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FROM 2008: In the waning days of WWII, as the cold war began to freeze Europe, as the Iron Curtain was erected, intelligence agencies began a mad scramble to recruit the best and brightest minds from Nazi Germany. Learn more about how Nazi war criminals were brought over to found NASA, work in military weapons labs and start stay-behind networks in Western Europe to carry out terror attacks in the strategy of tension.

FLASHBACK SHOW NOTES:

Episode 049 – Paperclipped Nazis and Stay-behind Gladios

Interview 1836 – The 9/11 Emergency: From Gladio to Gun Grabbing – #NewWorldNextWeek

Interview 1843 – Daniele Ganser Exposes The Ruthless Empire

Corbett Report 2007-2008 Data Archive (USB Flash Drive)

TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome to Episode 049 of The Corbett Report, “Paperclipped Nazis and Stay-behind Gladios.”

That is an enigmatic title, to be sure. So let’s start by helping define that first term, “Paperclipped Nazis.”

This comes from a declassified government program called Operation Paperclip. We can start by getting a description of that program from the ForbiddenKnowledge.com, which has an article entitled “Operation Paperclip Case File.”

Quote:

Convinced that German scientists could help America’s post-war efforts, President Harry Truman agreed in September 1946 to authorize Project Paperclip, a program to bring selected German scientists to work on America’s behalf during the Cold War.

However, Truman expressly excluded everyone found to have been a member of the Nazi Party and more than a nominal participant in its activities or an active supporter of Nazism or militarism.

The War Department’s Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) conducted background investigations of the scientists. In February 1947, JIOA Director Bousquet Webb submitted the first set of scientists’ dossiers to the State and Justice departments for review. The dossiers were damning.

Samuel Clouse, the State Department’s representative on the JIOA board, claimed that all the scientists in this first batch were ardent Nazis. Their visa requests were denied.

Webb was furious. He wrote a memo warning that the best interests of the United States have been subjugated to the efforts expended in beating a dead Nazi horse.

He also declared that the return of these scientists to Germany, where they could be exploited by America’s enemies, presented a far greater security threat to the country than any former Nazi affiliations which they may have had, or even any Nazi sympathies that they may still have.

By 1955, more than 760 German scientists had been granted citizenship in the US and given prominent positions in the American scientific community.

Many had been longtime members of the Nazi Party and the Gestapo, had conducted experiments on humans in concentration camps, had used slave labor and had committed other war crimes.

In a 1985 exposé on the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Linda Hunt wrote that she had examined more than 130 reports on Project Paperclip subjects, and every one had been changed to eliminate the security threat classification.

President Truman, who had explicitly ordered no committed Nazis to be admitted under Project Paperclip, was evidently never aware that his directive had been violated. State Department archives in the memoirs of officials from that era confirm this.

In fact, according to Clarence Lasby’s book, Project Paperclip, project officials covered their designs with such secrecy that it bedeviled their own president. At Potsdam, he denied their activities and undoubtedly enhanced Russian suspicion and distrust, quite possibly fueling the Cold War even further.

A good example of how these dossiers were changed is the case of Werner von Braun. A September 18, 1947, report on the German rocket scientist stated: “Subject is regarded as a potential security threat by the military governor.”

The following February, a new security evaluation of Von Braun said: “No derogatory information is available on the subject. It is the opinion of the military governor that he may not constitute a security threat to the United States.”

Here are a few of the 700 suspicious characters who were allowed to immigrate through Project Paperclip.

Arthur Rudolph

During the war, Rudolph was operations director of the Mittelbau factory at the Dora-Nordhausen concentration camp, where 20,000 workers died from beatings, hangings and starvation.

Rudolph had been a member of the Nazi Party since 1931. A 1945 military file on him said simply “100% Nazi. Dangerous type. Security threat. Suggest internment.”

But the JIOA’s final dossier on him said there was nothing in his records indicating that he was a war criminal or an ardent Nazi or otherwise objectionable.

