Secrecy is often essential in the name of national security. From uncovering the plots of terrorist organizations to keeping covert operatives safe in hostile territories, the government is sometimes obliged to keep sensitive details or programs under wraps. However, governmental bodies have abused this privilege time and again for dubious purposes. (These are the worst cases of espionage in U.S. history.)
When the goal is to serve the interests of large corporations or to quash popular social movements, the secretive nature of certain government programs can become a betrayal of the trust of the American people. And the Central Intelligence Agency is guilty of many such operations.
To determine covert operations that are now infamous, 24/7 Tempo referred to numerous historical and media sources as well as declassified Senate, CIA, FBI, and other government agencies’ documents. The list is far from being comprehensive, but attempts to reveal a variety of contentious operations involving various governmental agencies, many of which ended up being investigated by Congress.
Although the CIA claims to be bound by the Constitution and laws of the United States, including treaty agreements and international obligations, the organization has been involved in many illegal activities, including torture and other human rights violations, assassination attempts on foreign leaders, keeping secrets from Congress, and spying on its own citizens.
In fact multiple other governmental bodies, including the FBI and the NSA are also guilty of spying on American citizens. The FBI’s famous COINTELPRO operation, which aimed at disrupting subversive political organizations and rights movements, is known to have had files on dozens of activists and political organizers including Muhammad Ali, Jane Fonda, Abbie Hoffman, and Martin Luther King, Jr. (Find out why the FBI opened files on these 20 famous people.)
Here are 21 now-infamous covert operations
Tuskegee Experiment
- Years: 1932-1972
- Organization: US Public Health Service
The Tuskegee Experiment, conducted by the United States Public Health Service, aimed to record the effects of syphilis in the Black male community. The study included 399 Black men with syphilis who were falsely told they would receive treatment. Despite the availability of penicillin, researchers let the men progress into advanced stages of the disease, with many dying or transmitting the disease to their wives. The experiment continued for 40 years until an Associated Press article prompted public outrage in 1972.
Assassination attempts of foreign leaders
- Years: 1945-?
- Organization: Central Intelligence Agency
After the CIA’s involvement in several assassinations and attempts on foreign leaders – including Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, Indonesian president Achmed Sukarno, and Chilean general Rene Schneider – were exposed in the ’70s, President Gerald Ford signed an executive order forbidding such actions. The CIA, however, continued them and simply changed the terminology to “targeted killing.” Further actions included aerial bomb attempts on Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi in 1986, Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic in 1999, and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in 2003.
Operation Paperclip
- Years: 1945-1959
- Organization: Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency
Operation Paperclip, approved by President Harry Truman in August 1945, involved the U.S. hiring over 1,500 German scientists and engineers after World War II to work on America’s arsenal of rockets and biological weapons. Although Truman forbade the recruitment of Nazis or Nazi supporters, the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency of the United States Armed Forces falsified and whitewashed the records of some individuals who were considered wartime criminals. This included Nazis like Wernher von Braun, the Third Reich’s chief rocket engineer, and Walter Schreiber, a medical scientist who authorized dangerous human experiments.
Project Mogul
- Years: 1947-1949
- Organization: US Army Air Forces
Project Mogul was a Cold War operation of the US Air Force aiming to detect reverberations from possible Soviet nuclear-test blasts in the atmosphere using high altitude balloons. The top secret nature of the project spurred the infamous Roswell incident, in which mysterious wreckage that the Air Force claimed was a weather balloon was found in the New Mexico desert. The military coverup of the incident has fueled persistent alien and UFO conspiracy theories ever since, despite a report released in 1994 that attributed the wreckage to Project Mogul.
Operation Bloodstone
- Years: 1948-1950
- Organization: Central Intelligence Agency
According to declassified documents, the CIA and other U.S. agencies employed at least a thousand Nazis as Cold War spies and informants in the Soviet Union, Latin America, and Canada after WWII. Many former Nazis were used as anti-Soviet assets, while their potential participation in war crimes was overlooked. As recently as the 1990s, government agencies including the FBI have concealed ties to some of these agents still living in the U.S., even encouraging prosecutors to drop investigations into former Nazi informants.
