The pathway toward citizenship had begun. After consulate approval, the scientist was then let back into the United States, no longer under military guard but as a legal U.S. Scientists in the southwestern or western United States, accompanied by military escort, were driven in an unmarked army jeep out of the country into Mexico…With him, each scientist carried two forms from the State Department, I-55 and I-255, each bearing a signature from the chief of the visa division and a proviso from the Joint Chiefs of Staff… signifying that the visa holder was ‘a person whose admission is highly desirable in the national interest.’ The scientist also had with him a photograph of himself and a blood test warranting that he did not have any infectious diseases. “For Operation Paperclip, moving a scientist from military custody to immigrant status required elaborate and devious preparation, but in the end the procedure proved to be infallible. In this definitive, controversial look at one of America’s most strategic, and disturbing, government programs, Jacobsen shows just how dark government can get in the name of national security.

Was Operation Paperclip a moral outrage, or did it help America win the Cold War?ĭrawing on exclusive interviews with dozens of Paperclip family members, colleagues, and interrogators, and with access to German archival documents (including previously unseen papers made available by direct descendants of the Third Reich’s ranking members), files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, and dossiers discovered in government archives and at Harvard University, Annie Jacobsen follows more than a dozen German scientists through their postwar lives and into a startling, complex, nefarious, and jealously guarded government secret of the twentieth century. They were also directly responsible for major advances in rocketry, medical treatments, and the U.S.

Many of these men were accused of war crimes, and others had stood trial at Nuremberg one was convicted of mass murder and slavery. So began Operation Paperclip, a decades-long, covert project to bring Hitler’s scientists and their families to the United States. These were the brains behind the Nazis’ once-indomitable war machine. government faced many difficult decisions, including what to do with the Third Reich’s scientific minds. In the chaos following World War II, the U.S. The explosive story of America’s secret post-WWII science programs, from the author of the New York Times bestseller Area 51

Annie jacobsen paperclip