Rudolph became a US citizen and later designed the Saturn five rocket used in the Apollo moon landings. In 1984, when his war record was finally investigated, he fled to West Germany.

Wernher von Braun

From 1937 to 1945, Von Braun was the technical director of the Peenemunde Army Rocket Research Center, where the V-2 rocket, which devastated England, was developed.

As noted previously, his dossier was rewritten so he didn’t appear to have been an enthusiastic Nazi.

Von Braun worked on guided missiles for the US Army and was later director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.

He became a celebrity in the 1950s and early 1960s as one of Walt Disney’s experts on The World of Tomorrow.

In 1970, he became NASA’s associate administrator.

Kurt Blome

A high-ranking Nazi scientist, Blome told US military interrogators in 1945 that he had been ordered in 1943 to experiment with plague vaccines on concentration camp prisoners.

He was tried at Nuremberg in 1947 on charges of practicing euthanasia (extermination of sick prisoners), and conducting experiments on humans.

Although acquitted, his earlier admissions were well-known, and it was generally accepted that he had indeed participated in the gruesome experiments.

Two months after his Nuremberg acquittal, Blome was interviewed at Camp David, Maryland, about biological warfare.

In 1951, he was hired by the US Army Chemical Corps to work on chemical warfare.

His file neglected to mention Nuremberg.

End quote

Now, that’s an important article, and it goes on in much detail from there. But I think that gives you the start of an impression about what Project Paperclip was.

Again, it’s important to note that this is not some crazed conspiracy theory. This is information that has now been fully declassified and admitted by the government itself.

You can go to the National Archives at Archives.gov and look up Records of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Record Group 330, Office of Research and Engineering, and under the headline Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency, you’ll find this quote:

The Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) was established in 1945 as a subcommittee of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). The JIC served as the intelligence arm of the JCS, responsible for advising the JCS on the intelligence problems and policies and furnishing intelligence information to the JCS and the Department of State. The JIC was composed of the Army’s director of intelligence, the chief of naval intelligence, the assistant chief of Air Staff-2, and a representative of the Department of State.

The JIOA was given direct responsibility for operating the foreign scientist program, initially code-named Overcast and subsequently code-named Paperclip.

And under the heading Foreign Scientist Case Files 1945-1958, the following:

[. . .] personnel dossiers on over 1,500 German and other foreign scientists, technicians, and engineers who were brought to the United States under Project Paperclip and similar programs. Among the dossiers are those on Georg Rickhey, a former official at the Nordhausen underground V-2 rocket factory who arrived in 1946 but who left the United States in 1947 when he was tried (and acquitted) for war crimes by a U.S. military tribunal; Walter Schreiber, who had been instrumental in medical experiments on concentration camp inmates and who fled the United States to Argentina in 1952 after the appearance of a newspaper column about his activities; and Arthur Rudolph, who had been a V-2 project engineer and who left the United States in 1984 following the Department of Justice’s discovery of his role in the persecution of prisoners at the Nordhausen factory. Not included among the dossiers is one for rocket scientist Wernher von Braun. It was never transferred to NARA.

End quote

Again, that comes directly from Archives.gov. And I recommend all of my listeners go to CorbettReport.com and, under today’s episode, click on the documentation tab to find a link to this National Archives document at the present time index.

Now this Project Paperclip—and all of its implications—is, of course, frightening in and of itself.

The fact that these Nazi war criminals engaged in human experimentation, euthanasia, the development of plague vaccines, which were tested on concentration camp victims, and other atrocities, [and] were then allowed to participate in top-level American scientific programs is chilling.

When one starts to discover the deep connections between Nazi war criminals and the founding of NASA, it starts to shed new light on why so many important events in NASA history take place on Hitler’s birthday.
That’s a subject that I will leave my listeners to research for themselves.

But right now, let’s move on.

Project Paperclip, of course, was solely focused on bringing German scientific talent into America.

But this was not the only operation that was going on in post-World War II Germany to recruit ex-Nazis. In fact, businessmen, academics, and, of course, intelligence agents were also highly prized.

