PART 8 : SECRET AGENDA:PROJECT PAPERCLIP, PIPELINE TO THE ALAMAC HOTEL, WHAT PRICE TREASON

Secret Agenda The United States Government, Nazi Scientists and 

Project Paperclip 1945 to 1990 

By Linda Hunt 

11 

Pipeline to the Alamac Hotel

 

THE Alamac Hotel was located at Seventy-first Street and Broadway in New York City. Thousands of conventioneers, tourists, and other visitors had stayed in the nineteen-story hotel through the years. But the identities of some Alamac guests were kept a closely guarded secret from the American public. Army intelligence officers used a suite of rooms as a Paperclip office for decades, though they kept their Army connections secret by working in civilian clothes. They greeted scientists when their ships arrived, processed their immigration papers, and catered to their needs in the hotel. By the time Paperclip was shut down in the 1970's at least a thousand German and Austrian scientists had lived in the Alamac for months at a time while the military helped them find jobs.1 

Paperclip, National Interest, and a new project, code-named "63," operated nonstop during the 1950's despite numerous complaints that the projects were illegal and caused serious political tensions between the United States and the West German government. Up to 1950, 665 individuals were employed under Paperclip. Notwithstanding U.S. policies in force since 1948 that barred recruiting, and no matter who complained or what political problems were caused, the military stubbornly refused to stop the projects. The fact that 687 more Germans and Austrians were brought to the United States under Paperclip alone from 1950 through 1959 shows how little effect the complaints had on the projects.2 

In November 1950, J.I.O.A Director Daniel Ellis unleashed Project 63, which proved as controversial as Paperclip. This project's admitted sole purpose was to get the scientists out of Europe and away from the Russians. The scientists were paid $5,000 and given temporary visas to come to America for six months to look for jobs while being lodged in the Alamac Hotel. Most went to work for universities or defense contractors, not the U. S. government. Thus the American taxpayer footed the bill for a project to help former Nazis obtain jobs with Lockheed, Martin Marietta, North American Aviation, or other defense contractors during a time when many American engineers in the aircraft industry were being laid off.3 

The European end of the operation was run by the Army's Special Projects Team from the Intelligence Division of U.S. Army headquarters. The team interviewed and contracted scientists for all J.I.O.A projects in the field or from the team's offices in Frankfurt and Munich. For awhile, the Frankfurt office was located just inside the gate at Camp King, but later it was moved because of security reasons to two floors in a house across the street from the I.G. Farben building. Active recruitment was not necessary, since scientists all over West Germany already knew the location of the team's offices. Only the American public had been duped into believing that the project had ended in 1947.4 

"`Recruiting' was a nasty word," recalled retired U.S. Army Master Sergeant George Meidlein, who was with the project for over a decade at the Alamac and as a team contractor in Germany. "Everything was word of mouth. A scientist would get to the States and somebody would say, `How'd you get here?' They'd say, `Contact Mr. Meidlein in Frankfurt and he'll visit you.' And that's the way we got customers." Meidlein wore civilian clothes and traveled around West Germany in an Army car with German license plates so that the scientists' bosses would not know they were dealing with Americans. "We didn't want to jeopardize the scientist's job until we were prepared to offer him a contract," said Meidlein.5 

Soon after Project 63 was in force, one of the team's recruiters, Ernest Richter, headed for Austria, where he found an untapped source of scientific talent. Geographer Karl Neumaier was making maps for the U.S. Forces in Austria, as he had done for German intelligence during the war in China, Romania, and the Balkans. Chemical warfare expert Rudolph Ulm headed a chemical lab in Tyrol. In 1945 Ulm had been interned by the British when A. K. Mills's technical intelligence team captured Ulm at the chemical warfare experimental station at Spandau. Another Austrian, Wilhelm Lohninger, ran a nitrogen works in Linz. During the war, Lohninger had been employed in the Speer Armaments Ministry supervising war munition factories confiscated by the Nazis in France and Belgium.6 

Richter's efforts to hire the Austrians were hindered by their negative attitude toward the United States. "They consider the U.S., culturally speaking, a backward country," Richter observed. He suggested. that recruiters could counter that attitude by mentioning television musical programs and the Metropolitan Opera as proof that America was not as lacking in culture as the Austrians believed.7 

The team had more serious problems with the Russians. Like Germany, Austria had been divided into separate Allied zones, and some of the scientists were working in the Soviet zone or were members of the Communist party. For example, Karl Krejci-Graf, a well-known geological expert, was director of the Soviet's Geologic Institute in Vienna. In 1944 Krejci- Graf had represented German oil interests when the Nazis occupied Hungary. He was arrested and interned in 1945 by U.S. authorities in Austria because of his high SS rank. Another Austrian, biological warfare expert Fritz Kress, was working for the Russians on a study of diseases that deliberately caused abortion in cattle.8 

The Austrians' excuses as to why they had joined the Communist party were similar to those Germans made for having joined the Nazi party. For example, supersonics engineer Otto Golling told recruiters that he had been "forced to join" the Communist party to obtain employment after the war. He first had worked for the French Air Ministry in Paris and the British in Londori before returning to the Soviet zone in 1947. The team tried to reduce the Soviet influence over Golling by arranging for his relocation to the U.S. zone of Austria. Another Austrian, Ludwig Ettenreich, was director of the C. P. Goerz optical works in Vienna, which produced lenses exclusively for the Soviets. Ettenreich told the team that he had resigned from the Communist party and no longer held Communist views. But an investigation later determined that Ettenreich's name was still on the party's rolls.9 

Other scientists had been ardent Nazis during the war. Alfred Kepka, the inventor of the Madrid rocket, had joined the Austrian Nazi party in 1927 and was such a Nazi activist that he had been awarded the Golden Party Badge. Others had been members of the SS. A well-known coal dust explosives expert, Mario Zippermayr, had joined the SS in 1933. And geologist Frederich Hecht had even been jailed by U.S. Forces in Austria officers and fired from the University of Graz because of his SS membership.10 

Ellis and other J.I.O.A officers were so unconcerned about the Nazi backgrounds of those they wanted to employ under Project 63 that they even considered contracting convicted Nazi war criminals who were still in prison. Take, for example, the case of Eduard Houdremont, who was still serving a prison sentence from his war crimes conviction at Nuremberg. Ellis and seven other officers discussed Houdremont and other dubious individuals during a meeting at which they decided which scientists on the J.I.O.A's "K" list should be excluded from being hired under Project 63. Individuals in the "K" category were those whose skills should be denied to the Russians at any cost.11 

Houdremont had been a top official of Krupp and was convicted at Nuremberg for his involvement in Krupp's massive slave labor program. Thousands of Eastern European Jews had been deported to Nazi Germany to work as slaves in Krupp factories, including a steel plant run by Houdremont. Yet the officers failed to mention this man's crimes or the fact that he had been convicted of complicity in the murder of hundreds of Jews who were beaten or starved to death. Instead the J.I.O.A's brief discussion of whether to offer Houdremont a contract went like this: 

"The point to consider is whether the newspaper publicity would be adverse if he were brought over," J.I.O.A member Max Brokaw said. "If the man is on the `K' list and he should be brought over, we should do it regardless of the publicity," replied J.I.O.A Deputy Director James H. Skinner.12 

The J.I.O.A officers did not even pretend to have screened other individuals on their list. Austrian Karl Kamptner was still on the J.I.O.A's list even though the FBI was investigating him for having wrongfully obtained industrial information by posing as a member of the U.S. government. Although the officers did not indicate that they now planned to employ Kamptner again under Project 63, there was no explanation of why the list even included a man under FBI investigation.13 

Brokaw told the group that although the Austrians' backgrounds had not been completely investigated, the plan was to put them under contract and bring them to the United States, "in which case some of them may have to be `bought off later if they are found inadmissible."14 

Kurt Blome was one scientist whom the J.I.O.A "bought off " when the State Department refused to give him a visa because of his notorious Nazi past. Blome, who had held the rank of major general in the SA, had been a defendant in the Nuremberg Medical Case, in which he was charged with participating in euthanasia, extermination of tubercular Poles, biological warfare, and various deadly experiments. Blome had been the key biological warfare representative on the Reich Research Council, which had approved, funded, and commissioned experiments in the camps. Blome had told Alsos interrogators after the war that SS chief Himmler had ordered him in 1943 to conduct plague vaccine experiments on camp inmates. Blome had suggested to Himmler that Blome's new institute, then under construction in Poznan, would be better suited for the experiments than a camp because it was isolated. Himmler had then assigned an SS doctor to help with the work. The Alsos agent commented that during the interrogation Blome "had no hesitation in repeatedly referring to his intentions to use humans for his work on plague."15 

Despite this admission, the Nuremberg tribunal acquitted Blome of all charges and concerning the biological warfare charge stated: "It may well be that defendant Blome was preparing to experiment on human beings in connection with bacteriological warfare, but the record fails to disclose that fact, or that he ever actually conducted the experiments." The Alsos interrogation was not submitted as evidence in the trial.16 

Two months after Blome's acquittal, four representatives of Fort Detrick,the Maryland army base that was also headquarters of the CIA's biological warfare program-interviewed Blome about biological warfare. Dr. H. W. Batchelor set the tone for the meeting when he said, "We have friends in Germany, scientific friends, and this is an opportunity for us to enjoy meeting him (Blome] to discuss our various problems with him." During a lengthy interview Blome identified biological warfare experts and their locations and described different methods of conducting biological warfare.17

In 1951 J.I.O.A's recruiters signed Blome under a Project 63 contract to work for the Army Chemical Corps. Not one background investigation reported Blome's Nuremberg trial or his 1945 arrest for high SA rank. On his personnel forms Blome conveniently omitted any reference to where he had been from 1945 to 1948. Despite Blome's cleaned-up files, the U.S. consul in Frankfurt ruled him inadmissible for immigration due to the incriminating Alsos report. J.I.O.A officers were afraid that if they canceled Blome's contract, other German scientists might not sign contracts at all. In several meetings with Blome, an army officer told him that the reason he could not go to the United States was that the project had been canceled. After a long negotiation Blome finally agreed to work as a doctor at Camp King for the duration of his Project 63 contract.18 

The way Ellis ran Project 63 was as controversial as the backgrounds of some of those the J.I.O.A recruited. The State Department's scientific adviser, Dr. J. B. Koepfli, sent numerous complaints to the secretary of state and other officials in Washington about the questionable activities of some recruiters involved in the operation. One officer got into serious personal trouble during a recruiting trip in Germany. Another Special Projects Team member was a former diamond merchant from Los Angeles named Ehrman whose methods included handing out his personal business cards during meetings with German scientists. "You can imagine the reaction in German scientific circles of having a stranger and a diamond merchant calling on the most outstanding German scientists, including Nobel prize winners, offering a dubious contract in the name of the U.S. government," Koepfli reported.19 

