Colonel Ford’s request was likely influenced by information the JIOA had recently received from the Office of the Military Government in Germany. After months of negative press attention directed at Operation Paperclip, spearheaded by the Federation of American Scientists and given further momentum by the American Jewish Congress’s having identified the Axsters, of Fort Bliss, as “real Nazis,” the War Department had asked OMGUS to conduct an internal review of the Operation Paperclip scientists working in the United States. It was OMGUS in Germany that oversaw the reports on all the German scientists issued by Army Intelligence, G-2. The War Department told OMGUS that it did not want to have to deal with any other exposés.
In response, OMGUS sent the War Department 146 security reports that could potentially create scandals were the information contained in them to be revealed. One report pertained to rocket engineer Kurt Debus. Debus was an ardent Nazi. He had been an active SS member who, according to the testimony of colleagues, wore his Nazi uniform to work. Most troublesome was the revelation in his OMGUS security report that during the war he had turned a colleague, an engineering supervisor named Richard Craemer, over to the Gestapo for making anti-Nazi remarks and for refusing to give Debus the Nazi salute. From Nazi-era paperwork, it was clear that Debus had initiated the investigation into Craemer. No one else had heard the conversation between the two scientists; Debus had gone home after work and taken it upon himself to write up a report of what was allegedly said, which he had then submitted, in transcript form, to the SS. The specifics of the incident made it impossible for the European Intelligence Division of the U.S. Army to cast Kurt Debus as an apolitical scientist trying to survive in a fascist world. Debus had gone out of his way to have a colleague arrested by the Gestapo. Craemer was subsequently prosecuted for treason. According to the report, and as a result of Debus’s actions, on November 30, 1942, “Craemer was called to Gestapo H.Q. and confronted with this damning evidence.” The army intelligence officer assigned to the case, Captain F. C. Groves, explained what happened next. On April 5, 1942, “he [Craemer] was dragged before a ‘Sondergericht’ [a special Nazi court] and sentenced to 2 years imprisonment.” Groves’s lengthy summary and analysis of the incident was sent to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Debus’s “deliberate and vicious denunciation [of] Craemer” was not something army intelligence could disavow, wrote Groves. It was a matter of public record in Germany.
An OMGUS report put von Braun on equally shaky footing, and army intelligence cautioned that, given his international profile, pushing the State Department for a visa for von Braun could cause problems. The report revealed that not only had von Braun been an SS officer with the high rank of SS-Sturmbannführer, or SS-Major, but his membership had been sponsored by Heinrich Himmler. In response, JIOA director Colonel Ford proposed contrary action to what was being advised. Ford believed that the best solution was to get these undesirables on an even faster track toward citizenship. If Klaus signed the waiver, JIOA could expedite the process.
With Klaus refusing to sign the documents, the situation escalated into a standoff. Klaus left the meeting and did some investigative work on his own. In the months that followed, he learned what had transpired with Georg Rickhey at Wright Field—that Rickhey had been returned to Germany to stand trial for alleged war crimes. The information had purposely been withheld from the State Department. In a memo to the undersecretary of state, Klaus defended his opposition to the JIOA’s bullish requests to have him sign a blind waiver. “That the department’s security fears were not baseless was recently demonstrated when a war criminal, wanted for war crimes of a bestial kind, was found here among these scientists, to be returned to Germany.” Klaus was determined to hold his ground, but so was the JIOA. The difficulty for Klaus was that he was outnumbered.
The same month that the standoff between the State Department and the JIOA began, the Chemical Corps finally imported its first German scientist, an expert in tabun nerve agent synthesis named Dr. Friedrich “Fritz” Hoffmann. The U.S. Army had been interested in stockpiling tabun ever since it obtained its first sample from the Robbers’ Lair, in the British zone in Germany, in May of 1945. The man in charge of the tabun nerve agent program for the Chemical Corps was Colonel Charles E. Loucks, commander of the Army Chemical Center at Edgewood Arsenal, in Maryland.
