“ ‘I don’t like this,” Loucks wrote that his superior had informed him. “ ‘I don’t want to be made a fool of over this. Everyone seems to have cut them [the Nazis] off their list. To be friendly with them seems bad form.’ ”
But General Loucks noted in his diary that he had every intention of defying this superior’s request. He had become good friends with the German chemists. He regularly had meals with Walter Schieber and Richard Kuhn, and, on at least one occasion, Schieber had spent the night at Loucks’s house. “I’ll see them anyhow,” he wrote, in a diary entry dated February 1, 1950. The following day, Loucks was called back in to the Pentagon. “Went to Pentagon,” he wrote, “long session with H.Q. Int. [headquarters, intelligence] people… seemed interested in what we are doing [in Heidelberg]—would give me money necessary to exploit the Germans for scientific and technical intelligence.” In other words, what some at the Pentagon refused to condone, others were willing to support through covert means.
General Loucks’s secret Saturday roundtable at his house in Heidelberg with the Nazi chemists remained hidden from the public for six decades. Here was a brigadier general with the U.S. Army doing business with a former brigadier general of the Third Reich allegedly in the interests of the United States. It was a Cold War black program that was paid for by the U.S. Army but did not officially exist. There were no checks and no balances. Operation Paperclip was becoming a headless monster.
The CIA’s working relationship with the JIOA and Operation Paperclip had begun within a few months of the Agency’s creation. Within the CIA, Paperclip was managed inside the Office of Collection and Dissemination, and one of the first things requested by its administrator, L. T. Shannon, was “a photostatted copy of a set of files compiled by Dr. Werner Osenberg and consisting of biographical records of approximately 18,000 German scientists.” By the winter of 1948, hundreds of memos were going back and forth between the JIOA and the CIA. Sometimes the CIA would request information from the JIOA on certain scientists, and sometimes the JIOA would ask the CIA to provide it with intelligence on a specific scientist or group of scientists.
Also in the first three months of the CIA’s existence, the National Security Council issued Directive No. 3, dealing specifically with the “production of intelligence and the coordination of intelligence production activities within the intelligence community.” The National Security Council wanted to know who was producing what intelligence and how that information was being coordinated among agencies. In the opinion of the CIA, “the link between scientific planning and military research on a national scale did not hitherto exist.” The result was the creation of the Scientific Intelligence Committee (SIC), chaired by the CIA and with members from the army, the navy, the air force, the State Department, and the Atomic Energy Commission. “Very early in its existence the SIC undertook to define scientific intelligence, delineate areas of particular interest and establish committees to handle these areas,” wrote SIC chairman Dr. Karl Weber, in a CIA monograph that remained classified until September 2008. “Priority was accorded to atomic energy, biological warfare, chemical warfare, electronic warfare, guided missiles, aircraft, undersea warfare and medicine”—every area involving Operation Paperclip scientists. Eight scientific intelligence subcommittees were created, one for each area of warfare.