The team also sent fliers describing Project 63 to nearly every German scientist living in the U.S. zone. The sales pitch in these flyers would have been more suited to selling used cars than to convincing highly intelligent scientists to move to America. As a result, the Germans were either indignant over the crass approach or were convinced that the United States feared an immediate Soviet invasion of West Germany and was using this method to evacuate German scientists from the danger zone.20 

A number of Germans complained angrily that the Special Projects Team had lied to them about the contracts. For example, Helmut Ruska was in charge of the Berlin Institute for Micromorphology and had signed on for Project 63 because he had wanted to find a position with an American university. After he arrived at the Alamac, however, the military pressured him to accept jobs at military bases and refused to pay for his transportation to attend job interviews at universities. Another Project 63 recruit was unhappy from the minute he arrived in the country. Former Luftwaffe parachute designer Wilhelm Buss worked under a short-term Project 63 contract at Edwards Air Force Base in California. Buss complained that the heat and altitude made him sick and that he had been charged for Alamac Hotel accommodations that he thought would be provided free.21 

In 1952, American officials in West Germany dove for cover when they learned that a new twenty-man recruiting team for Project 63 was heading their way. This team included Air Force Colonel Gerold Crabbe, the J.I.O.A deputy director; Air Force Colonel Arthur S. Randak; Colonel Edward Berry from G-2; four U.S. civilians, including ex-diamond merchant Ehrman; six Paperclip specialists; and an assortment of lesser military personnel. U.S. High Commissioner John McCloy warned the secretary of state that he had the "gravest fears" that this effort would result in a "violent reaction" from West German officials.22 

Indeed, the situation reached such a crisis that even the CIA complained. Dr. Karl Weber ran a CIA operation collecting information about Soviet science by interrogating persons who had escaped from the east to West Germany. The J.I.O.A's recruiters already had disrupted Weber's operation once, when they tried to recruit some of his people. He complained to the CIA's scientific adviser that the recruiters were "inept." But he was most concerned about the political repercussions. The West German government had threatened to intercede unless the recruiting was stopped, because it conflicted with NATO regulations and U.S. policies in West Germany.23 

J.I.O.A Deputy Director Crabbe was a week late for a scheduled meeting with Weber to discuss the problems. "In the meantime the J.I.O.A group was well on its way to the repetition of previous blunders," Weber noted. When the meeting finally did take place, with Weber, H.I.C.O.G's chief scientist Carl Nordstrom, Crabbe, and Berry, Weber complained that the J.I.O.A's list of recruitment possibilities included people who were "too old, too rich, too busy and too thoroughly disgruntled with past experience with Americans" to justify trying to hire them. In return, Crabbe and Berry told Nordstrom that they regarded the CIA as "saboteurs and obstructionists."24 

The J.I.O.A's recruiting did not end, despite the complaints. In fact, they increased recruiting efforts for Paperclip as well. Even the reason for continuing that project was two-faced. On the one hand, Paperclip was defined in its policy as a project to exploit the skills of German scientists. But behind the scenes, the project was still viewed by those who ran it as a useful tool in the cold war game against the Russians. The military used the project to obtain military and political intelligence information about the USSR and the Soviet zone of Germany. As one Air Force history reported, "the loss of such intelligence and utilization to those powers not in sympathy with our way of life illustrated the program's `denial value.'"25 

Crabbe took over as J.I.O.A director in 1953. "Crabbe was the typical pre-World War II aviator. If you couldn't shoot it or eat it, he didn't care about it," recalled retired Army Colonel Bernard Geehan, who served on the J.I.O.A from 1953 to 1957. Geehan strongly believed that the United States received invaluable benefits from Paperclip and other J.I.O.A projects. "It would have been an absolute sin to have wasted this opportunity," Geehan said.26 

Geehan also claimed that there were no problems during his tenure with the J.I.O.A. "There was nothing underhanded, we had nothing to conceal," he said. "There were no war criminals. We had to be careful." He described the State Department as uncooperative. "Their deadpan GS-12 bureaucrat asked no questions about morality, only about a misplaced comma in the paperwork."27 

Geehan said the J.I.O.A had several run-ins with the CIA during the time he was in the agency. One incident occurred after the J.I.O.A contracted with two German scientists from Darmstadt. "All of a sudden two guys in black suits showed up at my house," he recalled. "I thought, `my God, it's the IRS.' But they were spooks from the CIA. They said they had a problem because our two German recruits were the CIA's undercover sources in R and D [Research and Development]."28 

Paperclip also got entangled in a fierce turf fight between the CIA and the FBI in the United States. The CIA's 1947 charter forbids the agency from operating within the continental United States. Yet Geehan said the J.I.O.A discovered that the CIA had spied on two Paperclip scientists who worked at Ohio State University. The scientists were terrified because they were being followed. "One man called the FBI and said it must be the Russians," Geehan recalled. "Now, I thought it might have been a football coach from a competitive university, but certainly not the Russians. We later found out it was the CIA."29 

The practice of employing foreign rather than American workers led to strong complaints from the federal employees' union. Paperclip, it said, discriminated against American workers by granting Germans preferential treatment in the job market. But Air Force officers thought American workers were mediocre. In 1954, for example, the Air Force was trying to fill sixty-three vacancies at the Air Research and Development Command laboratories. Air Force recruiters interviewed engineers who had been laid off from North American Aviation in California, but reported that these workers were of "low caliber, essentially technicians, even though they termed themselves engineers." To fill the jobs, the Air Force sent its own six-man team to Germany, where they recruited thirty-five ex-Nazi colleagues of the German old-boy network working for Colonel Donald Putt at Wright-Paterson Air Force Base.30 

The J.I.O.A had problems clearing three of these recruits because they were agents in Germany's intelligence service. Herbert Alfke, for example, was a physicist and high-frequency specialist for the Plendl Institute in Austria. He also continued his connections with German intelligence that he had established during World War II. Alfke had been a lieutenant in the Wehrmacht from 1941 to 1944 and an Abwehr officer at the German Embassy in Spain, where he engaged in clandestine intelligence activities against the Allies. The Air Force contracted him under Paperclip despite FBI and CIA reports that Alfke was considered a "potential security threat" due to his foreign intelligence connections.31 

Most new recruits were former colleagues of earlier Paperclip employee Albert Patin, who had obtained his U.S. citizenship despite having admitted using hundreds of Jewish women as slave laborers in his factory. In the early 1950's, Patin started his own company, Ampatco Laboratories in Chicago, to design and manufacture automatic pilot devices for jet fighter planes similar to those made by his factory in Nazi Germany.32 

Patin had given Putt a list of Germans he wanted to hire and said that their backgrounds were clean. "None of the persons . . . had affiliations with any extreme political parties, neither Nazi nor Communist," Patin claimed. The list included Willy Hornauer, former chief engineer and assistant to Patin in his factory during the war; Gerhard Klein, chief of development at Siemens electric company; and several men who worked for the British government, including Johannes Gievers, chief engineer for Kreiselgeraete, a subsidiary of Askania that developed the gyro for the V-1 and V-2. But investigations uncovered derogatory information on Klein, despite Patin's claims to the contrary. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Eugene Cook told the J.I.O.A to drop Klein from the list "for security reasons."33 

The Askania connections of some of the men also raised disturbing questions, since several top-level Askania officials, including a National Interest recruit, had been accused of collaborating with the Communists. In 1948, a German court charged Askania's technical director, Guido Wuensch, with "knowingly having delivered optical instruments to the Soviets" in an espionage case. Two years later, Wuensch was acquitted and brought to the United States to work for an Indiana company under a six-month contract. Wuensch then returned to Germany and resumed his position at Askania. He came under suspicion again in the mid-1950's when three Askania directors and several employees were convicted of selling half a million marks' worth of strategic military equipment to the Chinese Communists during the Korean War. Trial evidence revealed that some of Askania's directors, including Wuensch, were aware of the deal made with the Communists.34 

In addition to the Air Force group, the Navy brought several biological warfare experts to the United States in the 1950's under Paperclip. For example, Anne Burger arrived in 1951 to work for a Navy biological warfare project at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. Burger had been a wartime assistant to Paperclip scientist Erich Traub, who arrived earlier. Their work for the Navy included conducting experiments on animals to determine the lethal doses of more than forty strains of highly infectious viruses.35 

During the war Traub was in charge of biological warfare for the Reich Research Institute on the secluded island of Riems, where his biological warfare research specialty was viral and bacteriological diseases, including hoof and mouth disease and influenza. Traub's expertise fit right in with a scheme by SS chief Himmler to prepare a vaccine against the Rinderpest virus and to conduct experiments to see whether the virus could be preserved for later use. Himmler had obtained a strain of Rinderpest in Turkey and told Kurt Blome to send someone to collect it. Traub was chosen for the job, and after reporting to SS headquarters in Berlin he went to Turkey to get the Rinderpest. Experiments were conducted at Riems on cows that were deliberately infected by smearing the virus on their lips. In 1945 the Riems institute was captured and reestablished by the Russians. Traub, Burger, and other biological warfare experts worked there for the Russians until 1948.36 

Air Force Colonel Stone Christopher joined the J.I.O.A in 1955. A veteran intelligence officer who had worked with British intelligence during World War II, Christopher was born in Stockholm, Sweden, and came to New York when he was eighteen. He joked about how his first name, Sten, was changed when he filled out his U.S. citizenship papers. "This guy looks at it says, `well, that's Stone.' It's been Stone ever since. "37 

In October 1955, Christopher went to Frankfurt with Paperclip scientist Ernst Stuhlinger on a recruiting trip, traveling around West Germany to interview about five people a day who had been at Peenemunde during the war. Christopher said he felt that the men he interviewed were professionally unqualified to be included in the project. "I'm a stupid intelligence officer you know," he joked. "But everyone we investigated, we came up with the same conclusion that, well, `he's a phony. . . .' " Christopher recalled that he also had met a group of former Peenemunde employees who now were working for the French government. The French would not allow the Germans to live in France, and consequently, they took them back over the border into West Germany each evening after work.38 

Sixty-six-year-old Hermann Oberth, known as the "father of German rocketry," was hired in 1955 to work for the Army in Huntsville, Alabama, at Wernher von Braun's request. J.I.O.A Deputy Director Geehan went to Oberth's castle in Bad Hamburg to make arrangements for the trip. "He always dressed in pre-World War II fashion, with a starched collar and a stick pin in his tie," recalled Geehan. The J.I.O.A arranged to store Oberth's possessions in a warehouse near Washington, because there were truckloads of goods. "One day a guy from G-2 called and said, `that Kraut's belongings have been here for six months. Either get it out or we're going to send you a bill.' " It was then that the J.I.O.A discovered that Oberth's possessions included rare antique art and sculpture that had been taken out of West Germany in violation of that country's laws. "If the press would have gotten wind of that we would have had a real problem," Geehan said. The art was sent to a museum in Saint Louis for storage until Oberth returned to Germany a few years later.39 

