Unit 16 · Real Government Secrets

In the early 1950s, the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in the Cold War. This was a long rivalry between two powers that competed for influence around the world without fighting each other directly. Each side spied on the other. Each side feared the other was about to gain a secret advantage.

The Korean War (1950–1953) added a new fear. Some American prisoners held by North Korea and China signed false confessions or spoke on enemy radio. Newspapers used a new word, brainwashing, to describe what might have happened. The idea was that captors could strip away a person’s beliefs and put new ones in their place. Researchers later found that harsh treatment, hunger and pressure explained most of it. At the time, though, many officials were alarmed.

CIA leaders asked a question: if the other side could control minds, could the United States learn to do it too, or at least learn to defend against it? On 13 April 1953, CIA Director Allen Dulles approved a program to study the question in secret. It was called MKUltra. The CIA is the Central Intelligence Agency, created in 1947 to gather and analyze information about other countries.

Understanding the fear does not excuse what came next. It helps explain it. Historians try to see a decision the way the people inside it saw it, and then judge it by what it did to real people. Both steps matter. Explaining a choice is not the same as approving it.

MKUltra was run by the CIA’s Technical Services staff. Its best-known leader was Sidney Gottlieb, a chemist. The program did not build one big laboratory. Instead, it paid outside researchers at universities, hospitals, prisons and private companies. Those projects were called subprojects. Investigators later counted about 150 of them.

Many researchers did not know the CIA was paying them. The money often passed through a front organization, a group that looks independent but secretly serves someone else. A foundation with a scientific-sounding name could hand out grants while hiding where the money came from.

The subprojects studied many things. Some tested LSD, a powerful drug that changes perception, mood and thinking. Some studied hypnosis, sleep, stress and ways to get information from people during questioning, called interrogation. Some were ordinary science that simply had a secret sponsor. Others crossed clear lines, as the next lesson shows.

Because the program was spread across so many places and hidden behind other names, it was hard to see from the outside. That same spread later helped investigators. Each subproject left payment records behind. Money records name who was paid, when, and for what. They are hard to hide completely.

After World War II, judges at Nuremberg, Germany, tried Nazi doctors who had done cruel experiments on prisoners. In 1947 the court set out rules for research on people. These rules are called the Nuremberg Code. The first rule is about informed consent. That means a person agrees to take part, freely, after being told what will happen and what the risks are.

MKUltra broke that rule in some of its work. The CIA wanted to know how drugs would affect people who did not expect them, as an enemy’s victim would not expect them. So some people were given LSD without being told. The word for such people is unwitting: they did not know. Records show tests on unwitting people in ordinary places, including a CIA-run apartment in San Francisco.

Other subjects were patients, prisoners or people with addictions. They might have signed a form, but they had little real choice or little real information. Researchers call such people vulnerable: their situation makes it hard to say no or to understand the risk.

Not every MKUltra subproject harmed anyone. But the unwitting tests are why the program became a lasting symbol. They show what can happen when secrecy removes the usual checks on research. Rules like informed consent exist so that no one, not even a government agency, can decide alone that a person’s body may be used for a test.

Frank Olson was a scientist who worked for the U.S. Army at Camp Detrick in Maryland, studying germs that could be used as weapons. He had a wife and three children. In November 1953, he went to a work retreat at Deep Creek Lake in western Maryland with Army and CIA colleagues.

At the retreat, CIA officers from Sidney Gottlieb’s group put LSD into a drink and gave it to several of the men. Olson did not know. In the days that followed, he became deeply troubled and anxious. His colleagues took him to New York City to see a doctor who worked with the CIA.

Early on 28 November 1953, Olson fell from a tenth-floor window of the Statler Hotel in New York and died. For more than twenty years, his family was told only that he had suffered a breakdown. They were not told about the LSD. His death was treated as a private tragedy, not as the result of a secret experiment.

Olson’s story matters because it puts a face on the word unwitting. He was a trained scientist and a government employee. He still had no chance to say no. His family would not learn the truth for more than twenty years. The next lesson tells how they found out.

In June 1975, a presidential commission released a report on CIA activities inside the United States. One passage described an Army employee who had been given LSD without his knowledge in 1953 and who died days later after jumping or falling from a hotel window. The report did not give his name. The Olson family read it and recognized their father.

The family spoke publicly. In July 1975, President Gerald Ford met them at the White House and apologized on behalf of the government. Congress later approved a payment to the family. For the first time, the government admitted in public that one of its own secret tests had led to a death.