MKNAOMI
- Years: 1952-1970
- Organization: Department of Defence and Central Intelligence Agency
Project MKNAOMI was a covert biological weapons research program that was revealed during the 1975 Church Committee hearings. The project involved the development of poisons that could kill crops or cause deadly diseases, as well as biological weapons including a “heart attack gun” that used a frozen dart of undetectable shellfish toxin to hit targets from 100 meters away. Documents reveal that the CIA used the New York City subway as a test for some of their poison delivery systems, flooding the subway system with a harmless simulant of a poisonous gas.
Operation Gold
- Years: 1951-1956
- Organization: Central Intelligence Agency
During the Cold War, American and British intelligence built a tunnel under the Berlin Wall that stretched into East Berlin, enabling them to tap into Soviet military and intelligence officials’ phone lines. Despite a KGB mole in Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service revealing the operation, the Soviets chose not to intervene immediately, lest they blow his cover and lose his reports. This allowed Western intelligence to collect valuable information for 11 months.
Operation PBFortune/Operation PBSuccess
- Years: 1952-1954
- Organization: Central Intelligence Agency
These destabilization programs aimed to overthrow the democratically-elected President of Guatemala, Jacobo Árbenz, due to his socio-economic reforms that threatened U.S. business interests, specifically those of the United Fruit Company, as well as a fear that the president had communist leanings. The operations involved assassination plans, psychological warfare, a coup that led to Arbenz’s resignation in 1954, and the installation of a U.S.-backed military dictatorship. Subsequent human rights abuses under the new regime included the murders of hundreds of Guatemalans.
Operation Ajax
- Years: 1953
- Organization: Central Intelligence Agency
After Iran announced plans to nationalize its oil industry, British intelligence and the CIA orchestrated and financially backed a military coup that overthrew the country’s democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, and reinstated the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. To thank the U.S. for its role in his return to power, the Shah then signed over 40% of Iran’s oil fields to U.S. companies. The coup precipitated a surge in nationalism that would ultimately lead to the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the establishment of the country’s Islamic republic.
MK-Ultra
- Years: 1953-1973
- Organization: Central Intelligence Agency
Convinced the communists had discovered a method for mind control, the CIA embarked on its own mind control program. Prisoners and psychiatric patients, including pregnant women, in the U.S., Japan, Germany, the Philippines, and Canada became victims of these inhumane experiments, which involved decimating a person’s mind and sense of self to induce a “blank slate” with techniques including verbal abuse, sleep deprivation, electroshocks, and drugs including LSD. A number of test subjects died, and many were damaged for life.
COINTELPRO
- Years: 1956-1971
- Organization: Federal Bureau of Investigation
COINTELPRO was a counterintelligence program of the FBI that attempted to discredit subversive U.S. political organizations and derail social movements including those for civil rights and Puerto Rican independence. Tactics included illegal surveillance, infiltration, false media reports amounting to smear campaigns, police harassment, and wrongful imprisonment. The program targeted numerous organizations including the American Indian Movement, United Farm Workers, and the Black Panther Party, and has been implicated in facilitating the assassination of activist Fred Hampton.
Project Greek Island
- Years: 1958-1992
- Organization: US Government
In the late ‘50s, President Eisenhower and the U.S. government initiated a building plan at the Greenbrier Hotel in West Virginia, code-named Project Casper, that installed a 112,544-square-foot bunker with 1,100 beds that could serve as a shelter for Congress in the event of a nuclear war. It contained a six month supply of food, a hospital, and a broadcast center, and was kept in a constant state of readiness for 30 years until its existence was revealed by a Washington Post reporter in 1992 and it was immediately decommissioned.
Plots to assassinate Fidel Castro
- Years: 1960-1965
- Organization: Central Intelligence Agency
According to the Church Committee, a 1975 Senate subcommittee that chronicled abuses by various government agencies, the CIA planned and attempted numerous plots to assassinate Cuba’s leader Fidel Castro. The plots included poisoned cigars, an exploding seashell that would be painted colorfully to attract Castro (who was an avid scuba diver), and hiring various people to kill him, including mobsters and even one of his paramours. While some ideas were abandoned as impractical, others were carried out and failed.
