For Samuel Klaus, the second proposed policy change was untenable. The Nazi scientist program was originally defined as “temporary,” with scientists working under military custody. That was how the War Department was able to circumvent immigration law for all the scientists already here. Now the JIOA was demanding that immigration visas be issued to scientists and their families. Even if the policy change were approved, Klaus argued, the visa process was a slow-going one. The State Department was legally required to approve each scientist’s visa application individually. This was not an overnight task but a lengthy investigative process. The person requesting a visa was required to list on his or her application contacts who would in turn be interviewed by a representative from State. The Office of the Military Government in Germany needed to compile a security report on each individual scientist. Nazi Party records would have to be pulled from the Berlin Document Center. If the scientist had won an honorary award from the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP)—the Nazi Party—or was a member of the SS or the SA, that needed to be explained. This was the law, Klaus said.
With the new information about the Soviets, Robert Patterson, now secretary of war, shifted from being weary of the Nazi scientist program to becoming its champion. Only a year earlier, Patterson had called the German scientists “enemies… capable of sabotaging our war effort,” and had warned the Joint Chiefs of Staff that “[b]ringing them to this country raises delicate questions.” Now he stated in a memorandum that “the War Department should do everything possible to clear away obstacles that may be raised in the State Department.” This in turn caused Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, Samuel Klaus’s boss, to soften his opposition to Operation Overcast. Due to the emerging Soviet threat, Secretary of State Byrnes and Secretary of War Patterson agreed informally that leaving German scientists unsupervised inside Germany, where they could be bought by the Russians, was too dangerous. If the State Department required individual investigations, so be it, Byrnes said. German scientists and their families should be allowed to enter the country under temporary military custody with an interim State Department blessing, Patterson wrote. The logic was simple. If we don’t get them, the Russians will.
The State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee, now acting as an advisory body to JIOA, confirmed agreement with the positions of the Secretaries of War and State but added another consideration to the argument. German scientists left to their own devices presented “serious military implications to the future of United States Security,” according to SWNCC. In other words, Samuel Klaus’s argument could now be used against him in the military’s attempt to speed up the visa application process. Yes, the German scientists were inherently untrustworthy—so much so that they could not be trusted if they were left unsupervised, let alone left available to competing powers.
On March 4, 1946, SWNCC Paper No. 275/5 went into effect. German scientists could now be admitted to the United States in a classified program that was in the “national interest.” This shifted the focus from whether or not someone was a Nazi to whether they were someone the Russians would be interested in. The commander in chief of U.S. Forces of Occupation in Germany and commander of U.S. Forces, European Theater (USFET), General Joseph T. McNarney, was told to draft a list of one thousand top scientists in Germany who were to be brought to the United States at once so the Russians couldn’t get them. A military intelligence officer named Colonel R. D. Wentworth was assigned to provide General McNarney with material support on behalf of Army Intelligence, G-2. The scientists’ families were to be given food and clothing and were to be housed in a secret military facility northeast of Munich called Landshut until their visa applications were approved. It was a radical revision of the initial terms of the German scientist program, and it was exactly what the JIOA had envisioned all along.
The following month, the members of JIOA were called together to spend an entire day hammering out new program protocols. Expert consultants like Alsos scientific director Samuel Goudsmit were invited to attend. Expedite the German scientist program, said the Joint Chiefs of Staff. There were now 175 German scientists in America under military custody, none of whom had visas. The consensus, save Klaus, was that the application process needed to be sped up. The thorniest issue had to do with getting the State Department to approve certain individuals who had clearly been Nazi ideologues, including members of the SS and SA. Also at issue were those men who received high awards for their important contributions to the Nazi Party. These were people that by regulation were entirely ineligible for citizenship.
The meeting resulted in a clever workaround. Army Intelligence officers reviewing the OMGUS security reports of certain scientists could discreetly attach a paperclip to the files of the more troublesome cases. Those files would not be presented to the State Department right away. Instead, those men would remain under military custody in America, most likely for a longer period of time than some of their fellows. As a result, the Nazi scientist program got a new code name. Operation Overcast had apparently been compromised after the families of the German scientists starting calling their U.S. military housing Camp Overcast. So from now on, the Nazi scientist program would be called Operation Paperclip.