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Secret Agenda- The United States Government,Nazi Scientists,Project Paperclip - By Linda Hunt 1945

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Prologue
AMERICAN soldiers fighting in World War II had barely laid down their guns when hundreds of
German and Austrian scientists, including a number implicated in Nazi war crimes, began
immigrating to the United States. They were brought here under a secret intelligence project code-
named "Paperclip." Ever since, the U.S. government has successfully promoted the lie that
Paperclip was a short-term operation limited to a few postwar raids on Hitler's hoard of scientific
talent. The General Accounting Office even claims that the project ended in 1947.1
All of which is sheer propaganda. For the first time ever, this' book reveals that Paperclip was
the biggest, longest-running operation involving Nazis in our country's history. The project
continued nonstop until 1973-decades longer than was previously thought. And remnants of it are
still in operation today.2
At least sixteen hundred scientific and research specialists and thousands of their dependents
were brought to the U. S. under Operation Paperclip. Hundreds of others arrived under two other
Paperclip-related projects and went to work for universities, defense contractors, and CIA fronts.
The Paperclip operation eventually became such a juggernaut that in 1956 one American
ambassador characterized it as "a continuing U.S. recruitment program which has no parallel in any
other Allied country."3
The lie that Paperclip ended in the 1940s has conveniently concealed some of the most damning
information about the project-in particular the shocking revelation that one of the intelligence officers
who ran it was a spy. U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel William Henry Whaler, was the highest-placed
American military officer ever convicted of espionage. Despite the extensive publicity devoted to
Whalen's trial in the 1960s, exactly what he did for the joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) was not disclosed.
This book reveals that in 1959 and 1960 Whalen was at the helm of the joint Intelligence Objectives
Agency (JIOA)-which means he was running Paperclip at the same time he was selling America's
defense secrets to Soviet intelligence agents.
4

The full extent of the Soviet penetration of Paperclip remains unknown, since Whalen shredded
thousands of documents. But this much is clear: justified as being run in the interest of national
security, Paperclip instead posed a serious security threat. In addition to Whalen's activities, there is
evidence that the Soviets had penetrated the project almost from the beginning. Almost anything was
possible, given the JIOA officers' lax investigations of the foreign scientists' backgrounds .5
The legacy of Paperclip is said to be the moon rockets, jet planes, and other scientific
achievements that were a product of postwar research in this country. This is true-as far as it goes.
What the project's defenders fail to mention is that its legacy also includes the horrific
psychochemical experiments conducted on American soldiers at Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland, the
U.S. Army center for chemical warfare research. In this book you'll meet eight Paperclip scientists
who worked at Edgewood between 1947 and 1966 developing nerve gas and psychochemicals such as
LSD. But Edgewood's contribution to the Paperclip legacy could not have been made by the Germans
alone. The disturbing truth is that American doctors were the ones who sifted through grim
concentration camp reports and ultimately used Nazi science as a basis for Dachau-like experiments
on over seven thousand U.S. soldiers.6

Paperclip's legacy has its roots in the cold war philosophy espoused by the intelligence officers
who ran the operation. Their motives, schemes, and coverup efforts are a logical focus for this book,
since those are what shaped Paperclip from the beginning. Moreover, the military's secret agenda
was far different from the one foisted on the American public. At its heart was an unshakable
conviction that the end justified the means. The officers who ran Paperclip were determined to use
any means necessary to keep Nazi scientists out of Russian hands, even if that meant violating U. S.
laws and foreign policy.
There may be no better example of the officers' brazen disregard for U.S. policies than the action
they took in 1948. As first revealed in an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, JIOA
officers simply changed the records of those scientists they wanted, expunging evidence of war
crimes and ardent nazism. Though this meant directly defying an order given by President Truman,
JIOA Director Bosquet Wev excused the action by asserting that the government's concern over
"picayune details" such as Nazi records would result in "the best interests of the United States
[being] subjugated to the efforts expended in beating a dead Nazi horse."7
The repercussions of the JIOA officers' actions are still being felt today. One example is retired
NASA rocket engineer Arthur Rudolph, who left this country in 1984 rather than face war crimes
charges. His case has attracted a bizarre assortment of defenders bent on bringing him back to the
United States -including a U.S. congressman with alleged organized crime connections. On May
14, 1990, Congressman James A. Traficant of Ohio told a group of Rudolph's friends in
Huntsville, Alabama, that the rocket scientist's problems were caused by a "powerful Jewish
lobby" and warned: "If tonight it's Rudolph, who is it tomorrow?" That question undoubtedly
made several of Rudolph's colleagues in the audience uncomfortable, since their wartime Nazi
activities are also being scrutinized by justice Department prosecutors.
8

Other activities covered in this book that have not been examined up to now or that take on
new significance in light of Paperclip's true history include:

• the expansion of JIOA's intelligence operation in 1948 to include Project National Interest,
which brought a convicted Nazi war criminal, an ex-Nazi spy, and other ardent Nazis to the
United States to work for universities and defense contractors;
• how the CIA used National Interest as a cover to slip covert CIA operatives overseas into the
United States;
• how another JIOA project, called "63," signed up Nuremberg defendant Kurt Blome, convicted
Nazi war criminal Eduard Houdremont, and other notorious individuals while the JIOA ran the
operation out of a New York hotel;
-details of a scheme by U.S. Air Force General Robert L. Walsh, Director of Intelligence,
European Command, to intervene in court decisions involving ex-Nazi intelligence officers
working for postwar U.S. intelligence in Germany;
• details of another scheme by Walsh, who, as head of the Inter-American Defense Board,
relocated notorious German General Walter Schreiber from the United States to Argentina; • how
Whalen's Paperclip recruits in 1959 included a former Wehrmacht soldier who was working as a
dishwasher in Canada;
• how an alliance formed in 1985 between political extremist Lyndon LaRouche and former
Paperclip scientists tried to shut down the justice Department's Nazi-hunting unit;
• details of another scheme in 1986 to squelch the Justice Department's investigations of former
Paperclip specialists Guenther Haukohl and Dieter Grau;
• how NASA publicly honored those same men in a 1987 ceremony commemorating Wernher
von Braun;
• how Rudolph's friends tried to bring him back in 1990 to attend a NASA moon walk
celebration, despite laws barring his entry into the United States.

In essence this book deals with a hauntingly familiar and contemporary subject: a small group
of men in the Pentagon who decided that they alone knew what was best for the country. "And
that, I think, is the real danger hen," said former U.S. congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, who
authored the 1978 immigration law that bars Nazis from our shores. "We have agencies that think
that they are a law unto themselves, that regardless of what the law of the land is, regardless of
what the president of the United States says, they'll do whatever they think is best for themselves.