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Domestic Surveillance: The History of Operation CHAOS
by Verne Lyon
from Covert Action Information Bulletin, Summer 1990
Verne Lyon is a former CIA undercover operative
who is now a director of the Des Moines Hispanic
Ministry.
For over fifteen years, the CIA, with assistance from
numerous government agencies, conducted a massive
illegal domestic covert operation called Operation
CHAOS. It was one of the largest and most pervasive
domestic surveillance programs in the history of this
country. Throughout the duration of CHAOS, the CIA
spied on thousands of U.S. citizens. The CIA went to
great lengths to conceal this operation from the
public while every president from Eisenhower to Nixon
exploited CHAOS for his own political ends.
One can trace the beginnings of Operation CHAOS to
1959 when Eisenhower used the CIA to "sound out" the
exiles who were fleeing Cuba after the triumph of
Fidel Castro's revolution. Most were wealthy educated
professionals looking for a sympathetic ear in the
United States. The CIA sought contacts in the exile
community and began to recruit many of them for future
use against Castro. This U.S.-based recruiting
operation was arguably illegal, although Eisenhower
forced FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to accept it as a
legitimate CIA function. Congress and the public
showed no interest in who was recruiting whom.
The CIA's Office of Security was monitoring other
groups at this time and had recruited agents within
different emigr� organizations. (1) The CIA considered
this a normal extension of its authorized infiltration
of dissident groups abroad even though the activity
was taking place within the U.S. Increased use of the
CIA's contacts and agents among the Cuban exiles
became commonplace until mass, open recruitment of
mercenaries for what was to be the ill-fated Bay of
Pigs invasion was no longer a secret in southern
Florida. It was no secret to Fidel Castro either, as
we later found out.
This activity led the CIA to establish proprietary
companies, fronts, and covers for its domestic
operations. So widespread did they become that
President Johnson allowed the then CIA Director, John
McCone, to create in 1964 a new super-secret branch
called the Domestic Operations Division (DOD), the
very title of which mocked the explicit intent of
Congress to prohibit CIA operations inside the U.S.
(2) This disdain for Congress permeated the upper
echelons of the CIA. Congress could not hinder or
regulate something it did not know about, and neither
the President nor the Director of the CIA was about to
tell them. Neither was J. Edgar Hoover, even though he
was generally aware that the CIA was moving in on what
was supposed to be exclusive FBI turf. (3)
In the classified document creating the DOD, the scope
of its activities was to "exercise centralized
responsibility for the direction, support, and
coordination of clandestine operational activities
within the United States...." One of those was
burglarizing foreign diplomatic sites at the request
of the National Security Agency (NSA). The CIA also
expanded the role of its "quasi-legal" Domestic
Contact Service (DCS), an operation designed to brief
and debrief selected American citizens who had
traveled abroad in sensitive areas of intelligence
interest. Because the interviews took place in
airports between the aircraft and customs and
immigration control, the operations were not
technically considered domestic. the DCS also helped
with travel control by monitoring the arrivals and
departures of U.S. nationals and foreigners. In
addition, the CIA reached out to former agents,
officers, contacts, and friends to help it run its
many fronts, covers, and phony corporations. This "old
boy network" provided the CIA with trusted people to
carry out its illegal domestic activities.
The Justification
With the DCS, the DOD, the old boy network, and the
CIA Office of Security operating without congressional
oversight or public knowledge, all that was needed to
bring it together was a perceived threat to the
national security and a presidential directive
unleashing the dogs. That happened in 1965 when
President Johnson instructed McCone to provide an
independent analysis of the growing problem of student
protest against the war in Vietnam. Prior to this,
Johnson had to rely on information provided by the
FBI, intelligence that he perceived to be slanted by
Hoover's personal views, which often ignored the
facts. Because Hoover insisted that international
communism was manipulating student protest, Johnson
ordered the CIA to confirm or deny his allegations.
All the pieces now came together.
To achieve the intelligence being asked for by the
President, the CIA's Office of Security, the
Counter-Intelligence division, and the newly created
DOD turned to the old boy network for help. Many were
old Office of Strategic Services people who had
achieved positions of prominence in the business,
labor, banking, and academic communities. In the
academic arena, the CIA sought their own set of "eyes
and ears" on many major college and university
campuses. The FBI was already actively collecting
domestic intelligence in the same academic settings.
(4) The difference between the intelligence being
gathered was like night and day. The FBI Special
Agents and their informers were looking for
information that would prove Hoover 's theory. The CIA
wanted to be more objective.