The German rocket group had moved from Fort Bliss to Huntsville in 1950 to work on guided missiles at Redstone Arsenal. Some of its members' backgrounds still were causing problems. One man left the country after the Army learned that he was a homosexual. In addition, the U.S. Justice Department refused to approve the legal immigration status of Herbert Axster and his wife because of their Nazi past. Axster said he finally told his boss, Major Hamill, that he was fed up. "I quit," he said. "I had a contract with the government and I told Hamill: `End this contract any day you want.' They were happy to get rid of me." Axster opened a law firm with a friend in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and later returned to West Germany.40 

By the mid-1950's the Air Force had brought 153 new Paperclip specialists to various bases and research centers around the country. Ernst Czerlinsky, a former SS member, was sent to the Air Force Cambridge Research Center. Czerlinsky had been an aircraft engineer with the Experimental Institute for Aviation of the D.V.L in Berlin. In 1945, Army C.I.C agents arrested Czerlinsky to prevent him from interfering with U.S. expropriation of the D.V.L. O.M.G.U.S reports judged him to be an "ardent Nazi" because he had joined the SS and SA in the early 1930's.41 

Some Paperclip recruits had worked for the Soviets for several years. Engineer Horst Gerlach had gone to East Germany shortly after the war ended because he objected to Allied restrictions in the western zones. In 1946, he was deported to the USSR, where he worked on radar installations at a research institute near Moscow until 1952. Another Paperclip recruit, physicist Fritz Klaiber, had worked for Siemens electric company in Berlin during the war. In 1945, he was kidnapped by the Russians and taken to a P.O.W camp near Moscow, where he and other German P.O.W's made electrical parts for guided missiles. When Klaiber was released in 1953, he provided U.S. and British intelligence with information about the Soviets' activities. 42 

A group of chemical warfare experts went to Edgewood Arsenal in the late 1950's. Eduard Wulkow had been a textile chemist for Lever Brothers in Berlin and at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute during the war. He arrived at Edgewood in 1957 and developed fabrics for protective clothing that chemical warfare agents could not penetrate. Another specialist, Hermann Donnert, was a young Austrian nuclear physicist who graduated from the University of Innsbruck in 1951 and was working as a scientific assistant at the University of Cologne when he was hired under Paperclip. At Edgewood, he was assigned to the physics department to research and experiment with radioactive fallout.43 

Edgewood scientists worked on several projects involving the airborne dissemination of chemical warfare agents, and another new Paperclip recruit, Albert Pfeiffer, was assigned to develop new ways to disseminate the toxic chemicals. During the war Pfeiffer was a chemical warfare specialist with the German navy's High Command, where he developed flame throwers, smoke bombs, and chemical warfare detectors. In 1944 Werner Osenberg, the SS representative on the Reich Research Council, personally assigned Pfeiffer as the council's representative to the Navy Chemical Testing Institute in Kiel.44 

U.S. Army intelligence was still responsible for conducting background investigations on J.I.O.A recruits. The system improved somewhat after 1955, when many applicants were given a polygraph exam before leaving Germany. "I instituted using a polygraph overseas because I couldn't see polygraphing people after they came in here," Christopher said. "Then we would have a `disposal problem' you know. I went overseas myself and I picked my [polygraph] operator, because you don't use an operator that investigates crime to put a scientist on the box. You use a different technique." Some I.N.S.C.O.M dossiers on scientists considered for Paperclip after the mid 1950's contain copies of these polygraph tests. The scientists were asked questions to determine whether they had Communist affiliations or relatives living in Soviet territories.45 

But no polygraph questions were asked regarding their Nazi affiliations or activities during World War II. Neither Christopher nor any other officer connected to the project over the years believed that nazism posed a security threat. "What the heck would you think if you were in Germany under a dictator and you were a scientist and you wanted to work in your scientific field?" Christopher said. "They were Germans fighting for their country the same as we were fighting for ours. "46 

Apparently the Joint Chiefs of Staff felt the same way. The J.C.S had a secret plan to evacuate scientists from Europe in case of war with the USSR, and the J.I.O.A maintained lists of those included in the plan. One list included individuals who normally would not be admitted to the United States, but whose work was considered so important that their skills should be denied to the Russians. In 1957 this list included convicted Nazi war criminal Houdremont, Nuremberg defendants Blome and Siegfried Ruff, who had returned to the D.V.L and later worked for Lufthansa German Airlines, and many biological or chemical warfare experts. Nerve gas discoverer Gerhard Schrader and biological warfare expert Wolfgang Wirth worked for I. G. Farben Bayer, of Bayer aspirin fame, located in the British zone of Germany.47 

Willy Messerschmitt's name was also on J.I.O.A's list. Messerschmitt's famous jet fighter planes, which ruled the skies over Nazi Germany during the war, had been built by Messerschmitt factories that used thousands of inmates from Mauthausen and Dachau as slave laborers. When Allied troops liberated Mauthausen they uncovered a mound of human bones surrounding the quarry that hid the Messerschmitt aircraft factory. Willy Messerschmitt went into exile in Spain, but he did not have to worry about being called to account for the deaths of the Jewish slaves. A German denazification court fined him a mere D.M 2,000 for being a "fellow traveler" of the Nazis.48 

By 1960, Messerschmitt's aircraft company, located in Augsburg, was back in business with assets of over D.M 30 million. And Willy Messerschmitt was busy advising the Egyptian government on building rockets, which Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser declared would be used to destroy Israel. A large staff of Germans was in Cairo helping President Nasser develop his own aircraft, which the Israelis feared could carry high-explosive rocket warheads. The New York Times even reported that "a Munich physician wanted on charges of medical atrocities in concentration camps" was employed as a company doctor at the Messerschmitt factory near Cairo.49 

The Syrians also were employing German scientists, and a few were brought to the United States in 1957 under Paperclip after they worked for Syria. One was Wilhelm Wessel, who was in charge of a rocket design team in Syria from 1951 to 1954. Wessel had been a design engineer for B.M.W during the war. Another employee in Syria, Otto Cerny, had been a rocket engineer at Peenemunde. From 1945 on, Cerny worked in Austria, primarily as a foreman at a steel works in Linz. He went to Syria in 1956 and then worked on rockets for the U.S. Army in Huntsville.50 

By the late 1950's a great majority of those employed under J.I.O.A projects were younger men with little, if any, post-university experience as scientists. In 1957 alone, ninety-four Germans or Austrians arrived under Paperclip. Unlike the earlier Paperclip group, these men had been soldiers, not scientists, during World War II. 

Fifty-six specialists arrived during the first quarter of 1957 to work at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, the nerve center of scientific research and development for the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Most had served in the Wehrmacht or Luftwaffe during the war and then obtained advanced degrees in science. One physicist, Josef Parth, had been a Luftwaffe pilot who flew fighter planes in France, Russia, and the Balkans. Another recruit, Hans Joachim Naake, was a radar engineer who had served in the Luftwaffe and had been interned in an American P.O.W camp until the spring of 1946. Naake had been a member of the Nazi party and Hitler Youth during the war.51 

These men joined the earlier Paperclip group, headed by chief scientist Hans Zeigler, who helped the Army hire scientists in Germany and kept a tight rein over them at Monmouth. One Austrian rebelled against the mail censorship regulations soon after he arrived. A code of conduct required the scientists to mail their letters at a base postal box so that censors could screen their correspondence. Henning Harmuth thought the practice violated the principles of democracy. "I told them right away that I don't intend to exchange Austrian censorship for an American one," he said. This led Zeigler to remark that Harmuth had a "fanatic conception about freedom in the U.S."52 

But the controversy over mail was minor compared to the outrageous scandal that erupted when U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer Ivan Simitch, head of the Foreign Scientists Section at Fort Monmouth, was caught in a motel room with Olaf Guzmann's wife. Simitch had rented a room in the Long Branch Motel and was living there secretly with Hilde Guzmann. The Paperclip scientist knocked on the door and, looking through a crack, was able to see his wife naked on the bed and Simitch rapidly crossing the room, clothed in a dressing gown.53 

The Austrian engineer first met Simitch when he arrived at Fort Monmouth in late 1953. Guzmann, a wartime member of the S.A, had been working for Philips telecommunications in Vienna. Almost immediately Simitch began spending all of his off-duty hours at Guzmann's apartment, and he even moved in for awhile. Soon Hilde told Guzmann she was leaving him for Simitch, who was a married man: "Toward the end of October Simitch's advice assumed a threatening manner," Guzmann said in a sworn affidavit. "Simitch told me if I did not sign [a property settlement] then my wife would take me to a divorce court, and since I have only a temporary visa, it would be hard for me to get a permanent visa thereafter. I considered this a veiled threat from Simitch. This frightened me because he was an officer of the U. S. Army and my supervisor."54 

Unfortunately, Simitch was in a perfect position to prey on the Paperclip group. The scientists were vulnerable, since they were under military custody with no U.S. entry visas and depended on Simitch for their existence. "Mr. Simitch was my supervisor, he distributed pay checks, made arrangements for visas, censored all mail, provided for my aid or assistance under the terms of the contract," Guzmann stated in an affidavit. Most of the scientists did not speak English. And Simitch not only had access to their homes while they were at work, but he had used his security clearance to obtain information about their backgrounds.55 

Army security officers interrogated Simitch and threatened to prosecute him for adultery, immoral behavior, and violating the federal Mann Act when Simitch took Hilde across state lines to spend a weekend in Washington, D.C. In a report, Colonel Frank Moses noted that "the conduct of C.W.O Simitch in an unofficial capacity after duty hours, seriously compromises his character and standing as a gentleman and makes him morally unworthy to remain a member of the honorable profession of arms." Hilde Guzmann was repatriated back to Austria. The J.I.O.A and Army delayed Simitch's resignation from the Army until Hilde had left America, to stop Simitch from seeing her and avoid publicity.56 

While the Army was keeping a lid on this scandal, other controversies arose in 1956 that threatened to expose the ongoing project to the American public. First, members of the Minnesota chapter of the American Chemical Society uncovered the Army's operation in the Alamac Hotel. They were furious when they learned that the large number of Germans living there were going to be employed by the military. The A.C.S was concerned that the Germans were taking jobs from Americans and it vowed to do everything possible to stop the recruitment of foreign nationals.57 

Then the State Department found itself in the middle of a political controversy that jeopardized the friendly relations between the United States and West Germany. The West German government had complained for years about active recruitment of scientists by U.S. companies. Martin Marietta, Lockheed, and nearly every other major defense contractor sent their own teams to Germany to recruit scientists who then were brought to the United States under National Interest. The German government's complaints already had forced the secretary of state to write those companies and tell them to stop recruiting. Then the West Germans complained to Ambassador James Conant about Paperclip and demanded that it be shut down. Conant agreed and he urged Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to quickly find a way to stop the project "before we are faced with a formal complaint by the West German government against a continuing U.S. recruitment program which has no parallel in any other Allied country. "58 

Nevertheless, West Germany's complaints did not stop the projects. In November 1956, the U.S. Army Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence (A.C.S.I), Lieutenant General Robert Schow, told the J.I.O.A that the projects would continue but recommended that they concentrate on processing current cases and immediately discontinue active recruitment in Germany. Schow's comments reflected the views of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who felt that the recommendations would satisfy the German government while still allowing the project to continue.59 

In an effort to dupe the West German government into believing that Paperclip had ended, J.I.O.A Director Christopher changed the project's code name to the "Defense Scientists Immigration Program" (D.E.F.S.I.P). "I changed the name because the Germans objected to `Paperclip,' " recalled Christopher. The State Department was told that while applications would be accepted from interested German scientists, there was no longer a formal defense project to solicit them.60 

These changes made little difference. The Special Projects Team stopped overtly recruiting German specialists, but if one walked through the door, he would find a contract waiting for him. And there were few, if any, scientists in West Germany who did not know the team's address. The project's name change fooled no one. Even the J.I.O.A continued to refer to the project as Paperclip.

