In the 1970s, Congressional investigations and reports also revealed Agency connections with journalists and civic groups. [90] The case was dismissed in July 2013, due in part to the 1976 settlement between the family and government. [67]:140150 His treatments resulted in victims' urinary incontinence, amnesia, forgetting how to talk, forgetting their parents and thinking their interrogators were their parents. This accusation was based on the CIA Director's earlier denials of Senator Dianne Feinstein's claims that the surreptitious CIA search of the SSCI computers occurred, was inappropriate, or "violated the separation of powers principles embodied in the United States Constitution, including the Speech and Debate clause" or other laws. Among Olson's concerns were the development of assassination materials used by the CIA, the CIA's use of biological warfare materials in covert operations, experimentation with biological weapons in populated areas, collaboration with former Nazi scientists under Operation Paperclip, LSD mind-control research, and the use of psychoactive drugs during "terminal" interrogations under a program code-named Project ARTICHOKE. The full Intelligence Community archive of CORONA, ARGON, and LANYARD imagery has been transferred to the public archive at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and the Earth Resources Observation Systems (EROS) Data Center. [30], The project attempted to produce a perfect truth drug for interrogating suspected Soviet spies during the Cold War, and to explore other possibilities of mind control. "Operation Sea-Spray was a 1950 U.S. Navy secret experiment in which Serratia marcescens and Bacillus globigii bacteria were sprayed over the San Francisco Bay Area in California. [1][2] Operation Top Hat, however, was not among the projects submitted to the Secretary of the Army for approval. Substances which will produce "pure" euphoria with no subsequent let-down. Snowden released a significant amount of information on the U.S. government's surveillance program of its citizens[33][34][35][36] to The Washington Post as well as foreign news reporters. The proposed purchase aimed to stop other countries from controlling the supply. [54] On July 16, 2008, the fiscal 2009 Intelligence Authorization Bill was approved by House majority containing stipulations that 75% of money sought for covert actions would be held until all members of the House Intelligence panel were briefed on sensitive covert actions. According to Stephen Kinzer, the CIA project "was a continuation of the work begun in WWII-era Japanese facilities and Nazi concentration camps on subduing and controlling human minds". Later, From left: William Picketing, James Van Allen, and German scientist Wernher von Braun brandish a model of the first American satellite Explorer 1, on January 31, 1958. [46] The CIA wanted to know if they could make Soviet spies defect against their will and whether the Soviets could do the same to the CIA's own operatives. President Harry Truman launched this top-secret program after World War II to recruit scientists who had worked for Nazi Germany to develop stuff for the good guys. ", Stunning tale of brainwashing, the CIA and an unsuspecting Scots researcher, "Is Military Research Hazardous to Veterans Health? The Central Intelligence Agency, better known simply as the CIA, has inspired fear, suspicion, and curiosity ever since its official formation in 1947. Officials at the Office of Strategic Services (the predecessor to the CIA) recruited German scientists to America to aid the country's postwar efforts, which would also ensure that valuable scientific knowledge would not end up in the hands of the Soviet Union or the divided East and West Germany. ", "Operation Big Itch was a September 1954 series of tests at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. Documents describing secret writing fall under the CIA's purview to declassify. The ambitious program, called Project 1794, was initiated in the 1950s, and a team of engineers was tasked with building a disc-shape vehicle capable of traveling at supersonic speeds at high altitudes. Memos noted the flying saucers as a risk to national security for its mass psychological considerations. Physical methods of producing shock and confusion over extended periods of time and capable of surreptitious use. The program was canceled in 1966 after shifting ice created unstable conditions. While the goal of most of these covert operations (such as Operation Mongoose) was to assassinate Fidel Castro himself, other plans aimed to incite an all-out war between the U.S. and Cuba, experts have said. [13][23] Some surviving information about MKUltra was declassified in July 2001. Stanley. The damage incurred on these survivors was so severe that mind control was thought to be the culprit. [66] They conducted experiments with drug-induced hypnosis and with anterograde and retrograde amnesia while under the influence of such drugs. Rappoport, J. Browse the Collections | Advanced Search | Search Help. A spokeswoman for Wikipedia said in response that the changes may violate the encyclopedia's conflict-of-interest guidelines. The CIA captured people suspected of being enemy agents and other people it deemed "expendable" to undertake various types of torture and human experimentation on them. Center for the Study of Intelligence (CSI). Later admitting to the wiretapping, the CIA said 40,000 hours of telephone conversations were recorded. The