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THE PROPAGANDA WAR: THE CIA'S DOMESTIC SURVEILLANCE OPERATIONS IN THE UNITED STATES |
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by wakeupmag.co.uk "It is shameful
for the American people to be so misled. There is The CIA's gross violations of international law and the Agency's interference in the internal politics of other countries are well-established facts. Less well known is the fact that for decades the CIA has conducted a massive campaign of illegal covert operations within the United States, in breach of the Agency's own charter (officially the CIA has no legal jurisdiction within the United States; the National Security Act of 1947 prohibits the Agency from engaging in any kind of "internal security functions."). UNIVERSITY INFILTRATION AND CAMPUS SURVEILLANCE Professors and other operatives with academic cover have worked extensively for the CIA on campuses around the world. They have written books, articles and reports for U.S. consumption with secret CIA sponsorship and control; they have spied on foreign nationals at home and abroad; they have regularly recruited foreign and U.S. students and teachers for the Agency; they have hosted conferences with secret CIA backing under scholarly cover to promote disinformation; and they have collected extensive data, under the disguise of research, on Third World movements opposed to US interference.
"It is absolutely essential that the
Agency have available to it the single Since the 1940s, the CIA had hundreds of teachers and graduate students on more than 100 campuses who worked for the Agency secretly in recruiting, writing propaganda and running covert operations. For instance, Yale's crew coach "Skip" Walz was a spotter for the Agency throughout the 1940s and 50s. He received $10,000 to pass the names of athletic young men on to CIA recruiters. In one year, Skip introduced 25 such men to the CIA who went on to become paramilitary officers. In the 1950's, the CIA expanded its operations within educational institutions until some 5,000 academics at universities across the States were working for it by identifying and recruiting students, both from America and from the thousands of foreign students who came to the United States each year. These foreign students would then work as moles for the Agency when they returned to their own countries. The CIA, both overtly and covertly, established entire university institutes and research departments, and employed professors as recruiting agents and researchers. From 1952 to 1967, the Agency even funded the National Student Association, giving about $3.3 million to support its operations. The Agency was also involved in the creation of a number of academic foreign studies institutes. For instance, in co-operation with the American Metal Climax Corporation, a US-African mining company, the CIA established the African-American Institute in 1954 (now located in New York). The purpose of this was to generate interest in African studies that could subsequently be tapped by the CIA and other government agencies. Academic institutions also played an important role in promoting CIA interests in African affairs. The CIA funded the joint Harvard/ MIT Center for International Studies (MIT-CIS) and developed its African Research Programme through a network of academic agents. Max Milllikan, former director of the CIA's Office of National Estimates, was appointed director of MIT-CIS. He in turn appointed State Department official Arnold Rivkin to head the African programme. Together, the two supervised the centre's African studies for the CIA's use. For instance, Milllikan commenced Project Bushfire to study the political, psychological, economic and sociological factors leading to "peripheral wars." A 1958 CIA report stated that the Agency would need "a constant level of… seventy people specializing in the African area; they particularly desire those who have training in economics, geography or political science." CIA-backed professors at MIT-CIS and Cornell launched projects to train an elite group of Indonesian military and economic leaders at the Centre for South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California in Berkely. These trainees would later be christened "the Berkeley Mafia." They went back to Indonesia and became the impetus behind the coup that brought General Suharto to power, which resulted in the massacre of 500,000 to one million Indonesians during the CIA-backed coup. Durwood Lockard, assistant deputy to the CIA's Near East Division, became assistant head of MIT-CIS's Middle Eastern Studies Department in 1957. From that period onwards, several officials and faculty members of the Harvard Business School founded and helped to administer front organisations for the CIA. They published a number of books in two versions: one classified for CIA reading and the other unclassified and released to the general public.
