Reading Room

17 MAY, 1982, 6:00 PM

SUBJECT: Operation Paperclip

CITY: Washington DC

GLORIA MINOT: Earlier in the newscast you heard about an ex-federal prosecutor who charges that a State Department spy agency smuggled Nazis and other killers into the U.S. in the 1950s to spy on the Soviets.

In the following report, Travis T. Hipp says that action raises serious questions about the power and the internal workings of the CIA.

TRAVIS T. HIPP: Operation Paperclip, bent but still unbroken. The sudden discovery of Nazi war criminals alive and well in America under government-supplied covers is threatening to open an even bigger can of worms concerning the origins of the Central Intelligence Agency and Pentagon processing of Third Reich spies.

In the closing months of the European segment of World War II, Hitler’s top intelligence chief, one General Galand [?], put his vast I operat [?] in cold storage, packed his files and prepared to make a deal to save his skin and his organization.

The Americans negotiated, and eventually Galand and the rest of his top aides were brought to this country along with their files, melted in with the surviving native-born American spies from the Office of Strategic Services, and installed at Langley, Virginia as the newly formed CIA. The name of the program was Operation Paperclip.

By the mid-50s, the German sector had become so powerful in the agency that most European intelligence policy was in their hands, and when some of the old OSS gang tried to object through their old boss, Wild Bill Donovan, they were mostly purged to retirement, leaving control of America’s top spy agency in the hands of retread Reich spies, many of whim have since turned out to be double and even triple agents.

Recent rumors of top level mold in the CIA are said to be focused on the German connection which, in turn, may surface in the newly kindled interest of the media in post-war import of Nazi war criminals.

Watching the haunts of history, for Pacific news in Kamal, I’m Travis T. Hipp.