Tools of Tyrants

CIA Operations and Projects — Part Two

Today’s report is the second addressing some of the various “Operations” and “Projects” which the CIA has conducted around the world. It has always been difficult to reconstruct CIA activities, as it routinely classifies everything it even thinks about doing, and refuses to disclose documents exposing its activities under the Freedom of Information Act. Sadly, judges are afraid to overrule claims that CIA documents are classified no matter how weak the justification may be.

On June 26, 2007, the CIA released a limited number of documents admitting to some of its activities, posting them on a website entitled The Family Jewels, providing this description of its contents:

Widely known as the “Family Jewels,” this document consists of almost 700 pages of responses from CIA employees to a 1973 directive from Director of Central Intelligence James Schlesinger asking them to report activities they thought might be inconsistent with the Agency’s charter.

The private National Security Archive, founded in 1985, has long pressed for the CIA’s disclosure of over-classified documents, and serves as a repository of what is available in the public sphere. It described what it viewed as the Top Ten Most Interesting Family Jewels:

1) Journalist surveillance - operation CELOTEX I-II

2) Covert mail opening, codenamed SRPOINTER / HTLINGUAL at JFK airport

3) Watergate burglar and former CIA operative E. Howard Hunt requests a lock picker

4) CIA Science and Technology Directorate Chief Carl Duckett “thinks the Director would be ill-advised to say he is acquainted with this program” (Sidney Gottlieb’s drug experiments)

5) MHCHAOS documents (investigating foreign support for domestic U.S. dissent) reflecting Agency employee resentment against participation

6) Plan to poison Congo leader Patrice Lumumba

7) Report of detention of Soviet defector Yuriy Nosenko

8) Document describing John Lennon funding anti-war activists

9) MHCHAOS documents (investigating foreign support for domestic U.S. dissent)

10) CIA counter-intelligence official James J. Angleton and issue of training foreign police in bomb-making, sabotage, etc.

Continuing from last week’s Part One, presented here is an overview of another group of CIA Operations and Projects, as best as can be understood from public sources.

Project MKUltra (1953-72)

MK-Ultra involved “hundreds of clandestine experiments — sometimes on unwitting U.S. citizens — to assess the potential use of LSD and other drugs for mind control, information gathering and psychological torture.” The program involved more than 150 human experiments using psychedelic drugs, paralytics, and electroshock therapy, often without consent, which were conducted at universities, hospitals, and prisons in the United States and Canada. One part of MKUltra was “Operation Midnight Climax” where government- employed prostitutes lured unsuspecting men to CIA “safe houses” to be watched and recorded while drug experiments took place. MKUltra and successor projects ran until mid-1972, were alleged by the New York Times in 1974, were confirmed in the 1975 Church Committee and Gerald Ford’s “President’s Commission on CIA Activities within the United States” (Rockefeller Commission) investigations, and were the focus of 1977 Congressional hearings.

Operation PBSuccess (1954)

An American multinational corporation, United Fruit Company, “controlled 42 percent of Guatemala’s land, over two-thirds of its exports, and even its telephone and telegraph systems” and prospered from decades of economic exploitation. In the 1940s, United Fruit’s position was threatened by a new democratically elected government, after which the company persuaded the Eisenhower Administration that the new Guatemalan government was a dangerous Communist administration. The CIA’s first known coup in Latin America toppled a democracy and installed a dictatorship. The fall of popular progressive President Arbenz in 1954 was celebrated as a success by the CIA, but it triggered domestic corruption and instability in Guatemala that ultimately led to the 1960-1996 Guatemalan Civil War, a conflict that took the lives of over 200,000 Guatemalans.

Operation Peter Pan (1960-62)

Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution in Cuba installed a communist regime, leading the CIA to seek Castro’s ouster. The CIA edited, printed, and distributed copies of a fabricated “Patria Potestad” (i.e., parental authority) law under which the government would abolish parental rights, and broadcast on CIA-operated Radio Swan, helped fuel a U.S.-funded exodus of unaccompanied children, with assistance of clergy and the Catholic Church in both countries. Cuban parents feared the Marxist indoctrination of their children and the loss of parental rights. “Many parents rationalized that it was better to live apart than to live together under communism.” Between 1960 and 1962 over 14,000 children ages 6 to 18 were flown from Cuba to the United States. Upon arrival, the Catholic Church provided housing, placing the children in foster homes, never allowing them to be adopted in order to allow for family re-unification if and when their parents joined them in the U.S. The Cuban Missile Crisis abruptly ended all air traffic between the two countries in October 1962, leaving about 60 percent of the children the responsibility of the U.S. government.