The story did not end there. Olson’s sons came to believe the official account was still incomplete. In the 1990s they had his body examined again. They argue that he did not jump but was killed to keep secrets. Others hold that the drug and his distress explain the fall. No court or official inquiry has settled this dispute.

So there are two kinds of fact here. It is documented that Olson was secretly drugged and died days later. How exactly he died remains contested. Keeping those two kinds of fact apart is one of the most useful habits a reader of history can build. Both matter.

In January 1973, Richard Helms was leaving his job as director of the CIA. Before he left, he ordered MKUltra’s files destroyed. Sidney Gottlieb, who was retiring too, carried out the order. Most of the program’s working papers and reports were destroyed.

The timing matters. The Watergate scandal was growing in Washington. Congress and reporters were starting to ask hard questions about what the government had done in secret. Records that were destroyed could not be demanded later. Helms and Gottlieb later gave reasons, such as protecting the privacy of the researchers and subjects. Critics saw a simpler motive: removing the evidence.

Historians call the destruction of records a gap in the record. It is a real hole, not a sign of anything in particular. A gap tells you that something was there. It does not tell you what was there. That difference is important for the rest of this chapter.

Destroying records is also a kind of evidence in itself. The order shows that leaders knew the files could cause trouble if the public saw them. The 1973 order shows intent to hide. It does not tell us exactly what the lost pages said. Hiding and proving are different things.

Helms’s order reached the program’s main files. It did not reach every piece of paper MKUltra had created. Money leaves a trail. Each subproject needed contracts, invoices and payment approvals. Those were handled by the CIA’s finance staff and stored in a different place, among retired financial records.

In 1977, a search for records turned up these files. The search followed a Freedom of Information Act request from writer John Marks. The Freedom of Information Act, passed in 1966 and strengthened in 1974, lets anyone ask a federal agency for its records. The agency must search and must explain what it holds back.

The surviving papers came to about 20,000 documents. They did not contain the full research reports. They did show who was paid, how much, for which subproject, and often a short description of the work. That was enough to identify many universities, hospitals and researchers.

The lesson is practical. When you look for evidence of a hidden program, look where money moved. Budgets, receipts and payroll are dull, but they are hard to erase, because many different offices keep copies. Many copies in many hands make a secret much harder to erase.

On 3 August 1977, two Senate groups met together: the new Select Committee on Intelligence and the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research, led by Senator Edward Kennedy. The witness was Admiral Stansfield Turner, whom President Jimmy Carter had made CIA director that year.

Turner did not defend the program. He told the senators that the recovered papers had been found in financial files and described what they covered: drug tests, including on unwitting people, research on behavior, and funding hidden through outside groups. He said the CIA would try to identify the institutions involved and let them know.

A hearing is a meeting where lawmakers question witnesses in public or in private and create an official record. This one was printed as a government document. It became one of the main primary sources on MKUltra. A primary source is a record made at the time by people involved in the events.

The hearing also showed a new kind of relationship. A CIA director was answering questions from a permanent committee whose job was to watch his agency. Before 1976, no such Senate committee had existed. The hearing itself was a sign that the rules had changed.

In December 1974, reporter Seymour Hersh wrote in The New York Times that the CIA had spied on thousands of Americans inside the United States, mostly people who opposed the Vietnam War. The CIA’s charter was meant to keep it focused on other countries, not on Americans at home. The story caused an uproar.

In January 1975, President Gerald Ford named a commission to look into it. Vice President Nelson Rockefeller led it, so it is called the Rockefeller Commission. Its report came out in June 1975. It confirmed a CIA program, called Operation CHAOS, that had gathered files on American protesters. It also described drug testing, including the case that turned out to be Frank Olson’s.

Critics said the commission was too close to the government it was studying. Several members were former officials. It worked for only a few months. Supporters said it still put key facts on the public record for the first time. Commissions like this are one way a president can answer public worry.

Notice the chain. A reporter’s story led to a commission. The commission’s report led a family to the truth. Each step made the next one possible. This is how accountability often works: in steps, not all at once. A single story rarely tells the whole truth, but it can start the search.

On 27 January 1975, the Senate created a special committee to study the government’s intelligence agencies. Its chairman was Senator Frank Church of Idaho, so it is known as the Church Committee. The House of Representatives set up its own inquiry, called the Pike Committee.

The Church Committee had staff, a budget and the power to demand documents and question witnesses under subpoena, a legal order to appear or to hand over records. It looked at the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency and others. It held public hearings and many private ones.

