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Wev's job was to shepherd the experts' dossiers past the review board responsible for ruling on scientists nominated for the Paperclip program. Unfortunately for Wev, however, the State Department's representative on the committee was Samuel Klaus, a stickler for detail who made no secret of his belief that Nazis—“ex-” or otherwise—were a threat to the United States.

The OMGUS reports in Wev's first batch of folders had been prepared by OMGUS agents who served in Germany prior to the rapid revision of American intelligence attitudes toward former Nazis that was then under way. The reports bluntly pointed out that some of Wev's recruits, who had actually already entered the United States under Project Overcast,
had
been “ardent Nazis.” The records on other specialists on the Paperclip recruiting list were not much better. Some of the experts were accused of participating in murderous medical experiments on human subjects at concentration camps, for example, and of brutalizing slave laborers. One was a fugitive from formal murder charges. Another was known to have established an institute for biological warfare experimentation on humans in Poland. At least half of Wev's recruits, and probably more, were Nazi party members or SS veterans.

Klaus refused to be a team player. He rejected Wev's first batch
of applicants,
¹⁴
arguing that accepting them was against Truman's orders.

The JIOA chief was furious. In a scathing secret memo he warned that returning his scientists to Germany “presents a far greater security threat to this country than any former Nazi affiliations which they may have had, or even any Nazi sympathies that they may still have.” Wev complained to Major General Stephen Chamberlin, then the director of intelligence for the War Department general staff, that Klaus and another State Department official, Herbert Cummings, were “sabotaging by delay” his efforts to import scientists. “The most positive and drastic action possible [must] be taken,” Wev insisted, “in order to break the impasse which currently exists.”
¹⁵

The solution to Wev's problems proved to be surprisingly simple. If Klaus and Cummings would not accept the OMGUS dossiers as they were, then the files could be changed. In November of that year Wev's deputy returned seven OMGUS folders to General Chamberlin with a note explaining that the JIOA did not believe it “advisable” to submit the candidates to State and Justice “at the present time.” Among the withheld records, it is worth noting, was Wernher von Braun's OMGUS report, which stated that the scientist was wanted for a denazification hearing because of his SS record, although he “was not a war criminal.” JIOA also held back its file on Dornberger's wartime chief of staff, Dr. Herbert Axster.

Shortly thereafter JIOA Director Wev wired the director of intelligence at the U.S. European Command (EUCOM). His message was blunt: “[T]here is very little possibility that the State and Justice Departments will agree to immigrate any specialist who has been classified as an actual or potential security threat to the United States. This may result in the return [to] Germany of specialists whose skill and knowledge should be denied to other nations in the interest of national security.” Therefore, Wev concluded, “it is requested … that
new security reports be submitted
[emphasis added] where such action is appropriate” so that von Braun and his associates might be permitted to stay in the United States.

OMGUS sent the new dossiers back from Germany a few weeks later. The offending language in each file had been changed. Von Braun and other leading specialists who had been initially held up because of their Nazi party and SS histories were now described as “not constitut[ing] a security threat to the U.S.”
¹⁶
From that point
on OMGUS investigators didn't send Washington any more reports that claimed its scientific recruits might be “security threats” because of their service in Hitler Germany. Klaus and Cummings soon left the screening board, and Paperclip recruitment of German scientists ran smoothly for almost a decade.

Von Braun insisted throughout this minor ordeal that his appointment as an SS
Sturmbannführer
in 1937 had been purely honorary and without political significance. Yet von Braun, like Dornberger, had every opportunity to know what was happening at Nordhausen. Still, he continued to work industriously on behalf of the Reich until its final collapse. He tinkered away on the missiles' design, adding special insulation to prevent the machines from blowing up in flight, then improving the guidance system so that a greater percentage of the V-2's high-explosive warheads succeeded in hitting London. Like Dornberger, von Braun pushed for increased production from the slaves at Nordhausen. After the war, of course, von Braun asserted that he had been opposed to the National Socialist ideology all along. His real reason for working in the Nazi missile program, he said, had been the potential usefulness of his machines in “space travel.”

