Ancillary Mercy полностью

Within the world of intelligence, the cold war started before World War Two ended. OSS officers such as Allen Dulles realized the importance of obtaining Nazi spies with Soviet expertise. With OSS/CIA money, they recruited the bulk of Hitler’s Abwehr intact. For years, in fact, this organization actually reigned as the dominant intelligence service in West Germany, before it was even legally constituted. Thus, an illegal, foreign-funded group held more power than the official West German intelligence organization.³³

Scientists, however, were the real prize. The competition was intense—Americans, Soviets, British, French, and even Argentines scrambled for scientists. Several were kidnapped, despite everyone’s denials. These German scientists, the most prominent of them being rocketry genius Wernher von Braun, were years ahead of Allied scientists in a number of areas, including aircraft design and chemical/biological weapons. There remained the small matter that many of them were ardent Nazis, some wanted for war crimes. But the U.S. military intelligence falsified their records before putting them to work. We can assume other countries did likewise.³⁴

Army intelligence (G-2) countered dissent against the project through wiretaps and domestic spying, and it soon became necessary for the army to lie to the State Department on a regular basis. The press promoted a sanitized version of the project to the American public. In late November 1946, the War Department issued a five-page press release favorably describing how German scientists were helping Americans at Wright Field. In December, Life and Newsweek gave the story national coverage. The Nazi past of many of the scientists escaped notice, as did the strong undercurrent of hostility many Americans at Wright Field had toward these “former” Nazis. All in all, it was perfectly orchestrated War Department propaganda posing as news. Paperclip continued as part of American policy through the 1950s and even into the 1960s, albeit in a more limited fashion. Congress and the public knew nothing about it for decades.³⁵

COMING TO AMERICA

After the Second World War, much effort went into reorganizing the American national security establishment. In September 1945, Ferdinand Eberstadt, upon Navy Secretary James Forrestal’s request to study various military merger proposals, recommended a “complete realignment of our governmental organizations to serve our national security.” Truman believed he was doing his part when in the same month he disbanded the OSS, scattering OSS personnel throughout the Departments of State and War. No doubt Hoover was gleeful.³⁶

However, Truman soon developed second thoughts about his OSS decision. In January 1946, he created a National Intelligence Authority (comprised of the Secretary of State, Secretary of War, Secretary of the Navy, and Chief of Staff) and, under it, a Central Intelligence Group (CIG)—the direct forerunner of the CIA. To head the CIG, Truman swore in old friend Rear Adm. Sidney Souers as the nation’s first director of central intelligence (DCI). The CIG’s mission was to “coordinate” information, and its operation was as modest as it was secret: it had no spies, no legal power, and was not financed by lawful appropriations, but rather with funds secretly diverted from the armed forces budgets.³⁷

CIA historian Thomas Powers called the CIG “something of a joke.” Certainly, compared with its later growth it was. But from humble beginnings, the CIG grew rapidly. On June 10, 1946, Hoyt Vandenberg, the army’s former director of intelligence, replaced Souers as head of CIG. By the year’s end, he enlarged CIG’s staff and won the right to collect intelligence in Latin America (although the ever-jealous Hoover denied him use of the FBI’s agents or files). By the end of 1946, the CIG also obtained the authority to engage in psychological warfare and conduct covert operations. We know that some policy makers regarded the ghost rockets as Soviet psychological warfare. It is plausible that covert action policy was, at least in part, a response to the ghost rockets.³⁸