In the late summer of 1945, the Nazi scientist program underwent a significant organizational change. At the behest of the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee, control over the program was removed from the Military Intelligence Division of the War Department, G-2, and given over to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The newly created Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) would now be in charge of decision making for the rapidly expanding classified program. The JIOA was a subcommittee of the Joint Intelligence Committee, which provided national security information to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. To understand the JIOA’s power, and how it ran the Nazi scientist program so secretively, is to first understand the nature of the Joint Intelligence Committee. According to national security historian Larry A. Valero, who has written a monograph on the subject for the CIA, the JIC was and remains one of the most enigmatic of all the American intelligence agencies. “The JIC structure was always in motion, always morphing and changing, a flexible, ad-hoc system,” Valero says. “Subcommittees came and went, so did staff officers, but JIC decisions always had to be by consensus and were always reported to the Joint Chiefs.” Little has been written about the inner workings of the JIOA, but the stories of individual Nazi scientists, and the JIOA’s trail of partially declassified papers, help to define this powerful postwar organization.
In the immediate aftermath of the German surrender, the Joint Intelligence Committee was focused on the emerging Soviet threat. Between June 15, 1945, and August 9, 1945, the JIC wrote and delivered sixteen major intelligence reports and twenty-seven policy papers to the Joint Chiefs. “The most important JIC estimates involved the military capabilities and future intentions of the USSR,” says Valero. Those intelligence estimates determined that the Soviets were ideologically hostile to the West and would continue to seek global domination, an attitude they had managed to skillfully conceal during the war. In September 1945, the JIC advised the Joint Chiefs that the Soviet Union would postpone “open conflict” with the West in the immediate future but only so it could rebuild its military arsenal and by 1952 be back at fighting strength. After this date, said the JIC, the Soviets would be ready and able to engage the United States in “total war.”
The following month, JIC intelligence report 250/4 (the fourth report in the JIC 250 series) warned the Joint Chiefs that “eight out of ten leading German scientists in the field of guided missiles” had recently gone missing from Germany, had most likely been captured by the Soviets, and were now at work in the USSR. Similarly threatening, noted the report, two German physics institutes had been seized by the Red Army and reassembled in the USSR—not just the laboratories and the libraries but the scientists as well. JIC 250/4 warned of “intensive Soviet scientific research programs” under way across Russia, all of which threatened the West. It was from within this environment of intense suspicion that the JIOA was created. The Nazi scientist program was an aggressive U.S. military program from the moment the JIOA took control, just a few weeks after two atomic bombs ended the war with Japan. The employment of German scientists was specifically and strategically aimed at achieving military supremacy over the Soviet Union before the Soviet Union was able to dominate the United States.
Attaining supreme military power meant marshaling all the cutting-edge science and technology that could be culled from the ruins of the Reich. In the eyes of military intelligence, the fact that the scientists happened to be Nazis was incidental—a troublesome detail. It had no bearing on the bigger plan. The clock was ticking and, according to the Joint Intelligence Committee, would likely run out sometime around 1952.
There was language in the existing Nazi scientist policy that now had to be dealt with by the JIOA. The phrase “no known or alleged war criminal” could not remain as part of policy nomenclature for long, nor could the phrase “no ardent Nazis.” These words had been put there to appease a few generals in the Pentagon, certain individuals in the State Department and moralists like Dr. H. P. Robertson, General Eisenhower’s chief of scientific intelligence. For the program to move forward according to this new strategy, the language needed to change.