same NID was released again on December . [18], Perhaps the most disruptive incident involving counterintelligence was James Jesus Angleton's search for a mole,[19] based on the statements of a Soviet defector, Anatoliy Golitsyn. [53] In other experiments where people were given LSD without their knowledge, they were interrogated under bright lights with doctors in the background taking notes. [28] The CIA wanted to use similar methods on their own captives, and was interested in manipulating foreign leaders with such techniques,[25] devising several schemes to drug Fidel Castro. [61], Some subjects' participation was consensual, and in these cases they appeared to be singled out for even more extreme experiments. Substances which will promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness to the point where the recipient would be discredited in public. In September 1946, President Harry Truman authorized a program called Operation Paperclip, which aimed to lure scientists from Nazi Germany to the United States following World War II. Olson, a United States Army biochemist and biological weapons researcher, was given LSD without his knowledge or consent in November 1953, as part of a CIA experiment, and died by suicide by jumping out of a 13th-story window a week later. The operation was a field test designed to determine the feasibility of producing, storing, loading into munitions, and dispersing from aircraft the yellow fever mosquito (though these were not infected for the test) (Aedes aegypti). Throughout its history, the CIA has been the subject of a number of controversies, both at home and abroad. In the 1960s, the U.S. Army embarked on a secret mission to build a series of mobile nuclear missile launch sites under the Greenland ice sheet. Since CIA has no domestic police authority, it sends its analytic information to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other law enforcement organizations, such as the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the United States Department of the Treasury (OFAC). The U.S. General Accounting Office issued a report on September 28, 1994, which stated that between 1940 and 1974, Department of Defense and other national security agencies studied thousands of human subjects in tests and experiments involving hazardous substances. In his book on the topic, Edward J. Ruppelt, Air Force Captain and director of Project Grudge, wrote: "[I]t doesn't take a great deal of study of the old UFO files to see that standard intelligence procedures were not being followed by Project Grudge. [29] In some cases, academic researchers were funded through grants from CIA front organizations but were unaware that the CIA was using their work for these purposes. [32], The project began during a period of what English journalist Rupert Cornwell described as "paranoia" at the CIA, when the U.S. had lost its nuclear monopoly and fear of communism was at its height. 13 million CIA records were declassified and posted online a few weeks agothe result of a 2014 lawsuit filed by journalists seeking access to documents of historic value. The following is a list of controversies involving the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In line with this, Live Science have revealed a list of "declassified military and CIA secrets", some of which included the following. According to currently released documentation, none of the operations became active under the auspices of the Operation Northwoods proposals. The program's operators examined the effects of hypnosis, biological agents and drugs, such as LSD and barbiturates, on human subjects. ", "Operation Paperclip was a secret program of the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) largely carried out by Special Agents of Army CIC, in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians, such as Wernher von Braun and his V-2 rocket team, were taken from Germany to America for U.S. government employment, primarily between 1945 and 1959. "The whole committee was stunned. Materials and physical methods which will produce amnesia for events preceding and during their use. [Top 10 States for UFO Sightings], Critics of Project Grudge said the program solely set out to debunk UFO reports, and very little actual research was conducted. It is unknown whether any useful DNA was acquired from the program, but it was deemed not successful. Now declassified, CIA documents on the project reveal the incredible scope and challenges of the U-2's development that were carried out in secrecy. Operation Paperclip's most famous recruit was rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, who would go on to mastermind NASA's Apollo moon missions. That group compiled more than 9,000 pages of documents detailing crimes by U.S. troops during the Vietnam War, many of which were declassified during the 1990s. As part of a mass declassification of a number of secrets in 2012, the U.S. Air Force revealedthat its Aeronautical Systems Division had plans to produce aUFO-style aircraft back in the 1950s. The documents will be available on CIA.gov and in the CIA Records Search Tool (CREST) at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. These research funds were sent to Cameron by a CIA front organization, the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, and as shown in internal CIA documents, Cameron did not know the money came from the CIA. [64] The barbiturates were released into the person first, and as soon