The Senate's Paperclip

In 1945, American intelligence officers processed the files of German scientists they wanted to bring to the United States. When a dossier contained material that would disqualify the candidate, Nazi party membership, SS rank, knowledge of slave labor, the officers attached a new, sanitized biography to the folder with an ordinary paperclip. The paperclip marked the men whose records needed to be rewritten before America could use them. The program took its name from that small piece of office hardware, and over the next decade Operation Paperclip moved roughly 1,600 German scientists and engineers into American labs and missile ranges. Wernher von Braun, a former SS officer whose V-2 rockets were assembled by concentration camp prisoners at Mittelwerk, ended his career as the celebrated architect of the Saturn V.

The moral mechanics of Paperclip feel distinctly modern: the security state, the classified program, the laundered file. The underlying transaction is not modern at all. Rome ran the same program at the close of the Third Punic War, and it ran the program twice, once for a book and once for a man.

In the spring of 146 BC, Scipio Aemilianus burned Carthage. The Senate’s policy was erasure. The city was demolished, its surviving population was sold into slavery, and its territory became the province of Africa. Rome had spent a century telling itself that Carthage was a civilization of child-sacrificing merchants who deserved annihilation, and Cato had closed his speeches with the demand that Carthage be destroyed.

The Carthaginian libraries presented a small administrative matter inside this policy of erasure. The Senate responded by giving the libraries away to the Numidian kings as payment for their wartime service. Pliny the Elder records the single exception. The Senate held back one work, the 28-book agricultural treatise of Mago, and ordered that it be translated into Latin by a commission of experts under Decimus Junius Silanus, at public expense.

Imagine what needed to be true for the Senate to make that decree. Carthaginian religion was monstrous, Carthaginian commerce was treacherous, Carthaginian power was intolerable, but Carthaginian farming was the best in the Mediterranean. Somehow, all four propositions fit comfortably in the same session. Carthage had made North Africa the granary of the central Mediterranean, and agronomy was the platform technology of an ancient economy, the rocketry of its day. Rome wanted that capability transplanted into Latin and onto Italian soil, so the state funded the transfer.

The transfer of the knowledge worked. Mago’s principles flowed into Varro, Columella, Pliny, and Palladius, the writers who defined Roman farming for centuries. Columella, the most systematic agricultural writer Rome produced, called Mago the father of agronomy.

In fact, the absorption was so complete that the source disappeared. The Punic original is lost, Silanus’s Latin translation is lost, and Mago’s work survives only as fragments quoted inside the victor’s own canon. The victors did not merely take the knowledge. They took the credit that came with transmission, which is the part of the story von Braun would have recognized from his side of the transaction.

Rome had rehearsed the human version of this program twenty years earlier. After the legions of Aemilius Paullus destroyed the Macedonian army at Pydna in 168 BC, Rome demanded a thousand hostages from the Achaean League, drawn from a list of politically suspect men. One of them was Polybius, a rising statesman who had commanded the League’s cavalry. He arrived in Rome in 167 expecting the standard fate of a political hostage, which was internment in some Italian country town.

He received a far different fate because he was useful. Paullus, the victor of Pydna, brought Polybius into his own household to educate his sons. One of those sons, adopted into the family of the Scipios, was Scipio Aemilianus. The captured Greek became the tutor, then the friend, then the counselor of the man who would command Rome’s final war against Carthage. When the surviving Achaean hostages were finally released in 150, Polybius went home briefly and then returned to his patron’s side. He stood with Scipio at Carthage in 146 and advised him on the siege while the city burned, a hostage of Rome helping Rome finish its greatest enemy.

Then Polybius did the thing that makes him von Braun’s true predecessor. He became the great public explainer of his captor’s supremacy. His Histories set out to answer one question for his fellow Greeks: how Rome conquered nearly the whole inhabited world in under 53 years. His answer was manifold and credited Roman institutions, the mixed constitution, the citizen legion, the discipline of the camp. He wrote that Roman dominance was not an accident but a system, and Greeks should accommodate themselves to it. Von Braun performed a similar office on television. The German who built missiles for Hitler became, on Disney’s airwaves and at NASA’s podiums, the narrator of America’s technological destiny. Both men ended their careers writing the legend of the power that had captured them.

A smaller Roman precedent completes the pattern. At the start of the First Punic War, Rome had no fleet worth the name. Polybius himself tells us how the Romans solved this: a Carthaginian quinquereme ran aground, and Roman shipwrights used the captured hull as the template for a fleet of one hundred quinqueremes. The Americans who shipped captured V-2s to White Sands and fired them into the New Mexico sky were following a procedure the Romans would have found familiar.

Every one of these transfers required the victor to hold two official positions at once. The enemy was wicked, and the enemy knew things worth a Senate decree. Rome felt no tension between the positions and hid neither of them. The same body that ordered Carthage erased ordered Mago translated at public expense, and Pliny reports the decree as an honor to Mago rather than a scandal. Washington felt the tension acutely, which is why Truman’s directive formally excluded active Nazis, why the intelligence bureaucracy laundered the files to evade the directive, and why the program stayed secret for decades.

In one instance, Arthur Rudolph, who ran V-2 production at Mittelwerk and later managed the Saturn V program, surrendered his citizenship and left the country in 1984 when the Justice Department finally read the original file rather than the one under the paperclip.

Rome and Washington share the same appetite. Both powers concluded that a defeated enemy’s knowledge was too valuable to burn. They differed in the bookkeeping. Rome wrote the exception into the public record and let the contradiction stand. America wrote the exception in secret and spent forty years pretending the contradiction did not exist. If you know anything about the history of the CIA, you know this part is only the tip of the iceberg. The Roman method had the virtue of transparency, and it left the Republic with Mago’s vineyards, Polybius’s Histories, and no files that needed a paperclip.

Thanks for reading. Hold the standard!

Sources for this issue: Pliny the Elder, Natural History 18.5, on the Senate’s translation decree; Columella, De Re Rustica 1.1, on Mago as the father of agronomy; Polybius, Histories 1.20 on the captured quinquereme and Book 6 on the Roman constitution; Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip (2014); Michael Neufeld, Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War (2007).