The fifty-one-year-old Colonel Loucks had dedicated his life to chemical warfare. Born and raised in California, Charles E. Loucks received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Stanford University and first became fascinated by war gas while serving in World War I. During his assignment with the first Gas Regiment at Edgewood Arsenal, in 1922, his life’s path seemed to have been set. While Loucks distinguished himself as an expert rifleman, competing in National Rifle and Pistol matches and winning awards, chemical weapons fascinated him the most. He went back to school, to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to study chemical engineering, and in 1929 he received a Master of Science degree. By 1935 Loucks was the technical director of Chemical Warfare Service, Research and Development, at Edgewood. He had served as an officer with chemical weapons ever since.
Major Loucks spent the first year of World War II refining the U.S. military’s standard-issue gas mask. He even worked with Walt Disney and the Sun Rubber Company to transform the spooky, apocalyptic-looking face protector into a more kid-friendly version with a Mickey Mouse face. In August 1942, Loucks was made commander of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, outside Denver, Colorado, where he was in charge of planning, building, and operating the largest-capacity toxic manufacturing plant in the United States. Rocky Mountain produced mustard gas and incendiary bombs on an industrial scale—incendiary bombs that were dropped on Germany and Japan. Loucks was awarded the Legion of Merit for his war service.
During the war the U.S. Army had more than four hundred battalions ready for chemical combat. If chemical warfare broke out, the army expected it would involve mustard gas. Sixty thousand soldiers trained in chemical warfare were sent into battle with gas masks and protective suits, carrying a small card that explained what to do in the event of a chemical attack. Fortunately, World War II ended without the use of chemical weapons, but experts like Charles Loucks were caught off guard when they learned just how outperformed America’s chemists had been by Hitler’s. With the discovery that the Nazis had mass-produced previously unknown agents like tabun and sarin gas came the realization that if Germany had initiated chemical warfare it would have been a grossly uneven match. Since war’s end, the army’s Chemical Corps had received 530 tons of tabun, courtesy of the British, who had seized the Reich’s colossal cache from the Robbers’ Lair. But the Chemical Corps had yet to produce much tabun on its own, which is why Dr. Fritz Hoffmann had been brought to America under Operation Paperclip. Hoffmann arrived in February 1947 and immediately got to work synthesizing tabun. Nerve agents were Hoffmann’s area of expertise; he had synthesized poison gas at the Luftwaffe’s Technical Academy, Berlin-Gatow, and also at the chemical warfare laboratories at the University of Würzburg during the war.
Fritz Hoffmann was a gigantic man, six foot four, with dark eyes, sharp, angular features, and high cheekbones. He kept his hair combed back behind the ears, perhaps with the help of hair oil. Hoffmann was a gifted organic chemist and a contemplative man who also had a PhD in philosophy. He had suffered from polio as a child. According to the State Department, he was one of the minority of individuals recruited into Operation Paperclip who had been anti-Nazi during the war. When Hoffmann was captured at war’s end he carried with him an unusual document, an affidavit from the U.S. Embassy in Zurich, Switzerland, signed by American Consul General Sam E. Woods. “The bearer of this document… Dr. Frederick Wilhelm Hoffmann [was] anti-Nazi during the whole war,” the document stated. It further explained that Hoffmann’s father-in-law, the German economist Dr. Erwin Respondek, had risked life and limb to work as a spy for the Americans during the war. Respondek “rendered extremely valuable services to the Allied war effort,” wrote
Consul General Woods. “These services, which are known to the former Secretary of State, the Honorable Cordell Hull, were rendered at great personal risk to himself and family, were performed without compensation and were so valuable to our cause that… every courtesy and help should be accorded” to all members of the family, including Respondek’s son-in-law, Fritz Hoffmann, the affidavit read.
After being interrogated by army intelligence in Germany, Hoffmann was found “fit for exploitation for the Office of the Military Government, United States.” He was sent to the Army Chemical Center in Berlin, where he started working for the Chemical Warfare Service until his Operation Paperclip contract was finalized.
