Despite the urgency, the JIOA’s plan to make Operation Paperclip over into a long-term program was still at a standstill. By the spring of 1948, half of the one thousand German scientists bound for America had arrived, but not a single one of them had a visa. Troublemaker Samuel Klaus was gone from the State Department, but the JIOA could still not get the visa division to make things happen fast enough. On May 11, 1948, military intelligence chief General Stephen J. Chamberlin, the man who had briefed Eisenhower in 1947, took matters into his own hands. Chamberlin went to meet FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to enlist his help with visas. Cold War paranoia was on the rise, and both men were staunch anti-Communists. The success of Operation Paperclip, said Chamberlin, was essential to national security. The FBI had the Communists to fear, not the Nazis. Hoover agreed. Paperclip recruits needed the promise of American citizenship now more than ever, Chamberlin said, before any more of them were stolen away by the Russians. Chamberlin asked Hoover to put pressure on the State Department. J. Edgar Hoover said he would see what he could do. What, if anything, Hoover did remains a mystery. Three months later, the first seven scientists had U.S. immigrant visas. Now it was time to put the transition process to the test.
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. 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 either at Nuevo Laredo, Ciudad Juárez, or Tijuana. 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, Section 42.323 of Title 22, 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. After consulate approval, the scientist was then let back into the United States, no longer under military guard but as a legal U.S. immigrant in possession of a legal visa. The pathway toward citizenship had begun. If the scientist lived closer to the East Coast than the West Coast, he went through the same protocols, except that he would exit the United States into Canada instead of Mexico and reenter through the consulate at Niagara Falls.
It was an international crisis in June of 1948 that finally gave Operation Paperclip its long-term momentum. Early on the morning of June 24, the Soviets cut off all land and rail access to the American zone in Berlin. This action would become known as the Berlin Blockade, and it was seen as one of the first major international crises of the Cold War. “The Soviet blockade of Berlin in 1948 clearly indicated that the wartime alliance [between the Soviets and the United States] had dissolved,” explained CIA deputy director for operations Jack Downing. “Germany then became a new battlefield between east and west.” The CIA presence in Germany was redoubled as its plans for covert action against the Soviets shifted into high gear. The CIA needed to hire thousands of foreign nationals living in Germany to help in this effort—spies, saboteurs, and scientists—many of whom had spent time in displaced-persons camps and interrogation facilities operated by the U.S. Army in the American zone of occupied Germany. Initially, the CIA and the JIOA worked hand in glove inside Germany to thwart Soviet threats, but soon the two agencies would start competing for German scientists and spies.
The two agencies worked together inside a clandestine intelligence facility in the American zone informally called Camp King. The activities there between 1946 and the late 1950s have never been fully accounted for by either the Department of Defense or the CIA. Camp King was strategically located in the village of Oberursel, just eleven miles northwest of the United States European Command (EUCOM) headquarters in Frankfurt. Officially the facility had two other names: the U.S. Military Intelligence Service Center at Oberursel and the 7707th European Command Intelligence Center. A small plaque in a park outside the officers’ club explained to visitors the significance of the informal name. Colonel Charles B. King, an intelligence officer, had been in the process of accepting the surrender of a group of Nazis on Utah Beach in June 1944 when he was double-crossed and slain by a “strong and concentrated barrage of enemy artillery fire.” There was tragic irony in the name. Camp King had become home to many well-intentioned American officers trying to make deals with untrustworthy enemies. Many of these American officers would be double-crossed and at least one of them would be killed.
A lot had changed at Camp King since John Dolibois had personally delivered six Nazi Bonzen here in August 1945. The interrogation facility had become one of the most clandestine U.S. intelligence centers in Western Europe, and for more than a decade it would function as a Cold War black site long before black sites were known as such. Camp King was a joint interrogation center and the intelligence agencies that shared access to prisoners here included Army Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence, Naval Intelligence, and the CIA. By 1948, most of its prisoners were Soviet-bloc spies.