A few months later the Russians' activities were used as an excuse to escalate recruitment efforts again. On October 4, 1957, a Russian rocket launched Sputnik 1, the first satellite to orbit the earth. Less than a month later, on November 3, a much larger satellite was launched that carried a dog, the first living creature to circle the earth.61 

The space race had begun. At the time, former J.I.O.A Director Benjamin Heckemeyer was working on Paperclip as chief of the Intelligence Collection Branch for A.C.S.I in Europe. As a result of Sputnik, on November 1, 1957, Heckemeyer asked Schow for permission to recruit a large number of German scientists and "have them waiting at the Hotel Alamac when the go-ahead signal is given." He suggested accelerating the project by shortening the time spent on background investigations and eliminating the processing schedules altogether.62 

Heckemeyer then told Schow, in a gross understatement, "we can ship a lot of talent when you give the word."

12 

What Price Treason ? 

MOST mornings, J.I.O.A Deputy Director William Henry Whalen arrived at his office in the Pentagon either drunk or suffering from a bad hangover. The forty two-year-old Army lieutenant colonel was consuming at least a pint of liquor a day. His heavy drinking went hand in-hand with the whirlwind social life that had become a habit by the time he was assigned to the J.I.O.A in July 1957. For the previous two years, he had been assistant chief of the U. S. Army Foreign Liaison Office, where his job included attending as many as three foreign embassy-sponsored social events a night. Whalen and his wife were caught up in the glittering Washington social scene and continued to attend embassy parties after he joined the Joint Chiefs of Staff agency.1 

Whalen had made several friends while making the rounds of diplomatic parties. One was Colonel Sergei Edemski, the acting Soviet military attache and a known agent of the Soviet military intelligence agency, the G.R.U. Whalen had known Edemski since 1955 and the two men frequently socialized in each other's homes. The tall, forty-three-year-old, blond haired Russian always appeared friendly and talkative. He was fluent in English, probably from having been stationed in London from 1944 to 1951, and his conversations were sprinkled with a lot of American slang.2 

The smooth-talking Russian was a pro at using subtle coercion to snare someone into his spy net. As one Pentagon investigator noted years later, the tactic that Edemski used on Whalen was "a beautiful example of patient, calculated and well thought out, sophisticated recruitment of a source."3 Edemski was like a spider who assessed his prey over a long period, found a weakness, and then spun a web tighter and tighter around his victim before moving in for the kill. 

Edemski began to tighten the web soon after Whalen joined the J.I.O.A. He asked the Army officer several times to give him some innocuous, unclassified U. S. Army manuals that Edemski easily could have obtained himself from the Government Printing Office. Whalen refused-for the moment-but the Soviet agent was a patient man. It would be only a matter of time before he put the pressure on Whalen's Achilles' heel. In addition to being an alcoholic, Whalen was deeply in debt to numerous credit bureaus and businesses throughout northern Virginia.4 

It was worth the Russian's while to be patient with the Army officer who later would be called the highest-placed American military officer ever convicted of espionage. The Joint Chiefs of Staff is one of the nation's most super-secret agencies and forms the very heart of America's military defense system. And the world was in the midst of a chilling crisis that eventually would result in the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. Whalen's position on the J.I.O.A gave him access to both America's and West Germany's defense secrets. With his top secret security clearance, Whalen now could roam the J.C.S's heavily guarded Pentagon offices at will.5 

The missile crisis between the United States and the USSR began to escalate almost from the moment that Sputnik was launched. By 1959 the missile gap had widened-the Russians were first to land an unmanned rocket on the moon. If Soviet rockets could reach the moon, they most certainly were capable of hitting targets in the United States. And Premier Nikita Khrushchev made that point abundantly clear in his public statements. "If we were attacked," he warned, "we could wipe off the face of the earth all our potential enemies." The tension heightened in 1959 when Khrushchev threatened to invade West Berlin, asserting that rockets with hydrogen bomb warheads were being manufactured in Soviet factories at the rate of 250 a year.6 

Paperclip scientists were thrust into the middle of that crisis. Rocco Petrone, former director of N.A.S.A's Marshall Space Flight Center, was working for the Army at the time. Petrone recalls that Wernher von Braun's rocket team had been ready to launch a satellite on an Army rocket before Sputnik was launched in 1957. "There were six birds on the floor at Huntsville that could have gone into orbit at the time the Russians put up Sputnik, but they were given orders that they could not go all the way," Petrone said. Instead, politicians in Washington gave the Navy the go-ahead and its Vanguard rocket blew up on the launch pad. "Therefore, we denied ourselves the right to be first, and put the word Sputnik into our vocabulary."7 

Whalen was already a familiar face to some of the men who ran Paperclip. Most of Whalen's military intelligence career since 1948 had been spent in various assignments with the Office of Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence. Colonel Montie Cone and other Army intelligence officers involved with the earlier Paperclip cover up of the scientists' Nazi pasts worked in a branch of the A.C.S.I that had run Paperclip administratively from the beginning. In the late 1950's Cone was the executive officer of J-2, the Army intelligence directorate in the J.C.S. Christopher was J.I.O.A director until he retired in the spring of 1958. Other officers on J.I.O.A's staff included Navy Captain Earle Gardner, Navy Commander William Lahodney, Army Lieutenant Colonel Don Davis, and Army Lieutenant Colonel Robinson Norris. As noted earlier, Heckemeyer supervised the Special Projects Team recruiters as chief of the Intelligence Collection Division for A.C.S.I in Europe.8 

"Whalen was a big braggart," recalled Norris, who was on the J.I.O.A in 1960-61. "One day he came in and announced to me and a couple of other people that `I am going to be the assistant secretary of defense.' I said, `Oh, how do you know that?' And he said, `My mother delivered so many hundred thousand votes in New York state for John Kennedy and he's going to make me assistant secretary of defense.' " Norris laughed. "I thought that was rather presumptuous."9 

State Department representative Walter Mueller described the vindictive way Whalen threatened to use that position. "Whalen griped about being discriminated against and said certain members in the Department of Defense would be sorry someday," Mueller told investigators. When Mueller asked what Whalen meant by that statement, Whalen indicated that when he became assistant secretary of defense he would see to it that certain persons were "given the works."10 

Soon after Whalen joined the J.I.O.A, Heckemeyer's earlier prediction that Paperclip would accelerate as a result of Sputnik was proven correct. In early 1958 J.I.O.A Director Christopher told Heckemeyer to keep the Special Projects Team "ready to go all out" on short notice. "Of course you must be careful that you are not accused of recruiting," Christopher warned. The military was going to bring more German and Austrian scientists to the United States even though they had yet to devise a plan to best utilize their skills.11 

The project immediately underwent the same kind of acceleration that had taken place a decade earlier. A total of 361 Paperclip specialists were brought to the United States from 1957 through 1960, which was an increase over the previous few years. Ninety-four individuals arrived in 1957, compared with 64 the previous year. In 1958, the number increased again to a total of 109 specialists. In 1959 and 1960, while Whalen was spying for the Soviets, 158 specialists were brought to the United States under Paperclip. And in addition to the Paperclip group, a large number of scientists from Germany, Austria, and other countries were brought in under Project 63 and National Interest to work for universities and defense contractors, including Duke University, RCA (Princeton, New Jersey), Bell Laboratories, Douglas Aircraft, and Martin Marietta. Information about the number of defectors and other individuals brought in by the CIA and military intelligence agencies is unknown, since J.I.O.A records concerning them were either shredded or pulled during the FBI's investigation in 1964.12 

In 1958 the J.I.O.A was still bringing in older scientists, primarily Austrians, who had obtained their scientific reputations during the time that Austria was willingly part of Hitler's Third Reich. One was Hans Nowotny, a professor at the University of Vienna who specialized in metallurgy and corrosion. Another Austrian, Alfred Popodi, was a former Nazi party member who had been a research engineer at Telefunken in Berlin during the war. Popodi then was senior engineer at the Laboratory Elektromedizin in Germany from 1948 until he came to America.13 

Forty-five-year-old Heinz Gorges also was recruited in 1958. Gorges was a German rocket scientist who worked for the British after World War II and then immigrated to Australia. Paperclip scientists were supposed to be investigated and given polygraph exams before being brought to America. But that was not done in Gorges's case. In a memo to the State Department Visa Office, Whalen noted that Gorges's security investigation would not be completed before he began working with von Braun's group at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville. The results of that investigation are unknown. Among the few documents in Gorges's I.N.S.C.O.M file is a memo noting that the dossier would be destroyed March 6, 1959 the month that Whalen began spying for the Soviets.14 

West Germans began complaining about Paperclip when it shifted back into high gear. For example, officials at Telefunken complained to the U.S. Embassy in Bonn that the Special Projects Team was actively recruiting its employees. Telefunken had a defense contract to make Hawk missiles and the company could not complete the contract if their best engineers left Germany to work in the United States under Paperclip.15 

Around the same time, the Bild-Zeitung newspaper in West Germany published a scathing story about the plight of a blind, crippled space scientist who was losing his scientific helper because of Paperclip. Twenty-eight-year-old Hans Goslich was going to the United States to work for von Braun because the blind scientist could not afford to pay him. "Thus the sale on brains that started during those miserable years after 1945 goes on," the newspaper editorialized. A storm of publicity followed when a West German TV network held a fund-raising campaign on behalf of the blind scientist. The Special Projects Team's office was besieged with calls from German reporters wanting to know what was going on.16 

Whalen coordinated a scheme with other officers to keep a lid on the story, which never was reported in the American press. German reporters were told that the "scientist exchange program" operated under State Department auspices and that the U. S. military did not recruit scientists. One reporter from a Cologne magazine was allowed into Camp King to talk with project officers, but they carefully kept him away from the team's offices, where a group of scientists was waiting to come to the United States.17 

