What Is Operation CHAOS?

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10 months ago

This is a new series of articles where I explain various terms, catchphrases, and other confusing topics, as well as many secret government projects and agencies. If there are any subjects you’re interested in learning about, please include them in the comment section.

Nixon and Johnson Pushed the CIA to Spy on U.S. Citizens, Declassified Documents Show

What prompted the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to spy on American citizens on U.S. soil in the 1960s—in violation of its own charter? Because two inhabitants of the White House suspected sinister foreign influence behind the decade’s growing civic unrest.

For President Richard Nixon, the anti-war demonstrations that mired his presidency never made sense. During one conversation with his treasury secretary John Connally, he described the unrelenting protesters as “a wild orgasm of anarchists sweeping across the country like a prairie fire.”

His confusion wasn’t entirely misplaced. More than a quarter-million Americans demonstrated against the conflict in Vietnam, a sustained and widespread effort that helped erode morale amongst servicemen overseas. It was a sharp break from the broad bipartisan support Americans had offered to the previous wars of the century.

Nixon wasn’t just resentful of the anti-war movement: He was also suspicious that foreign powers might be behind them. And so, in June 1969, the president directed the CIA to prepare a report on the anti-war movement and what foreign communist support the demonstrations might be receiving.

He was the second consecutive president to demand CIA surveillance of American dissidents. His predecessor, President Lyndon Johnson, had already directed federal agencies to investigate civil unrest in July 1967 following a spate of race-related violence.

The result of those executive requests—the CIA’s Operation CHAOS—would directly violate the Agency’s charter, mandating that the CIA focus its counterintelligence on overseas targets only. The charter, drafted when the agency was created in 1947, reflected the Constitutional principle that American citizens are entitled to a high degree of personal privacy.

How Did the CIA Do Their Spying?

Because the goal of Operation CHAOS was to establish proof of foreign influence in American dissident movements, agents were deployed to universities across the United States, where they infiltrated the “New Left” and learned the culture and lingo of the movements they would purportedly be part of. Once they had successfully infiltrated, agents deployed to foreign nations, where they sought information on foreign connections.

In both their domestic training and their international work, agents collected the names of American citizens and organizations connected to dissident movements, creating a computerized index of more than 300,000 names. Of those, approximately 7,200 American citizens had more thorough “201” files opened on them, deeper portraits which included information such as their place of birth, their family members and their organizational affiliations.

The CIA also supplemented some of these “201” files with information gathered through a CIA mail-intercept program, wherein the CIA covertly read postal correspondence between the United States and the USSR.

Who Was the CIA Spying On?

The CIA was most concerned about foreign influence inside the loudest civil-unrest movements. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, that meant looking for foreign linkages to the antiwar movement, the black nationalism movement (the Black Panther Party) and civil-rights groups, such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

But while the stated goal of Operation CHAOS was to find connections to foreign actors, most of the “201” files were at best tenuously connected. For example, a 201 file was opened on Grove Press, Inc. a press that published an author later discovered to be a Soviet agent. In an unrelated endeavor, Grove Press also helped produce I Am Curious (Yellow), a Swedish film drama with explicit sex scenes. When those scenes drew a polarized response amongst the American public, the CIA kept track of how film critics reviewed the movie.

Despite their diligence, in 1969 the CIA reported to the White House that there was “very little evidence of communist funding and training of such movements and no evidence of communist direction and control.” Operation CHAOS nevertheless remained in effect until 1974.

The top-secret report “Restless Youth,” penned by CIA Director Richard Helms at the request of the White House, concluded that student radicalism sprang more from political and social alienation at home. In his cover letter, addressed to then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Helms took pains to emphasize that spying on U.S. students was outside of the CIA’s purview: “This is an area not within the charter of this Agency, so I need not emphasize how extremely sensitive it makes the paper. Should anyone learn of its existence it would prove most embarrassing for all concerned.”

Kissinger, in summarizing the letter for the president, derided the findings, in part because it “tends to dismiss the communist and other outside influence as a factor.”

It was “a no-win situation,” writes former CIA officer and Operation CHAOS member Frank Rafalko in his book MH/CHAOS, which defended the Agency against those who criticized it of domestic overreach. “Each time we reported that there was no evidence of foreign control within the domestic student and black militant groups, the White House reaction was one of skepticism… It was back to the drawing board each time. And each time, we had to expand our horizons, to reach further and look at every dissident to try to detect any foreign contact and what that contact meant. In the end, we were trying to defend our conclusion—we were trying to prove a negative.”

What Made The CIA Finally Stop?

The 1972 discovery that two former CIA operatives were involved with the Watergate burglary had dramatic repercussions for both the CIA and the White House. Nixon fired CIA Director Helms, whose replacement, James Schlesinger, would only last a few months before being replaced by William Colby. In 1974, as the Agency faced heightened scrutiny over partisan corruption, Colby terminated CHAOS.

