If the Greek philosopher Heraclitus is right and war is the father of all things, then America’s Nazi scientist program was a nefarious child of the Second World War. Operation Paperclip in turn created a host of monstrous offspring, including Operations Bluebird, Artichoke, and MKUltra. Before Frank Olson became involved in the CIA’s poisoning and interrogation programs, he conducted research and development of the airborne delivery of biological weapons. Olson had been working in the field of biological weapons research since 1943. He was recruited by Detrick’s first director, Ira Baldwin, during the war. After the war, Dr. Olson became a civilian scientist at Detrick. He joined the Special Operations Division in 1950 and was part of a team that covertly tested how a weaponized biological agent might disperse if used against Americans.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Olson had traveled across the United States overseeing field tests that dispersed biological agents from aircraft and crop dusters in San Francisco, the Midwest, and Alaska. Some field tests involved harmless simulants and others involved dangerous pathogens, as Senate hearings later revealed. One such dangerous experiment was conducted by Olson and his Detrick colleague Norman Cournoyer. The two men went to Alaska and oversaw bacteria being sprayed out of airplanes to see how the pathogens would disperse in an environment similar to that of a harsh Russian winter. “We used a spore,” Cournoyer explained, “which is very similar [to] anthrax, so to that extent we did something that was not kosher. Because we picked it up all over [the United States] months after we did the tests.” A third man involved in the covert tests with Cournoyer and Olson was Dr. Harold Batchelor, the bacteriologist who learned airborne spray techniques from Dr. Kurt Blome, whom Batchelor consulted with in Heidelberg. Olson and Batchelor also conducted covert field tests in closed spaces across America, including in subways and in the Pentagon. For these tests, the Special Operations Division used a relatively harmless pathogen that simulated how a deadly pathogen would disperse. A congressional inquiry into these covert tests found them “appalling” in their deception.
By being part of a team of covert poisoners, be it out in the Alaskan tundra or inside a safe house at Camp King in Germany, Dr. Frank Olson and his colleagues violated the Nuremberg Code, which requires informed consent. As circumstances would have it, the great tragedy of Frank Olson’s life and death was that his own inalienable right to be protected from harm from his government and his doctor was violated on orders from the very same people to whom he had dedicated his life’s work.
This new war, the Cold War, was now the father of its own dark events.
PART V
“War is the father of all things.”
—Heraclitus
CHAPTER TWENTY
In the Dark Shadows
The Cold War became a battlefield marked by doublespeak. Disguise, distortion, and deception were accepted as reality. Truth was promised in a serum. And Operation Paperclip, born of the ashes of World War II, was the inciting incident in this hall of mirrors.
But in 1952, the heedless momentum of Operation Paperclip began to slow as conflicts emerged between the JIOA and the CIA over policies with the new West German government. German officials warned High Commissioner John J. McCloy that Operation Paperclip violated NATO regulations and even America’s own policies for governance in Germany. On February 21, 1952, McCloy sent a memo to the U.S. Secretary of State expressing his concern that if Paperclip was not curtailed, it could result in a “violent reaction” from officials in West Germany. With McCloy no longer expressing unbridled enthusiasm for Operation Paperclip, the JIOA began to lose its once indomitable grip on the program. But the CIA was not bound to the same NATO policies as were the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and so the CIA continued to do what it had been doing—namely, recruiting Nazi scientists and intelligence officers to act as advisers at Camp King. The five-year partnership between the two agencies began to unravel.
JIOA officials became furious as they watched the CIA poach German scientists and technicians from the Accelerated Paperclip lists. In response, and in spite of McCloy’s requests otherwise, in the winter of 1952 the JIOA prepared to send a twenty-man team to Frankfurt on a recruiting trip. Delegates included JIOA’s new deputy director, Colonel Gerold Crabbe; General Walter Dornberger; and five unnamed Paperclip scientists who were already working in America. When McCloy learned of the trip, he asked the State Department to intervene and cancel it, fearing it would draw the ire of German officials, which it did. The trip happened anyway.