Hitler and the Nazis had been defeated. And now the uneasy truce between the USA and the Soviets had dissolved into a fog of paranoia, secrecy and intrigue.

The CIA’s first enemy was to be the Red Menace from Russia:

PRESIDENT HARRY S. TRUMAN: “Our homes, our nation. All the things we believe in are in great danger. This danger has been created by the rulers of the Soviet Union.”

In 1946, the CIA was desperate for information and intelligence on the Soviets. It was prepared to employ anyone with insider knowledge on the Russians, even if that meant working with the Nazis.

ROBERT LIVINGSTONE: “I was in Austria in the 1940s, and we were under tremendous pressure from our superiors to get information about the Soviet zone of Austria and about Soviet troop movements and Soviet political movements in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
And we had nobody. We had nobody. And so we went and recruited people. And we didn’t look very closely. There’s no doubt about it, we didn’t look very closely to the background of these people.”

LINDA HUNT: “Many of these people were hardcore Nazis. Some were out-and-out Nazi war criminals who should have been tried, and many got away with murder.”

ELIZABETH HOLTZMAN: “Using Nazi war criminals is how the CIA got started. And these were as bad guys as you could ever find.”

The CIA’s main Nazi spy asset was a man by the name of Reinhard Gehlen, seen here in secret footage with other Nazis employed by the CIA. Gehlen had been Hitler’s main spy chief against the Russians during the Second World War, so he had massive amounts of intelligence on the Soviets. The CIA thought he’d be the perfect man to do their spying for them.

LIVINGSTONE: “Reinhard Gehlen was a brigadier general in charge of intelligence on the Eastern Front until April of 1945. April 1945, a month before the war ended, he realized it was lost, and he and several colleagues decided that they would take their files and bury them and give them to the Americans. They felt that they could make a better deal with the Americans. And the CIA, a newly established organization with a good big budget, picked him up.”

The CIA brought hundreds of Hitler’s ex-intelligence officers back to the USA after the war. At secret bases, they were retrained as CIA spies, then sent back to Germany to start spying on the Russians. So just how many Nazis were on the CIA payroll?

Ex-Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman has spent years uncovering the CIA’s secret Nazi files.

HOLTZMAN: “We’ve discovered already 100 names of Nazi war criminals who were working in Galen’s operation. They themselves may have been in danger of prosecutions because of their involvement in war crimes. Of course, if they were working for the CIA, that danger was gone.”

The CIA did a secret deal with the Nazis in return for their services. The CIA guaranteed that not one of them would be charged with war crimes committed whilst they’d worked for Hitler.

[Music]

HOLTZMAN: “Why didn’t anybody stop to ask the moral question? At that point, no one could hide anymore from the secrets of Auschwitz. The concentration camps and what happened in them were writ large over Europe. People understood the horrors of what the Nazis had done. How could we then turn around and protect the very people who were responsible for the deaths and murders of six million Jews and millions of non-Jews? By uncovering the secrets of 60 years ago, we can come up with some of the same problems and issues that we confront today, and hopefully it will allow us to make wiser decisions.”

SOURCE: In Bed with the Nazis – CIA – Project Paperclip

Indeed, long suspected ties between Nazi war criminals and the very founding of the CIA in the late-1940s was confirmed early in this decade by files released by the CIA itself.

The BBC ran an article on the 28th of April 2001 under the very blatant headline “CIA Admits Employing Nazis.”

Quote:

Files released by the Central Intelligence Agency in the United States have confirmed that World War II Nazi war criminals were employed by Western intelligence agencies.

However, the files dispel the widespread view that one of Hitler’s closest allies, Gestapo Chief Heinrich Mueller, survived World War II and went on to work for the CIA. They show that Mueller died in 1945, but that other former Nazi officers were employed by the CIA—in particular for their knowledge of the Soviet Union.

A US Justice Department spokesman, Eli Rosenbaum, said the files demonstrated that the real winners of the Cold War were Nazi war criminals. Rosenbaum deplored the CIA’s use as intelligence sources of war criminals such as Klaus Barbie, the infamous butcher of Lyon. Barbie was eventually convicted of crimes against humanity by a French court.

