Introduction

From out of dust of World War II rose a United States which desperately clamored to set its “house” in order. Geopolitical tensions rose to a fever pitch after the fall of Nazi Germany; two major world powers arose after the destruction of the Third Reich. With the signing of the Warsaw Pact (the treaty which organized a collective unity of the Soviet Union and seven other Soviet satellite nations), the United States underwent a massive restructuring of its military and intelligence sectors in order to be adequately prepared to do battle in the nuclear age. On the side of the United States, the Cold War had unofficially begun when then-President Harry Truman signed several initiatives into action, namely: the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, and the National Security Act of 1947. The focus of this paper is to on one of the major consequences of the latter. The National Security Act scribed into existence the Central Intelligence Agency. Originally created to “conduct analysis and [perform] clandestine activities”[1], the CIA has since grown into what was described in the 1960s by Harry Truman himself, the man to sign the agency into being, a “a mistake. And if I’d known what was going to happen, I never would have done it”[2]. But why did Harry Truman, who so readily approved the organization in its original outset, have such a drastic change of heart just two decades later? Truman himself explains this:

Why, they've got an organization over there in Virginia now that is practically the equal of the Pentagon in many ways. And I think I've told you, one Pentagon is one too many. Now, as nearly as I can make out, those fellows in the CIA don't just report on wars and the like, they go out and make their own, and there's nobody to keep track of what they're up to. They spend billions of dollars on stirring up trouble so they'll have something to report on. They've become ... it's become a government all of its own and all secret. They don't have to account to anybody… …And if what happened at the Bay of Pigs doesn't prove that, I don't know what does. You have got to keep an eye on the military at all times, and it doesn't matter whether it's the birds in the Pentagon or the birds in the CIA..[3]

During the 1960s, the CIA had outgrown its own charter. No longer satisfied with performing menial analysis, the agency had slowly but surely morphed into a leviathan engaged in all manner of espionage and counterintelligence, as well as conducting illegal experiments on American citizens[4]. While it is often repeated, it is a misnomer to suggest that the CIA is/was only concerned with foreign intelligence operations; the CIA also acts as the chief spying apparatus for domestic affairs with the stated intention of counter-terrorism (including the suppression and erasure of communist sentiment within the general population). The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that, during the periods between the late 1950s and 1973, the CIA had engaged in several illegal initiatives against the American people to monitor and suppress dissident actors, especially those related to the antiwar movement. There are three major operations which this paper will focus on in order to demonstrate this, which are as follows: · The National Student Association · Operation Midnight Climax · Operation CHAOS These initiatives were initially leaked to the New York Times by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in a front-page report in December of 1974, but have been partially declassified as of June 25th, 2007[5]. These CIA operations, as Hersh claims in his 1974 exposé, “directly violated its charter, conducted a massive, illegal domestic intelligence operation during the Nixon Administration against the antiwar movement and other dissident groups in the United States”[6].

