QUANTICO, Va. -- Between the shadow of World War II and the growing Cold War, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations rapidly proved itself as an ambitious and efficient new agency. Founded on August 1, 1948, AFOSI hit the ground running immediately. Within a year of its establishment, AFOSI inherited or created three programs that proved vital to the growing counterintelligence efforts against the Soviet Union in occupied Germany with Project Wringer, Project Barnacle, and Project Dragon.
These projects were managed by the AFOSI USAFE Directorate, which was established on May 23, 1949, within the U.S. Air Forces in Europe area of operations, just three months before the Soviet Union would shock the world by detonating it’s first atomic bomb rapidly intensifying the early Cold War.
Project Wringer began in 1947 at the urging of Army Counterintelligence Corps Agent Arnold Mysior. Mysior was stationed at Straubing Air Base in Bavaria, and, as a German speaker, built a local intelligence network. After World War II, in an effort to appease the United States, the Soviet Union released 400 or 500 of the half a million German national and POWs in the Soviet Union. When the first German POWs returned, one of Mysior’s local contacts asked if he was interested in interviewing the recently repatriated POWs. Sensing they might have useful information, Mysior agreed. The interview provided Mysior with a wealth of information on Soviet infrastructure and construction projects that would be useful for Air Force planners.
As a result, Mysior suggested a formal project to interview all German POWs repatriating from the Soviet Union. In 1949, AFOSI inherited this project. As part of this effort, AFOSI was also tasked with interviewing civilians attempting to flee East Berlin. These “illegal travelers,” were not hostile, rather they used illegal documentation to leave Berlin’s Eastern Zone. They often came through the civilian terminal at Tempelhof Air Base in West Berlin and were apprehended by local German police. Once an individual was detained, the German authorities sent them to AFOSI for interviewing. Some of the civilians had excellent information or contacts, and AFOSI hoped to recruit some. The findings in Project Wringer were fruitful for Air Force planners and also provided insights behind the Iron Curtain.
Project Barnacle focused specifically on collecting intelligence about the Soviet Air Force, such as airfield construction and aircraft fuel supplies in the Soviet Union and the eastern bloc. For the Barnacle Project, AFOSI often sent double agents into the Eastern Zone to collect information and share what they gathered when they returned. As a sign of the times and evidence of the scarcity of luxury items in East Berlin, Double agents were sometimes compensated with cigarettes or bottles of whiskey instead of currency. This practice was eventually stopped through direct intervention of Major General Joseph F. Carroll, then AFOSI Commander, due to the flooding of these items on the Black Markets which had developed in Germany post war.
As these projects evolved, their missions grew increasingly dangerous as the East German government tracked individuals making frequent trips to and from East Germany. But, Despite this, Berlin’s vast networks of public and private transportation, made such intense tracking difficult, and the East German government could not oversee all activity between East and West Berlin.
While the Wringer and Barnacle projects helped AFOSI gain critical information about the Soviet Union through the early stages of the Cold War, they did not come without complications. For instance, AFOSI initially lacked an adequate number of German speakers within its ranks, so they relied on foreign nations to conduct interrogations. Eventually, AFOSI targeted and trained enough of its own personnel to lighten that language burden. Furthermore, the illegal travelers were more willing to speak with a German than and an America. So, to maintain cover that the illegal traveler was being interviewed by a German organization, AFOSI rented office space in Tempelhof Air Base’s civilian section.
Lastly, Project Dragon, operated by AFOSI’s technical section in West Berlin, assisted in the evacuation of high-level technical engineers who, despite being German nationals, worked in the Soviet Union. These experts attempted to defect from the Soviet Union and return to Germany. AFOSI agents assisted in their evacuation to West Berlin, interrogated them about Soviet technical developments, and then relocated the specialists and their families to the Western zone of Germany. Project Dragon was especially fruitful, because of the caliber of the individuals interrogated.
Within a few years these projects were all eventually taken over by either the Army or the Central Intelligence Agency; however, the Wringer and Barnacle projects showcase how effective AFOSI was during the early Cold War and proving it’s worth early on as a new and forming agency as it ran double agents, navigated the heavily controlled Eastern Zone of Berlin, and gleaned a wealth of information that would aid Air Force planners identify key Soviet targets.