Operation Popeye
- Years: 1967-1972
- Organization: Central Intelligence Agency
Operation Popeye was a weather modification operation during the Vietnam War that aimed to extend the monsoon season. It involved US Air Force planes that engaged in cloud seeding to increase rainfall and disrupt the enemy by washing out roadways and causing landslides on their supply routes. The secret project cost taxpayers an estimated 15 million, but its success has been a subject of debate.
Operation Chaos
- Years: 1967-1974
- Organization: Central Intelligence Agency
Operation Chaos was a domestic espionage project initiated by President Lyndon B. Johnson and expanded by President Richard Nixon that spied on American citizens involved in anti-war and civil unrest movements. The goal was to uncover foreign influences, particularly communist ones, in these movements. However, despite collecting data on over 300,000 citizens including university students and leftists, the operation found little evidence of such influence and was terminated in 1974.
Operation Condor
- Years: 1968-1989
- Organization: Central Intelligence Agency
Operation Condor was a US-backed campaign that claimed to combat terrorism by supporting military coups and right-wing dictatorships in eight South American countries: Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil, Peru, and Ecuador. The governments involved used secret police agencies to coordinate attacks against political opponents of their regimes, even across national boundaries. Kidnapping, rape, torture, and murder of dissidents were all common tactics, and the CIA supplied many of these countries with money, weapons, and training.
Project Azorian
- Years: 1968-1974
- Organization: Central Intelligence Agency
Project Azorian was a six-year CIA operation during the Cold War to retrieve a sunken Soviet submarine from the Pacific Ocean. The submarine, carrying three nuclear-armed ballistic missiles, was located 1,800 miles northwest of Hawaii, and could provide valuable intelligence if recovered. Using a specially designed ship, the Hughes Glomar Explorer, the CIA managed to retrieve a section of the submarine, while another section broke off and sank. The project was leaked to the press before the broken section could be recovered.
Operation “Argo”
- Years: 1979-1980
- Organization: Central Intelligence Agency
During the Iranian hostage crisis, the CIA worked with the Canadian government to rescue six American diplomats being sheltered by Canadian diplomats in Tehran. The caper involved the creation of a fake movie-production company and press for a sci-fi movie called “Argo.” A small group of CIA agents posed as Argo production team members in order to gain entry into Iran under the auspices of scouting filming locations. They then helped the diplomats disguise themselves as film crew members. All six successfully escaped the country with fake Canadian passports.
Iran-Contra
- Years: 1985-1987
- Organization: National Security Council
In the midst of the bloody Iran-Iraq war, Iran was desperate for weapons. Despite a U.S. trade embargo, members of the Reagan administration secretly sold weapons to Iran for $30 million, in exchange for help in the release of American hostages being held by Iranian-backed terrorists in Lebanon. Adding to the scandal, $18 million from the arms deal was secretly used to support Nicaraguan anti-communist Contras that were battling the communist Sandinista government.
Extraordinary rendition
- Years: 1995-?
- Organization: Central Intelligence Agency
Extraordinary rendition is the extrajudiciary transfer of foreign nationals suspected of terrorism to detention centers in other countries where illegal and inhumane interrogation methods may be applied. This program began during the presidency of Bill Clinton, when several suspected terrorists were transferred from Croatia, Albania, and Bulgaria to Egypt, where they were tortured and in some cases executed without trial. After 9/11, this program expanded dramatically. At least 136 people have been detained in this way by the CIA, and in several of those, the CIA abducted the wrong people due to mistaken identity.
NSA surveillance
- Years: 2001-?
- Organization: National Security Administration
In 2013, Edward Snowden, an NSA contractor, revealed that the US government was spying on its own citizens. The surveillance included monitoring telephone records, calls, and texts, and tapping into the servers of companies including Google and Facebook to access audio and video chats, photographs, emails, documents, and connection logs. Following the leak, new laws and regulations were enacted to limit data collection, but some experts believe these changes only slightly improved surveillance practices. (These are some surprising things the U.S. government knows about you.)