Those who defend Operation Paperclip point to the achievements of those Nazi technological masterminds—in aerospace, rocket and guided missile technology, radar and infra-red sniper technology radiation, submarine warfare, incendiary bombs (including napalm, jellied gasoline) – mostly achievements in warfare technology.
What the project’s defenders fail to mention is the evil legacy of despicable crimes and ghastly concentration camps, whose inmates were subjected to abominable human experiments, and either exterminated or conscripted as slave laborers who were worked to death to produce the technological Nazi achievements. They fail to mention the evil influence these villains had in shaping and guiding abhorrent biological experiments that were conducted on more than 7,000 American soldiers, many of who have suffered harm from chronic debilitating diseases.
And they fail to mention the undisclosed thousands of unwitting civilians — men, women and countless children — who were subjected to abhorrent experiments without their knowledge or informed consent. The defenders of the policy that harbored Nazis for their technological prowess fail to consider the human carnage because they do not recognize those humans as equals.
In his final address as President of the United States (Jan. 1961), Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose career revolved around armaments, issued a prophetic warning to the American people:
“we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence… by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes… In holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
However, Eisenhower failed to recognize his own worst mistake; which was his misplaced trust in the judgment of John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen to whom he delegated virtually all diplomatic and foreign policy decisions. Eisenhower’s legacy is tarnished by the documented evidence that has only recently been brought to light in Stephen Kinzer’s biography of The Brothers in which he reveals that Eisenhower supported and approved each of the disastrous covert actions dreamed up by John Foster and carried out by Allen and the CIA. Kinzer shows how the brothers’ “compulsive activism” and covert violent operations aimed at overthrowing regimes and assassination of national leaders were ill-conceived and mostly backfired.
In her book, Secret Agenda, Linda Hunt showed how the very impenetrable layers of secrecy and lack of accountability, enabled Nazi medical scientists under Paperclip contracts, and the CIA to penetrate American academic institutions. They influenced hundreds of American medical scientists under CIA contract to conduct monstrous mind control experiments.
“The disturbing truth is that American doctors were the ones who…ultimately used Nazi science as a basis for Dachau-like experiments on over seven thousand U.S. soldiers.”
Indeed, the scope and duration of the MK-ULTRA project in which thousands of unwitting American men, women and children were subjected to dehumanizing mind control experiments, led former State Department officer John Marks, author of The Manchurian Candidate (1979) to conclude: “the intelligence community…changed the face of the scientific community during the 1950s and early 1960s.” Adding insult to injury, in 1972, the Agency itself acknowledged that these tests made little scientific sense.
Furthermore, Hunt cited Paperclip’s layers of secrecy as military intelligence operatives rendered the Paperclip project a security risk. Secrecy posed a risk for the victims of rogue experiments and for the nation in whose name they were conducted.
In 1962, Lieutenant Colonel William Henry Whalen, an Intelligence Adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was arrested by the FBI for espionage. From 1957—1959, he had served as deputy director of the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA); and four months after he began selling U.S. defense secrets to the Soviets, he was promoted to be JIOA’s director, serving from 1959-1960. During his watch a second wave of 361 German scientists were imported through Paperclip and given visas based on Whalen’s certifying their security clearance even without an investigation. Whalen held a Top Secret security clearance; he was the highest ranking American ever to be convicted of espionage (1966). But the full extent of Whalen’s espionage remains unknown, as does the extent of Soviet penetration of Paperclip. Neither has the full number of CIA-imported Nazi scientists been made public. Whalen shredded thousands of documents. (Hunt, Secret Agenda, 1991)