Operation CHAOS
Operation CHAOS or Operation MHCHAOS was a Central Intelligence Agency domestic espionage project targeting the American people 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.[1][2] The "MH" designation is to signify the program had a worldwide area of operations.[3]
The CIA was formed as a result of the National Security Act of 1947. 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 communist 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.[4]
The CIA developed numerous operations targeting American dissidents in the US. Many of these programs operated under the CIA's Office of Security, including:[2]
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.
When President Richard Nixon came to office in 1969, existing domestic surveillance activities were consolidated into Operation CHAOS.[5] Operation CHAOS first used CIA stations abroad to report on antiwar activities of United States 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.[3] 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.[2] 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.[1] 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.[6]
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.[8]
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."[8]
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.[1] In total, 6 reports were compiled for the White House and 34 for cabinet level officials.[2]
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.[1][9] Amid the uproar of the Watergate break-in involving two former CIA officers, Operation CHAOS had been closed in 1973.[4] Further details were revealed in 1975 during Representative Bella Abzug's House Subcommittee on Government Information and individual Rights.[3] 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.[1] 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."[1]
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."[3]
See also
CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties
CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties is a 2019 non-fiction book written by Tom O'Neill with Dan Piepenbring [de]. The book presents O'Neill's research into the background and motives for the Tate–LaBianca murders committed by the Manson Family in 1969. O'Neill questions the Helter Skelter scenario argued by lead prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi in the trials and in his book Helter Skelter (1974).[3][4] The book's title is a reference to the covert CIA program Operation CHAOS.[5]
In 1999, entertainment reporter Tom O'Neill accepted a three-month assignment from the film magazine Premiere to write about how the Tate–LaBianca murders changed Hollywood. O'Neill missed his deadline but continued to investigate the murders.[6][7] CHAOS is the product of twenty years of meticulous research, hundreds of interviews, and falling-outs with publishers that led to financial and legal repercussions for O'Neill.[8][9][10]
Publishers Weekly wrote that "True crime fans will be enthralled."[11] The Guardian's Peter Conrad wrote, "As [O'Neill] admits, the loose ends are still not tied up and with so many of the culprits dead they probably never will be. O’Neill's intricately sinister 'secret history' often sounds incredible; that doesn’t mean that it’s not all true."[9] Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Stephen Phillips deemed that O'Neill did "yeoman's work filling out an aging narrative straitjacketed by the exigencies of its author’s legal strategy. "[12] Greg King of The Washington Post wrote, "There’s plenty of new information that makes Chaos a worthwhile addition to the canon of Manson literature, even if it ends without a unified theory of the crimes and their motivations.".[13]
In a mixed review, Kirkus Reviews called the book "overlong", praising "the author's confessions of the many dead ends and blank spots he encountered" but largely criticizing O'Neill for exploring too many theories.[14] Tony Allen-Mills of The Sunday Times felt that the early chapters of the book "do a convincing job picking out the flaws in Bugliosi's case, but the wheels start to come off when O'Neill begins searching for alternative explanations."[15]
Joe Rogan referred to the book multiple times on his podcast The Joe Rogan Experience. He later invited O'Neill on to discuss the book at length on episode #1459.[16]
See also:
https://thedissedent.page/2021/09/02/the-secret-team/
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“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”
From ‘Propaganda’ by Edward Bernays
PSYOP THEATER
WHERE THE WHOLE WORLD IS THE STAGE
GENERAL THEORY
By William Whitten
https://hybridrogue1.wordpress.com/2012/11/25/psyop-theater-v2/
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