When Friedrich Hoffmann arrived at Edgewood Arsenal in February 1947, America’s premier chemical weapons research and development facility had been producing war gases for thirty years. The three-thousand-acre peninsula, thick with field and forest, was located twenty miles northeast of Baltimore, Maryland, on the Chesapeake Bay. Because Fritz Hoffmann was the first German at Edgewood thus far, he was quartered inside a barracks with American soldiers. The Top Secret research and development division he had been assigned to was called the Technical Command, and it was there that he began work “synthesizing new insecticides, rodenticides and miticides,” which meant tabun.
Colonel Loucks had been ordered by the Chemical Corps to determine how to produce tabun on an industrial scale under a classified program code-named AI.13. Army intelligence believed the Soviets’ chemical weapons program to be considerably ahead of its own, and the Chemical Corps was under pressure to catch up. The Soviets had captured the entire IG Farben laboratory at Dyhernfurth and had since reassembled it outside Stalingrad, in the town of Beketovka, under the codename Chemical Works No. 91. In addition to having the laboratory and the science, the Soviets had also captured some of the Farben chemists who had worked at Dyhernfurth. Through their own version of Operation Paperclip, a parallel exploitation program called Operation Osoaviakhim, the Soviets captured German chemist Dr. von Bock and members of his team. The group was taken to Chemical Works No. 91, where von Bock, an expert in air filtration systems, decontamination systems, and hermetically sealed production compartments, was put to work. Von Bock’s esoteric knowledge gave the Soviets access to critical technical aspects of producing tabun. The hope was that Fritz Hoffmann could bring the Americans up to speed at Edgewood.
Indeed, Fritz Hoffmann proved to be a great asset for the classified program. Within months of his arrival at Edgewood he was delivering “work of a high order” and had “shown considerable ingenuity and excellent knowledge,” according to a declassified internal review of his performance. Tabun work progressed. When military intelligence learned that the Soviets’ Chemical Works No. 91 was also producing sarin, Edgewood was told to continue working on tabun but also to redouble efforts in sarin production, with a plan to start producing it on an industrial scale as soon as possible. Project AI.13 was given even higher priority and a new code name, Project AI.13-2.1. In Germany, Nazi scientists with knowledge of tabun and sarin were now being even more aggressively sought for recruitment into Operation Paperclip.
Declassified documents reveal that the Chemical Corps wanted to employ Otto Ambros, but he was not available. Ambros was incarcerated inside the prison complex at Nuremberg, awaiting a war crimes trial. Imprisoned alongside Ambros were fellow Farben board members Fritz Ter Meer and Karl Krauch as well as Hermann Schmitz, Farben’s powerful CEO and the man who kept the Auschwitz scrapbook hidden in a secret wall safe. SS-Brigadeführer Dr. Walter Schieber, Ambros’s liaison to the Speer ministry and the man who oversaw the work at Dyhernfurth, was also high on the Paperclip target list, but recruitment of Schieber would have to wait. Schieber was also being held at Nuremberg. The IG Farben trial, officially called United States of America v. Carl Krauch et al., was scheduled to begin in a few months, in the summer of 1947. Time would tell who, if any, of Hitler’s chemists would become available.
It had been a little over four months since the New York Times had broken the story of Operation Paperclip, and the negative attention to the program had not subsided. Then, on March 9, 1947, journalist Drew Pearson reported the most outrageous news story about Operation Paperclip to date. According to Pearson, the U.S. Army had offered Farben executive Karl Krauch a Paperclip contract while he was incarcerated at Nuremberg. Krauch was the lead defendant in the upcoming war crimes trial. He had served as Göring’s plenipotentiary for chemical production and had advocated for the use of nerve agents against the Allies. Krauch was the man who galvanized his fellow German industrialists to mobilize resources to help the Nazis go to war.
