Conspiracy: The CIA and the Nazis reveals a CIA program known as Operation Paperclip, about how over 4,000 former Nazis went to work for theU.S. government, without the public’s knowledge, to help fight the Soviet Union. Reinhard Gehlen, an intelligence officer forHitler’s General Staff, was tapped to head the U.S. intelligence program in WestGermany to spy on the Russians. At the same time, former Nazi scientists and engineers were welcomed onto American soil. But the extent of these operations is only now becoming clear: In 1998, a law was passed mandating declassification of documents concerning recruitment of former Nazis. THE CIA AND THE NAZIS examines these files to see how far the U.S. went in recruiting its former enemy to fight its new one.
More on Project Paperclip, from Wikipedia: Operation Paperclip was the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) program used to recruit the scientists of Nazi Germany for employment by the United States in the aftermath ofWorld War II (1939–45). It was executed by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA), and in the context of the burgeoning Soviet–American Cold War (1945–91), one purpose of Operation Paperclip was to denyGerman scientific knowledge and expertise to the USSR and the UK.
Although the JIOA’s recruitment of German scientists began after the European Allied victory (8 May 1945), USPresident Harry Truman did not formally order the execution of Operation Paperclip until August 1945. Truman’s order expressly excluded anyone found “to have been a member of the Nazi Party, and more than a nominal participant in its activities, or an active supporter of Nazi militarism.” Said restrictions would have rendered ineligible most of the scientists the JIOA had identified for recruitment, among them rocket scientists Wernher von Braun and Arthur Rudolph, and the physician Hubertus Strughold, each earlier classified as a “menace to the security of the Allied Forces”.
To circumvent President Truman’s anti-Nazi order, and the Allied Potsdam and Yalta agreements, the JIOA worked independently to create false employment and political biographies for the scientists. The JIOA also expunged from the public record the scientists’ Nazi Party memberships and regime affiliations. Once “bleached” of their Nazism, the US Government granted the scientists security clearance to work in the United States. Paperclip, the project’s operational name, derived from the paperclips used to attach the scientists’ new political personae to their “US Government Scientist” JIOA personnel files.
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