In April 1965, Johnson appointed Vice-Admiral William
Raborn CIA Director (DCI, or Director of Central
Intelligence) and Richard Helms Deputy Director. Since
Raborn's days at the helm of be CIA seemed numbered
from the outset, he never really became involved in
the nuts and bolts of domestic operations; that was
left to Helms, a career intelligence officer who had
come up through the ranks (he had been Deputy Director
for Plans (DDP) since 1962 and Deputy DCI from
1965-66) and who could be trusted. Helms became DCI in
June 1966. As Deputy Director, he had allowed the CIA
slowly to expand its domestic intelligence operations
and understood his orders from President Johnson were
to collect intelligence on college and university
campuses with no governing guidelines other than
"don't get caught." Helms now had a free hand to
implement Johnson's orders and, by August 1967, the
illegal collection of domestic intelligence had become
so large and widespread that he was forced to create a
Special Operations Group (SOG). The SOG was imbedded
in the DDP's counterintelligence division and
provided, data on the U.S. peace movement to the
Office of Current Intelligence on a regular basis. (5)
As campus anti-war protest activity spread across the
nation, the CIA reacted by implementing two new
domestic operations. The first, Project RESISTANCE,
was designed to provide security to CIA recruiters on
college campuses. Under this program, the CIA sought
active cooperation from college administrators, campus
security, and local police to help identify anti-war
activists, political dissidents, and "radicals."
Eventually information was provided to all government
recruiters on college campuses (6) and directly to the
super-secret DOD on thousands of students and dozens
of groups. The CIA's Office of Security also created
Project MERRIMAC, to provide warnings about
demonstrations being carried out against CIA
facilities or personnel in the Washington area. (7)
Under both Projects, the CIA infiltrated agents into
domestic groups of all types and activities. It used
its contacts with local police departments and their
intelligence units to pick up its "police skills" and
began in earnest to pull off burglaries, illegal
entries, use of explosives, criminal frame-ups, shared
interrogations, and disinformation. CIA teams
purchased sophisticated equipment for many starved
police departments and in return got to see arrest
records, suspect lists, and intelligence reports. Many
large police departments, in conjunction with the CIA,
carried out illegal, warrantless searches of private
properties, to provide intelligence for a report
requested by President Johnson and later entitled
"Restless Youth." (8)
SOG was being directed by Richard Ober, a CIA person
with an established record of domestic intelligence
operations in academia. (9) When Ramparts magazine
disclosed the relationship between the National
Student Association and the CIA in early 1967, Ober
was assigned to investigate the magazine's staff
members, their friends, and possible connections with
foreign intelligence agencies. (10)
In July 1968, Helms decided to consolidate all CIA
domestic intelligence operations under one program and
title. The new operation was called CHAOS and Ober was
in charge. (11) Its activities greatly expanded from
then on at the urging not only of President Johnson,
but also his main advisers Dean Rusk and Walt Rostow.
Both men were convinced that Hoover was right and
foreign intelligence agencies were involved in
anti-war protests in the U.S. Johnson was not
convinced and wanted the CIA's intelligence in order
to compare it with that provided by the FBI.
The Nixon Administration
After Richard Nixon took office in January 1969, Helms
continued operations with the assurance that nothing
would ever be leaked to the public. But he began to
face pressure from two opposing factions within the
CIA community.
One wanted to expand domestic operations even more,
while the other reminded him that Operation CHAOS and
similar activities were well "over the line" of
illegality and outside the CIA's charter. To put a
damper on this internal dissent, Helms ordered Ober to
stop discussing these activities with his direct boss
in counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton. The
internal protests continued, however, as White House
aide and staunch anti-Communist Tom Charles Huston,
pressed for ever increasing domestic operations.
Huston was eager to expand Operation CHAOS to include
overseas agents and to "share" intelligence with the
FBI's intelligence division, directed by William
Sullivan. There were more than 50 CHAOS agents now,
many receiving several weeks of assignment and
training positions to establish their covers as
radicals. (12) Once they returned to the U.S. and
enrolled in colleges and universities, they had the
proper "credentials."
In June 1970 Nixon met with Hoover, Helms, NSA
Director Admiral Noel Gaylor, and Defense Intelligence
Agency (DIA) representative Lt. Gen. Donald V. Bennett
and told them he wanted a coordinated and concentrated
effort against domestic dissenters. To do that, he was
creating the Interagency Committee on Intelligence
(ICI), chaired by Hoover. The first ICI report, in
late June, recommended new efforts in "black bag
operations," wiretapping, and a mail-opening program.
In late July 1970, Huston told the members of the ICI
that their recommendations had been accepted by the
White House. (13)
John Dean replaced Tom Huston as White House aide in
charge of domestic intelligence, and at his urging, a
Justice Department group, the Intelligence Evaluation
Committee, was established to study domestic groups,
over Hoover's protest. Deteriorating relations between
the FBI and the other intelligence agencies,
especially the CIA, caused Hoover to fire William
Sullivan. At that time, Sullivan was the liaison
officer between the FBI and the other intelligence
agencies and he strongly favored the expansion of
domestic operations.
Second Thoughts
Even Helms began to have second thoughts about how
large CHAOS had grown, but Nixon made it clear to him
that the CIA was a presidential tool he wanted at his
disposal. Helms got the message, yet he also
understood the growing uneasiness in other government
circles. In 1972, the CIA's Inspector General wrote a
report that expressed concern about Operation CHAOS in
the following way: "... we also encountered general
concern over what appeared to be a monitoring of the
political views and activities of Americans not known
to be or suspected of being involved in espionage ...