End quote

Of course, that story doesn’t get to the bottom of the CIA/Nazi war criminal connection, as evidenced by another BBC report from February 2005: “CIA urged to release Nazi Records.”

Quote:

The CIA has been urged to release documents about Nazi war criminals hired by US intelligence officials during the Cold War era.

The call comes from members of Congress who drew up the 1998 Public Disclosure Law, which requires declassification of all documents about the Holocaust.

They say the CIA is withholding details of people it recruited after World War II for their expertise. Released documents show links between US intelligence and Nazi war criminals. The CIA has contributed 1.25 million pages of documents of more than 8 million released under the 1998 law.

One former Nazi known to have been employed by Western intelligence was Klaus Barbie, the infamous butcher of Lyon. He was eventually convicted of crimes against humanity by a French court.

The law’s authors, Senator Mike DeWine and Representative Carolyn Maloney, believe the CIA is withholding further details on the Nazi war criminals, suspects or collaborators that were hired.

“There is still information that we believe the CIA has about the United States’ involvement with former Nazis,” said Senator DeWine.

“We need to get this information out.”

End quote

In June 2006, some 27,000 pages were disclosed by the CIA relating to the Nazi war criminal connection.

This comes from an article from FAS.org entitled “CIA Nazi Files Released,” from June 7, 2006.

Quote:

Some 27,000 pages of Central Intelligence Agency records regarding operational relationships between the CIA and former Nazis following World War II were disclosed yesterday at the National Archives.

The release was announced by the Interagency Working Group (IWG) on Nazi War Crimes, which was created by a 1998 law. The IWG, which has previously overseen the declassification of eight million war crimes-related records, is chaired by former Information Security Oversight Office Director Steven Garfinkel.

The latest release almost failed to occur due to CIA recalcitrance.

“In 2002, the CIA declared that it was no longer going to follow the criteria observed since 1999 for all the participating agencies in the IWG declassification project [and that] henceforth it would produce files relating only to individuals whom we could prove had personally engaged in war crimes,” recalled IWG member Richard Ben-Veniste (pdf).

“For 18 months the IWG tried to persuade CIA that its unilateral redefinition of its obligation was erroneous and unacceptable,” he said.

The relevance of today’s disclosures on Nazi war crimes to the issues this nation faces today is striking, suggested IWG member Thomas H. Baer.

The question the documents raise, he said, “is to what extent and under what circumstances can our government rely upon intelligence supplied by mass murderers and those complicit in their crimes?”

End quote.

Now, again, all of this is extremely troubling information.

From Nazi war criminal scientists engaged in human experimentation, secreted into the country and allowed to participate in top-level American scientific programs, especially those developing weapons for the US military, is chilling.

That the CIA, which was being founded in the late 1940s by Allen Dulles, who met with Reinhard Gehlen—and the two apparently got along quite well—is troubling.

But to think that these Nazi war criminals were only being used for the intelligence they had in the past and were not being used for current or ongoing operations would of course be naive.

Timothy Naftali of the University of Virginia wrote an essay on new information on Cold War CIA stay-behind operations in Germany and on the Adolf Eichmann case.

In it, he gives an indication of another operation which the CIA was actively taking part in, in Europe, using German Nazi intelligence contacts.

In that paper, [Naftali] says:

Quote:

Between 1949 and 1955, the Central Intelligence Agency organized stay-behind networks of German agents in southwestern Germany and Berlin. The programs, known as Pastime Berlin and Kibbutz Southwestern Germany, were designed to provide a source of intelligence from behind enemy lines in the event of a Soviet invasion of West Germany. These agents were trained to use radio sets, and the CIA buried radio sets money and some ammunition at secret dumps for the use of these agents in wartime. The Kibbutz operation involved at least two former members of the SS staff—Sergeant Heinrich Hoffmann, Lieutenant Colonel Hans Roos, and Lieutenant Colonel Walter Kopp, whom the CIA referred to as an unreconstructed Nazi.