as the person began to fall asleep, the amphetamines were released. [59], The Office of Security used LSD in interrogations, but Sidney Gottlieb, the chemist who directed MKUltra, had other ideas: he thought it could be used in covert operations. [79], At least one death, the result of the alleged defenestration of Frank Olson, was attributed to Olson's being subjected, without his knowledge, to such experimentation nine days before his death. [61] Representative Silvestre Reyes announced the probe will look into "whether there was any past decision or direction to withhold information from the committee". ", "The Legacy of the CIA's Secret LSD Experiments on America", "Cloak and Dropper The Twisted History of the CIA and LSD", " " "", "Cruel science: CIA torture and U.S. foreign policy", "CIA Funded Experiments On Danish Orphans For Decades", "Huge C.i.a. [38], The CIA sometimes finds itself in conflict with other parts of the government when there is disagreement over the legality of specific covert programs. [44] They spent an estimated $10 million or more, roughly $87.5 million adjusted for inflation. In December 2021, radio documentarian Per Wennick discovered 36 boxes of MKUltra records stored at a psychiatric center in a Copenhagen suburb, but when he asked for access, the center shredded the records, in violation of Danish law. [63] They gave up on the notion that LSD was "the secret that was going to unlock the universe," but it still had a place in the cloak-and-dagger arsenal. The National Intelligence Daily for December 29, 1989, was first declassified by the CIA on June 3, 1999. From a secret U.S Air Force project to build a flying saucer to a now-famous World War II-era research program that produced the first atomic bombs, below are 10 declassified military and CIA secrets. To date, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain the only uses of nuclear weapons in war. Materials which will promote the intoxicating effect of alcohol. The CIA exported experiments to Canada when they recruited British psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron, creator of the "psychic driving" concept, which the CIA found interesting. [86] The medical examiner termed Olson's death a "homicide". "[42]:365. about Become a Part of Our Story. Enjoy the video below of a hypnotized woman being instructed to pick up a venomous snake. Funding for MKSEARCH commenced in 1965, and ended in 1971. [98] The majority argued that "a test for liability that depends on the extent to which particular suits would call into question military discipline and decision making would itself require judicial inquiry into, and hence intrusion upon, military matters." Dubbed Operation Crossroads, the test The first nuclear bomb was detonated at 5:30 a.m. on July 16, 1945, during the so-called Trinity test at the Alamogordo Air Base, 120 miles (193 km) south of Albuquerque, N.M. 94-755, 94th Cong., 2d Sess. Below, weve collected a few of the crazier ones. Fidel Castro arrives MATS Terminal, Washington, D.C. (Image credit: Warren K. Leffler, Library of Congress), The only color photograph available for the Trinity blast, taken by Los Alamos scientist and amateur photographer Jack Aeby from near Base Camp. Sidney Gottlieb, who had retired from the CIA two years previously and had headed MKUltra, was interviewed by the committee but claimed to have very little recollection of the activities of MKUltra. Before it was called the CIA, it was. [24][25] According to John Dinges, author of The Condor Years (The New Press 2003), documents released in 2015 revealed a CIA report dated April 28, 1978 that showed the agency by then had knowledge that U.S.-backed Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet ordered the assassination of Orlando Letelier, a leading political opponent living in exile in the United States.[26]. [4] As a result, the remaining Big Itch tests were conducted using only the smaller capacity E14. ", "Ken Kesey, Author of 'Cuckoo's Nest,' Who Defined the Psychedelic Era, Dies at 66", "I'm Whitey Bulger. NY 10036. Project MKUltra (or MK-Ultra) [a] was an illegal human experimentation program designed and undertaken by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), intended to develop procedures and identify drugs that could be used in interrogations to weaken individuals and force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture. Project Grudge was a short-lived program launched in 1949 to study unidentified flying objects. [85] On 28 November 2012, the Olson family filed suit against the U.S. federal government for the wrongful death of Frank Olson. Known to the public as the U.S. Air Force's Discoverer program, the classified CORONA project operated during the height of the Cold War to collect pictures over the denied areas of eastern Europe and Asia. [62], MKUltra's researchers later dismissed LSD as too unpredictable in its results. Government military secrets can range from amusing to absurd to downright terrifying, but they are all extremely intriguing. [29] Whether or not the physicians were compelled is an open question. Research by Dr. Alfred W. McCoy, Gary Webb, and others has pointed to CIA involvement in narcotics trafficking across the globe, although the CIA officially denies such allegations. The Office of Transnational Issues[43] applies unique functional expertise to assess existing and emerging threats to U.S. national security and provides the most senior U.S. policymakers, military