Annie Jacobsen · 575 pages
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“The past is a foreign country.” —L. P. Hartley”
― Annie Jacobsen, quote from Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America
“The name came from the fact that prisoners could be “concentrated” in a group and held under protective custody following Nazi law. Quickly, this changed. Himmler made concentration camps “legally independent administrative units outside the penal code and the ordinary law.” Dachau”
― Annie Jacobsen, quote from Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America
“General Loucks’s secret Saturday roundtable at his house in Heidelberg with the Nazi chemists remained hidden from the public for six decades. Here was a brigadier general with the U.S. Army doing business with a former brigadier general of the Third Reich allegedly in the interests of the United States. It was a Cold War black program that was paid for by the U.S. Army but did not officially exist. There were no checks and no balances. Operation Paperclip was becoming a headless monster. The”
― Annie Jacobsen, quote from Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America
“The U.S. war crimes office for the chief counsel wrote up a list of doctors involved in medical research that resulted in “mercy killings,” a euphemism used by the Reich for its medical murder programs. The list was classified with a strict caveat that access to it remain “restricted for 80 years from the date of creation.” This meant that, by the time the world would know who was on this list, it would be the year 2025, and everyone named would be dead. A”
― Annie Jacobsen, quote from Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America
“By the end of January 1946, 160 Nazi scientists had been secreted into America. The single largest group was comprised of the 115 rocket specialists at Fort Bliss, Texas, led by Wernher von Braun.”
― Annie Jacobsen, quote from Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America
“The goal of Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee was to investigate all things related to German science. Target types ran the gamut: radar, missiles, aircraft, medicine, bombs and fuses, chemical and biological weapons labs. And while CIOS remained an official joint venture, there were other groups in the mix, with competing interests at hand. Running parallel to CIOS operations were dozens of secret intelligence-gathering operations, mostly American. The Pentagon’s Special Mission V-2 was but one example. By late March 1945, Colonel Trichel, chief of U.S. Army Ordnance, Rocket Branch, had dispatched his team to Europe. Likewise, U.S. Naval Technical Intelligence had officers in Paris preparing for its own highly classified hunt for any intelligence regarding the Henschel Hs 293, a guided missile developed by the Nazis and designed to sink or damage enemy ships. The U.S. Army Air Forces (AAF) were still heavily engaged in strategic bombing campaigns, but a small group from Wright Field, near Dayton, Ohio, was laying plans to locate and capture Luftwaffe equipment and engineers. Spearheading Top Secret missions for British intelligence was a group of commandos called 30 Assault Unit, led by Ian Fleming, the personal assistant to the director of British naval intelligence and future author of the James Bond novels. Sometimes, the members of these parallel missions worked in consort with CIOS officers in the field.”
― Annie Jacobsen, quote from Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America
“found to contain a markedly potent and hitherto unknown organophosphorus nerve agent” had been developed by the Nazis”
― Annie Jacobsen, quote from Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America
“The war in Europe was over. Germans called it die Stunde Null, zero hour. Cities lay in ruins. Allied bombing had destroyed more than 1.8 million German homes. Of the 18.2 million men who had served in the German army, navy, Luftwaffe, and the Waffen-SS, a total of 5.3 million had been killed. Sixty-one countries had been drawn into a war Germany started. Some 50 million people were dead. The Third Reich was no more. Heinrich”
― Annie Jacobsen, quote from Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America
“They were still in the happier stage of love. They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be on a plane where no other human relations mattered. They both seemed to have arrived there with an extraordinary innocence as though a series of pure accidents had driven them together, so many accidents that at last they were forced to conclude that they were for each other. They had arrived with clean hands, or so it seemed, after no traffic with the merely curious and clandestine.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote from Tender Is the Night
“Bread, soup - these were my whole life. I was a body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach. The stomach alone was aware of the passage of time.”
― Elie Wiesel, quote from Night
“It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things, that while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humour.”
― Charles Dickens, quote from A Christmas Carol
“If you went twenty-four hours without cigarettes, I'd drink a can of pop. Regular pop. The whole can."
Isaw the glimmer of Adrian's earlier smile returning. "You would not."
"I totally would."
"Half a can would put you into a coma."
Sonya frowned. "Are you diabetic?" she asked me.
"No," said Adrian, "but Sage is convinced one extraneous calorie will make her go from super skinny to just regular skinny. Tragedy."
"Hey," I said. "You think it’d be a tragedy to go an hour without a cigarette."
"Don’t question my steel resolve, Sage. I went without one for two hours today."
"Show me twenty-four, and then I’ll be impressed."
He gave me a look of mock surprise. "You mean you aren’t already? And here I thought you were dazzled from the moment you met me.”
― Richelle Mead, quote from The Golden Lily
“Nothing moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We're screwed down here-for life!”
― John Irving, quote from The Hotel New Hampshire
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