End quote

Indeed, the stay-behind operation in Europe, organised by the CIA and MI6, is a massive story—a much greater one than this one document can encapsulate.

To get more information about the stay-behind program in Europe, I turn to Stephen Dorril.

Stephen Dorril is known as one of the foremost academic researchers and investigators of British intelligence agencies. He’s written numerous books on the subject, including a book about MI6 and its black operations and a book entitled Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism, one that I’ve read recently and would highly recommend to my listeners.

In our wide-ranging discussion, we touched on the topic of the stay-behind programme in Europe in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s and its connections to right-wing fascist elements.

STEPHEN DORRIL: “The stay-behind operation is a very, very big story. It goes across the whole of Europe. Almost every country in Western Europe had a stay-behind unit. These were set up either by MI6 or the CIA. Europe was split up at some meeting where the CIA officers and MI6 officers decided on a strategy to organize the stay-behind units.

“The CIA took a number of countries, particularly Italy, and MI6 took some of the other countries, particularly the Scandinavian countries. And they set up their own networks. MI6 based them on people they used during the war. And the individual countries—their intelligence agencies set up their own networks. It’s often the case there might be three or four networks within one country because nobody trusted anyone.

“These involved different areas. There would be kind of a traditional guerrilla unit and a number of points within the country would have secret depots of arms, etcetera. Often these would be in the countryside in remote areas, which could be supplied by parachutes or arms drops, as had been done during the Second World War. There would be propaganda units. Sometimes there would be secret stations for radio and later TV.

“There would be escape and evasion units to help bring back downed pilots and other important personnel, etcetera. They varied from country to country in terms of the politics and what they actually did.

“Obviously we know quite a lot about Italy, where the recruitment of former fascists led to trouble in the ’70s, with the strategy of tension, whereby some of these units were used internally to put down the communists and to prevent the Communist Party coming to power.

“Other places, such as Holland—they were actually kind of a social democratic make-up—had little involvement at all in domestic affairs, were very secretive and just kept in the background.

“They’re probably more prominent in France, but not to the extent of Italy. But also some of the neutral countries. Switzerland had a unit set up by MI6. Sweden had units set up by the CIA.

“These were amongst the most secretive parts of the intelligence agencies, and we still know little about what they actually did. They were activated at various times, particularly 1956, the time of Suez and the Hungarian uprising, and again at the time of the Cuban missile crisis.

“The whole network was put on alert for fear that there was going to be another war. If that had taken place, then people who’d been recruited—and these might be, say, in Austria, they might be shepherds who knew the passes. They knew the mountains. They may have worked with intelligence agencies during the war. They would be activated. They would start digging up the weapons.

“There were hides—secret places to go to. Communications network would be activated. And small teams of special forces from the CIA and MI6 would be parachuted in. It was, as I said, activated at the time of the Cuban missile crisis. Everybody was put on alert. But I think that’s as far as it went.”

JAMES CORBETT: “Can you expand on that term ‘strategy of tension’?”

DORRIL: “It’s really a French idea: psychological operations. They use the term “intoxication”—kind of intoxicate the situation [with] bombing. The great fear on the Italian right, and amongst the CIA and State Department—going back to the 1940s with the election and then in the ’50s—was that the Communist Party, which is growing, would eventually gain power.

“Sometime in the early ’60s, the stay-behind parties in Italy were moved away from just being in the background and secrets waiting for the war. They were turned on the Communists.

“And in the late 1960s, you see a number of explosions, bombings, which were alleged to have been by the left, but we now know were actually carried out by extreme right elements.

“They were creating this strategy of tension, which would force the army, the authorities, to intervene and maybe even arrange a coup d’état against the Communist Party.

“And so there were a number of incidents which kind of intoxicated the situation, increased the tension. In a way, they managed to succeed in that they didn’t. The Communist Party didn’t manage to take over, [though] they came very, very close.”

CORBETT: “Now, to be clear, what kinds of incidents were staged to take part in the strategy of tension?”

