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TICOM: Seizing Nazi Intelligence

It’s much too common for most people to look past the developments of World War II. It’s an era that most would like to forget. However, have you asked yourself this following question. Now that Hitler had committed suicide and some of his ringleaders had been captured, what happened to the German intelligence party? TICOM (Target Intelligence Committee) was a project formed to seize German intelligence assets, including cryptographic ones. The United States had recognized the potential of this bounty and valuable information was recovered.

Now some decades later, some of this intelligence is starting to leak out.

For those readers interested in more research, there are a couple of books on the market to start off with. The Ultra Americans: The U.S. Role in Breaking the Nazi Codes is one of them. The Ultra Secret: The Inside Story of Operation Ultra, Bletchley Park and Enigma is yet another one.

In the book written by James Bamford, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency, he explains how secretive this mission was. It goes like this [page 8]: “In 1992, the director of the National Security Agency extended the secrecy order until the year 2012, making TICOM probably the last great secret of the Second World War.”

There is another online source from Google, a TICOM Archive I believe.

For those interested, there’s the TICOM Collection hosted by Scribd.

Some may or not be familiar with Operation Paperclip, which was a “program used to recruit the scientists of Nazi Germany for employment by the United States in the aftermath of World War II (1939–45).” President Harry Truman executed this operation in August of 1945.

Alsos Mission was an effort by the Allies to “evaluate the German nuclear project.”

Operation Surgeon was to exploit German aeronautics.

There’s another introduction to World War II and the shadow warriors. Patrick O’Donnell is the author of Operatives, Spies, and Saboteurs: The Unknown Story of the Men and Women of World War II’s OSS. A hidden war — a war of espionage, intrigue, and sabotage — played out across the occupied territories of Europe, deep inside enemy lines.

According to the book Eavesdropping on Hell written by Robert J. Hanyok, it was believed that the Allies knew of the Jewish massacre. But saving the Jews was not a priority at the time.

3 Responses

  1. Christos Triantafyllopoulos

    The scribd files were uploaded by me. Your readers would appreciate a reference to my site http://chris-intel-corner.blogspot.gr/

    I’ve written extensively about WWII singals intelligence using information from the recently declassified ticom reports.

  2. Free Energy and Anti Gravity Space Vehicles (and tracking the development of 70 year old programs) – IDEAS ABOUT INNOVATION !

    [...] Alsos)-started in fall 1943 as the precursor to The Manhattan Project). Another American project (Operation TICOM) gathered German experts in cryptography. The United States Bureau of Mines employed seven German [...]

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