Its final report was issued on 29 April 1976, in six books totaling about 2,700 pages. It covered MKUltra and other drug testing, CIA plots against foreign leaders, and the FBI’s secret campaign against American groups, which the next chapter explores.

The committee’s members did not all agree. Some worried that revealing secrets could hurt the country or put agents at risk. Others said that hidden abuses were the greater danger to a free country. That debate, between secrecy and oversight, has never fully ended.

Because MKUltra was real and hidden, it has become the base for many larger stories. A careful reader sorts the claims into three groups. First, what is documented: the program existed from 1953; it paid about 150 subprojects; it tested drugs on some people without their knowledge; Frank Olson was drugged and died; most files were destroyed in 1973.

Second, what is contested: how Olson died; how many people were harmed in total; exactly what some subprojects did. Honest researchers disagree, because the evidence is incomplete. In Canada, patients at a Montreal psychiatric hospital who went through harsh treatments in work partly paid for by MKUltra later sued, and some won settlements.

Third, what is not supported by the records: that MKUltra built a working method to control people’s minds, or that it created programmed assassins. Investigators found no evidence of this. Many who worked on the program said the results were disappointing.

The destroyed files leave real gaps. Some people fill those gaps with the most dramatic answer. Historians leave a gap as a gap and say what is and is not known. Saying "we do not know" is honest. It is also a strong position when others claim to know more than the records show.

The investigations did more than tell stories. They changed how the government works. In May 1976, the Senate created a permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. In 1977, the House created its own permanent intelligence committee. Agencies now had to report to these committees on a regular basis.

In 1976, President Ford issued an executive order that banned U.S. government employees from taking part in political assassination. In 1978, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA. It requires the government to get approval from a special court before it listens in on people inside the United States for intelligence purposes.

Research rules changed too. In the 1970s, federal rules required review boards to approve research on human beings before it starts. These boards check for informed consent. The shock of cases like MKUltra helped push those protections forward. Consent became a rule to check, not a favor to ask.

Oversight is not a machine that runs itself. It depends on members of Congress asking hard questions, on judges, on reporters and on people inside agencies who speak up. The system of the 1970s made abuse harder to hide. It did not make it impossible.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI, is the main national police agency of the United States. It investigates federal crimes and threats to national security. By 1971 it had been led for almost fifty years by one man, J. Edgar Hoover. Many Americans admired the FBI. Critics said it had grown too powerful and too secret.

The eight people who broke into the Media office on 8 March 1971 were ordinary citizens with a political goal. They believed the FBI was watching people who opposed the Vietnam War and people working for civil rights. They could not prove it from the outside. So they planned a burglary, a break-in to steal property, and chose a small office with little security.

They took about 1,000 pages. When they read them, they found what they had suspected. Some files showed the FBI watching student groups, Black student organizations and peace activists. One file encouraged agents to interview protesters often, so they would feel that there was an FBI agent behind every mailbox.

The burglars mailed copies to reporters and lawmakers. Then they went back to their ordinary lives. The FBI searched for them for years and never charged anyone. They spoke publicly only in 2014. Their silence protected them. Their files spoke for them.

When the envelopes arrived, editors faced a hard choice. The files were stolen. The Justice Department, which oversees the FBI, asked newspapers not to publish them, warning that doing so could endanger lives and national security. Not everyone who received copies was willing to use them.

At The Washington Post, reporter Betty Medsger and her editors read the documents closely. They checked that the files looked real. They weighed the risk of harm against the public’s interest in knowing what a government agency was doing. The Post decided that the files showed possible abuse of power and that citizens had a right to know. It published the first story in March 1971.

This is an example of press freedom at work. The First Amendment protects the right of newspapers to publish, even information the government wants kept quiet. It also puts a responsibility on journalists to verify what they print and to think about harm.

Other papers followed. Once the stories were out, members of Congress and other reporters had a starting point for more questions. The decision to publish is one reason the public learned about COINTELPRO at all. A free press can act as a check on government when other checks are quiet.

Among the Media papers was a routing slip marked COINTELPRO. The word was short for Counterintelligence Program. Counterintelligence usually means working against foreign spies. So why would it appear in files about American students and activists?

An NBC News reporter, Carl Stern, decided to find out. He used the Freedom of Information Act to ask the FBI for records about the word. The FBI resisted. Stern went to court. In the end, the FBI had to release papers that showed COINTELPRO was a set of programs aimed at groups inside the United States.

