A compromise was reached between U.S. officials and Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s office whereby the JIOA and the CIA agreed to stop recruiting new scientists but could continue to work with the scientists who remained on the original, President Truman–approved, thousand-person list. Official numbers vary dramatically in different declassified record groups, but there were approximately six hundred Paperclip scientists in the United States at this time, meaning some four hundred German scientists were still on the target list. JIOA renamed Paperclip the Defense Scientists Immigration Program, or DEFSIP, and the CIA renamed one vein of its involvement the National Interest program, but most parties still referred to it all as Operation Paperclip.
It was a dwindling empire. In 1956 the CIA ceded control of the Gehlen Organization to the West German government, which renamed it the BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst). The former Nazi general and his men were spies for Chancellor Adenauer’s government now. Then, in 1957, JIOA got a new officer in Lieutenant Colonel Henry Whalen, a man whose actions would have a profound effect on the legacy of the Paperclip program. By 1959 Whalen was promoted to deputy director of JIOA, which meant he had access to highly classified intelligence reports from scientists working on atomic, biological, and chemical weapons. Whalen had an office in the “E” Ring of the Pentagon, reserved for senior officials, and enjoyed direct access to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. During his year-long tenure as JIOA deputy director, no one had any idea that Whalen was working as a Soviet spy. It wasn’t until 1963 that the FBI learned that he had been passing military secrets to Colonel Sergei Edemski, a GRU intelligence agent posing as a military attaché in the Soviet embassy in Washington. By then Henry Whalen had already left the JIOA.
When the Justice Department began investigating Whalen, they seized all of the JIOA records that he had been working with. The FBI learned that Whalen had destroyed or given away thousands of Paperclip files. In 1966, a grand jury was presented with evidence against Whalen behind closed doors. He was indicted and the trial was conducted under a gag order, with the press denied access to what the FBI had learned and to Whalen’s confession. Journalists were prohibited from reporting on the trial, and no one made the connection between Whalen, the JIOA, and Operation Paperclip. The Nazi scientist program had long since faded from public discourse. Whalen was sentenced to fifteen years at a federal penitentiary but was paroled after six years. Most of the FBI’s investigation of Whalen remains classified, which likely explains why so few Paperclip files from that time frame are housed at the National Archives.
In 1962, the JIOA was officially disbanded. What remained of the Paperclip program was taken over by the Research and Engineering Department at the Pentagon. Under the DoD Reorganization Act of 1958, this new office had been created to handle the military’s scientific and engineering needs under a scientific director who reported to the Secretary of Defense. The act also gave a home to the Pentagon’s new in-house, cutting-edge science agency—the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA, later renamed DARPA—with a D for defense. The first director of the Research and Engineering Department was the nuclear physicist Herbert York. York also served as the first scientific director of ARPA. He was one of the nation’s leading experts on nuclear weapons and on Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, or ICBMs.
The ICBM is the “truly revolutionary military offspring” of Hitler’s V-2 rocket, says Michael J. Neufeld, curator of the Department of Space History at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and author of several books and monographs on German rocket scientists. The ICBM is capable of carrying, in its nose cone, a weapon of mass destruction and delivering it to a target almost anywhere in the world. The ICBM became the centerpiece of the Cold War—the ultimate sword. It also became the ultimate shield. “Total war” with the Soviets never happened. The Cold War never became a shooting war. Deterrence prevailed.