Paperclip recruiting continued to escalate in 1959 as tension between the United States and Russia grew stronger and the press reported rumors of war. Khrushchev announced a Soviet plan to turn West Berlin into a demilitarized "free city" and demanded that the Allied powers withdraw their troops by May 1959. Khrushchev's plan would leave the small island of democracy defenseless in the middle of Communist East Germany. The crisis escalated when Marshal Vasily Sokolovsky, chief of the Soviet armed forces, told a cheering crowd in Moscow that even if it meant starting a war, the Soviets would retaliate with force if the Western powers used force to remain in Berlin. "And the United States will not succeed in sitting it out on either side of the ocean with impunity," Sokolovsky warned. "The Soviet Union has intercontinental rockets, and no oceans will save the United States from retaliation."18 

Then, in March 1959, President Eisenhower announced that he had not ruled out using atomic bombs if the Berlin crisis escalated into a war. Eisenhower said he thought fighting a ground war against Soviet troops in Europe was hopeless. "What good would it do to send a few more thousands or indeed, a few divisions of troops to Europe?" he asked. To attempt to fight the vastly greater number of Soviet forces on the ground would be "a miscalculation" and an "error," Eisenhower said, but he emphasized that he had not discounted nuclear war. "I think we might as well understand this-might as well all of us understand this: I didn't say that nuclear war is a complete impossibility."19 

That same month, Whalen made the fateful decision to betray his country. He met Edemski at a shopping center in Alexandria, Virginia, and agreed to turn over America's defense secrets. From that day in March 1959 Whalen was a paid Soviet agent until he stopped spying in early 1963. He eventually gave the Soviets at least thirty to thirty-five U.S. Army manuals and oral information, for which he was paid approximately $14,000 in cash.20 

Edemski and another Soviet agent gave Whalen specific instructions about the kinds of information they wanted. They asked him to obtain documents relating to U.S. defense plans for West Berlin, including U.S. troop movements and plans to reinforce the U.S. forces in Germany. The Berlin crisis had resulted in a number of military exercises involving the airlift of combat troops from the United States to Europe and vice versa while Whalen was in the J.I.O.A. The Soviets directed Whalen to get information concerning the timetables of the airlifts and the specific destinations of the U. S. troops involved. The Soviets also wanted information concerning the realignment and streamlining of U.S. Army combat units, including details of combat strategy utilizing atomic bombs.21 

The full extent of Whalen's espionage activities and of the information he gave the Soviets is unknown. This account is based primarily on federal court records and Whalen's massive eight-volume dossier from the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command. The F.B.I. refused the author's F.O.I.A request for Whalen's file. But Whalen had told F.B.I. interrogators that he could not remember everything he had given the Soviet agents. For instance, he claimed that he could positively identify only seventeen of the thirty to thirty-five manuals he had given them. In addition, I.N.S.C.O.M reports note that he had shredded "thousands of documents" while working in the J.I.O.A.22 

Nevertheless, as one Department of Defense investigator reported, "it must be assumed that he probably gave them any information to which he had access." Army intelligence documents show that that definitely included information about the German scientist projects.23 

Four months after Whalen began actively spying, he was promoted to director of the J.I.O.A, on July 2, 1959. In that position Whalen sent lists of German or Austrian scientists to the State Department's visa director, Thomas G. Spence, asking State to issue visas so that they could enter the United States. Whalen's memos certified that "these aliens are not now, nor likely to become security threats to the United States," even though investigations on several scientists had not been completed. Whalen also sent the scientists' personal history forms to the F.B.I., noting that a complete security investigation had been conducted "with favorable results."24 

Ninety-four individuals were brought to the United States under Paperclip in 1959. Most were employed by the Army in Huntsville or at Fort Monmouth. Others worked for the Navy at China Lake, California, or White Oak, Maryland, where the earlier wind tunnel group was based. The Air Force's group primarily went to Wright-Patterson in Dayton. In addition to Paperclip recruits, an unknown number of others worked under Project 63 or National Interest for Martin Marietta, General Electric, and other defense contractors or for universities, including Yale.25 

Friedwardt Winterberg[L] was one German scientist who was named as a candidate for J.I.O.A's denial Project 63 in 1959. As the reader will learn later, in 1985 Winterberg positioned himself as media spokesman for Arthur Rudolph[R] when Rudolph left the country rather than face war crimes charges. In January 1959 the thirty-year-old physicist was demanding a salary of over $1,000 a month. A.C.S.I Director of Plans Brigadier General Richard Collins told the Special Projects Team that Winterberg might be considered for J.I.O.A's project if he discontinued that demand. "Age and lack of experience would cause prospective employers to be reluctant to offer such a salary," Collins wrote. It was suggested that Winterberg be sent to the Alamac Hotel for job interviews. Winterberg accepted a position at Ohio's Case University in 1959 and currently is with the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada.26 

The 1959 group also included older scientists who had established their careers under Hitler. One was forty-seven-year old Hans Dolezalek, a German meteorologist who had worked for the Wehrmacht Weather Service during World War II and had been an early member of the S.A, the brown-shirted storm troopers. The J.I.O.A was not supposed to actively recruit scientists after 1948. Yet the team's recruiter, Knut Lossbom, had approached Dolezalek as early as 1953, sending him forms to apply for work in America. Dolezalek visited America in 1958 to attend a conference of meteorological experts. He accepted a position under Paperclip at AVCO in Wilmington, Massachusetts, for $13,000 a year, twice the salary offered by Fort Monmouth.27 

Another 1959 recruit was working as a dishwasher in Canada when he asked Wernher von Braun for a job. Sixty-one-year old Friedrich Wigand was first touted as a top German rocket scientist, but after he arrived in Huntsville he admitted that he had never even seen a rocket. He had been a lieutenant in the Wehrmacht stationed for a time at Kummersdorf, where some of Germany's rocket work was being done. After the war, Wigand immigrated to Canada and worked on a farm picking sugar beets. In 1956, he got a job washing dishes at a hospital in Calgary. "Every night after my work in the kitchen, I studied my chemistry and my physics," said the self-taught chemist. He arrived in Huntsville in May 1959 and obtained a position as a lab technician at Brown Engineering Company.28 

One physicist was returned to Germany when he could not find permanent employment in America. Fritz Rossmann, a former S.S member, had worked for the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville and the Patrick Air Force Base in Florida. Despite a more lenient immigration law, Rossmann had problems obtaining permanent residency because of his S.S and Nazi party memberships and the fact that he had been arrested twice by Army C.I.C agents and convicted by a denazification court. During the war he had been chief of the atmospheric electricity section of the German Glider Research Institute in Braunschwieg. Rossmann returned to Germany in 1959 and joined the faculty at the University of Munich.29 

Whalen's position as J.I.O.A director in charge of the German scientist program gives rise to disturbing questions about further services he might have provided his Soviet handlers. 

• Did he bring in a spy or saboteur? Whalen could have inserted a specialist hand-picked by the Soviets into a crucial area of American defense-related research, where the scientist-agent could then either sabotage our efforts or report on them to his spy masters. 

• Did he use blackmail to recruit a spy or saboteur from among the approximately sixteen hundred Paperclip specialists and hundreds of other J.I.O.A recruits brought to this country since 1945? It certainly is clear from the evidence that many of them had a lot to hide. 

• Did he give the Soviets information on research being done by J.I.O.A specialists all across the country? These specialists worked on guided missiles for the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force. They worked in the NASA space program, in aeromedical research, in atomic, biological, and chemical warfare research, and on the latest designs in jet aircraft and submarines. They worked at nearly every military installation and for most key defense contractors across the country, and in all of those locations they had access to classified information. 

Whalen did pass on information gleaned from the watch list of scientists working on defense projects in West Germany. The scientists research was closely monitored by Army C.I.C agents and other individuals. This information obviously would have provided the Soviets with up-to-date knowledge of West Germany's defense research. 

The issue of how much use Whalen made of the intelligence information obtained from scientists also is important. It should be clear by now that J.I.O.A officers viewed Paperclip as an intelligence project, not an exploitation project. This view was discussed during a March 1960 meeting to decide whether the three projects should be continued. In that meeting, Whalen concluded that the projects had produced a "vast amount" of intelligence information and should be continued for that reason. Project 63, the denial project, was even defined as "definitely an intelligence program." Army intelligence officers interrogated scientists in America who corresponded with foreign scientists and attended international scientific conferences to learn what other countries were doing.30 

Whatever use the Soviets made of Whalen's connection with the J.I.O.A projects, the material he provided them from other sources was damaging enough. Because of his position in the J.C.S, Whalen was able to requisition documents to meet the demands of his Soviet handlers. He sold the Soviets army manuals, which were classified as secret, that gave details of U. S. Army nuclear artillery and missile capabilities and included information on Hawk and Nike missiles. One manual was entitled "Field Artillery Missile Group." Another was a Department of the Army technical bulletin that described the Nike-Ajax and Nike-Hercules anti-aircraft guided missile systems and included detailed information on electronic countermeasures. Whalen, as one of the destruction officers for the J.C.S, was able to destroy the documents after they were returned by the Soviets.31 

In addition to selling classified documents, Whalen made oral and handwritten reports based on his conversations with colleagues in the J.I.O.A, the Foreign Liaison Office, the A.C.S.I, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff office. One 1970 investigation noted that none of the officers from whom Whalen obtained information was involved in espionage. The report stated: 

There is absolutely no evidence of connivance by others. In effect, Whalen used friendship as a vehicle to move conversations to a topic in which he had immediate interest in satisfying his handlers. These innocent parties were guilty of nothing more than a certain laxity in security in that they allowed themselves to, be duped into discussing sensitive material to which subject had no established need-to-know.32 

Whalen took advantage of casual conversations with associates in the Pentagon to obtain information for the Soviets concerning the movement of troops and the reorganization of U.S. Army combat units. Some of that information included data regarding mobile combat units equipped with Honest John rockets.33 

Whalen met Edemski once a month in shopping center parking lots in Alexandria, Virginia, where they held operational planning meetings. On three or four occasions Whalen gave Edemski classified information about plans to evacuate U.S. civilians in West Germany in the event of a surprise attack by the Soviets. Several other times Edemski took notes on a three by-five-inch pad of paper while Whalen made oral reports about the U.S. buildup or reduction of troops in Europe and defense plans for West Germany and France.34 

Other oral reports to Edemski contained information from Washington Liaison Group projects in which Whalen had participated. He was the Department of Defense representative on the Liaison Group, whose purpose was to devise worldwide plans to evacuate and save the lives of U.S. citizens abroad in case of nuclear attack or imminent hostilities. The Liaison Group, headed by State Department representative Walter Mueller, met weekly in the State Department building. The members discussed the number of Americans living in foreign countries, the number of military personnel to be involved in evacuation plans, strategic evacuation "hot spots," such as West Germany and, particularly, Berlin, and other vital information. The J.I.O.A's activities were extremely relevant to the Liaison Group's concerns, since there were plans to evacuate German scientists from Europe in case of war, and one main feature of Paperclip from the beginning was keeping track of scientists in Europe and their activities.35 