DORRIL: “Well, the most famous one is the bombing of Bologna, which was carried out by extreme right-wing elements and fascists linked into elements of the Italian intelligence service, particularly a unit within that which dealt with stay-behind and what was known as Gladio. That linked in also to political elements around Gelli P2 [short for Propaganda Due], the Freemason outfit.”

Again, an excellent and wide-ranging interview, which I recommend all of my listeners go and listen to at CorbettReport. com.

Now, my astute listeners will already have established the connection, I’m sure, between the strategy of tension outlined by Dorril there and Problem/ Reaction/Solution, or order out of chaos, which we outlined in Episode 047 of the Corbett Report.

To make that connection clear, let’s turn to a very basic definition of strategy of tension from Wikipedia.

[WIKIPEDIA] “A strategy of tension is an alleged way to control and manipulate public opinion using fear, propaganda, disinformation, psychological warfare, agents provocateur as well as false flag terrorist actions.”

According to historian Daniel Ganser, it is a tactic which consists in committing bombings and attributing them to others.

By the term “tension,” one refers to emotional tension—to what creates a sentiment of fear. By the term “strategy,” one refers to what feeds the fear of the people towards one particular group.

The term was coined in Italy during the trials that followed the 1970s and 1980s Years of Lead, during which terror attacks and assassinations were committed by neo-fascist terrorists such as Ordi Nuovo, Avant Guardia Nazionale or Frontier Nazionale.

Some claim that the terrorists were backed by the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies, the P2 Masonic Lodge and Operation Gladio, a NATO secret stay-behind Army officially set up to perform guerrilla and resistance activities should Italy be successfully invaded by the Soviet bloc.

Now, again, this stay-behind organization, which was originally meant to act as a rearguard action and an intelligence source in the event of a Soviet takeover of any Western European states, eventually morphed into a loose network of agents who were willing and able to—and eventually did—carry out terrorist acts on citizens of their own countries in order to blame it on political rivals.

This is Problem/Reaction/Solution, and it was put to diabolical use, especially in Italy by the Italian branch of stay-behind known as Operation Gladio, which was set up by NATO and which was linked to a series of bombings (from the Piazza Fontana bombing in 1969 to the Bologna railway station bombing in 1980, which killed 85 people and injured 200).

Again, this is now a declassified, admitted example of false flag terrorism, which was used to corral the public through the strategy of tension, or Problem/Reaction/Solution, into supporting one side of a political debate.

For more on Operation Gladio, I highly recommend a documentary which originally aired on BBC in 1992, entitled Gladio.

You can find the link to this video from my home page, CorbettReport.com in today’s documentation list.

Right now, let’s listen to a small excerpt from Gladio.

[NARRATOR] “For 40 years, secret terrorist organizations, many trained by Western intelligence agencies, have manipulated the political control of European sovereign states by a campaign of terror and murder. Originally part of a secret network, these groups changed from being defenders of state security into attackers of the established political order. Until two years ago, that secret network was generally known by the single word, Gladio.”

[Music]

[NARRATOR] “On November the 9th, 1990, the prime minister of Italy, Giulio Andreotti, revealed to his own parliament and the world the existence of a top-secret European-wide network of secret agents. It was called Gladio. This network of stay-behind groups was intended to fight a Soviet invasion of Western Europe.

“Andreotti’s announcement led to an immediate reaction in the capitals of Europe. The suspicion was that some parts of the Gladio structures were involved in internal subversion.”

[Music]

There is a line of historical continuity that runs from World War II, from the Nazis themselves, through the intelligence agencies of the Western world, to the false flag terrorist paradigm which we are facing today.

The police state that the governments of the Western world are trying to impose on their citizens at the moment in the name of security from terrorism is only a small part of a much larger story.

One example of how this is related comes from Richard Thieme, a writer for Salon, Forbes and The Village Voice, who wrote an article in October 2003 entitled “Real Conspiracies: Operation Paperclip, which assimilated Nazis into the US establishment, shows the antecedents for labeling people of conscience enemies of the state.”