Meanwhile, on 28 April 1971, less than two months after the break-in, Hoover officially ended the programs called COINTELPRO. He said future actions would be handled case by case. Critics pointed out that ending a program’s name is not the same as ending its methods.

The full picture came later, when the Church Committee studied the FBI’s files in 1975 and 1976. A single word on a slip of paper had opened a paper trail. A paper trail is a chain of documents that can be followed from one record to the next. Following a paper trail takes patience, but each record points to the next one.

Investigating a crime means gathering evidence so a court can decide if someone broke the law. COINTELPRO did something different. Its goal was to disrupt groups, meaning to break them apart, weaken them and damage their reputations, whether or not their members had committed any crime.

The Church Committee described the methods. Agents sent anonymous letters to stir up quarrels between members or between rival groups. They gave damaging stories to friendly reporters. They tried to get people fired from jobs. They placed informants, people who secretly report to the police, inside groups.

Hoover and his agents saw themselves as defending the country. They believed some of these groups were controlled by foreign enemies or were heading toward violence. Some groups did include people who broke laws. But the FBI also targeted people for their ideas and for lawful speech and protest.

The Church Committee concluded that many of these methods would be wrong in a free country even if every target had been violent. The problem was not only who was targeted. It was that a secret agency was acting as judge and punisher without any court.

COINTELPRO was not one program but several, started at different times. The first, in 1956, targeted the Communist Party of the United States. Over the next twelve years, the FBI added more. The political spectrum is the range of political views, from left to right. COINTELPRO reached across much of it.

In 1961 the FBI added the Socialist Workers Party, a small group on the far left. In 1964 it added white hate groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, which was using terror against Black Americans and civil rights workers. In 1967 it added what it called Black nationalist groups, which swept in major civil rights leaders and organizations. In 1968 it added the New Left, meaning student and antiwar groups.

The Klan program is complicated. The Klan was committing real violence, and many people wanted it stopped. Yet the FBI used the same secret methods against the Klan as against peaceful groups. And most COINTELPRO actions were aimed at groups on the left, including Black-led and antiwar groups.

Most people in every one of these groups were never charged with any crime. Knowing the range helps a reader avoid a simple story. The lesson is not that one side was targeted. It is that secret power, once created, can be pointed at anyone. The Klan’s violence was real, and so was the misuse of secret power.

Martin Luther King Jr. led the most famous nonviolent movement in American history. He preached peace and used marches, boycotts and speeches to win civil rights. The FBI treated him as a threat. Hoover disliked him and claimed he was under Communist influence. The Church Committee later found that the FBI never showed that King himself was.

In 1963, Attorney General Robert Kennedy approved FBI wiretaps, secret listening devices on phone lines, on King and some of his advisers. The FBI also placed hidden microphones in hotel rooms where King stayed. Agents gathered personal information to use against him.

In 1964, the year King won the Nobel Peace Prize, the FBI mailed him an unsigned letter full of insults and threats, with a recording. King and many historians read the letter as pushing him to take his own life. The Church Committee described this campaign in detail in 1976.

King kept working until he was killed in 1968. His story shows how COINTELPRO-style methods reached even a leader devoted to nonviolence. It also shows resilience: the movement continued, and the truth about the FBI’s campaign came out through records.

Fred Hampton grew up in Maywood, a suburb just west of Chicago. As a teenager he was a youth leader in the NAACP, the civil rights organization. In 1968 he joined the Black Panther Party and soon became chairman of its Illinois chapter. He was a powerful speaker who could hold a crowd.

The Black Panther Party was founded in Oakland, California, in 1966. Its members carried guns openly at first and talked about defending Black neighborhoods from police abuse. They also ran community programs. In Chicago, the Panthers served free breakfast to children before school, and they talked about health care and other needs of poor neighborhoods.

Hampton also worked to bring different groups together. He reached out to Chicago street organizations and to groups of poor white and Puerto Rican young people, in what was called the Rainbow Coalition. Members saw him as a young leader who could unite people across racial lines.

The FBI saw the same abilities as a danger. Under its COINTELPRO program against Black groups, it watched Hampton closely and placed an informant near him. Seeing both views does not mean they are equal. It means understanding why each side acted as it did.

Early on 4 December 1969, officers working for Cook County State’s Attorney Edward Hanrahan raided an apartment on West Monroe Street on Chicago’s West Side. They said they were looking for illegal weapons. Several Panthers were asleep inside, including Fred Hampton and Deborah Johnson, who was expecting their child.