planners, and law enforcement with analysis, warning, and crisis support. Brennan ordered the creation of an internal personnel board, led by former senator Evan Bayh, to review the agency employees' conduct and determine "potential disciplinary measures. While Area 51 was not a top-secret base designed to study extraterrestrials, the U.S. Air Force did study the existence of UFOs. This list may not reflect recent changes. "Is giving your kid a test in school an inhibition on his free learning?" The aim was to find drugs that would bring out deep confessions or wipe a subject's mind clean and program them as "a robot agent. "[65], The agency attracted widespread criticism after it used a local doctor in Pakistan to set up a hepatitis B vaccination program in Abbottabad in 2011 to obtain DNA samples from the occupants of a compound where it was suspected bin Laden was living, hoping to obtain samples from bin Laden or his children in order to confirm his presence. Two offices of CIA Directorate of Analysis have analytical responsibilities in this area. The experiments continued even after Frank Olson, an army chemist who had never taken LSD, was covertly dosed by his CIA supervisor and nine days later plunged to his death from the window of a 13th-story New York City hotel room, supposedly as a result of deep depression induced by the drug. There is always the risk that one part of the government may make the covert operations of another part of the government public. Ancient bird with T. rex-like skull discovered in China, Extinct giant tortoise was the 'mammoth' of Madagascar 1,000 years ago, Utah's Great Salt Lake is on the verge of collapse, and could expose millions to arsenic laced dust. The CIA has been called into question for, at times, using torture, funding and training of groups and organizations that would later participate in killing of civilians and other non-combatants and would try or succeed in overthrowing democratically elected governments, human experimentation, and targeted killings and assassinations. It's not that long, but it wants to be read in small slices because it's a lot of information to digest. !<-- Layton (2007), Whistle-Blower's Fight For Pension Drags On, The Washington Post -->, US Senate Report on CIA Detention Interrogation Program, European Parliament report of February 2007, United Nations Convention Against Torture, Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture, Official reports by the U.S. Government on the CIA, U.S. intelligence involvement with German and Japanese war criminals after World War II, CIA transnational anti-crime and anti-drug activities, CIA's relationship with the United States Military, Classified information in the United States, Freedom of Information Act (United States), Title 32 of the Code of Federal Regulations, United States and state-sponsored terrorism, United States Department of Homeland Security, "Review of 'Legacy of Ashes: The History of CIA', "Renditions: Constraints Imposed by Laws on Torture", "Obama's War on Terror May Resemble Bush's in Some Areas", "Background Paper on CIA's Combined Use of Interrogation Techniques", "New CIA Docs Detail Brutal 'Extraordinary Rendition' Process", "Remarks of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice Upon Her Departure for Europe, 5 December 2005", "Obama preserves renditions as counter-terrorism tool", "N.Y. billing dispute reveals details of secret CIA rendition flights", "Under Obama Administration Renditionsand Secrecy Around ThemContinue", "Resolution 1507: Alleged secret detentions and unlawful inter-state transfers of detainees involving Council of Europe member states", Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, "Outsourcing Torture: The secret history of America's 'extraordinary rendition' program", "Afghan Base Hit by Attack Has Pivotal Role in Conflict", "Intelligence Reform is the President's Urgent Challenge", "A Bombshell on Pinochet's Guilt, Delivered Too Late", "Doctors Aided CIA Torture, Records Show", "CIA Made Doctors Complicit in Torture After 9/11, Report Says", "The Snowden Affair: Electronic Briefing Book No. 1. [1] Jeffrey T. Richelson of the National Security Archive has been critical of its claims. He was almost awarded thePresidential Medal of Freedom but was denied it because ofhis Nazi past. [26][27] Its aim was to develop mind-controlling drugs for use against the Soviet bloc in response to alleged Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean use of mind control techniques on U.S. prisoners of war during the Korean War. Visit our corporate site (opens in new tab). 3. A declassified document from 1955 added that MK-Ultra sought to observe "materials which will cause the victim to age faster/slower in maturity" and "substances which will promote illogical . [20] Many CIA officers fell under career-ending suspicion; the details of the relative truths and untruths from Nosenko and Golitsyn may never be released, or, in fact, may not be fully understood. "These documents remained classified for nearly a century until recent advancements in technology made it possible to release them," CIA Director Leon E. Panetta said. Its purpose was to develop, test, and evaluate capabilities in the covert use of biological, chemical, and radioactive material systems and techniques of producing predictable human behavioral and/or physiological changes in support of highly sensitive operational requirements. Secret writing document oneSecret writing document