In 1956 the CIA established the Asia Foundation, providing it with $88 million in funding each year. The foundation sponsored research, supported conferences, ran academic exchange programmes, funded anti-Communist academics in various Asian countries and recruited foreign agents and new case officers. Large numbers of American academics participated in the program. From 1955 to 1959, Michigan State University was under a $25 million contract with the CIA to provide academic cover to five CIA agents stationed in South Vietnam. Their jobs included drafting the South Vietnamese government's Constitution and providing police training and weapons to the repressive Diem regime. The level of CIA surveillance on American campuses was best summed up by one student, recruited by the CIA at Iowa State University in 1965, who wrote: "My campus missions included monitoring selected students; obtaining printed materials from student protest groups, including membership and donor lists and programs of planned actions and protests; gathering information on the private sexual activities of selected students or faculty, and on the student visa status of selected foreign students; and learning the identities of visiting "travelling agitators" from other colleges and universities… Ethnic and racial groups were watched as well as student radical movements. No guidelines were given that differentiated between what was legitimate protest and what constituted a perceived threat to national security. This allowed the CIA to expand its domestic surveillance to cover draft resistance organisations, military deserters, non-mainstream newspapers and publications, most black militant groups, and US citizens travelling abroad. Most domestic political activity was also covered." In 1968 the CIA used the Eagleton Institute for Research at Rutgers University in a plan to influence the outcome of the presidential election in Guyana. Through the Eagleton Institute, the CIA helped amend the Guyanese constitution to allow Guyanese and relatives of Guyanese living abroad to vote by absentee ballot. Then, 16,000 votes were manufactured in New York City, giving the CIA's candidate, Forbes Burnham, a narrow margin over socialist Cheddi Jagan. The nature of the relationship between the CIA and academic community was perhaps best highlighted by a 1968 memo from Dr. Earl C. Bolton, who, while serving as Vice President of the University of California at Berkeley, was secretly consulting with the CIA. The memo was widely circulated among US universities and advised the use of "duplicity and deception to hide CIA connection to the campuses." It also advised lying about CIA involvement in university projects, stating, "The real initiative might be with the Agency but the apparent or recorded launching of the research should, wherever possible, emanate from the campus." Bolton's memo also recommended setting up programmes with CIA funds "to establish the study of intelligence as a legitimate and important field of inquiry for the academic scholar." Under Bolton's plan, the CIA was to fund one-year post-doctoral programmes for selected scholars. By the late 1970s, about 500 academics were working for the CIA, identifying and recruiting American students and providing full-time screening committees designed to select 200-300 future CIA operatives from among the 250,000 foreign students in the U.S. Around 60% of these professors, researchers and administrators were fully aware of and received direct payment from the CIA as contract employees, or from research grants. In 1976, one CIA official bragged about the level of recruitment of foreign students who would go on to become moles for the Agency in their own countries, stating that "by 1985, we'll own 80% of the Iranian government's second and third level of officials." By the late 1980s, the CIA had made recruitment of new personnel a key priority and initiated an "Officer in Residence" programme to increase the Agency's presence and prestige in the US academic community. According to CIA "Academic Coordinator Arthur Hulnick, "about ten" major universities across the country were hosting CIA Officers in Residence at the time.
James McInnis, the CIA's Officer in
Residence Today, according to John P. Littlejohn, the CIA's deputy director of personnel, approximately 1,000 CIA employees are hired each year from campuses and two to three hundred of these become clandestine officers. The Agency's surveillance of U.S. citizens was not limited to academic institutions. Following the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by CIA-trained forces in 1961, Cuban exiles were directed and paid by the Agency to compile secret files on and watch over other Cubans and Americans "who associated with individuals under surveillance." By the late 1960's such activities were being supported by the CIA in several key American cities, including Los Angeles, New York, Miami and San Juan. It was estimated that 150 informants were on the payroll of a "Cuban counterintelligence" office located in Florida. INFILTRATING THE MEDIA Since the 1950s, the CIA conducted extensive operations within newspaper, magazine and television organisations, maintaining liaison relationships with about 50 American joumalists and U.S. media organisations. An uncensored portion of the Senate's Church Committee investigation into the CIA stated: "They [the 50] are part of a network of several hundred foreign individuals around the world who provide intelligence for the CIA and at times attempt to influence foreign opinion through the use of covert propaganda. These individuals provide the CIA with direct access to a large number of foreign newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers and other foreign media outlets." The Agency also established close links with book publishing houses and media organisations in the U.S. Between 1947 and 1967, the CIA produced, subsidised or sponsored well over 1,000 books, many of them published by cultural organisations backed by the Agency. In early 1964, President Johnson's national security advisors decided something was needed to overcome the American public's apathy towards U.S. involvement in Vietnam, so the CIA fabricated evidence to justify the war to its domestic audience. In 1965, just before the entry of American