Once Whalen told Edemski the details of meetings he had attended in Beirut, Lebanon, and Rome on the evacuation of U.S. civilians. On another occasion he disclosed information from an agreement between the departments of Defense and State that Whalen said had been written in part by him as a member of the Liaison Group. This agreement contained details of secret plans for the evacuation of U. S. civilians and military dependents worldwide and defined the responsibilities of the Defense and State Departments in executing those plans in the event of war with the U.S.S.R.36 

During the time that Whalen spied for the Soviets, he not only was promoted to chairman of the J.I.O.A but he passed a background investigation that cleared him for access to classified information. A security investigation on October 22, 1959, cleared him for access to both top-secret and cryptologic information. Although the investigation reported that he "occasionally drank to excess and that between 1952 and 1959 he had recurrent financial problems," it did not uncover evidence that he was a spy.37 

Lieutenant Colonel Norris said he did not notice Whalen "except for him walking around, beating on his chest, making rash statements." Other J.I.O.A officers certainly were aware of his drinking problem, but that did not trigger enough of a concern to prompt anyone to report him as a security threat. "After this thing broke I had people I knew come up to me saying he drank, he borrowed money," recalled Colonel Christopher, who rejoined the project in 1962. "I said, `Why the hell didn't you tell somebody? That's an indication.' "38 

Yet J.I.O.A officer Gardner did consider a college student as being suspect simply because he was researching Paperclip. Clarence Lasby was a student at the University of California at Los Angeles and had decided to write his doctoral dissertation on Project Paperclip. As part of his research Lasby sent questionnaires to a number of Paperclip scientists, including Hans Ziegler at Fort Monmouth, where the Guzmann sex scandal took place. And remember, earlier Ziegler had been given a little help by Army C.I.C agents with his denazification court decision.39 

On August 5, 1960, Ziegler telephoned Gardner, expressing "grave concern" that Lasby had asked several German scientists at Monmouth to fill out a questionnaire regarding their Paperclip experiences. Ziegler then turned Lasby's questionnaires over to E. M. McDermott, the security control officer at Monmouth, who advised the recipients of the questionnaires to "stand fast" and refrain from responding.40 

Gardner alerted other officers that he intended "to check the possible Communist affiliations of Laspy [sic] through appropriate agencies." And so he did. Gardner notified the F.B.I, the A.C.S.I, and the Office of Naval Intelligence and asked them to check out Lasby. In addition Gardner contacted a Captain Howell, described as the "J.C.S watchdog in the field of adverse or undesirable publicity." Gardner's investigation did not uncover any derogatory evidence against Lasby. But while Gardner was busy checking out an innocent college student, Whalen was wandering freely around the Pentagon gathering information to sell to the Soviets.41 

In 1960 the J.I.O.A brought fifty-five more Paperclip recruits to the United States. "We weren't overwhelmed with applications," recalled Norris. "They were mostly younger people with a bright future who didn't think they could get the opportunity to utilize their talents in Germany." Several went to work for the Army Signal Corps at Fort Monmouth: Karl Moeller had just obtained a doctorate in physics from the University of Heidelberg and Rupert Brand had been an engineer with Siemens. In addition, the U.S. Bureau of Standards in Boulder, Colorado, hired physicist Adalbert Goertz and Watervliet Arsenal in New York employed engineer Friedhelm Bachmann.42 

A number of others came in 1960 to work for universities, defense contractors, or private firms, including General Electric, Union Carbide, and the Case Institute of Technology. Thirty-year-old physicist Kurt Breitschwerdt obtained a position with Remington Rand. Thirty-five-year-old Reinhard Buchner parlayed his doctorate in experimental physics to become senior research engineer at AC Spark Plug in Boston. The Austrian Herwig Kogelnik, who had a doctorate in electronics from the Institute of Technology in Vienna, arrived in 1960 to work under a short-term government contract until his employment term began with Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1961.43

Meanwhile, Whalen's contact in Soviet intelligence was changed in February 1960 when Edemski was transferred to London and immediately promoted to the rank of general. During his farewell party at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, Edemski introduced Whalen to "Mike" and told Whalen to help the new man in the same way that he'd been helping Edemski. Mikhail "Mike" Shumaev was a known G.R.U agent and first secretary of the Soviet Embassy.44 

Following Edemski's departure, Whalen met with Shumaev approximately eleven times in Alexandria shopping center parking lots. He received $3,000 in cash between March and July 1960 alone for turning over America's defense secrets to the Soviets. Some of that information was included in oral reports and approximately ten to fifteen U.S. Army manuals and documents that were classified either confidential or secret. Whalen later told the F.B.I. that he could not remember the content of the information he gave Shumaev. In June 1960, for example, Whalen gave Shumaev a written report pertaining to three or four subjects, none of which Whalen could recall later, although he did remember that the information was classified confidential or secret and that he had obtained the information from conversations with other officers at the J.C.S.45 

By July Whalen's health had deteriorated dramatically due to his heavy drinking. His once-towering six feet three frame was now painfully stooped over from arthritis and recurring bouts of multiple sclerosis. He could not stay seated in one position for long and as a result was constantly pacing the floor. On July 4 he had his first heart attack and was hospitalized at DeWitt Army Hospital in Fort Belvoir, Virginia, where doctors told him to take it easy. He had another heart attack the day before Thanksgiving.46 

Whalen did not return to active duty after his first heart attack and he officially retired from the military in February 1961. But anyone who might think Whalen let serious health problems or retirement get in the way of his espionage activities would be dead wrong. One confidential source familiar with this and other espionage cases said that he had never seen as persistent and tenacious a spy as Whalen.47 

Whalen continued to roam the halls of the Pentagon until early 1963 to get information for the Soviets through conversations with officers he knew. This shocking example of Whalen's tenacity also raises serious questions about security-or lack of it-at the Pentagon. One officer reported that he saw Whalen sitting at a desk "reading papers" in a highly secret Joint Chiefs of Staff office a few months after Whalen had been hospitalized for his first heart attack. Another officer said that he had seen Whalen in a secret Army intelligence office where visitors were barred and that he had passed Whalen in the Pentagon corridors on one or two other occasions.48 

Just one month after Whalen retired from the military, he received $1,000 in cash for turning over more secret information during a meeting with Shumaev. After Whalen's retirement Shumaev instructed him to develop a contact within the Pentagon who could furnish Whalen with information and documents for the Soviets; to obtain civilian employment in the Pentagon that would provide him access to information of interest to the Soviets; and to visit the Pentagon in order to develop information through conversations with former military colleagues. Whalen indicated that he would try to comply with these instructions.49 

Whalen apparently was unsuccessful at finding an accomplice in his espionage activities. During the Cuban missile crisis, at the direction of Soviet intelligence, he did seek employment at the Defense Intelligence Agency and the A.C.S.I. One A.C.S.I officer said Whalen walked freely into his office, which was located in a highly sensitive Pentagon area that is off limits to visitors, to ask about a civilian job. Fortunately Whalen failed to obtain employment. Nevertheless, for two months following his retirement Whalen made frequent visits to the Pentagon to talk with acquaintances in the J.I.O.A. In April 1961, based on conversations with those persons and discussions he had overheard, Whalen prepared an oral report for Shumaev dealing with U.S. armed forces, defenses, and plans pertaining to the European theater. Thereafter, Whalen visited the A.C.S.I section at the Pentagon in quest of information for the Soviets.50 

From February 1961 until the last operational meeting that Whalen had with Shumaev in early 1963, the Soviet agent frequently upbraided him for lack of production. During their last meeting Whalen indicated that he would be unable to obtain further information and suggested that their relationship be ended. The Soviet tried to persuade Whalen to keep trying, but to no avail. After the meeting Shumaev persisted by telephoning Whalen several times-again to no avail.51 

Meanwhile, the F.B.I. had begun to sift through the evidence from an espionage case involving one Colonel Stig Wennerstrom, a Swedish Defense Ministry official who was convicted of espionage in 1964 and sentenced to life imprisonment for compromising the entire Swedish air defense system. Wennerstrom had been air attache in the Swedish Embassy in Washington from 1952 to 1957 and had frequently attended embassy parties with U.S. military officers, including Whalen. According to testimony at his trial, Wennerstrom gave the Soviets information on the U.S. defense system that included details of missiles, nuclear weapons, bombing sites and a lengthy report on his visit to a Strategic Air Command base where he was allowed to inspect nearly everything. He had also obtained a huge amount of classified material by bribing some of the officials he met during numerous trips to aircraft factories in the U.S. and Canada. "I had entree everywhere," he testified. Wennerstrom's Soviet handlers told him not to bother with such "unnecessary" intelligence as data on Defense Department personnel-those matters were being taken care of by "an agent or agents" within the Pentagon.52 

FBI agent Donald Gruentzel was conducting a damage assessment of the Wennerstrom case when he encountered Whalen's name during investigations into Wennerstrom's spying activities. At the same time, a counterintelligence source warned the F.B.I. that there was a Soviet mole high up in the Pentagon. In late 1963 Gruentzel visited Whalen in his home to inquire whether Whalen had any knowledge about Wennerstrom and Edemski. The F.B.I. put Whalen's house under surveillance and subpoenaed his bank records. Those documents revealed that Whalen, who had been deeply in debt, suddenly had come into an unexplained financial windfall in 1959. The FBI also placed an illegal wiretap on Whalen's home telephone, an action that nearly blew the Justice Department's case against Whalen in 1966.53 

On September 22, 1964, an Army C.I.C agent telephoned Whalen and asked if he would come to a meeting at the Pentagon. By now Whalen was downing nearly a quart of liquor a day. The following day, after three or four drinks, Whalen arrived in time for the one o'clock meeting. He met with two F.B.I. agents, Gruentzel and Paul Nugent, in a soundproof room near A.C.S.I offices, where, unbeknownst to the F.B.I., the Army surreptitiously recorded their conversation. During the meeting Gruentzel confronted Whalen with his bank records and asked repeatedly if he had furnished information to the Soviets. Although Whalen identified Edemski's photograph, he denied that he had given Edemski any information. After the meeting, Whalen went home and got drunk.54 

The next day Whalen met the agents at F.B.I. headquarters in Washington, where he underwent a polygraph exam. While Whalen was strapped to the polygraph machine, he thought that he was going to have another heart attack. "Just stop this," he told the agents. "I will tell you anything I can tell you, and let me sit down or lie down and rest somewhere." After Whalen rested for awhile, the agents continued the interview.55 

