Operation Paperclip

Operation Paperclip was a postwar U.S. government program that recruited German and Austrian scientists, engineers, and technicians and brought them to the United States for exploitation in military and civilian research. The program operated from 1945 through the early 1970s. At least 1,600 scientists and their dependents were brought to the United States under Paperclip and its successor programs.

The program was run by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency, a special intelligence office reporting to the Director of Intelligence in the War Department. The JIOA coordinated between the Army, Navy, Air Force, State Department, Department of Justice, FBI, and CIA. It compiled dossiers on scientists, managed their entry into the United States, and served as the liaison to British intelligence officers running a parallel program.

The program's original code name was Operation Overcast. It was renamed Operation Paperclip in November 1945, after Ordnance Corps officers began attaching paperclips to the folders of rocket experts they wished to employ in the United States.

The presidential authorization document, signed by Harry S. Truman on September 3, 1946, contains the screening standard that governed which scientists could enter the United States. That standard excluded anyone who was more than a nominal Nazi Party participant. It explicitly stated that position or honors awarded under the Nazi regime solely because of scientific ability would not disqualify a specialist. This standard is in the document Truman approved. It is not an allegation.

The FBI's internal summary, written January 7, 1983 and classified SECRET, confirms that in February 1947 the FBI reported to the Department of Justice that 16 of 124 scientists checked had Nazi Party membership in their files. The FBI stated at the time that it considered any person with Nazi Party connections a definite security threat. The program continued. The scientists received visas.

The FBI conducted 525 investigations of German scientists and specialists brought into the United States under the Paperclip program. It repeatedly refused to assume ongoing security responsibility for the scientists, stating this was outside its jurisdiction.

The documents do not establish that every Paperclip scientist was a war criminal. They establish that the U.S. government wrote a standard that allowed scientists with Nazi records to enter, was informed that some had those records, and continued the program.

Operation Paperclip does not stand alone in the declassified record. The scientists recruited under Paperclip went to work at institutions and programs that appear elsewhere in the government's own documents.

Several Paperclip scientists worked at Edgewood Arsenal, which later appears in the MKOFTEN and MKSEARCH records transcribed on this site. The institutional overlap between Paperclip, the postwar chemical and biological weapons programs, and the CIA behavioral research programs is documented, not speculative. The documents are the evidence.

The following documents have been transcribed in full as searchable HTML for the first time.