CIA sex-houses and Mind Control

One of the more nefarious undertakings of the CIA comes in the form of a sub-project under the equally appalling Project MKULTRA. Established by Sidney Gottlieb under the order of CIA director Allen Dulles in the mid-1950s, Project MKULTRA was an infamous string of initiatives undertaken by the Central Intelligence Agency with the express purposes of: 1. Testing the effects of behavioral drugs on knowing and unwitting subjects for the purposes of developing a truth drug for interrogations[7] 2. Testing the effects of electroshock and other harassment techniques on knowing and unwitting subjects[8] 3. Experimenting with sex techniques to blackmail prominent citizens and extract information from targets[9] The third initiative is, a series of experiments which were totally and blatantly illegal, was known as Operation Midnight Climax. The total scale of Operation Midnight Climax, as well as that of the entirety of the Project MKULTRA program, is lost in history. Because of the hysteria behind the Watergate Scandal, Gottlieb had ordered the immediate destruction of as many MKULTRA files as possible (another illegal activity Gottlieb and the CIA engaged in). What little is known about Midnight Climax can be gleaned from Seymour Hersh’s New York Times expose as well as those few documents which remain undestroyed. Midnight Climax was a simple endeavor at its face: CIA agents in San Francisco, California coopted several safehouse and disguised them as brothels with the intention of dosing unwitting johns with LSD and studying their reactions.[10] These interactions, which were also filmed through one-way glass, served as a convenient two-pronged approach. The first was that the actual tapes of possibly prominent US citizens could be used as sexual blackmail against them, the effects of which are completely lost to time because of the destruction of critical documents. The second of which was that the CIA, in testing illegally on domestic citizens, would be able to develop a possible truth serum with which to interrogate suspected communists and antiwar activists. The project was fully halted in the mid-1960s before the formal breakout of the Vietnam War and was considered a failure on all counts. Though unsuccessful, Operation Midnight Climax demonstrates two important things about the CIA during this time period. The first was that the CIA was willingly and capably acting outside legal means to obtain illicit information on both private and public American citizens with the purpose of possibly obtaining blackmail material against them and the second was that the CIA was willingly and capably acting with the intentions of harming domestic citizens who were sympathetic to communist causes (hence, the attempt to develop a ‘truth serum’ to use in interrogations of dissidents).

The NSA and the Ramparts

In the summer of 1947, the National Student Association (NSA) held its inaugural meeting in Madison, Wisconsin. The purpose of the Association was to form a national conference of student leaders to allow for better coordination of student-based movements. This movement was so outrageously successful that it went on, just a few years later, to form the International Student Conference (ISC), a coalition not only between all of the student leaders of the NSA but, by its peak in 1960, also included nearly one-hundred international student unions[11]. This inclusion of international student organizations is often believed to be the source of Central Intelligence Agency interest in the NSA. Sol Stern, researcher and author of the famous Ramparts expose in March of 1967, penned an incredible investigative piece into the connections between the CIA, the State Department, and the international student organizations. In the piece, Stern claims that “it is widely known that the CIA has a number of foundations which serve as direct fronts or as secret ‘conduits; that channel money… to preferred organizations”[12]. But beyond this initially innocuous string of funding student leaders was something far more sinister. The real bombshell regarding CIA manipulation is found deeper in the Ramparts exposé, “an extraordinary conversation’ which led to the next decade-and-a-half of infiltration of the association by CIA interests. The former president of the NSA, Phillip Sherburne, had invited Michael Wood, the then-current director of development and chief fundraising officer for the NSA, to a casual luncheon. In the conversation, Sherburne explained to Wood that the NSA had “certain relationships with certain government agencies engaged in international relations”[13]. The ISC members of the NSA had a rather self-explanatory interest in the foreign affairs of the agency. Foreign members campaigned for more representation and more sway within the organization’s domestic equivalents, including having a vested interest in spreading communist attitudes and provoking students to engage in anti-Cold War activities, including protests. It was not irregular that the president of the NSA would engage in talks with these international student groups (many of whom belong to the nations within the Eastern Bloc) over possible student transfers. What Sherburne had informed Wood of was that he had been “admonished”[14] by a CIA agent against accepting foreign students without the express permission of the Agency first. As well as this, the CIA essentially had full control over student transfers of any kind which would be performed by the NSA. This allowed the CIA to carefully comb any and all student transfers for the particular political attitudes they preferred- in one instance an NSA international staffer was able to report on specific student contacts in the Dominican Republic who were participants in the civil war on the side of the constitutionalists (those in direct opposition to dictator Rafael Trujillo, an unsuccessful target of planned CIA assassination). They were able to, through threat of intense legal consequences, manipulate Sherburne and anyone who had been clued into the CIA’s plans, to communicate any form of information to foreign student leaders. What the CIA had done to the NSA was, essentially, use the organization as an extension of American foreign policy and suppress dissident behavior from incoming transfer students.