troops into Vietnam, the State Department issued two reports, one of which was entitled Aggression From the North: The Record of North Vietnam's Campaign to Conquer South Vietnam. Both papers relied on contrived CIA "intelligence" to support their arguments. The Agency conducted several covert operations to prove the papers' thesis. One involved an elaborate scheme to print large numbers of postage stamps showing the Viet Cong shooting down a U.S. helicopter. The highly professional production technique was meant to indicate that the stamp was produced in North Vietnam because the South had no such capability. The CIA printed sheets of these stamps, wrote letters in Vietnamese, mailed them all over the world and made copies available to U.S. journalists. A full colour blow-up of the stamp appeared on the cover of Life magazine on February 26th 1965. Another covert operation entailed planting a weapons shipment and blaming it on the North Vietnamese. The CIA took tons of Communist-made weapons out of its warehouses, loaded them onto a Vietnamese ship, faked a firefight and then called in Western reporters and International Control Commission observers to "prove" that the North Vietnamese were aiding the Viet Cong rebels. A State Department White Paper featured details of this operation under the headline "Hanoi Supplies Weapons, Ammunition and Other War Material to its Forces in the South." Seven pages of the White Paper were devoted to the fake CIA "evidence". On March 6th 1965, just a week after publication of the White paper, President Johnson ordered two Marine Corps battalion-landing teams into Vietnam and the initiation of Operation Rolling Thunder, which consisted of the systematic bombing of North Vietnam. The Vietnam War had begun. THE DOMESTIC OPERATIONS DIVISION Also in 1964, President Johnson allowed CIA Director John McCone to create a new super-secret branch of the CIA's proprietary front organisations called the Domestic Operations Division (DOD), the very title of which mocked the supposed congressional prohibition of CIA operations inside the U.S. In the classified document creating the DOD, the scope of its activities were "to exercise centralised responsibility for the direction, support and coordination of clandestine operational activities within the United States." One of those activities was burglarising foreign diplomatic sites at the request of the National Security Agency (NSA). The CIA also expanded the role of its "quasi-legal" Domestic Contact Service (DCS), an operation designed to brief and debrief selected American citizens who had travelled abroad in sensitive areas of intelligence interest. The DCS also monitored the arrivals and departures of U.S. nationals and foreigners. Thus, a nationwide network was established, comprising the DOD, the DCS and the Agency's network of fronts, covers and phoney organisations, operating entirely without congressional oversight or public knowledge. As anti-war protests spread across American campuses during the late 60s, the CIA reacted by implementing two new domestic operations. The first, Project RESISTANCE, was designed to provide security to CIA recruiters on campuses. Under this programme, the CIA sought active cooperation from college administrators, campus security and local police to help identify anti-war activists, political dissidents and "radicals". Information on thousands of students and dozens of groups was fed to the DOD. The CIA also created Project MERRIMAC, to provide warnings about demonstrations being carried out against CIA facilities or personnel in the Washington area. Under both Projects, the Agency infiltrated agents into all sorts of domestic groups and embarked on a massive campaign of burglaries, explosives, criminal frame-ups and disinformation. The CIA worked closely with local police, purchasing sophisticated equipment for them, and in return was given access to arrest records, suspect lists and intelligence reports. Many large police departments, in conjunction with the CIA, carried out illegal warrantless searches of private property, to provide intelligence for a report requested by President Johnson and later entitled "Restless Youth." By 1967, the CIA's illegal collection of domestic intelligence had become so large and widespread that CIA Director Richard Helms was forced to create a Special Operations Group (SOG), which provided data on the U.S. peace movement to the Office of Current Intelligence on a regular basis. SOG was directed by Richard Ober, a CIA officer with an established record of domestic intelligence operations. OPERATION CHAOS In July 1968, CIA Director Helms decided to consolidate all CIA domestic intelligence operations under one programme and title; this was called Operation CHAOS. The Agency's domestic activities greatly expanded from then on, at the urging of both President Johnson and his main White house advisers Dean Rusk, Walt Rostow and Tom Charles Huston, who were staunch anti-Communists and wanted the Agency to establish the involvement of foreign intelligence agencies in the anti-war movement in the U.S. After Richard Nixon took office in January 1969, Operation CHAOS became one of the largest and most pervasive domestic surveillance programmes in the history of the United States. The CIA went to great lengths to conceal the operation's existence from the public, while Nixon, like Johnson, exploited CHAOS for his own political ends. Helms recommended that computer networks be used to "share information about American dissidents between the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency and military intelligence units." Using a computer system called HYDRA, the CIA gathered information on individuals and groups from all of these intelligence organisations. The Agency also employed satellites to monitor anti-Vietnam War demonstrations. Many of the CHAOS agents received several weeks of assignments and training overseas to establish their covers as radicals. Once they returned to the US and enrolled in colleges and universities, they had the proper "credentials." The CHAOS unit periodically drew up reports "on the foreign aspects of the anti-Vietnam War, youth and similar movements and their possible links to American counterparts" and collected files on over 300,000 individuals in the United States.