Police fired many shots. Fred Hampton, 21, was killed in his bed. Mark Clark, 22, a Panther leader from Peoria, Illinois, was also killed. Several others were wounded and then arrested. Hanrahan’s office said the Panthers had fired first and that the officers had defended themselves.

Evidence soon challenged that account. People from the neighborhood toured the apartment and saw the bullet holes. A federal grand jury in 1970 found that nearly all of the shots had come from police weapons. The charges against the survivors were dropped. Hanrahan and several officers were later charged with blocking justice and were found not guilty in 1972.

Hampton’s son, Fred Hampton Jr., was born weeks after the raid. The deaths of two young men are the center of this story. The records matter because they show what happened to them. Their families and neighbors, and the lawyers who took the case, spent years making sure the facts were not buried.

Hampton’s family, the survivors and Mark Clark’s family sued the officials involved. The case is known as Hampton v. Hanrahan. It took more than a decade. During it, lawyers pried loose FBI documents that the government had fought to keep secret. The families pressed on for years.

The documents showed that William O’Neal, the Chicago chapter’s head of security, was a paid FBI informant. He had given his FBI contact a floor plan of the apartment, marking where Hampton slept. The FBI passed the information to the State’s Attorney’s officers before the raid. Historians still debate how much each official knew and intended.

In 1979, a federal appeals court ruled that there was enough evidence of a cover-up to send the case back for a new trial. In 1982, the case was settled for $1.85 million. The federal government, Cook County and the City of Chicago each paid one-third. A settlement is not a verdict. It ends a case without a final finding of guilt.

Chicagoans still remember Hampton and mark the anniversary of his death each year. The case shows how courts, not only Congress, can open secret records. It also shows how long the search for truth can take: thirteen years from the raid to the settlement.

In 1959, Fidel Castro took power in Cuba, ninety miles from Florida, and soon allied with the Soviet Union. In April 1961, a CIA-backed invasion at the Bay of Pigs failed. President John F. Kennedy’s government kept looking for ways to remove Castro.

On 13 March 1962, General Lyman Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the top military leaders, sent a memo to Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Its title was Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba. The plan is known as Operation Northwoods.

The memo listed ways to create a pretext, a false reason given to hide the real one. It suggested staging fake attacks on the U.S. base at Guantánamo Bay, blowing up a U.S. ship and blaming Cuba, and faking a Cuban attack on an aircraft. The idea was to make the world believe Cuba had attacked first, so an invasion would look justified.

An attack staged to look like the work of an enemy is often called a false flag operation. Northwoods matters because it is written proof that top U.S. military leaders once proposed such a plan on paper. A plan on paper is not an action. The next lesson shows what happened to it.

Northwoods was never carried out. On 16 March 1962, three days after the memo, military and civilian leaders met with President Kennedy. A memo about that meeting, written by General Edward Lansdale, records that the president said plainly that U.S. military force was not under discussion.

Researchers have not pointed to a written reply from McNamara himself. What is clear is that the civilian leaders did not approve the plan. Lemnitzer left the chairmanship later that year. This is how civilian control of the military is supposed to work: elected leaders, not generals, decide on war.

For thirty-five years the memo stayed classified. Classified means officially secret, open only to people with permission. After the 1991 film JFK stirred public interest, Congress passed a law in 1992 to release records about Kennedy’s assassination. The Assassination Records Review Board reviewed millions of pages. In November 1997, it released the Northwoods memo.

The memo reached a wide audience in 2001, when journalist James Bamford wrote about it in his book Body of Secrets and the National Security Archive posted it online. The memo became public because a law required old secrets to be opened. That is how a hidden plan finally reached ordinary readers.

Look back at the three secrets in this unit. MKUltra was proven by payment records and a Senate hearing. COINTELPRO was proven by stolen files, a FOIA lawsuit and a Senate report. Northwoods was proven by the memo itself. In every case, documents made the difference between suspicion and proof.

Real secrets leave traces. Money is paid, memos are written, and people remember and sometimes speak. Those traces can be found by reporters, courts, Congress and ordinary citizens. That is why real secrets were exposed, often years later. Secrets can last a long time, but they are hard to keep forever.

The same test works in the other direction. When someone claims a huge secret plot, ask: what documents exist? Who made them, and when? Have they been checked? A claim that has no records after many years of searching is not proven. A document shown to be forged proves nothing except the forgery.

Northwoods also teaches a limit. It proves that a false flag plan was proposed in 1962 and rejected. It does not prove that any later event was staged. Each claim needs its own evidence. This is evidence-based reasoning: matching the size of a conclusion to the size of the proof.