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The driving concept at DARPA was to harness the best talent, but not to isolate it. Ideas needed to flow quickly and unimpeded to allow for rapid decision making and to spur innovation.

While a key group of scientists were permanent employees meant to ensure continuity, the majority of DARPA staff was hired for four- to six-year rotations and told to be bold and not fear failure. DARPA didn’t just want outside-the-box thinking, it wanted thinking where you couldn’t even see the box. That could happen only by constantly bringing in fresh ideas and perspectives, a core strength that allowed DARPA to build incredible teams of researchers.

DARPA was about anticipating a scientific advancement and reverse-engineering it, even if such advancement hadn’t been fully realized yet. They also took older experimentation or scientific concepts that had never come to fruition and went at them from completely new angles.

While some projects lasted only the length of a four- to six-year team rotation, more time-intensive projects saw their teams allowed to continue beyond that time frame so as to ensure successful collaboration.

In order to keep itself lean and mean, DARPA often outsourced things it required to different branches of the Department of Defense and the military. Regardless of where DARPA got its personnel, the number-one job of the agency’s director was to hire the brightest minds with the biggest ideas and give them everything they needed to be successful. Leslie Paxton, like her predecessors, understood that radical innovation could come about only from radical, high-risk investments in her people.

Jack Walsh was the Joint Chiefs’ director for intelligence. It was he who had summoned Paxton to the Pentagon from DARPA headquarters this afternoon. His office had been in a flurry of activity. In fact, as Leslie had walked in, the fifty-two-year-old rear admiral had been in the process of throwing a staffer his car keys, saying, “Take mine and double-park it right on their front steps if you have to. I want those records immediately. If anyone gives you any problems, you call my cell phone directly.”

Walsh was a charming, no-BS guy. Intelligence was a people business and he excelled at it. He disliked bureaucracy but could navigate it like no one else in the military. He was as adept at cutting through red tape as he was at circumventing it when a situation called for it. Some of the country’s most innovative intelligence revolutions had sprung from the mind of Admiral Jack Walsh. He was the kind of person people went to bed at night praying was working around the clock to keep them safe. And with two grown children and a failed marriage behind him, Walsh had all the time in the world to focus on keeping America safe.

No matter how many people were in the room, Walsh always made Leslie feel that she was the most important. For a man possessed of such people skills, Paxton found it hard to understand why he had never remarried. In the old-boy network of the Pentagon, he’d always treated her as an equal. He even made it a point to reach out to her and solicit her feedback on different things he was working on, something others in the DoD weren’t as apt to do. He was just an incredibly good guy. And while Paxton respected the professional boundaries of their relationship, if he had ever asked her to dinner, or even to lunch, for that matter, she would have said yes in a heartbeat.

But he hadn’t asked her to come to the Pentagon for a social call. He had asked her to come to assist him in making a presentation to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in response to a developing national security emergency.

They’d spent the better part of the morning and into the afternoon working on what they would do and what they would say. When the time neared for their meeting, she still didn’t feel fully prepared.

“You’re going to do great,” said Jack. “Don’t worry. The chairman is a nice guy; very affable. His assistant can be a real pain in the ass, but he’s also a good guy. He’s pretty direct, so don’t let that intimidate you. It’s just his style. Answer his questions as succinctly as you can and you’ll be fine. Are you ready? Do you need a minute to collect your thoughts?”

Leslie straightened to her full height and shook her head. “The longer we wait the worse this is going to get.”

“I agree,” said Walsh as he reached down and opened the door. “Here we go.”

CHAPTER 6

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Red Cooney, as well as his assistant, Lieutenant General Jim Slazas, stood when Jack Walsh and Leslie Paxton entered the secure conference room. After shaking hands, Cooney invited everyone to take their seats.

“So, Jack,” the chairman said, “I assume we’re not here because I’ve been ignoring your Facebook updates.”