CIA Director Richard Helms, who
developed In 1970, Richard Helms joined with others in recommending to President Nixon "an integrated approach to the coverage of domestic unrest," which came to be known as the Huston Plan. The CIA "recruited or inserted about a dozen individuals into American dissident circles" In order to "establish their credentials for operations abroad." These agents "submitted reports on the activities of the American dissidents with whom they were in contact." This information was kept in CIA files and passed on to the FBI. In June 1970, Nixon met with Helms, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, NSA Director Admiral Noel Gaylor and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) representative Lt. General Donald V. Bennett, and told them that he wanted an even more concentrated and coordinated effort against domestic dissenters. To that end, Nixon created the Inter-agency Committee on Intelligence (ICI), chaired by Hoover. The first ICI report, in late June, recommended new efforts in "black bag operations", wiretapping and mail-opening; within a month these recommendations had been accepted by the White House. In 1972, a report by the CIA's Inspector General expressed misgivings about Operation CHAOS: "…we also encountered general concern over what appeared to be a monitoring of the political views and activities of Americans not known to be or suspected of being involved in espionage… Stations were asked to report on the whereabouts and activities of prominent persons… whose comings and goings were not only in the public domain, but for whom allegations of subversion seemed sufficiently nebulous to raise renewed doubts as to the nature and legitimacy of the CHAOS program." By now, even Helms and Hoover began to have second thoughts about the expansion of CHAOS and its widespread use as a political tool by Nixon. Both men feared that the whole question of domestic operations was going to become public knowledge. Meanwhile, Helms continued to lie to Congress and to the public, denying that the CIA was involved in domestic operations, or using American institutions such as the Peace Corps, the business community or the media as covers for CIA operations. Yet just a few years later, the Washington Star revealed that over 35 American journalists, some full-time, some free-lance and some major media correspondents, were on the CIA payroll. And in 1974 the CIA was forced to admit that over 200 CIA agents were operating overseas posing as businessmen. When the Watergate scandal broke out in 1972 (in which two former CIA officers, E. Howard Hunt and James McCord, were involved in a burglary at the Watergate complex in Washington), the Agency's web of lies, deception, misinformation and illegal domestic activities began to unravel with speed. In an effort at damage control, new CIA Executive Director William Colby decided that Operation CHAOS and Project RESISTANCE should be terminated. In 1975, largely as a result of Watergate and other exposures, the CIA underwent public investigation and scrutiny by the Church Committee and the Rockefeller Committee. These investigations revealed considerable evidence showing that the CIA had carried out criminal activities with total contempt for the law, both in the United States and abroad. Documents released in early 1979 by the Agency as the result of a lawsuit indicated that Operation CHAOS, contrary to earlier accounts in reports to government committees, had infiltrated political groups in the United States in order to collect purely domestic information. The documents also revealed a number of aspects of CHAOS and related programmes not reported by the Church Committee, including information that "the Agency had investigated domestic political groups as much as five years before the initiation of CHAOS, that CHAOS collected information on prominent Americans including Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Ronald Dellums (Chair of the House of Representatives Black Caucus), that CHAOS information was preserved and continued to be used after the operation's supposed termination in 1974", and that "the programme was for several years assigned highest operational priority." During the life of Operation CHAOS, the CIA had compiled personality files on over 13,000 individuals, as well as files on over 1,000 domestic groups, and that the Agency had shared information on over 300,000 people with the FBI, DIA and other agencies.. THE TENTACLES WIDEN The literature that exists of the CIA's illegal domestic operations is by no means complete, since it describes only those activities that have been uncovered, and most of those have only come to light years after the fact, because of unauthorised leaks or Freedom of Information Act requests. There is good reason to believe that the number of operations has escalated, rather than diminished. After taking office, President Bush greatly increased the CIA's secret budget for internal spying and the number of academics on the Agency's payroll expanded sharply. In 1982, the CIA brazenly proposed that all scientific research papers written in the United States by U.S. academics be submitted to the Agency for "prior review." And in 1986, Robert Gates, the CIA's Deputy Director for Intelligence, told university professors at a public speaking engagement that the CIA would "continue to strengthen the kinds of programmes it ran in universities in the