"We were discussing at this point again, his finances," Gruentzel later testified, "as to why he had been in debt for such a long period of time, up until 1959, and during '59 and '60 the debts were erased. He had no debts, more money was put in the bank account, and [we] suggested the possibility that, maybe, this was the fruit of selling information to the Soviets. And, at this point, he just blurted out, `O.k., you've got me over the barrel. I sold them the stuff.'"56 

Two years later, on July 12, 1966, a federal grand jury indicted Whalen of acting as an agent of the USSR and conspiring to gather or deliver defense information to the USSR pertaining to "atomic weaponry, missiles, military plans for the defense of Europe, estimates of comparative military capabilities, military intelligence reports and analyses, information concerning the retaliation plans by the U.S. Strategic Air Command and information pertaining to troop movements."57 

But Justice Department prosecutors had several difficulties with their case. First, there was the question of whether information about Whalen's finances had been obtained as a result of an illegal F.B.I. wiretap. Second, there was the question of whether the F.B.I. had advised Whalen of his rights during approximately thirty-six interrogations. Third, it was uncertain whether the court would allow the prosecutors to use confessions Whalen had made during the F.B.I. interrogations. Finally, as in many cases involving espionage, there was concern that confidential sources and sensitive defense information would be exposed if the case went to trial in open court.58 

Meanwhile, Federal Judge Oren Lewis issued a gag order forbidding the press from publishing any information about the confessions, even though that information had been discussed during a hearing in open court. Although there were numerous articles about the Whalen case in The New York Times, the Washington Post, and other media, the subject of Paperclip and Whalen's connection to the project never was revealed. No one ever reported what his job had been in the J.C.S. Witnesses who might have established the Paperclip connection and clarified other matters,such as the identity of Whalen's loose-lipped sources,never were called to testify. The witness list included Cone and J.I.O.A officers Gardner and Lahodney. Although the J.I.O.A name was mentioned in open court, no one reported what that agency's mission actually was. An Army press officer told The New York Times that he did not know what Whalen's duties had been in the J.C.S. In addition, the Army's press release concerning Whalen's background was misleading. Whalen was described simply as an officer in the Joint Chiefs of Staff agency, and the biography that the Army gave the press abruptly ended in 1955.59 

Furthermore, no information was made public about Whalen's J.I.O.A connections to both the State and Justice Departments. The New York Times quoted a State Department press officer, Robert McClosky, as saying that one of Whalen's J.C.S committee assignments (the Washington Liaison Group) involved updating the plans for the evacuation of U.S. citizens from any area of potential trouble. According to McClosky, that assignment was Whalen's only access to the State Department "that I am aware of." Yet, as has been shown repeatedly, the J.I.O.A had close connections with both the State and Justice Departments. Included among the few J.I.O.A documents available are memos signed by Whalen to both the Visa Department and the attorney general listing German and Austrian scientists who were recommended by the J.I.O.A to be brought to the United States under Paperclip. State Department officials and the attorney general had approved their U. S. entry in part on the basis of J.I.O.A Director Whalen's recommendation.60 

In November 1966 U.S. Attorney C. Vernon Spratley announced that the Justice Department might not prosecute Whalen on espionage charges if the court suppressed a series of statements containing confessions that Whalen had given to the FBI. Judge Lewis warned government attorneys that "they can't rely on a confession alone." If Whalen claimed that he had made the statements involuntarily and if the government had no other evidence, "he will be set free regardless of how guilty he is," the judge added.61 

Behind the scenes, Whalen cut a deal with the Justice Department. Whalen was concerned that if convicted of espionage, he would be stripped of his military benefits and his family would suffer as a result. Whalen agreed to plead guilty to a lesser charge if special legislation was passed guaranteeing his wife the survivor benefits accruing from his retired military status. This also meant that when Whalen died he could be buried alongside America's military heroes at Arlington Cemetery.62 

Confronted, with the lesser charge on December 17, 1966, Whalen told Judge Lewis, uncertainly, "Uh-I will plead guilty." Not satisfied with this answer, the judge explained the charges to Whalen in detail. At one point Whalen said he did not "understand the terminology" of the charges. "I'll put it in lower language," Lewis answered.63 

"You are charged with conniving . . . to get secret documents pertaining to U.S. defense and giving them to the Russians to use against us. . . . Did you do that, Colonel?" "Yes, sir," Whalen answered, betraying little emotion.64 

After accusing Whalen of "selling me and all your fellow Americans down the river," Judge Lewis sentenced the man who had been at the helm of Paperclip while operating as a Soviet spy to fifteen years' imprisonment.65

next
Moon Walk ih the Shadow of the Third Reich-145 

CHAPTER 11: PIPELINE TO THE ALAMAC HOTEL 
1. Contract terms with Alamac Hotel is in "Minutes of JIOA Liaison Officers Meeting," 26 February 1951, G-2 Paperclip files, RG 319, WNRC. The Alamac Hotel is now a condominium complex. 
2. Detailed statistical reports are in JIOA post-1952 administrative files, RG 330, NARS. 
3. For a copy of a Project 63 flyer with contract information see State fiche, RG 59, NARS. Policy: JCS 1363/75, RG 218, NARS. 
4. Special Projects Team reports are in ACSI post-1952 Paperclip files, RG 319, WNRC. 
5. Author interview with retired Army Master Sergeant George Meidlein. 
6. Information on Neumaier, Ulm, Lohninger, and other Austrians is in "Austrian Scientists," IRR dossier, RG 319, NARS. 
7. Ernest Richter, Special Projects Team, trip report to ACSI, 16 April 1957, ACSI post-1952 Paperclip files, RG 319, WNRC. 
8. Information on Krejci-Graf and Kress: see "Austrian Scientists." 
9. Memo, Colonel Lewis Perry to ACSI, 6 July 1951, JIOA administrative files, RG 330, NARS. 
10. Ibid. 
11. Houdremont was tried in Nuremberg, case 10, U.S. v. Krupp et al., M896, RG 238, NARS. Quote is from Minutes of JIOA Liaison Officers Meeting, 2 February 1951, G-2 Paperclip files, RG 319, WNRC. 
12. Minutes of JIOA Liaison Officers Meeting, 2 February 1951. 
13. Ibid. On Kamptner see AC of S report, USFA Headquarters, 29 August 1950, in Kamptner INSCOM dossier XE271686. 
14. Minutes of JIOA Liaison Officers Meeting, 2 February 1951. 15. Blome information: Hunt, "U. S. Coverup of Nazi Scientists." Original Alsos interrogation: Kurt Blome INSCOM dossier XE001248. 
16. Hunt, "U.S. Coverup of Nazi Scientists." Blome court decision: Brandt. 
17. Hunt, "U.S. Coverup of Nazi Scientists." Fort Detrick interrogation: Blome's INSCOM dossier. 
18. For copies of contracts see Kurt Blome's INSCOM dossier and his JIOA dossier, RG 330, NARS. 
19. Memo, Dr. J. B. Koepfli to State Department, 6 April 1951. See 304 Notes also J. B. Kcepfli to Frederich Nolting, 14 January 1952, regarding the JIOA misrepresenting contracts and CIA and State comments about the JIOA's "dubious" recruiting methods, including an "ex-diamond merchant from LA"; all are from State fiche, RG 59, NARS. 
20. For a Project 63 flyer see State fiche, RG 59, NARS. 
21. Complaints by Helmut Ruska are in memo, Carl Nordstrom, Chief Scientific Research Division, HICOG, to JIOA Director Benjamin Heckemeyer, 7 December 1951, JIOA administrative files, RG 330, NARS. Buss complaints: Wilhelm Buss IRR dossier EE392034, RG 319, NARS. 
22. Cable, John McCloy, HICOG, to Secretary of State, 21 February 1952, State fiche, RG 59, NARS. 
23. Karl Weber, CIA Frankfurt, to Marshall Chadwell, CIA Washington, CIA memo S/C (4-5-6), OSI (7-8), 20 February 1952, State fiche, RG 59, NARS. But the West German government could not have been too happy with the CIA either; see Alistair Horne, Return to Power (New York: Praeger, 1956), pp. 121-23, for a short but fascinating account of a CIAbacked guerrilla unit that was caught operating in West Germany with a "liquidation" list that included top West German government officials. 
24. Memo, Karl Weber to P. G. Strong, March 18, 1952, State fiche, RG 59, NARS. 
25. Air Research and Development Command. See also Colonel U. P. Williams, "Alleged Recruitment Program," memo to the ACSI, 23 November 1956, noting the value of continuing Paperclip and an estimated 420,000 engineering school graduates in Russia, ACSI post-1952 Paperclip files, RG 319, WNRC. 
26. Geehan interview. 
27. Ibid. 
28. Ibid. 
29. Ibid. 
30. Air Research and Development Command. 
31. For information on Herbert Alfke see CIA Biographic Register, July 1952; and memo, CIA, Liaison Division, to Director of Intelligence, U.S. Air Force, 23 August 1952-both in the Alfke JIOA dossier, RG 330, NARS. 
32. See Ampatco file, JIOA administrative files, RG 330, NARS. 
33. Information on Klein: Lieutenant Colonel Eugene Cook to JIOA Director, 1 June 1950, memo noting that Klein "has been dropped from the list for security reasons," JIOA administrative files, RG 330, NARS. 
34. Wuensch's U.S. entry is noted in cable, HICOG to 66th Army CIC, March 1950, in Guido Wuensch IRR dossier XE187525, RG 319, NARS. 
35. Anne Burger biography and biological warfare job description: memo, C. F. Berrens, Naval Medical Research Institute, to Chief of Naval Notes 305 Operations, 27 November 1950, JIOA administrative files, Navy Escape Clause, RG 330, NARS. Erich Traub biography is in Traub's JIOA dossier, RG 330, NARS. 
36. Traub's trip to Turkey is discussed in Alsos interrogation of Kurt Blome, Blome INSCOM dossier XE001248. 
37. Author interview with retired Air Force Colonel Stone Christopher. 
38. Ibid. 
39. Geeham interview; records on Oberth's U.S. entry are in ACSI post-1952 Paperclip files, RG 319, WNRC. 
40. Axster interview. 
41. Air Research and Development Command; Ernst Czerlinsky Berlin Document Center report, 1 June 1953 contract, and Basic Personnel Record for German Specialists listing NSDAP, SS, SA, and other organizations are in Ernst Czerlinsky IRR dossier XE301737, RG 319, NARS. 
42. Biographies are in Horst Gerlach's and Fritz Klaiber's ACSI dossiers, ACSI post-1952 Paperclip files, RG 319, WNRC. 
43. Biographies are in Eduard Wulkow's and Hermann Donnert's ACSI dossiers, ACSI post-1952 Paperclip files, RG 319, WNRC. 
44. Osenberg signed a certificate transferring Pfeiffer to Kiel on 13 April 1944, in Albert Pfeiffer INSCOM dossier. 
45. Christopher interview. For an example of polygraph questions see Hans Dolezalek INSCOM dossiers XI574906 and I13B488. 
46. Christopher interview. 
47. JIOA 1957 list, JIOA post-1952 administrative records, RG 330, NARS (declassified per author's FOIA request). 
48. Messerschmitt use of slave laborers is described in Benjamin Ferencz, Less Than Slaves (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979); Messerschmitt denazification: "Messerschmitt Fined as Nazi," The New York Times, 27 May 1948. 
49. Ferencz, Less Than Slaves; The New York Times, April 3 and 5, 1963. 
50. Wilhelm Wessel biography: Wessel's ACSI dossier, in ACSI post1952 Paperclip files, RG 319, WNRC; Otto Cerny information is in memo, Mrs. Hedemarie Cerny to Andrew Loehr, Special Projects Team, 19 September 1956, in Cerny INSCOM dossier GE009781. 
51. Lists of Fort Monmouth recruits, Josef Parth's ACSI dossier, and Hans-Joachim Naake's ACSI dossier are in ACSI post-1952 Paperclip files, RG 319, WNRC. 
52. Ivan Simitch, "Memo for the Record," 8 July 1953; Hans Ziegler, "Memo for the Record," 14 August 1953; and Ivan Simitch, "Memo for the Record," 14 August 1953-all in ACSI post-1952 Paperclip files, RG 319, WNRC. 306 
53. Olaf Guzmann statement and Major Lewis Saxby, "In the Matter of CWO Ivan Simitch and Mr. and Mrs. Guzmann," 18 January 1954, are in the Guzmann ACSI dossier, ACSI post-1952 Paperclip files, RG 319, WNRC. 
54. Ibid. 
55. Ibid. 
56. Colonel Frank Moses, "Memorandum," 11 November 1953, in the Olaf Guzmann ACSI dossier, ACSI post-1952 Paperclip files, RG 319, WNRC. 
57. American Chemical Society complaint: memo, Herbert Schon to Colonel Kight, Army Press Desk, 21 November 1956; and memo, Colonel U. P. Williams to ACSI, 23 November 1956-both in ACSI post-1952 Paperclip files, RG 319, WNRC. 
58. Ambassador James Conant to Secretary of State, 13 July 1956, State fiche, RG 59, NARS. 
59. ACSI Deputy Director General Robert Schow to JIOA, 26 July 1956; and U. P. Williams, AC of S, to CRD, 26 November 1956-both in ACSI post-1952 Paperclip files, RG 319, WNRC. 
60. Christopher interview. For Christopher correspondence on name change to Project DEFSIP see memo, JIOA Director Stone Christopher to Army, Navy, Air Force Intelligence Chiefs, 26 March 1957, JIOA post1952 administrative files, RG 330, NARS. 
61. Walter Sullivan, "Soviet Launches Earth Satellite," The New York Times, 5 October 1957. 
62. Colonel Benjamin Heckemeyer to ACSI Deputy Director General Robert Schow, 1 November 1957, in ACSI post-1952 Paperclip files, RG 319, WNRC. 