“No, sir,” Walsh replied with a smile. He had been pushing a classified DoD-wide Facebook/Wikipedia hybrid as a means of better sharing, disseminating, and understanding everything from insurgent tactics to terror cell hierarchies. Cooney had been slow to buy in and often made the project the butt of jokes in meetings. Walsh had been hearing from everyone else, though, how valuable they had found it and knew it was only a matter of time before Cooney finally came around. “If you’ll permit me, I’d like Director Paxton to begin the presentation.”

Paxton had been busy setting up her laptop, and once the spinning DARPA logo could be seen on the screen at the front of the room, she said, “Admiral Walsh has asked me to brief you on some rather unusual science.”

“Isn’t that redundant coming from DARPA?” asked Slazas.

Leslie had been determined that she was going to kill Slazas with kindness and flashed him her brightest smile. “Very true, we’re in the unusual science business. But I think you’ll find this case particularly interesting. Are you familiar with something called Operation Paperclip?”

“That was our effort at the end of World War II to gather up as many German scientists as we could. The goal was to deny the Soviets, as well as the UK, access to their knowledge and expertise.”

“Correct,” said Leslie as she advanced to her first slide. It was a black-and-white photo of 104 rocket scientists at the White Sands Proving Grounds in New Mexico. “Paperclip was created by the CIA’s precursor, the OSS, and overseen by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency under the Joint Chiefs.

“President Truman at the time had been adamant that any active Nazis or any active supporters of Nazism be rejected from the program. He didn’t care if other nations scooped them up; they were not welcome in America.

“Needless to say, both the OSS and the Joint Chiefs disagreed with the president.”

Paxton advanced to her next slide. It was a picture of Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin. “To circumvent President Truman, as well as the Potsdam and Yalta agreements, the JIOA created false histories for the scientists. Any Nazi affiliations were either minimized or scrubbed altogether. They also scoured German political and employment records and scrubbed those as well.

“The new sanitized bios were then paperclipped, hence the code name, to the scientists’ U.S. government personnel files, and they were granted their security clearance to work in the United States.”

“Imagine what we could get done if the OSS was still around,” mused Cooney.

Slazas nodded in agreement and said to the DARPA director, “What does this have to do with why we’re sitting here?”

Paxton advanced to her next slide, a group of German scientists in a lab somewhere, surrounded by beakers and Bunsen burners. Taking a sip of water from the glass on the table in front of her, she replied, “Operation Paperclip had originally begun as part of Operation Overcast, but was eventually spun off as its own op. While Paperclip was focused on scientists, Overcast was all about locating and securing actual Nazi scientific and military technologies, of which there were a tremendous number.

“Toward the end of the war, when Hitler had been handed multiple defeats by the Soviets, he charged Werner Osenberg, the scientist in charge of the Nazis’ Military Research Association, the Wehrforschungsgemeinschaft, with identifying and recalling from combat Germany’s brightest scientists, engineers, and technicians.

“The names were compiled into what was known as the Osenberg List. It was a veritable who’s who of the greatest scientific minds the Nazis had, and it formed the basis for Operation Paperclip. From it, we were able to recruit top scientists for our space program, such as Wernher Von Braun, as well as scientists who secretly worked on the Manhattan Project.”

“Director Paxton,” said Slazas, “can we fast-forward through the history lesson?”

Walsh held up his hand. “We’re almost there, Jim. Trust me. This is important.”

Slazas backed down and Leslie continued. “What many people don’t know is that Hitler had another list compiled at about the same time. It was based on the top-secret work of a Nazi SS Obergruppenführer who some say was the Third Reich’s most brilliant scientist, General Hans Kammler. This list ranked the Nazis’ most promising scientific and military projects, many of which were decades ahead of their time. With detailed overviews, status, and ratings, it was known as the Kammler Dossiers.

“JIOA bifurcated their operations so that the Paperclip team could focus on the scientists and the Overcast operatives could focus on the actual projects. Of particular interest to the Joint Chiefs at that time was the Nazi Wunderwaffe program.”

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