With the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency now in control, a new, aggressive recruitment process would begin. On its governing body, the JIOA had one representative of each member agency of the Joint Intelligence Committee: the army’s director of intelligence, the chief of naval intelligence, the assistant chief of Air Staff-2 (air force intelligence), and a representative from the State Department. The diplomat in the group was outnumbered by the military officers three to one.
The State Department officer assigned to the JIOA was Samuel Klaus, and he was perceived by his JIOA colleagues to be a troublemaker from day one. Samuel Klaus was a forty-two-year-old shining star in the State Department, a brilliant lawyer, avid horseman, and Hebrew scholar who also spoke Russian and German. Because Klaus was the man on the JIOA who was in charge of approving the visas for all incoming German scientists, it was important that he be on board with what the JIOA wanted to accomplish. But Samuel Klaus was fundamentally opposed to the Nazi scientist program, and this created intense conflict within the JIOA.
Klaus had hands-on experience with Nazi Party ideology, owing to his wartime work for the U.S. Foreign Economic Administration during the war. During the war, Klaus ran Operation Safe Haven, a program with international reach designed to capture Nazi assets, including stolen art and gold being smuggled out of Germany for safekeeping in neutral countries. During his years running Safe Haven, Klaus had interviewed hundreds of German civilians, and he had developed the belief that many “ordinary Germans” had profited from the Nazi Party and had had a tacit understanding of what was happening to the Jews. In his role as the State Department representative on the JIOA, Klaus argued that the Germans at issue were not brilliant scientists who had been unwittingly caught in a maelstrom of evil but rather that they were amoral opportunists of mediocre talent. JIOA records indicate that Klaus’s sentiments were shared by at least two of his State Department colleagues, including Herbert Cummings and Howard Travers. But it was Samuel Klaus who was unabashedly vocal about how he felt and what he believed. At a JIOA meeting in the late fall of 1945, Klaus vowed that “less than a dozen [German scientists] would ever be permitted to enter the U.S.” on his watch. For this, he was seen as a thorn in the side of military intelligence and he was also outnumbered. Per the JIOA’s charter, it was required to share its plan with a cabinet-level advisory board, which included a representative from the Department of Commerce. As it so happened, the representative from the Commerce Department, John C. Green, was an advocate of the German scientist program, apparently without benefit of knowing who these German scientists really were. In the fall of 1945 Green came up with an idea that would undermine Samuel Klaus’s resistance to Operation Overcast.
After the war in Europe ended, President Truman put the Department of Commerce in charge of a program designed to excite the nation about a unique form of reparations being culled from the defeated German state, namely, the acquisition of scientific and technical information. There would be no financial compensation coming from Nazi Germany, the Department of Commerce explained, but American industry could now benefit from a different kind of restitution: knowledge. Secretary of Commerce (and former vice president) Henry Wallace had been appointed by the president to supervise the release of thousands of what would become known as PB reports, named after the Commerce Department’s Office of the Publication Board. These reports contained non-armaments-related information collected by CIOS officers in Germany after the war. The idea behind the PB reports was to get average Americans to start their own small businesses inspired by German technological advances. These new businesses would be a boon to America’s postwar prosperity, the Commerce Department said.
Thanks to Reich scientists, the public was told, beverage manufactures could now sterilize fruit juice without heat. Women could enjoy run-proof hosiery. Butter could be churned at the rate of 1,500 pounds per hour. These lists seemed not to end. Yeast could be produced in unlimited quantities, and wool could be pulled from sheepskins without injuring the animal’s hide—all because of brilliant German scientists. Hitler’s wizards had reduced suitcase-sized electrical components to the size of a pinkie finger and pioneered electromagnetic tape.