Dornberger himself did not experience the immigration difficulties that von Braun did. He was permitted to enter the United States without State Department opposition even at the height of the 1947 controversy, much to the dismay of the British, who had been, after all, the target of Dornberger's rockets. The British had held Dornberger as a POW for two years following the war, and they had made no secret of their desire to bring him to trial as a war criminal. Even the Americans had been leery of him at first but had gradually come around to believing him indispensable as the United States' own military rocket program gradually got off the ground. In the end Dornberger appears to have slipped through Klaus's and Cummings's security screen because he had never been a member of the Nazi party or the SS. No party or SS membership meant that OMGUS did not investigate him as a “security threat,” and no negative report from OMGUS meant that he could enter the United States under Paperclip without opposition.

Between 1945 and 1955, 765 scientists, engineers, and technicians were brought to the United States under Overcast, Paperclip, and two other similar programs. At least half, and perhaps as many as 80 percent, of the imported specialists were former Nazi party members or SS men, according to Professor Clarence Lasby, who
has authored a book-length study of Paperclip. Three of these experts, so far, have been forced out of the country. They are Georg Rickhey, a former official at the Nordhausen factory who arrived in 1946 but who left the country in 1947 when he was tried (and acquitted) for war crimes by a U.S. military tribunal; Major General Walter Schreiber, who had once been instrumental in medical experiments on concentration camp inmates by the Luftwaffe (German air force) and who fled the United States in 1952 following an expose by columnist Drew Pearson; and Arthur Rudolph, another Nordhausen veteran who quietly moved to West Germany in 1984 following the U.S. Department of Justice's discovery of his role in the persecution of prisoners at the underground factory.
¹⁷
Rudolph is generally given credit for having been instrumental in organizing the construction of the powerful Saturn V rockets that launched America's astronauts to the moon.

Overcast and Paperclip were just the beginning. American intelligence agencies, which are, after all, research institutions of a sort, also wanted European specialists, just as the more conventional scientific laboratories did. The most fruitful potential source of new recruits for them was obviously the defeated intelligence agencies of Nazi Germany.

But unlike the scientists, many of whom could plausibly claim not to have been personally involved in war crimes, veterans of Hitler's clandestine services could hardly claim to have been ignorant of Nazi criminality. Hitler's spy agencies had been at the cutting edge of Nazi efforts to locate and exterminate Jews, Communists, and other enemies of the German state throughout the war.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Man at Box 1142

Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler's most senior military intelligence officer on the eastern front, had begun planning his surrender to the United States at least as early as the fall of 1944. Germany's inevitable defeat had become obvious by that time, and a number of senior Nazi security officers—including SS chief Heinrich Himmler and Himmler's adjutant, SS General Karl Wolff—had also undertaken secret surrender plans. The common features in their tactics were, first, the offer of something of value to the Western Allies, like espionage information or a quick (though not necessarily unconditional) surrender of German forces, and, second, an attempt to create an alibi that downplayed their participation in war crimes and genocide. The price tag for their cooperation with the West, they hoped, was insulation from prosecution. In the end Gehlen, Wolff, and several hundred other senior German officers succeeded in making deals with Britain or the United States, while a smaller number of top-ranking Nazis, apparently several score, made their peace with the USSR and its Eastern European satellites.

General Gehlen, however, proved to be the most important of them all. He was a scrawny man—at five feet eight and a half inches he weighed less than 130 pounds at the time of his surrender—with an arrogant demeanor and a violent temper that got worse as he grew older. But he also had extraordinary powers of concentration
and a jeweler's attention to detail, both of which served him well in his remarkable thirty-seven-year career as a spy master.

In early March 1945 Gehlen and a small group of his most senior officers carefully microfilmed the vast holdings on the USSR in the Fremde Heere Ost (FHO), the military intelligence section of the German army's general staff. They packed the film in watertight steel drums and secretly buried it in remote mountain meadows scattered through the Austrian Alps. Then, on May 22, 1945, Gehlen and his top aides surrendered to an American Counterintelligence Corps team.

