemical-filled weapons in the deep sea. But upon investigation, it turned out that many of the sarin- and VX-filled bombs stored at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal were already leaking nerve agent. These munitions needed to be encased in ste
el-and-concrete “coffins” before they could be dumped in the ocean. The Pentagon also had thirteen thousand tons of nerve agent and mustard gas stored in secret on its military base in Okinawa, Japan, which now needed to be disposed of. In 1971, these munitions were brought to an American-owned atoll in the South Pacific called Johnston Island in an operation called Red Hat. The plan was to store the sarin-and VX-filled bombs in bunkers on the atoll until scientists figured out how best to destroy them. But as it turned out, the sarin and VX bombs were not made to ever be dismantled. So the army had a massive new scientific endeavor on its hands, for which it created the Johnston Atoll Chemical Agent Disposal System, the world’s first “full-scale chemical weapons disposal facility.”

  It took another thirty-four years for America’s arsenal of chemical weapons to be destroyed. “The numbers speak volumes,” says the army. “More than 412,000 obsolete chemical weapons—bombs, land mines, rockets and projectiles—all destroyed.” The elaborate destruction process involves the robotic separation of the chemical agent from the munitions, followed by incineration of the separated parts in three separate special types of furnaces. The army says it is “proud [of its] accomplishment,” which cost an estimated $25.8 billion as of 2006, or approximately $30 billion in 2013.