Operation Paperclip was the codename under which the US intelligence and military services extricated Nazi scientists from Germany, during and after the final stages of World War II. The project was originally called Operation Overcast, and is sometimes also known as Project Paperclip
When the Allies entered Germany in 1945 their scientific intelligence experts were astounded by the sheer scope of the German technical and scientific accomplishments. The original unnamed plan to only interview scientists changed after Major Robert Staver, staff officer of the Ordnance Corps Rocket Branch, sent a cable (signed by Colonel Joel Holmes) to the Pentagon on May 22 1945 of the urgency to evacuate the German technicians and their families as "important for Pacific war."
Beginning immediately after the German surrender and continuing for the next two years the U.S. pursued a vigorous program to harvest all technological and scientific know-how as well as all patents in Germany. John Gimbel comes to the conclusion, in his book Science Technology and Reparations: Exploitation and Plunder in Postwar Germany, that the "intellectual reparations" taken by the U.S. and the UK amounted to close to $10 billion.
The program of acquiring German scientists and technicians for the U.S. was not only founded in profit interests, however; an equally strong motivator was the desire to deny the expertise of German scientists to the Soviet Union. The case for finding and holding Nobel laurate Werner Heisenberg was summed up thus "he was worth more to us than ten divisions of Germans. Heisenberg was in charge of the German secret atomic bomb program code-named "Virus House". Had he fallen into Russian hands, he would have proven invaluable to them."
Of particular interest to the U.S. were scientists specialising in aerodynamics and rocketry (such as those involved in the V-1 and V-2 projects), chemical weapons, chemical reaction technology and medicine. These scientists and their families were secretly brought to the United States, without State Department review and approval; their service for Hitler's Third Reich, NSDAP and SS memberships as well as the classification of many as war criminals or security threats would have disqualified them from officially obtaining visas.
Another aim of the operation was capturing German equipment before the Soviets came in. Where that was not possible, the US Army destroyed some of the equipment to prevent its capture by the advancing Red Army. For example, a prototype Horton Ho-229 jet-powered, flying wing fighter/bomber was captured by the Americans and sent to the Northrop Corporation for evaluation, while several more partial Ho-229 airframes were destroyed.
The majority of the scientists, numbering almost 500, were deployed at White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico; Fort Bliss, Texas; and Huntsville, Alabama to work on guided missile and ballistic missile technology. This in turn led to the foundation of NASA and the US ICBM program.
Project MKULTRA (also known as MK-ULTRA) was the code name for a CIA mind-control research program that began in the 1950s. There is much published evidence that the project involved not only the use of drugs to manipulate persons, but also the use of electronic signals to alter brain functioning.
It was first brought to wide public attention by the U.S. Congress (in the form of the Church Committee) and a presidential commission (known as the Rockefeller Commission) and also to the U.S. Senate.
Headed by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, MKULTRA was started on the order of CIA director Allen Dulles on April 13, 1953, largely in response to alleged Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean use of mind-control techniques on U.S. prisoners of war in Korea. The CIA wanted to use similar methods on their own captives. The CIA was also interested in being able to manipulate foreign leaders with such techniques, and would later invent several schemes to drug Fidel Castro.
In 1964, th
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