In December 1974, four months after President Nixon’s resignation, The New York Times broke the story of Operation CHAOS to the general public. The following year, President Gerald Ford established the United States President’s Commission on CIA Activities within the United States (also known as the Rockefeller Commission), which further elucidated the claims.

Operation CHAOS or Operation MHCHAOS was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) domestic espionage project targeting American citizens operating from 1967 to 1974, established by President Lyndon B. Johnson and expanded under President Richard Nixon, whose mission was to uncover possible foreign influence on domestic race, anti-war, and other protest movements. The operation was launched under Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Richard Helms by chief of counter-intelligence James Jesus Angleton, and headed by Richard Ober. The “MH” designation is to signify the program had a global area of operations.

Background

The CIA was charged with the collection, correlation, and evaluation of intelligence. While the Act does not specify a prohibition on collecting domestic intelligence, or a restriction to only collect foreign intelligence, Executive Order 12333 of 1981 added prohibitions to limit CIA activities. The CIA began domestic recruiting operations in 1959 in the process of finding Cuban exiles who could be used in the campaign against Cuba and President Fidel Castro. As these operations expanded, the CIA formed a Domestic Operations Division in 1964. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson requested that the CIA begin its own investigation into domestic dissent—independent of the FBI’s ongoing COINTELPRO.

The CIA developed numerous operations targeting American dissidents in the US. Many of these programs operated under the CIA’s Office of Security, including:

HTLINGUAL – Directed at letters passing between the United States and the then Soviet Union; the program involved the examination of correspondence to and from individuals or organizations placed on a watchlist.
Project 2 – Directed at infiltration of foreign intelligence targets by agents posing as dissident sympathizers and which, like CHAOS, had placed agents within domestic radical organizations for the purposes of training and establishment of dissident credentials.
Project MERRIMAC – Designed to infiltrate domestic antiwar and radical organizations thought to pose a threat to security of CIA property and personnel.
Project RESISTANCE – Worked with college administrators, campus security and local police to identify anti-war activists and political dissidents without any infiltration taking place.

Scale of operations

When Nixon came to office in 1969, existing domestic surveillance activities were consolidated into Operation CHAOS. Operation CHAOS first used CIA stations abroad to report on antiwar activities of American citizens traveling abroad, employing methods such as physical surveillance and electronic eavesdropping, utilizing “liaison services” in maintaining such surveillance. The operations were later expanded to include 60 officers. In 1969, following the expansion, the operation began developing its own network of informants for the purposes of infiltrating various foreign antiwar groups located in foreign countries that might have ties to domestic groups. Eventually, CIA officers expanded the program to include other leftist or counter-cultural groups with no discernible connection to Vietnam, such as groups operating within the women’s liberation movement. The domestic spying of Operation CHAOS also targeted the Israeli embassy, and domestic Jewish groups such as the B’nai B’rith. In order to gather intelligence on the embassy and B’nai B’rith, the CIA purchased a garbage collection company to collect documents that were to be destroyed.

Targets of Operation CHAOS within the antiwar movement included:^[5]

At its finality, Operation CHAOS contained files on 7,200 Americans, and a computer index totaling 300,000 civilians and approximately 1,000 groups.

Findings

The aim of the programs was to compile reports on “illegal and subversive” contacts between United States civilian protesters and “foreign elements” which “might range from casual contacts based merely on mutual interest to closely controlled channels for party directives.”

DCI Richard Helms informed President Johnson on November 15, 1967, that the CIA had uncovered “no evidence of any contact between the most prominent peace movement leaders and foreign embassies in the U.S. or abroad.” Helms repeated this assessment in 1969. In total, 6 reports were compiled for the White House and 34 for cabinet level officials.

Exposure

The secret program was exposed by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in a 1974 article in The New York Times entitled Huge CIA Operation Reported in US Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years. Amid the uproar of the Watergate break-in involving two former CIA officers, Operation CHAOS had been closed in 1973. Further details were revealed in 1975 during Representative Bella Abzug‘s House Subcommittee on Government Information and individual Rights. The government, in response to the revelations, felt pressured enough to launch the Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States (The Rockefeller Commission), led by then Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, to investigate the depth of the surveillance. Richard Cheney, then Deputy White House Chief of Staff, is noted as having stated the Rockefeller Commission was to avoid “… congressional efforts to further encroach on the executive branch.”

Following the revelations by the Rockefeller Commission, then-DCI George H. W. Bush admitted that “the operation in practice resulted in some improper accumulation of material on legitimate domestic activities.”

Resources

history.com, “Nixon and Johnson Pushed the CIA to Spy on U.S. Citizens, Declassified Documents Show.” By Adam Janos; en.wikipedia.org, ” Operation Chaos.” By Wikipedia Editors; researchgate.net, “Operation CHAOS: The CIA’s Domestic Surveillance Program and Its Implications.” By Douglas C. Youvan;

Background

Scale of operations

Findings

Exposure

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