26. he hired a team to analyze: Interview with Edward Lovick. 27. painting the U-2 was a bad idea: Ibid.
28. Air Force transferred money over to the CIA: Pedlow and Welzenbach, Central Intelligence Agency, 77.
29. Among those selected: Interview with Tony Bevacqua.
30. The next test was a freezing experiment: Interview with Bevacqua. Cold experiments were presented in the Nuremberg doctors’ trials as “The Effect of Freezing on Human Beings,” the purpose of which was for Nazi doctors to determine at what temperature a human subject dies from heart failure when being frozen.
31. aviation medicine school at Wright-Patterson: Hunt, Secret Agenda, 10, 16, 19, 21. Hunt wrote that during the war, Lieutenant General Donald “Putt gathered the Germans together and, without approval from higher authorities in the War Department, promised them jobs at Wright Field,” sourcing her interview with Lieutenant General Putt; “Report on Events and Conditions Which Occurred During Procurement of Foreign Technical Men for Work in the U.S.A.,” September 25, 1945, Department of the Air Force, History of the AAF Participation in Project Paperclip, Appendix, May 1945-March 1947.
32. previously worked at Nazi concentration camps: Bower, Paperclip Conspiracy, 214–323. Colonel Harry Armstrong, a surgeon with the U.S. Eighth Air Force, petitioned for the Nazi doctors to come to America after the war and “at the end of his distinguished career, in 1976, he would boast that the thirty-four German aviation doctors he
brought to America had saved ‘a great many millions of dollars.’” Armstrong had obtained approval from Eisenhower for an operation to “exploit certain uncompleted German aviation medicine research projects.” Also see Staff Memo to Members of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, “Post-World War II Recruitment of German Scientists — Project Paperclip,” April 5, 1995 (as per President Clinton). The committee obliquely concludes: “Follow-up Research. The staff believes this trail should be followed with more research before conclusions can be drawn about the Paperclip scientists… It is possible that still-classified intelligence documents could shed further light on these connections.”
33. conducting barbaric experiments: In Linda Hunt’s Secret Agenda, chapter 5, “Experiments in Death,” she chronicles several Nazi scientists who became Paperclips. Siegfried Ruff and Hermann Becker-Freyseng conducted death experiments on prisoners at Dachau, placing them in a pressure chamber that simulated high altitudes of up to 39,260 feet. “The U.S. military still viewed Ruff and Becker-Freyseng as valuable assets, despite their connection to these crimes. They were even employed under Paperclip [at the AAF Aero Medical Center in Heidelberg, Germany] to continue the same type of research that had resulted in the murder of Dachau prisoners,” Hunt wrote. Ruff and Becker-Freyseng never got permanent U.S. Paperclip jobs; both were eventually arrested and tried at Nuremberg. Ruff was acquitted, Becker-Freyseng was convicted and given a twenty-year prison sentence. Another notable case was that of Konrad Schaefer. In an effort to study if Luftwaffe pilots could survive on seawater, Schaefer forced prisoners to drink seawater until they went mad from thirst. He then punctured their livers in order to sample fluid and blood. Schaefer was tried at Nuremberg and acquitted, at which point the United States hired him as a Paperclip. “When he arrived at San Antonio in 1950,” wrote Hunt, “he was touted as ‘the leading German authority on thirst and desalinization of seawater.’”
34. six hundred million still-classified: Pauline Jelinek, “U.S. Releases Nazi Papers,” Associated Press, November 2, 1999. But in reality, this number is just a guess, since documents can be hidden
inside agencies that are still classified (as the National Reconnaissance Office, NRO, was from 1961–1992); Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records, April 2007. In 1998, President Clinton signed into law the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, which “required the U.S. Government to locate, declassify, and release in their entirety, with few exceptions, remaining classified records about war crimes committed by Nazi Germany and its allies.” An interagency working group was created to oversee this work. Steven Garfinkel, acting chair of this five- year effort, wrote: “the IWG has ensured that the public finally has access to the entirety of the operational files of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), totaling 1.2 million pages; over 114,200 pages of CIA materials; over 435,000 pages from FBI files; 20,000 pages from Army Counterintelligence Corps files; and over 7 million additional pages of records.” Garfinkel makes no mention of any Atomic Energy Commission files or the files of private contractors inside the Atomic Energy Commission, such as EG&G, who control documents classified as Restricted Data (RD).