Notes CHAPTER 12: WHAT PRICE TREASON? 
1. Whalen biography is from ACSI, "The William H. Whalen Case," ACSI Case Summary, 1968, in William Whalen INSCOM dossier B1009214. 
2. Whalen's relationship with Edemski and Edemski's biography are in Whalen's INSCOM dossier. 
3. Quote is from Eugene Stapleton, "Memorandum for the DOI," 1 September 1970, Whalen's INSCOM dossier. 
4. ACSI, "Whalen Case"; U.S. Army Intelligence Command, "Summary of Information," memo, 27 August 1970, in Whalen's INSCOM dossier. Information on Whalen's finances is in Whalen trial records. 
5. ACSI, "Whalen Case." 
6. Walter Sullivan, "Soviet Launches Earth Satellite," The New York Times, 5 October 1957; and The New York Times, 14 September 1959. Notes 307 
7. Author interview with Rocco Petrone. 
8. Whalen's biography: in ACSI, "Whalen Case"; information on other officers is from JIOA post-1952 administrative files, RG 330, NARS, and ACSI post-1952 Paperclip files, RG 319, WNRC. 
9. Author interview with retired Army Colonel Robinson Norris. 
10. Colleagues' descriptions of Whalen with sources' names deleted: Agent Report, 1 June 1965; 902d Intelligence Corps Group, "Memo for the Record," 1 November 1964; and Agent Report, 8 December 1964-a11 from Whalen's INSCOM dossier. 
11. JIOA to Special Projects Section, U.S. Army, Europe, 7 November 1957, in Hans Longosch's ACSI dossier, ACSI post-1952 Paperclip files, RG 319, WNRC. 
12. Statistics and information on where recruits worked are in JIOA post-1952 administrative files, RG 330, NARS. 
13. Popodi biography is in INSCOM dossier GE012017; Nowatny information is in "Austrian Scientists." 
14. See especially "Request for BDC and Wast Check," 7 November 1958, in Gorges INSCOM dossier HE031272. 
15. "Complaint Made by Telefunken to the U.S. Charge d'Affaires in Bonn Concerning an Offer of Employment Extended to a Telefunken Employee," unsigned memo, 26 November 1959, in JIOA post-1952 administrative files, RG 330, NARS. 
16. Quotes are from Bild-Zeitung, in the Hans Goslich ACSI dossier, ACSI post-1952 Paperclip files, RG 319, WNRC. 
17. Memo, Major George Lanstrum, ACSI, to Major Lewis Saxby, Special Projects Section, Frankfurt, 22 November 1957, in the Hans Goslich ACSI dossier, ACSI post-1952 Paperclip files, RG 319, WNRC. 
18. Max Frankel, "U.S. Refuses to Yield Rights: Soviet Asks Talk," The New York Times, 28 November 1958; and Osgood Caruthers, "Gromyko Warns of `Big War' Peril in Berlin Dispute," The New York Times, 26 December 1958. 
19. Jack Raymond, "President Bars Troop War in Europe But He Declines to Rule Out a Nuclear War," The New York Times, 12 March 1959. 
20. ACSI, "Whalen Case." 
21. ACSI, "Damage Assessment in the Case of Whalen," April 1965, in Whalen's INSCOM dossier. 
22. ACSI, "Administrative Investigation Concerning the Assignment of Lt. Colonel William Henry Whalen," memo, 1 February 1965, in Whalen's INSCOM dossier. 
23. ACSI, "Damage Assessment." 
24. Whalen's memos to the State Department are in JIOA post-1952 administrative files, RG 330, NARS. 308 
25. Lists and statistics: ibid. 
26. For Winterberg listings see Brigadier Ger.eral Richard Collins, "Disposition Form: Alien Specialists Interested in Employment in the United States," 5 January 1959; and memo, Brigadier General Richard Collins to ACSI, Special Projects Section, 9 January 1959-both in ACSI post-1952 Paperclip files, RB 319, WNRC. 
27. Letter, Knut Lossbom to Hans Dolezalek, 3 August 1953; Alien Personal History Statement, 25 August 1953, in Dolezalek's INSCOM dossier XE574904. 
28. Sandy McPherson, "Top German Scientist Washed Dishes in City," Calgary Herald, 5 May 1959; "German Immigrant to Get New Start at Local Firm," Huntsville Times, 6 May 1959; and "Rocket `Expert' Says He Wasn't," Huntsville Times, 10 May 1959. The personnel office at Brown Engineering confirmed Wigand's 1959 employment. 
29. Rossmann INSCOM dossier XE574904; see also letter, G. A. Little to Major Lewis Saxby, 31 October 1952, on Rossmann not qualifying for immigration, in Rossmann's ACSI dossier, ACSI post-1952 Paperclip files, RG 319, WNRC. 
30. Memo regarding intelligence meeting and enclosure no. 1 identified as being JIOA, 1 March 1960, in ACSI post-1952 Paperclip files, RG 319, WNRC. 
31. ACSI, "Damage Assessment." 
32. Stapleton, "Memorandum." 
33. Memo, Colonel Graham Schmidt to Director, Security Plans and Programs, Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense, March 1965, in Whalen's INSCOM dossier. 
34. ACSI, "Damage Assessment." 
35. Statement on "William Henry Whalen" was submitted to the American Embassy by Walter Mueller, 20 May 1963, State Department document referral from Whalen's INSCOM dossier. 
36. ACSI, "Whalen Case." 
37. Ibid. 
38. Norris and Christopher interviews. 
39. Hans Zeigler to JIOA Director Earle Gardner, 9 August 1960; E. M. McDermott to Security Control Officer, Fort Monmouth, Department of the Army, August 1960; and JIOA Director Earle Gardner to ACSI, 31 October 1960-a11 in JIOA post-1952 administrative files, RG 330, NARS. 
40. Ibid. 
41. JIOA Director Earle Gardner to Director of Intelligence, 8 August 1960; and JIOA Director Earle Gardner, "Memorandum for the Record," 5 August 1960-both in JIOA post-1952 administrative files, RG 330, NARS. Notes Notes 309 
42. Norris interview; lists of recruits are in Personnel Employed Under DEFSIP Contracts, in JIOA post-1952 administrative files, RG 330, NARS. 
43. Ibid. 
44. ACSI, "Whalen Case." 
45. U.S. Army Intelligence Command, "Summary"; and ACSI, "Damage Assessment." 
46. ACSI, "Whalen Case"; and Whalen. 
47. Ibid. 
48. Agent Report, 9 February 1966, in Whalen's INSCOM dossier. 
49. Whalen; and ACSI, "Whalen Case." 
50. ACSI, "Whalen Case." 
51. Ibid. 
52. Information on Wennersuom is in Fred Graham, "Retired Pentagon Officer Is Seized as Spy for Soviets," The New York Times, 13 July 1966; H. K. Ronblom, The Spy Without a Country (New York: Coward McCann, 1965); and Thomas Whiteside, An Agent in Place (New York: Viking, 1966). 
53. Whalen. 54. Ibid. 
55. Ibid. 
56. Testimony of Gruentzel is in ibid. 
57. Grand Jury Indictment is in ibid. 
58. Ibid. 
59. Ibid.; E. Kenworthy, "Officials Say FBI Agents Shadowed Spying Suspect From 1959 to 1961," The Nezv York Times, 14 July 1966; and Army press release, in Whalen's INSCOM dossier. 
60. Kenworthy, "FBI Agents Shadowed Spying Suspect"; memos to State and Justice Departments signed by Whalen are in both JIOA post1952 adminisuative files, RG 330, NARS, and ACSI post-1952 Paperclip files, RG 319, NARS. 
61. "U.S. May Not Prosecute Whalen on Spy Charges," Washington Star, 14 November 1966. 
62. Information on plea bargain is in memo, JAG Special Assistant Conrad Philos to Attorney General, 12 December 1966, in Whalen's INSCOM dossier. 
63. "Whalen Pleads Guilty to Defense Secret Plot," Washington Post, 17 December 1966. 
64. Ibid. 
65. Whalen.