Manufactured CHAOS

The final, and most pervasive, CIA operation would find its peak during the Nixon administration, but was actually created under the Johnson Administration. Operation CHAOS was the largest domestic surveillance and suppression program in the history of the nation at the time. The operation was not one function, but two unique projects as well as several fringe initiatives underneath the umbrella of the CHAOS codename. These two unique programs were known as Project RESISTANCE and Project MERRIMAC. Another important aspect of Operation CHAOS would come later during the Nixon administration, and was known as “Restless Youth”. The first attempt in Operation CHAOS was known as “Project 1”. In it, it was recommended to CIA Director Richard Helms that several domestic groups related to the Peace movement and Black Power movement be penetrated by operatives, and their “communications, contacts, travel, and plans” be monitored. This proposal was turned down by Helms because he believed if it was to go public it would have appeared to go beyond the CIA’s jurisdiction[15]. This consideration did not seem to last, because in 1967, the CIA recruited agents and assigned them to various antiwar protest groups within the Washington D.C. area[16]. These groups would be monitored exactly as was outlined in “Project 1”. This project was known as MERRIMAC and was so successful that one of the penetrating agents was actually turned over to the FBI for questioning by one of the protest groups. This project functioned in conjunction with a similar project, this one entitled Project RESISTANCE. Project RESISTANCE was seen as taking inspiration from the CIA’s earlier infiltration of the NSA and sought to spy on dissident activity on university campuses[17]. The CIA worked with local police and campus officials[18] to obtain large amounts of information on college radicals[19]. Several damning pieces of information were revealed because of the Hersh leaks. The first was that Operation CHAOS was “relatively unsuccessful in obtaining meaningful information” and did not slow the “tempo of dissident activities”[20]. The charter of Operation CHAOS was also dangerously vague. The Church Committee determined that “CHAOS was not an intelligence mission… Nixon pressed the Director of the CIA, Richard Helms, to determine the extend of hostile foreign influence on domestic unrest among students, opponents of the Vietnam war, minorities and the ‘New Left”[21]. The second was that it had been revealed that the CIA was running several illegal mail intercepts, including a New York intercept that was supplied with a watchlist of some prominent New Yorkers who would have fallen into the aforementioned dissident categories[22]. Thirdly, and perhaps most egregiously, it is revealed by the Rockefeller and Church Commission reports that the CIA was working directly with the FBI (particularly exchanging information on dissidents such as the “anti-war”, “radical left”, and “black militant groups”) during the era of COINTELPRO[23]. It is very likely that agents who worked between the FBI and the CIA (a common theme for Operation CHAOS) were supplying the Chicago Police department with government issue equipment in exchange for advanced training and funding of local right-wing groups which would burglarize leftist organizations[24]. Even more alarming is that in a lawsuit filed by the December 4th Committee (an organization which formed for the purposes of filing a wrongful death lawsuit against the Chicago PD over the assassination of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark) it is alleged that the CIA had directly trained the police department in surveillance techniques- techniques which would likely have been used to organize and execute the assassination of the two Panthers. The CIA had knowingly violated its own protocol, which was sent out to cooperating field offices in 1971, which stated that “No attempts should be made to recruit new informants or sources such as campus or police officials regarding dissident groups”[25]. Conclusion The CIA acted maliciously during Project MKULTRA and Operation Midnight Climax, intentionally drugging unwitting citizens and filming their sexual encounters with prostitutes for a number of means: as a test to acquire a truth serum and as a collection of potential blackmail against prominent San Francisco citizens (both with the intention of being utilized to combat dissident and communist-sympathetic behavior). It infiltrated the National Student Association’s highest ranks and threatened (yet again both illegally and in violation of its own charter) several of its members with severe legal consequences did they not comply with the strict vetting of transfer students that the CIA desired. And finally, it engaged Operation CHAOS as well as several subprojects which instructed CIA agents to penetrate antiwar organizations and monitor the movements, behaviors, and plans of those prominent members within it, as well as worked with the FBI and the Chicago Police Department to harass members of the black power movement, as well as supply the Chicago Police Department with the necessary techniques it required in order to carry out the tactical assassinations of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. The Central Intelligence Agency, by the time of the Vietnam War, had morphed from a defensively-capable counterintelligence unit whose goal was to protect the nation against intellectual warfare by a growing Soviet power, to an arm of the executive branch which was utilized by both the Johnson and Nixon administrations to suppress dissidents and counterculture revolutionaries in an attempt to silence antiwar rhetoric. The Agency had, at countless times, not only breached the rules of its own charter, but engaged in illegal activities in direct opposition to the interest of the American people as a whole.
[1] (The Central Intelligence Agency 2008) [2] (Miller 1986) [3] (Deist 2017) [4] (Senate Select Committee on Intelligence 1977) [5] (Osborn 2007) [6] (Hersh 1974) [7] (U.S. Senate August 3rd, 1977) p 12 [8] Ibid. p 13 [9] (Alliance for Human Research Protection 2015) [10] (Grant 2015) [11] (Stern 1967) p 30 [12] ibid [13] Ibid p 34 [14] Ibid p 35 [15] (Rockefeller Commission Report 1975) p 137 [16] (Osborn 2007) p 29-30 [17] (PrivacySOS n.d.) [18] (Trifunov 2014) [19] (Church Committee 1974) p 682-683 [20] (Rockefeller Commission Report 1975) p 139 [21] (Church Committee 1974) p 688 [22] (Rockefeller Commission Report 1975) p 142 [23] Ibid 140 [24] (December 4th Committee Early 1970s) [25] Chief, Targets Analysis Branch OS (1970 – 1973), Rockefeller Comission pp 1296, 1314