Luck was with them. Captain John Bokor was assigned as their interrogator at Camp King, near Oberursel, in the American occupation zone. Bokor had been interned by the Germans early in the war, had been treated well, and had later served as an interrogator of captured German officers at Fort Hunt near Washington, D.C. Though he was unquestionably anti-Nazi, Bokor's contact with the German officer corps had left him with a certain amount of respect for the enemy and a disdain for the narrow-minded anti-Germanism of many American officers of the time. He was, as Gehlen recalled later, “the first American officer I met with expert knowledge of Russia and with no illusions about the way political events were turning … we became close friends and have remained so.”
¹
During the weeks following Bokor's new assignment Gehlen gradually laid his cards on the table. Not only did the former Wehrmacht general know where the precious archives were buried, but he had also maintained the embryo of an underground espionage organization that could put the records to work against the USSR. Captain Bokor was interested.

There were serious obstacles to the plan. For one thing, the U.S. command mistrusted any type of deals offered by desperate Germans. For another, the Yalta agreements required the United States to turn over to the Russians captured Axis officers who had been involved in “eastern area activities” in exchange for Soviet help in returning the thousands of American POWs who had been picked up by the Red Army.

According to Gehlen's memoirs, Captain Bokor decided to proceed on his own, regardless of official policy. He kept the details of Gehlen's offer secret from the other Americans at the interrogation center and worked quietly to remove the names of Gehlen's senior command from the official lists of POWs in U.S. hands. Bokor and
Colonel William R. Philp (chief of the CIC's sprawling interrogation headquarters at Camp King) arranged for seven senior Gehlen officers to be transferred to the camp, where they were constituted as a “historical study group” supposedly working on a report on the German general staff. Gehlen's precious cache of records was located and shipped to the interrogation center under such secrecy that not even the CIC's chain of command was informed of what was being born at Dulag Luft, as the Germans called the garrison. “Bokor feared …” Gehlen related thirty years later, “that if he had reported our existence too early to [U.S. headquarters at] Frankfurt and the Pentagon, we might have become exposed to hostile forces [within the U.S. chain of command] and then we would have been beyond salvation. I now know … that Captain Bokor was acting on his own” during the earliest days.
²

By the end of the summer, however, Bokor had won the support of Generals Edwin Sibert and Walter Bedell Smith, respectively the highest ranking U.S. Army intelligence officer in Europe and the chief of staff of the Supreme Allied Command. General William (“Wild Bill”) Donovan and Allen Dulles of America's wartime clandestine operations agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), were also tipped off about Gehlen's offer by a Dulles double agent inside the German Foreign Office. The OSS was soon jockeying with U.S. military intelligence for institutional authority over Gehlen's microfilmed records and, before long, over control of the German spy master himself.

Sibert shipped Gehlen and three of his assistants to Washington, D.C., for debriefing in August 1945. By December Sibert had won permission to proceed “under his own authority” with financing and exploitation of the German's espionage group. In the jargon of the spy trade, Sibert became a “cutout,” in effect, for me policymakers in Washington—that is, Sibert could have his German operation, but if it went sour, he would be the one to take the blame. At the same time, however, Dulles's Secret Intelligence Branch (SIB) of the OSS enjoyed direct liaison with Gehlen. Frank Wisner, a dashing young Wall Street lawyer who had distinguished himself in underground OSS intrigues in Istanbul and Bucharest, headed the coordinating team.
³
*

The documentation that might establish exactly how much President Truman knew about American recruitment of Gehlen and his organization remains classified. It is known, however, that the Soviets made vigorous protests against this secret agreement at least as early as the Potsdam Conference; thus it is unlikely that the matter escaped Truman's attention altogether. Considering the senior status of Donovan, Dulles, Sibert, and the other U.S. intelligence officers known to have been directly involved, and considering that two competing American intelligence bureaucracies were attempting to share Gehlen's archives, it is reasonable to suspect that the president had been well briefed about this operation. Further, the extreme political sensitivity inevitably involved in recruiting an enemy spy chief for missions against a country that was still officially an ally of the United States suggests that Truman's personal approval may well have been necessary before full-scale exploitation of the German general began. Either way, it is clear that before a year was out, the Americans had freed Gehlen and most of his high command, then installed them in a former Waffen SS training facility near Pullach, Germany, which has remained the group's headquarters to this day.