past", and "We need your help." One example of this was the case of Professor Richard Mansbach, head of the political science department at Rutgers, who assigned an undergraduate class to do data-intensive research on Western European political culture. The studies that the students carried out on Western Europe's disarmament, labour, women's and environmental movements were secretly passed on to the CIA. Professor Nadav Safran was forced to leave his director's position at Harvard's Centre for Middle Eastern Affairs in 1986, when it was revealed that he was on the CIA's payroll. He had received over $100,000 from the Agency to write a book on Saudi Arabia and $50,000 to organise a university conference on Islam. Just a year earlier, the director of Harvard's Centre for International Affairs, Samuel P. Huntington, was also uncloaked as a CIA asset, having worked secretly with a CIA consultant and published documents that were funded by the Agency. It is safe to assume that only a small number of CIA academics are ever exposed, while the great majority remain secret. It is difficult to typecast the CIA scholar. Gustav Hilger, a CIA academic who held posts at Harvard and Johns Hopkins University, was a former member of the Nazi Foreign Office. But even liberal professors have been inducted into the CIA. James R. Hooker of Michigan State's African Studies Centre was regarded as left thinking; he spoke publicly against the Vietnam War and was friendly with leaders of liberation movements in Africa and the Caribbean. However, as a CIA researcher, Hooker travelled to Africa to document the support of various political parties and eventually gave his support to UNITA and the FNLA in Angola. Evidence of the Agency's creation, support and training of the Salvadoran death squads in the U.S. was documented in 1984, when it was revealed that the head of Salvador's Treasury Police (key organisers of the death squads) had been a paid CIA informant since the late 1970s. The CIA, along with the State Department and US military, conceived and organised ORDEN, the rural paramilitary intelligence network that initiated the use of terrorism against government opponents. ORDEN became Mano Blanca (the "White Hand") and developed into a network of death squads whose members received direct training in the United States from U.S. officials. In the summer of 1986, Northwestern University's Traffic Institute, a police-training facility, began participation in the "Anti-Terrorism Assistance Program", which involved the training of Salvadoran police force members who were connected with the death squads. Media coverage and protests from campus and community groups eventually forced the university to pull out of the programme but State Department spokesman Michael Kraft said that "schools in the New England area" had already completed their participation in the programme. In 1987, Harvard University agreed to take on a $1.2 million study in conjunction with the CIA to study problems in intelligence assessment and foreign policy, using the Philippines as a model. CONCLUSION Just as the FBI's illegal actions against U.S. citizens did not stop with the supposed termination of its COINTELPRO programme, so the termination of the CIA's Operation CHAOS never ended the Agency's criminal activities against domestic dissidents. President Reagan extended the CIA's domestic operations dramatically and the following Bush administration and CIA head William Webster both announced the need to again target political enemies of the U.S. for assassination. The CIA is not the only U.S.-based organisation with frightening domestic surveillance capacities. Using a computer system called HARVEST, the National Security Agency (NSA) can monitor thousands of phone conversations simultaneously, honing in on and recording specific conversations according to pre-programmed "trigger words" such as "Cuba," "CIA," or "protest." It was revealed in the Iran-Contra hearings that the U.S. government, through the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), has detention camps in place and ready for use for dissenting Americans labelled as "subversives," who are to be detained by police and military units in an "emergency" situation. FEMA developed a secret contingency plan, written as part of an Executive Order signed by President Reagan, for use in a "severe crisis." The plan calls for suspension of the Constitution, appointment of military commanders to run state and local governments, and declaration of martial law. Such a "crisis" situation includes "domestic opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad." Much of what was done outside the law under the COINTELPRO and CHAOS programmes has since been legalised by Executive Order No. 12333, signed by the President on December 4th 1981. This gives the CIA extended license to carry out domestic operations in the United States and limits the public's access to information about these operations. Also under Executive Order 12333, government infiltration "for the purpose of influencing the activity of domestic political organisations" has received official sanction. The CIA's methodology, applied so ruthlessly abroad, has now been given full legislation for use at home.... "In the CIA we justified our
penetration, disruption and sabotage of the left "The lesson we learn from this
history is that we cannot keep our liberty
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