Rather than give you a long list of books, most of which you’re never going to read, I picked relatively short documents from good sources that you can read online for free. Of course, just about everything and everyone I mention in the book has a Wikipedia entry.
The story begins with Sarah working for the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services. It is, of course, a real thing, and in many ways the ancestor of the CIA. You’ve seen them or read about them before. In Cloak and Dagger (1946) by Fritz Lang, Gary Cooper plays an OSS agent who—drumroll—has to exfiltrate a German scientist. Indiana Jones worked for them, according to Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and Diana Prince, a.k.a. Wonder Woman, works for Steve Trevor at the OSS. The great thing about the organization is that they were the first espionage agency of their kind,[1] as in there weren’t earlier ones that they could model themselves after. They made it up as they went along. The result is sometimes amazing, sometimes really, really weird. They made gizmos and gadgets. Think Sean Connery’s James Bond: cameras in the shape of a matchbox, playing cards that hid secret maps, the ever-useful compass hidden inside a uniform button, and explosives disguised as just about everything.
Their hiring practices were interesting, to say the least. They hired baseball catcher Moe Berg after his career with the Red Sox ended, and sent him to Zurich to meet German physicist Werner Heisenberg, to ascertain how close the Germans were to the atomic bomb, and to shoot him if he thought they were close to a breakthrough. Famous chef Julia Child was apparently too tall to enlist in the Women’s Army Corps, and so she joined the OSS instead. There, she assisted in developing a shark repellent for the navy. All this is to say that I felt fairly comfortable having them send nineteen-year-old Mia on a mission in Germany.
There were real heroes working for the OSS, men and women braver than any of us—well, me anyway—but in some respects, the agency also resembled what my ten-year-old would come up with if I asked him to start his own spy thing. If you want to read about the OSS, I suggest the publications section on the CIA website.[2] You should also look up Virginia Hall. She’s literally a superhero.
Operation Paperclip has to be one of the most famous secret operations in history. Its purpose was to extract German scientists and to get them to work for the US. Why Paperclip? The way I heard it, the US put together a big pile-o’-files on German scientists, and researchers would put a paper clip on the ones they thought were of interest. The operation was… let’s just say controversial. People often talk about Wernher von Braun because he makes for a more sympathetic figure, but hiring people working for Hitler in Nazi Germany significantly increases your chances of ending up with actual Nazis. I won’t speculate as to these people’s beliefs or motivations, but von Braun wasn’t the only one working at NASA who once wore the SS uniform. Kurt Debus, director of the Launch Operations Center at Cape Canaveral, was a member of both Hitler’s Brownshirts and the SS. He worked with von Braun at Peenemünde. The gigantic Vertical Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral was designed by Bernhard Tessmann, who helped set up the facilities at Peenemünde. Tessmann was one of the people von Braun asked for help in hiding the V-2 research documents Himmler had ordered destroyed.
The Saturn V rocket, which sent the Apollo astronauts to the moon, was designed by former SS Sturmbannführer von Braun, and Arthur Rudolph, who joined the Nazi Party in 1931 and later the Brownshirts. These are the more presentable people the US recruited. Then you have people like Kurt Blome, director of the Nazi biological warfare program. This guy did some really nasty stuff I won’t describe here (but you’ve already guessed where he got his test subjects from). He was later hired by the US to work on… chemical warfare.
This book begins with Mia and von Braun during their escape from Germany. Writing it was super fun, because it’s all true, more or less. Accounts of the events differ slightly from source to source, even for something that happened not that long ago, but the gist of it is always the same. Von Braun and some of his people decide they want to surrender to the US. The Russians are coming, and they have to leave Peenemünde. They have a bunch of conflicting orders to pick from, and they choose to go to Bleicherode, but they’re worried about their gigantic convoy getting stopped. This is where it gets crazy. Yes, they just happen to have a box of misprinted letterhead on hand, and they use it to make fake papers for this VzBV secret project. Somewhere along the way, von Braun’s driver falls asleep at the wheel, and he breaks his arm in a crash. They get to Bleicherode, where they meet Dornberger. They receive orders to burn all their research and take the top five hundred scientists to a camp in Oberammergau. They hide all the research documents inside a mountain instead, because why not. Once in Oberammergau, they convince the SS major in charge that they should disperse in the nearby towns. From there, they use the VzBV letterhead to requisition supplies and go wait it out at a resort in the Alps until von Braun’s brother Magnus runs into a certain PFC Schneikert while riding his bicycle. The American soldier points his gun at him, and Magnus says, in broken English: “My name is Magnus von Braun. My brother invented the V-2. We want to surrender!”
I think what I like most about the von Braun story is that he did it all himself, as far as I can tell. Operation Paperclip wasn’t always pretty. Truman authorized one thousand German scientists to be held in “temporary, limited military custody.” That usually meant scouting and then kidnapping people. Von Braun, on the other hand, chose to surrender to the US. He didn’t have a Mia helping him. He got his people out of Germany all on his own (with a little help from Dornberger), and he did it in the craziest way.
Before the Saturn rockets used in the Apollo missions, von Braun developed the Redstone, the first large American ballistic missile, which served as the basis for a whole series of rockets. A modified Redstone launched the first US satellite, and the Mercury-Redstone rocket sent the first Americans into space. He did a lot to popularize the concept of space travel. Check out his crazy concept for the “ferry rocket” from the pages of Collier’s magazine in 1952.[3] Von Braun died of pancreatic cancer in 1977.
Walter Dornberger spent two years in a British prison camp after escaping Germany. The British didn’t like him at all. They thought he was a weasel. That didn’t stop the US from hiring him in 1947. He worked on a bunch of things, including the ultracool X-20 Dyna-Soar spaceplane. It was never made, but the concept was as awesome as the name. I’ll let you google that one.
In Act III, Mia recruits Sergei Korolev in Germany and brings him back to Russia, along with thousands of German specialists. This was called Operation Osoaviakhim. It pretty much went as I describe it, sans Mia. The Soviets didn’t mess around. You want scientists? We’ll “recruit” thousands of them at gunpoint, all at the same time, and drag them and their families back to Moscow. The memo Mia reads to her mother is an actual translation of what these people were given.
Korolev is fun to read about. He had it rough, though. Arrested for treason and sabotage, tried and sent to a gulag where he lost all his teeth to scurvy. Saved at the last minute, retried and forced to work in a prison for scientists. When he got out, he ended up as chief designer of long-range missiles at the OKB-1 special design bureau. Korolev, the chief designer, was more or less the face of the Russian missile and space program, but the Soviet Union was a mess under Stalin. There were so many people working on so many different things, it’s really hard to keep up. I found a great read on the Soviet space program in the NASA archives.[4] If you have any interest in rocket research and all the politics involved, you have to read it. It’s fascinating.
1
The office of the Coordinator of Information (COI) came before the OSS, but it was much smaller.
4
Asif A. Siddiqi,”Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945–1974” (NASA SP-2000–4408, 2000). Part 1: https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4408pt1.pdf. Part 2: https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4408pt2.pdf.