Operation Paperclip

Read this before anything else

The West took the rocket men openly and the others quietly, and the others are the reason this wiki has a CIA entry at all.

What was bought was not doctrine. It was two practical skills and the men who had them.

Operation Paperclip is the ordinary name for the absorption of German specialists into American service after 1945. The programme is a matter of public record in its documented form. This entry concerns the part of it that ran alongside — smaller, worse recorded, and staffed out of the Aryan Kult rather than out of its laboratories. contested

The Aryan Kult entry already records that cult members were taken into custody by American, Soviet and City of London hands to fuel further research into The Dark. This is how, and what for.

What was actually valued

Not theory, and this is the point recruits miss. The Kult's cosmology was of no interest to anyone doing the recruiting; several of the men who signed the paperwork appear to have regarded it as nonsense. Two capabilities were of interest. defector

Reading the Tibetan material

The Kult had mounted expeditions and come back with texts, and it had spent two decades building the small number of people who could work through them. That competence does not transfer by seizing a library. It sat in perhaps a dozen heads. unverified

Handling the artefacts

The larger of the two, and the one that decided the matter. The looted objects were already in Allied hands. What the Allies did not have was anyone who could handle them without coming to harm. The Kult's people could, or could do it well enough to keep working, which was the standard being applied. contested

This is the shape of the whole transaction and it is worth stating plainly: the West held the objects and lacked the operators, and it solved that by hiring the operators it had just finished defeating. Nothing about the arrangement required anyone to believe the Kult's account of what the objects were. unverified

The consequence is recorded elsewhere on this wiki without its cause: the Kult's methods entered the others' hands intact, and its aims did not. See Fifth Generational Warfare. Method travels through hired men. Aims do not. inherited

Both sides, and the problem with knowing that

Both blocs ran programmes. That much is not seriously disputed here — mind control, chemical interrogation, and the line of work that produced the CIA's Remote Viewing and Mind Divers programmes on one side, and a parallel effort on the other. unverified

The difficulty is with the second half of that sentence, and it is severe.

A large part of what the West believed about Soviet capability in this field, through the 1950s and 1960s, was reported by former SS intelligence officers who were by then drawing American salaries. Those men had one asset to sell and it was their account of the enemy. An enemy far ahead in the esoteric arms race made them indispensable; an enemy that was nowhere made them redundant. astroturf

We are not claiming the Soviet programmes were invented. We are stating something narrower and worse: the same men reported the threat and constituted the response to it, and we possess no channel from that period that routes around them. An arms race and a story about an arms race are indistinguishable from inside, if the storytellers are also the racers. contested

Which means every CIA programme downstream of this — including the two this wiki treats as established — inherits a founding uncertainty about whether it was answering anything.

Competing accounts

a defector from the CIA programme, name withheld at their request— interview, second session— 2016 defector

The artefact handling was real. I will not argue about the rest but I will not have that part called a story. There were objects nobody could be in a room with, and there were four old men who could, and everything the programme became grew out of watching those four men work.

Against it: He joined decades after the period he is describing and is repeating what he was told by the institution he later left.

unsigned— board archive, recurring astroturf

There was nothing to handle. There were crates of looted junk, a budget line that had to be justified, and a group of prisoners who had correctly worked out that being the only people who could do something was the difference between a consultancy and a rope.

Against it: Fully accounts for the record and requires nothing supernatural, which is either its strength or the reason it is repeated so readily. Tagged astroturf rather than unverified because it travels in a form too well-shaped for its origins.

unsigned— Elder Cult commentary, quoted secondhand inherited

Both blocs were being worked. The question of which of them was ahead was the question they were meant to be asking, and they asked it for forty years.

Against it: Unfalsifiable, and it arrives from a body with a standing interest in the young cults having been played.

How this entry was assembled

Drawn from: One defector interview, board archive, one Elder Cult commentary at two removes, and the public record of the documented programme — which does not mention any of this.

Compiled by: Gershon.

Known weaknesses: The central claim rests on defector testimony from a man describing a period he was not alive for. The manufactured-threat reading is strong enough that it may swallow the entire entry, including the parts we would rather keep. We have no Soviet-side source of any kind.

Wanted: Anything from the eastern side of this, from anyone. A single document from the period not touched by the men described above.

See also

The Soviet-side record this entry asks for is not lost. The Materialist Cult describes where it went and why that is worse than lost.