US employed ex-Nazis to develop interrogation methods
February 17, 2014 Leave a comment
By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org
The United States relied on the assistance of dozens of German scientists to develop invasive interrogation techniques targeting the Soviet Union in the early years of the Cold War, according to a new book on the subject. The book, entitled Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America, by American journalist Annie Jacobsen, is to be published this week. Operation PAPERCLIP was initially set up during World War II by the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Its aim was to recruit scientists that had previously been employed by the German Third Reich, with the primary goal of denying German scientific expertise to the USSR. Hundreds of former Nazi scientists were brought to the US under secret military research contracts during the second half of the 1940s. Eventually, the recruited scientists were used to augment an entire array of American government-sponsored endeavors, including the space program and several intelligence collection techniques. Jacobsen’s book details Operation BLUEBIRD, a program run by the CIA under PAPERCLIP, which employed former Nazi biological weapons experts, chemists and medical doctors. The latter were tasked with employing lysergic acid diethylamide, commonly known as LSD, in order to involuntary extort confessions from Soviet intelligence targets. In several cases, the hallucination-inducing chemical substance was dispensed on Soviet captives, who were also subjected to hypnosis and other methods of psychological manipulation. According to the book, the techniques were developed under the primary supervision of Dr. Walter Schreiber, Germany’s Surgeon General during the Third Reich. Schreiber helped the OSS set up an experimentation facility at Camp King, a CIA site located near Frankfurt in the American sector of Allied-occupied Germany. Read more of this post
By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org
News you may have missed #870
February 27, 2014 by Ian Allen 1 Comment
►►Documents show NZ spies taught ‘honey trap’ tricks. Members of New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau were briefed by counterparts from the ultra-secret Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group, a unit of the British Signals intelligence agency GCHQ, on setting honey traps and Internet “dirty tricks” to “control, infiltrate, manipulate, and warp” online discourse, documents leaked by Edward Snowden reveal. According to the slides, JTRIG conducted “honey traps”, sent computer viruses, deleted the online presence of targets and engaged in cyber-attacks on the “hacktivist” collective Anonymous.
►►Ex-CIA analyst tells how data helped catch bin Laden. A central figure in the manhunt for Osama bin Laden, Nada Bakos spoke this week as the keynote speaker at a conference in California, on how data, big and small, led to the capture of al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden. “You don’t want to lead the information, you want the information to lead you”, she said, and credited the agency’s innovative gathering process that institutionalized various types of intelligence analysis —opposed to solely relying on general guidelines and best practices.
►►The story of WWI German spy Carl Lody. Towards the end of August 1914 a man checked into what is now the Balmoral Hotel in the centre of Edinburgh claiming to be an American tourist. In reality he was a German spy who had been sent to gather intelligence from the British. Carl Lody was a junior naval officer who had been forced to retire for health reasons but was looking for other ways to serve the fatherland. He was especially attractive to German naval intelligence because he had lived for years in the United States and spoke English fluently, although with an American accent.
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