Quote:

One way a government mobilizes support for morally dubious actions is to make those actions sound like the right thing to do. Decisions made for other reasons entirely for reasons of strategy, say, or economic advantage, are cloaked in religious rhetoric. And when our leaders claim the moral high ground, we the people want to believe them.

[ . . . ]

This gets a person with a strong conscience into a real pickle. The simple fact is, any person willing to act on the convictions of a strong conscience is as much an enemy of the state as an avowed terrorist because he or she will not accept the designer lies of the state as the motivation for its morally dubious actions.

Perhaps this is illustrated best with a historical example. Let’s use Operation Paperclip.

The United States and its Western European allies agreed after World War II to deny immigration rights and work opportunities to Nazis with scientific and technological expertise who were more than trivially connected to the Third Reich. Those who joined the party before 1933 or advanced in the SA (Brown Shirts) or the SS or were identified by credible witnesses as participating in atrocities were included in that category.

Contradictions arose, however, after the war. Denying German scientific expertise to the Soviets and using it ourselves became primary motivations for wanting those Germans here, working for us. Over time the need for German proficiency in aerospace design, lasers and other advanced research superseded moral concerns for what they had done during the war.

Operation Paperclip was the name of the project that assimilated Nazi scientists into the American establishment by obscuring their histories and short-circuiting efforts to bring their true stories to light. The project was led by officers in the U.S. Army. Although the program officially ended in September 1947, those officers and others carried on a conspiracy until the mid-’50s that bypassed both law and presidential directives to keep Paperclip going. Neither Truman nor Eisenhower were informed that their instructions were ignored, and if there is a lesson to be learned from Operation Paperclip, it is that, as Elie Wiesel said of the Holocaust, the world can get away with it.

Please note: Those who documented Operation Paperclip are not “conspiracy theorists.” They are journalists and scholars who describe a genuine conspiracy.

Fast forward 50 years.

When Total Information Awareness—the effort to mine and correlate vast amounts of data about Americans and non-Americans alike—became public knowledge, it was assailed for further eroding civil liberties already undermined by the Patriot Act, rights previously guaranteed by the Constitution.

Asked at a news conference about Total Information Awareness, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld laughed and said, “Well, then we’ll change the name and do it anyway.”

Rumsfeld was just stating the obvious. Data mining has long been an important area of research for the intelligence establishment. The ability to filter out irrelevant data and align the many signals transmitted by our daily transactions into profiles with predictive value has been pursued for a long time. Rumsfeld was just saying, OK, if there’s a problem with the name, we’ll change the name and we’ll do it secretly.

It’s the combination of eradicating rights guaranteed by the Constitution, such as habeas corpus, and modern technologies that enable the national security state to know and anticipate the tendencies of the souls of its citizenry, all in the name of counterterrorism, that makes us nervous.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a literal description of what our leadership is doing.

Back in the early days of Paperclip, when those with consciences and/or memories of Nazi atrocities tried to stop the steamroller, they were accused of being communist agents or sympathizers or useful idiots who did not know they were being manipulated by the Communist Party.

Real enemies during the Cold War became the justification for labeling persons of conscience enemies, too—a strategy that was canny and intentional.

Today, real terrorists are the justification for targeting persons of conscience as if they are enemies not only of America, but of the American empire, too.

End quote

That article nicely dovetails the Operation Paperclip of the 1940s and 50s with the current political realities of a government that will stop at nothing to take your rights from you.

However, I would just like to stress that, yes, I believe the author of that article is right when he says real terrorists are the justification for targeting persons of conscience today.

But those real terrorists are terrorists in the strategy of tension—that is, terrorists in intelligence agencies behind the scenes, pulling the strings, pushing your buttons, getting you to react, to demand the government to take away your freedoms.

We’ve only touched on the many important ways in which it can be said the Nazis did not lose World War II. They just changed sides.

There are hundreds of other threads to pick up from this discussion.

But again, I urge my listeners to start their own research.

Start looking into some of the topics explored in today’s episode and let others know that the Nazis never really went away.