twoSecret writing document threeSecret writing document fourSecret writing document fiveSecret writing document six, Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room. CIA spokesman George Little said that he could not confirm if CIA computers were used to make the changes, claiming that "the agency always expects its computer systems to be used responsibly. The operation was detailed in a partially declassified U.S. Army report in 1981. Wishing well used for Bronze Age 'cult rituals' discovered in Bavaria, Man holding penis and flanked by leopards is world's oldest narrative carving, This wasp uses its prickly penis to escape certain death, iPad Pro M2 review: all dressed up and nowhere to go, Rare, 'high-status' Viking burial unearthed in a garden in Oslo, The ultimate action-packed science and technology magazine bursting with exciting information about the universe, Subscribe today and get your first 3 issues for just 3" today, Engaging articles, amazing illustrations & exclusive interviews, Issues delivered straight to your door or device. [2][3] The tests were designed to determine coverage patterns and survivability of the tropical rat flea (Xenopsylla cheopis) for use in biological warfare as disease vector. [77] These files dealt with the financing of MKUltra projects and contained few project details, but much more was learned from them than from the Inspector General's 1963 report. (Keystone/Getty Images), A Soviet soldier inside the 350 yard tunnel extending from the American Sector of Berlin into the Soviet Sector on April 26, 1956. The mosquitoes were released from ground level in Savannah, Georgia and then recovered using traps baited with dry ice. Between 1953 and 1964, the program consisted of 149 projects involving drug testing and other studies on unwitting human subjects, Given the CIA's purposeful destruction of most records, its failure to follow informed consent protocols with thousands of participants, the uncontrolled nature of the experiments, and the lack of follow-up data, the full impact of MKUltra experiments, including deaths, may never be known. The ACLU also "expressed serious concern about the lack of public information about the policy and the potential for abuse of unchecked executive power. [59], The Wall Street Journal reported, citing former intelligence officials familiar with the matter, that the program was an attempt to carry out a 2001 presidential authorization to capture or kill al-Qaeda operatives.[60]. Substances which produce physical disablement such as paralysis of the legs, acute anemia, etc. The United States Military Tribunal established the Nuremberg Code as a standard against which to judge German scientists who experimented with human subjects. [I]n defiance of this principle, military intelligence officials began surreptitiously testing chemical and biological materials, including LSD. Cher Ami, a black checker pigeon, earned his fame carrying messages for the American military during World War I. Subproject 54 was the Navy's top-secret "Perfect Concussion" program, which was supposed to use sub-aural frequency blasts to erase memory; the program was never carried out. He commuted from Albany, New York to Montreal every week to work at the Allan Memorial Institute of McGill University, and was paid $69,000 from 1957 to 1964 (US$579,480 in 2021, adjusted for inflation) to carry out MKUltra experiments there, the Montreal experiments. The articles and internet postings by The Washington Post and The Guardian included classified documents that were marked TOP SECRET. In the film, soldiers were selected to be part of a military program examining whether it was possible to affect the physical world with thought forms. This article was featured in the InsideHook newsletter. [41] The project was a joint project between the U.S. Army Chemical Corps and the CIA's Office of Research and Development to find new offensive-use agents, with a focus on incapacitating agents. Declassified CIA File - Project AERODYNAMIC (15 Feb 1967) Original Title: Declassified CIA file - Project AERODYNAMIC (15 Feb 1967) Uploaded by Operation Gladio Description: Source: http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/document_conversions/1705143/AERODYNAMIC%20%20%20VOL.%205%20%20 (DEVELOPMENT%20AND%20PLANS)_0004.pdf Copyright: Washington, D.C., February 12, 2010 - For the first time, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has declassified substantive information on one of its most secret and sensitive schemes, "Project Azorian," the Agency codename for its ambitious plan to raise a sunken Soviet submarine from the floor of the Pacific Ocean in order to retrieve its secrets. One of the most well-known secret research programs is the Manhattan Project, which eventually produced the world's first atomic bombs. In late 2012, the U.S. Air Force declassified a trove of documents, including records of a secret program to build a flying saucer-type aircraft designed to shoot down Soviet bombers. [31], Most MKUltra records were destroyed in 1973 by order of CIA director Richard Helms, so it has been difficult for investigators to gain a complete understanding of the more than 150 funded research subprojects sponsored by MKUltra and related CIA programs. His "driving" experiments consisted of putting subjects into drug-induced comas for weeks at a time (up to three months in one case) while playing tape loops of noise or simple repetitive statements.
declassified cia projects