Drew Pearson’s column, “Washington Merry-Go-Round,” was widely read and highly influential, and the report about Krauch caused such a scandal that General Eisenhower, the U.S. Army chief of staff, demanded to know what was going on with Operation Paperclip. The man who briefed Eisenhower was chief of military intelligence Stephen J. Chamberlin. After what was reported to be a twenty-minute meeting, General Eisenhower remained in support of the Paperclip program. For the military chiefs inside the JIOA, the problems with the public’s perception of Paperclip were almost universally blamed on the State Department. Dean Rusk, who worked in the office of the assistant secretary of war, summed up JIOA’s attitude toward the State Department in a memorandum the day after the Eisenhower briefing. “The public relations people are feeling mounting pressure on the German scientist business.… Our position is inherently weak because the State Department finds this whole program difficult to support.”
The JIOA decided it was time to get rid of Samuel Klaus. Director Thomas Ford wrote General Stephen Chamberlin saying that Klaus was “obnoxiously difficult” and needed to be removed. Within the week, Klaus was transferred from the visa section of the State Department to the Office of the Legal Adviser. He no longer had any say over the policies and procedures regarding Operation Paperclip. It remains a mystery if Klaus had anything to do with the public’s perception of the program, but in years to come, and as McCarthyism expanded, Klaus would be accused of having leaked negative stories about the German scientist program to the press. But even with Klaus banished from the program, for the first time since Paperclip’s inception in the spring of 1945, the entire operation was now in danger of collapse. Assistant Secretary of War Howard Petersen worried with colleagues that the War Department would be buried in scandals involving Nazi scientists. Petersen predicted that the whole program would be shut down in a matter of months.
Instead the opposite happened. With the signing of the National Security Act by President Truman, on July 26, 1947, America’s armed services and intelligence agencies were restructured. The War Department was reconstituted into the Department of Defense, the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee became the National Security Council, and the Central Intelligence Agency was born.
A new age was dawning for the controversial Paperclip program. On the one hand, it struggled to hold up a false face of scientific prowess behind which lay a tawdry group of amoral war opportunists, many of whom were linked to war crimes. But just as von Braun admitted to New Yorker writer Daniel Lang that what he really cared most about was seeing “how the golden cow could be milked most successfully,” the newly created CIA saw the Paperclip scientists in similar quid pro quo terms. There was advantage to be had in using men who had everything to lose and were, at the same time, uniquely focused on personal gain.
In Operation Paperclip the CIA found a perfect partner in its quest for scientific intelligence. And it was in the CIA that Operation Paperclip found its strongest supporting partner yet.
Sometime in the spring of 1947, scientists at Edgewood Arsenal began conducting human experiments with tabun nerve agent. All soldiers used in these experiments were so-called volunteers, but the men were not made privy to the fact that they were being subjected to low-level concentrations of tabun. Some of the tests took place in Utah, at the Dugway Proving Ground. Other tests took pl
ace inside Edgewood’s “gassing chamber for human tests,” a 9 x 9-foot tile-and-brick cube with an airtight metal door. One of the people observing the tabun tests was Dr. L. Wilson Greene, technical director of the Chemical and Radiological Laboratories at the Army Chemical Center at Edgewood and a close collaborator of Fritz Hoffmann’s. Greene was a short man with a square jaw and a barrel chest. What he lacked in height he made up for in vision. While observing the behavior of the soldiers in the tabun gas experiments, L. Wilson Greene had a revelation.
Greene noticed that, after soldiers were put in the “gassing chamber,” they became “partially disabled for from one to three weeks with fatigue, lassitude, complete loss of initiative and interest, and apathy.” What struck Greene most was that the men were wholly incapacitated for a period of time but not permanently injured. The men recovered entirely on their own; the antidote was time. Dr. L. Wilson Greene saw in this a new kind of warfare. He sat down and began outlining his idea for America’s war-fighting future in an opus that would become known as “Psychochemical Warfare: A New Concept of War.” In the monograph, Greene wrote, “The trend of each major conflict, being characterized by increased death, human misery, and property destruction, could be reversed.” His seminal vision for psychochemical warfare—a term he coined—was to incapacitate a man with drugs on the battlefield but not to kill him. Greene believed that in this way the face of warfare could change from barbaric to human. Incapacitating agents were “gentle” weapons; they knocked a man out without permanent injury. With psychochemical warfare, Greene explained, America could conquer its enemies “without the wholesale killing of people or the mass destruction of property.”