INTELLIGENCE: SECRET CITIZENS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-01208R000100120019-0
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 25, 2011
• Sequence Number: 19
• Publication Date: May 4, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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4 May 1985
DISPATCHES
EXCERPTED
KAI BIRD AND MAX HOLLAND
^ INTELLIGENCE: Secret Citizens
Ask Graham Greene why spies spy and he might suggest
ideology, money, love or lust as the prime motives. The
Central Intelligence Agency would like to add American
citizenship to that list.
For several years, it has been pressing Congress topass
legislation that would allow the President to grant citizen-
ship to a select number of foreigners working for U.S. in-
telligence agencies who "have contributed substantially to
the security of the United States." According to immigra--
tion laws, the President may admit up to one hundred
aliens annually at his discretion. That has proved invaluable
to the U.S. intelligence community as a way of providing a
haven for its spies, but people admitted that way become
permanent resident aliens and must wait the statutory five
years before applying for citizenship.
Moreover, the C.I.A. argues, suppose the intelligence in-
formant is from an Eastern European country, or even the
Soviet Union, as prominent recent defector Arkady Shev-
chenko was-. To make an extraordinary contribution to U.S.
security, the agent would have to be a member of the Com-
munist Party. But the McCarran-Walter Act stipulates that
former party members must wait ten years after leaving the
party before they can be eligible to become citizens. The
solution, says the C.I.A., is to empower the President, with
the approval of the Director of Central Intelligence and the
Attorney General, to confer citizenship on five such persons
every year.
The proposal is contained in the Omnibus Intelligence
and Security Improvements Act, introduced in February by
Arizona Representative Bob Stump, the ranking Republican
on the House Intelligence Committee. The waiver has at-
tracted little critical notice, although the House Judiciary
Committee, which shares jurisdiction over the bill with the
Intelligence Committee, is said to be unenthusiastic about
tampering with the rules of citizenship.
If citizenship becomes a reward for extraordinary spying,
it will inevitably be cheapened to an inducement. Potential
agents could begin demanding it in return for service. And
who would be allowed to become citizens? The Attorney
General would have to certify that the person is "of good
moral character," but U.S. spies in Third World countries
are often unsavory characters. In Central America, U.S. in-
telligence has relied on people like Col. Nicolas Carranza
former head of El Salvador's notorious Treasury Police and
Gen. Reynaldo Perez Vega, who was the C.I.A.'s top con-
tact in Managua when Somoza was in power. Before he was
assassinated by the Sandinistas, Perez Vega was widely*known
as El Perro-"the dog."
eaceru?rrEn
^ UNITED STATES: Their Nazis, Our N
Between May 1945 and December 1952, the United States
admitted 642 alien scientists and engineers, most of them
Germans, under Project Paperclip. Some of those scientists,
like Arthur Rudolph, had committed war crimes, but in-
stead of being tried, they were put to work for the U.S.
space program. Rudolph designed the Saturn 5 rocket which
lofted the Apollo astronauts to the moon. Last year, under
threat of persecution for falsification of immigration pa-
pers, Rudolph renounced his U.S. citizenship and fled to
West Germany.
A great deal of new information on Rudolph and Project
Paperclip can be found in an article by Linda Hunt titled
"U.S. Coverup of Nazi Scientists," which was published in
the April Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The Russians
had their own model of Project Paperclip, about which little
is known in the West. -Recently, however, "Dispatches" ob-
tain a classified C.I.A. document, dated October 31
1949, which reports that two teams of German scientists
were sent tote Soviet Union. From this and other sources,
it seems clear that most of the scientific personnel imported
by the Russians were low-level technicians, engineers and
workmen from Nazi rocket sites and laboratories.
According to the C.I.A. document, the two groups of
German scientists, numbering about a dozen each, were in-
stalled in a laboratory in Sukhumi, on the Black Sea, in the
fall of 1945. One team was headed by Gustav Hertz, winner
of the 1925 Nobel Prize in Physics. The other was led by_
Baron Manfred von Ardenne.
"Because he was not a pure Aryan," says the report,
"Hertz lost his professorship in 1935." He spent the war
years as director of the Siemens & Halske nuclear research
laboratories. Von Ardenne's Nazi ties were more obvious.
According to the C.I.A.:
He liked to regard himself as Germany's leading nuclear
physicist. Among scientific circles, however, it i-s-tfi-eg-e-ner-9
opinion that this view was shared only by some of the Nazi
ministers who provided von Ardenne with large sums of
money to buy equipment for his laboratory.
The Russians treated the German scientists very well.
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/25: CIA-RDP90-01208R000100120019-0
Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/02/25: CIA-RDP90-01208R000100120019-0