35. U-2 was as radical and as unorthodox: Interview with Tony Bevacqua.
36. Edgerton’s famous stop-motion photographs: Available for viewing at the Edgerton Center at MIT, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Room 4-405, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as well as online at Edgerton.org; Grundberg, “H.E. Edgerton, 86, Dies, Invented Electronic Flash,” New York Times, January 5, 1990.
37. Kenneth J. Germeshausen: Joan Cook, “Kenneth Germeshausen, 83, Dies; Was Nuclear and Radar Pioneer,” New York Times, August 21, 1990. Information on Germeshausen also comes from the Kenneth J. Germeshausen Center for the Law of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Franklin Pierce Law Center; MIT archives; author interviews with Al O’Donnell, Jim Freedman.
38. the most highly classified engineering jobs: Interviews with former EG&G employees Al O’Donnell, Jim Freedman, Wayne Pendleton, T. D. Barnes, and others.
39. EG&G agreed to set up a radar range: Pedlow and Welzenbach, Central Intelligence Agency, 130. It is also interesting to note that in the footnotes in this CIA monograph, the source for information regarding the location of EG&G’s radar range is redacted, only that they are from Office of Special Activity (OSA) records. Written requests to the CIA were denied.
40. Lockheed test pilot Robert Sieker: Among pilots living at Area 51, a debate ensued about the cause of Sieker’s crash. U-2 pilots Tony Bevacqua and Ray Goudey told me they believe pilot error caused Sieker’s crash. According to them, he was known to open up his faceplate and take bites of candy bars during flight. Bevacqua himself flew a U-2 dirty bird and lived to tell the tale. Many of these mission flights were made over Asia. Lovick maintains it was the Boston Group’s paint that caused the aircraft to overheat.
41. “As it beeped in the sky”: Killian, Sputnik, Scientists and Eisenhower, 7.
42. Killian and Bissell found themselves: Welzenbach, “Science and Technology,” 18. “Killian had confidence in Bissell. A special relationship existed between Killian and Bissell going back to 1942.”
43. formidable top secret billion-dollar spy plane: Top Secret Memorandum of Conference with the President, July 20, 1959. “It will have a radar cross section so low that the probability of hostile detection and successful tracking would be very low. It would have a 4000-mile range at mach 4, with 90,000 feet altitude.” Office of the Staff Secretary, Subject Series, Alphabetical Subseries, Box 15, Intelligence Matters.
44. Advancing science and technology for military purposes: The Advanced Research Projects Agency was Eisenhower’s response to Sputnik, “a high-level defense organization to formulate and execute R&D projects that would expand the frontiers of technology beyond the immediate and specific requirements of the Military Services and their laboratories.” In 1972, ARPA became DARPA. The D denotes Defense.
Interviews with Richard Mingus, Al O’Donnell, Jim Freedman, Dr. Wheelon, Troy Wade, Darwin Morgan, Stephen M. Younger
1. involved thirty consecutive nuclear explosions: Defense Threat Reduction Agency, fact sheet, Operation Plumbbob: “Operation Plumbbob, the sixth series of atmospheric nuclear tests conducted within the continental United States, consisted of 24 nuclear detonations and six safety tests. The Plumbbob series lasted from April 24 to Oct. 7, 1957, and involved about 14,000 Department of Defense (DoD) personnel.”
2. airplane transporting an atomic bomb would crash: Atomic Energy Commission, Summary of Project 57, the First Safety Test of Operation Plumbbob, report to the General Manager by the Director, Division of Military Application, 24.
3. the perfect place to do this was Area 51: Ref. Sym 5112-(127), Appendix A, Administrative Committee Report, J. D. Shreve Jr., Sandia Corporation (seven pages, no date). “B. Area Chosen (clockwise perimeter) (Groom Mine Map) Start at intersection of 89 with north NTS boundary; follow 89 north to 51 (off map); 90 east on 51 to 04, south on 04 to Watertown (north) boundary, thence west to 95, south to NTS line, and finally west along NTS line to 89. More simply, it is the rectangle of land (1) bounded north and south by grids 51 and an extension of the north NTS edge respectively, (2) bounded east and west by grids 04 and 89 respectively, (3) excluding all area assigned to Watertown,” 5.
4. “relinquished for 20,000 years”: Operation Plumbbob, Summary Report, Test Group 57, Nevada Test Site, Extracted Version, MayOctober 1957, ITR-1515 (Extracted Version), 17.
