Operation CHAOS and the CIA Plan to Spy on Americans
The United States has, for much of its existence, presented itself as a country who prioritize the rights of its citizens. The founding document of the country, the United States Constitution, starts with “We the people” and much of what differentiates this country from many others is this recognition of the rights of the individual.
The legal framework within which this country operates is specifically built around this humanist approach. In theory, the poorest and lowliest individual should enjoy the same protections as the President themself.
Of course, this is not how things are in reality. This position the US holds which allows them to occupy the moral high ground when facing less “free” states across the negotiating table, is in reality somewhere between a flawed system and a mutually-recognized façade.
And there were flaws, times when the US thought itself above the law when dealing with its citizenry. For nearly a decade a US agency flouted its presumed jurisdiction in pursuit of a morally dubious goal.
Typically when accusations are leveled at a US organization operating in illegal ways, it is the CIA who are in the crosshairs. The US generally gives them a free pass for these activities, they are secret, easily deniable, and most importantly they involve foreign powers.
The CIA doesn’t do any of its surveillance business inside the US. The rights of the individual are ordinarily protected to that extent. Except there was a time when they weren’t.
“Improper Accumulation of Material”
Operation CHAOS was one such operation, and the problem was easy to see. The year is 1965 and the US President, Lyndon B. Johnson, is facing problems both foreign and domestic.
The war in Vietnam, a US priority given their need to promote capitalism and oppose the communist alternate of the Soviets, does not go well. Anti-war sentiment and dissent are on the rise domestically, and something needs to be done to keep a lid on things.
Happily, the CIA had a solution: they would spy on their own citizens. Specifically, they would be tasked with the collection and analysis of evidence, and the identification of threats presented by US citizens.
The CIA was not prohibited from doing so, it would be 1981 before such an Executive Order limited them to overseas activities and by that point the even more secret NSA was there to take their place, spying on Americans without warrants. But to take the CIA’s far-reaching approach to surveillance and threat assessment and apply that to domestic problems was, at the very least, a frank statement about the threat the US government felt it was facing.
The CIA had started with Cuban exiles from Castro’s 1959 revolution, initially intending them to be used against Cuba. However in the process they set up a domestic operations department in 1964, and a year later President Johnson expanded their remit to cover all domestic dissent.
The FBI already had this covered, of course. The CIA’s work was even more hidden, even more carefully handled, and of course entirely outside of the legal framework.
By the time Richard Nixon was inaugurated in 1969 there were multiple CIA operations running to this end. Far from shutting these down, Nixon took a pragmatist’s view and combined them all into one Operation, CHAOS.
The initial intent had been to spy on those US citizens whose travel plans raised official eyebrows. The CIA would use its network to spy on US citizens abroad, but the remit grew and grew.
By the end of the 1960s the CIA would routinely keep tabs on just about anyone they didn’t like while they were travelling aboard. They also sought to infiltrate foreign groups suspected of working with US domestic organizations who spoke out against US foreign or domestic policy.
These were not terrorist cells. Jewish charities and the Israeli Embassy in Washington DC was targeted. Student organizations, women’s liberation organizations, human rights groups, publications from the left of US politics, the CIA spied on them all.
By the end, Operation CHAOS had started files on more than 7,000 US citizens and 1,000 politically-active groups. Some 300,000 names had been collected secretly as potential actors against the interests of the US.
It would take a national scandal to break Operation CHAOS. The fallout from Watergate led to the operation being quietly shuttered in 1973, and the public only became aware of its scope and activities a year later when investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published an article revealing what the CIA had been up to.
A commission was founded, headed by Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller, to assess the depth of the scandal and the amount of surveillance overreach. It was the findings from this commission, in part, which lead to the executive order to prohibit the CIA from ever operating in such a fashion again.
So, what did they find? Looking purely at results. Did Operation CHAOS actually do anything good? Were these anti-war protestors supported by hostile foreign powers, looking to destabilize the US?
In 1967 the CIA told President Johnson they had found “no evidence of any contact between the most prominent peace movement leaders and foreign embassies in the US or abroad.” This assessment had not changed when the CIA reported to Nixon in 1969.
The people wanted peace. And the US government, far from listening to them, had concluded that they must be subject to some outside influence.
Top Image: Operation CHAOS was intended to monitor domestic dissent for US foreign policy, but it ended up spying on just about anybody the government didn’t like. Source: TommyJapan1 / CC BY 2.0.
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