On August 30, 1946, the undersecretary of the State Department, Dean Acheson, asked President Truman to make a decision on Paperclip. If the president did not act quickly, Acheson wrote, many of the German scientists “may be lost to us.” After four days of deliberation Truman gave his official approval of the program and agreed that Operation Paperclip should be expanded to include one thousand German scientists and technicians and allow for their eventual immigration to the United States. With presidential approval official, the attorney general was able to expedite the proposed changes to the program. A new JIOA contract was drawn up, allowing scientists who had been in the United States for six months to sign on for another year, and with the government maintaining the right to renew the contract for another five years. Operation Paperclip was transitioning from a temporary program to a long-term one. Former enemies of the state would now be eligible for coveted U.S. citizenship.
In response to the Clifford Report, the Joint Intelligence Committee conducted its own classified assessment of the Soviet threat, JCS 1696. The Soviet Union, wrote the JIC, sought world domination and would begin by bringing other nations into Soviet control to isolate the capitalist world. JIC saw a future war with the Soviet Union as being of apocalyptic proportion. In a war “with the Soviet Union we must envisage complete and total hostilities unrestricted in any way on the Soviet part by adherence to any international convention or humanitarian principals,” noted JCS 1696. “Preparations envisaged on our part and our plans must be on this basis.” In other words, for the United States to prepare for “total war” with the Soviets, America had to maintain military supremacy in all areas of war fighting, including chemical warfare, biological warfare, atomic warfare, and any other kind of warfare the other side dreamed up.
Copies of the classified report were sent out to thirty-seven or thirty-eight people, says CIA historian Larry A. Valero, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was not known if President Truman received a copy of JCS 1696, as he was not on the distribution list.
One of the scientists on the JIOA list of one thousand was Dr. Kurt Blome. The Allies were unsure what to do with Hitler’s biological weapons maker. Clearly, no discreet paperclip attached to Blome’s file would be able to whitewash the reality of his inner-circle role as deputy surgeon general of the Third Reich. But if the United States were to go to war with the Soviet Union it would mean “total war” and, according to JCS 1696, would likely include biological warfare. America needed to “envisage” such a scenario and to plan for it, with both sword and shield. Dr. Blome had spent months at the Dustbin interrogation facility, Castle Kransberg, but had recently been transferred to the U.S. Army Military Intelligence Service Center at Darmstadt, located eighteen miles south of Frankfurt. In the summer of 1946, Dr. Blome was employed there by the U.S. Army “in the capacity of a doctor.”
Dr. Kurt Blome’s expertise was in great demand, but his future was as yet undecided. In his Posen laboratory, Blome had made considerable progress with live plague pathogens, including bubonic and pneumonic plague. How far that research progressed remained vague, likely because it would put an unwanted spotlight on human experiments many believed had taken place there. Blome repeatedly told investigators that he had intended to conduct human trials but never actually did.
Blome’s American counterpart in wartime plague-weapon research was a left-leaning bacteriologist named Dr. Theodor Rosebury. During the war, the biological weapons work Rosebury conducted was so highly classified that it was considered as secret as atomic research. He had worked at a research facility outside Washington, D.C., called Camp Detrick. It was like Posen, only bigger. Detrick had 2,273 personnel working on Top Secret biological warfare programs. Like Blome, Rosebury worked on bubonic plague. Rosebury’s colleagues worked on 199 other germ bomb projects, including anthrax spore production, plant and animal diseases, and insect research, in an effort to determine which bugs were the most effective carriers of certain diseases.