Operation Mongoose (1961-64)

In November 1961, President Kennedy authorized a covert operation to accomplish what the Bay of Pigs Invasion had failed to do: remove the Castro regime from Cuba. General Edward Lansdale was tasked with coordinating efforts between the CIA, the Defense Department, and the State Department. During a White House meeting in November 1961, Robert Kennedy wrote that the “idea is to stir things up on the island with espionage, sabotage, general disorder, run [and] operated by Cubans themselves.” The goal was to incite a revolt by the Cuban people, attempting to overthrow Castro by October 1962; the CIA even engaged the Mafia to help assassinate Castro. Documents eventually released show CIA and Pentagon plans for infiltrations, sabotage, espionage, and regime change.

Operation Northwoods

Operation Northwoods was a 1962 proposal (never implemented) by the CIA to carry out false flag attacks and blame Cuba and Fidel Castro. The proposals included shooting down a plane repainted as an American warplane, staging attacks on American military installations, attacking Cuban immigrant boats, killing Cuban-American immigrants, and bombing D.C. or Florida cities like Miami. The plan was to create a “pretext which would provide justification for US military intervention in Cuba.” The memorandum by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Lyman L. Lemnitzer seeking to advance that plan is extraordinary.

Operation Chaos (1964-74)

Operation Chaos covers a number of the CIA’s illicit activities, including engaging in domestic espionage targeting people in the United States, feeding information to the FBI. Anti-war protestors and Black Panther Party members were targeted, while journalists were added to the CIA’s payroll. “At the very least, this activity occurred from 1964 to 1974, but the actual start and end dates are foggy. Intelligence was compiled on over 300,000 people, with individual files on over 7,000 U.S. citizens.” Operation Chaos became public in late 1974 in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal and was confirmed in June 1975 by the Rockefeller Commission.

Phoenix Program (1967-72)

Derived from Director Robert Komer’s 1967 CIA plan named “Intelligence Coordination and Exploitation,” the Phoenix Program utilized military and CIA intelligence and identified Viet Cong operatives to target for arrest, defection, or assassination. Phoenix agents employed extremely controversial methods, and the program was plagued by corruption and poor oversight on the part of the South Vietnamese, while its violent operations in villages further alienated Vietnamese citizens from the government in Saigon. Congress began investigating the Phoenix Program in 1971, and the United States ended its involvement in the program the next year.

Operation Gladio (late 1960s-1980s)

Operation Gladio had its roots in post-World War II fears of a Russian invasion of Europe; anti-communist resistance networks were set up in advance, trained, and supplied with arms caches dotted around Europe, supported by European intelligence agencies and the CIA and organized through, although officially unaffiliated with, NATO. In Italy, ex-fascists and right-wing extremists were appointed to important positions in intelligence and politics and forged close links with the anti-communist Mafia. As one CIA agent put it, “The Mafia, because of its anti-communist nature, is one of the elements which the CIA uses to control Italy.” The CIA worked with the Italian Christian Democracy party, including neo-fascists and criminal groups. “Gladio was allegedly first deployed in 1963 ... operatives are thought to have been involved in countless drug deals, violent attacks on leftists, and assassinations.” Between 1968 and 1988, a “not-so-secret collusion between state officials, fascist terrorists and agents provocateurs” brought about the Strategy of Tension; social and political turmoil in Italy known as the “years of lead,” with hundreds killed by political violence in the form of bombings, assassinations, and street warfare.

Operation Condor (1975-1980)

The CIA helped efforts by military dictatorships in Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Brazil to hunt down and eliminate opponents and leftists around the world. The United States facilitated communications among South American intelligence chiefs. Investigation of the September 1976 assassination of Chile’s former foreign minister and ambassador to the U.S. Orlando Letelier and U.S. citizen Ronni Moffitt by a bomb placed in his car in Washington, D.C. concluded a CIA-trained anti-Castro group was behind the assassination, and a CIA agent was among those convicted.

Operation Cyclone (1979-89)

The CIA’s most expensive covert military assistance program during the Cold War was approved by President Jimmy Carter following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on December 24, 1979: “National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski ... saw the Afghan resistance as a golden opportunity to embroil the Soviets in a quagmire.” In events presented in a 2007 movie, Congressman Charlie Wilson (D-TX) orchestrated media coverage and successfully bypassed various bureaucratic hurdles to increase aid to the Mujahideen to an unprecedented level, peaking at around $700 million per year by 1987. With the Russian withdrawal in 1989, the Mujahideen splintered into different groups, eventually giving rise to factions like the Taliban and complicating the Afghan civil war, and leaving “Afghanistan ... awash in weapons, some of which ended up in the hands of groups ... like al-Qaeda. The U.S. had to reckon with these unintended consequences during the invasion of Afghanistan 2001 and in subsequent counterterrorism operations.”

Questions to Ponder

If you had been CIA Director when these “Operations” and “Projects” were being planned, how many would you have authorized? Then, with what we now know about how they turned out, how many do you believe were beneficial to the vital national security interests of the United States?