Works Cited

Alliance for Human Research Protection. 2015. 1953–1964: Operation Midnight Climax — CIA’s lurid ventures into sex, hookers and LSD. January 18. http://ahrp.org/1953-1964-operation-midnight-climax-cias-lurid-ventures-into-sex-hookers-and-lsd/. Church Committee. 1974. CIA INTELLIGENCE COLLECTION ABOUT AMERICANS : CHAOS AND THE OFFICE OF SECURITY. Oversight Report, http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/book3/pdf/ChurchB3_9_CHAOS.pdf: US Government Printing. December 4th Committee. Early 1970s. "Freedom Archives." Remembering Fred Hampton, Mark Clark. http://freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/DOC513_scans/Fred_Hampton/513.Fred.Hampton.Remember.Fred.Hampton.pdf. Deist, Jeff. 2017. Truman Was Right About the CIA. 03 08. https://mises.org/wire/truman-was-right-about-cia. Grant, Brittany. 2015. "Was It All Just A Hallucination? The CIA's Secret." ScholarWorks At Arcadia University. Spring. https://scholarworks.arcadia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1013&context=senior_theses. Hersh, Seymour. 1974. "Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years." The New York Times, December 22: 1, 26. Miller, Merle. 1986. Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S. Truman. Berkley. Osborn, Compiled by Howard J. 2007. The Family Jewels. Report, Central Intelligence Agency. PrivacySOS. n.d. THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY. https://privacysos.org/cia/. Rockefeller Commission Report. 1975. "Commission on CIA Activities within the United States: Chapter 11." Special Report https://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/rockcomm/pdf/RockComm_Chap11_CHAOS.pdf. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. 1977. "Project MKULTRA, The CIA's Program of Research in Behavioral Modification." U.S. Government Printing Office. 178. Stern, Sol. 1967. "A Short Account of International Student Politics and the Cold War with Particular Reference to the NSA, CIA, Etc." Ramparts, March: 29-39. The Central Intelligence Agency. 2008. A Look Back … The National Security Act of 1947. https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/2008-featured-story-archive/national-security-act-of-1947.html. Trifunov, David. 2014. 8 times the CIA used American spies to spy on Americans. 03 20. https://www.salon.com/2014/03/20/8_times_the_cia_used_american_spies_to_spy_on_americans_partner/. U.S. Senate. August 3rd, 1977. 1977 Senate Hearting on MKULTRA; Testimony of CIA Director Stansfield Turner. Joint Hearing, Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office.