Name Arnold Silver | ||
Arnold M. Silver was a senior CIA operations officer. A Boston native, he died of multiple myeloma on December 16, 1993 in the age of 74 at his home in Luxembourg City. During his years of service he worked in Austria, Luxembourg, Germany, Turkey and the US.
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Biography
Silver graduated at Tufts University and received a master's degree in German philology from Harvard University in 1942. During the second world war he participated in the Normandy landings and later became a prisoner-of-war interrogator (IPW), first in the IPW team of the 66th Infantry Division. In September 1945 he joined the IPW team in Oberursel, near Frankfurt-am-Main, at the 7707th European Intelligence Center, also referred to as Camp King. "Oberursel", as the camp was most frequently called, became the Army's center for detailed interrogation of former Nazi military personnel, émigré personalities and potential Sovjet informants.
Many of the Paperclip scientists were recruited there and it was Silver's task to interrogate persons such as Otto Skorzeny, Walter Schellenberg and Richard Kauder (alias Klatt).
After Skorzeny was acquitted of war crimes by a military court in Dachau in 1946, he was sent to Oberursel until a decision would be made what to do with him. After several interrogations by Silver, it was decided that he resettled to Spain:
G-2 and USFET (US Forces, European Theater) in Frankfurt concurred in my recommendation that he be resettled there. He became a rather successful entrepreneur in Madrid, but for years afterwards - I think I last heard about him in 1961 - he approached each succeeding US Air Force attaché in Madrid with an offer to build a network of agents in the USSR for the United States. What surprised me (or did it?) was the fact that each succeeding Air Force attaché recommened [sic] to the Pentagon that Skorzeny be taken up on his offer, although there was not the slightest shred of evidence that he had the capability of the know-how to implement his proposal. The Pentagon rejected each of the recommendations from Madrid.
About his time at Oberursel, Silver writes:
As a result of their interrogations of defectors from the Soviet and East European intelligence services, as well as arrested agents of these services, the interrogators in the counterintelligence section of Oberursel became experts on the services, especially the Soviet state security service (MGB at the time, then KGB) ad, to a much lesser extent, the Soviet Military intelligence Service (GRU).
In 1948, he retired from the Army as a technical sergeant and joined the CIA, founded one year before. Silver became CIA Chief of Station in Luxembourg from 1957-1960.
Retirement
He retired from the CIA in 1978 and settled in Luxembourg, but continued publishing articles on European and Soviet affairs in newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal and the Herald Tribune.
He died on December 16, 1993, of multiple myeloma at his home in Luxembourg City. He was survived by this wife, the former Annemarie Rassbach.