Stations were asked to report on the whereabouts and
activities of prominent persons ... whose comings and
goings were not only in the public domain, but for
whom allegations of subversion seemed sufficiently
nebulous to raise renewed doubts as to the nature and
legitimacy of the CHAOS program." (14)
Helms was being squeezed by White House demands to
expand Operation CHAOS and the fear that the whole
question of domestic operations was going to become
public knowledge, as Hoover feared. Helms found
himself constantly shoring up one lie with another and
then another. He found himself deceiving Congress and
lying to the public as well as CIA employees. In March
1971, a group of young CIA executives known as the
Management Advisory Group (MAG) protested Operation
CHAOS and similar domestic operations by issuing a
statement saying, "MAG opposes any Agency activity
which could be construed as targeted against any
person who enjoys the protection of the U.S.
Constitution ... whether or not he resides in the
United States." (15)
Helms of course denied the CIA was involved in
domestic operations, or using basic American
institutions such as the Peace Corps, the business
community, or the media as covers for CIA operations.
Just a few years later, Oswald Johnston of the Washing
ton Star reported that over 35 American journalists,
some full-time, some free-lance, and some major media
correspondents were on the CIA payroll. And in 1974
the CIA admitted that over two hundred CIA agents were
operating overseas posing as businessmen. (16)
The Collapse of the House of Cards
The web of deception, misinformation, lies, and
illegal domestic activities began to unravel with
speed in the summer of 1972 when Howard Osborn, then
Chief of Security for the CIA, informed Helms that two
former CIA officers, E. Howard Hunt and James McCord,
were involved in a burglary at the Watergate complex
in Washington, D.C. The house of cards was about to
come crashing down and Helms now wanted to salvage
what he could and distance himself from not only
Watergate but also the domestic operations. He
appointed CIA Executive Director William Colby to
handle any investigations into the Agency's domestic
operations and began to prepare for the inevitable.
Helms was called to Camp David by President Nixon and
subsequently fired. His replacement was James
Schlesinger (who would last but a few months).
Schlesinger would be replaced in July 1973 by Colby,
and Helms would become U.S. Ambassador to Iran to get
him as far away as possible. In an effort at damage
control, Colby decided that Operation CHAOS and
Project RESISTANCE should be terminated.
In 1975 the CIA underwent public investigation and
scrutiny by both the Church and Rockefeller
committees. These investigations revealed considerable
evidence showing that the CIA had carried out its
activities with a tremendous disregard for the law,
both in the U.S. and abroad.
During the life of Operation CHAOS, the CIA had
compiled personality files on over 13,000 individuals
including more than 7,000 U.S. citizens as well as
files on over 1,000 domestic groups. (17)
The CIA had shared information on more than 300,000
persons with different law enforcement agencies
including the DIA and FBI. It had spied on,
burglarized, intimidated, misinformed, lied to,
deceived, and carried out criminal acts against
thousands of citizens of the United States. It had
placed itself above the law, above the Constitution,
and in contempt of international diplomacy and the
United States Congress. It had violated its charter
and had contributed either directly or indirectly to
the resignation of a President of the United States.
It had tainted itself beyond hope.
Of all this, the CIA's blatant contempt for the rights
of individuals was the worst. This record of deceit
and illegality, implored Congress as well as the
President to take extreme measures to control the
Agency's activities. However, except for a few
cosmetic changes made for public consumption such as
the Congressional intelligence oversight committee
nothing has been done to control the CIA. In fact,
subsequent administrations have chosen to use the CIA
for domestic operations as well. These renewed
domestic operations began with Gerald Ford, were
briefly limited by Jimmy Carter, and then extended
dramatically by Ronald Reagan.
Any hope of curbing these illegal activities is scant.
Recently, George Bush and current DCI William Webster
announced a need to again target political enemies of
the U.S. for assassination. It is ironic that Webster,
a former Federal Judge, would chose to ignore the
limits and constraints placed on the government by the
Constitution. During his tenure as Director of the
FBI, the bureau was once again involved in the
infiltration of groups practicing their constitutional
right to dissent against U.S. government policies.
Once again, the FBI compiled thousands of files on
individuals protesting Reagan's war against Nicaragua
and support for the genocidal Salvadoran military.
Now, Webster is in a position of perhaps even greater
power and, without doubt, would have no qualms about
abusing it.
Conclusion
Given the power granted to the office of the
presidency and the unaccountability of the
intelligence agencies, widespread illegal domestic
operations are certain. We as a people should remember
history and not repeat it. It is therefore essential
that the CIA be reorganized and stripped of its covert
operations capability. Effective congressional
oversight is also an important condition for ending
the misuse of the intelligence apparatus that has
plagued every U.S. administration since the formation
of the CIA. A great deal is at risk our personal
freedoms as well as the viability of this society. The
CIA must be put in its place. Should we demand or
allow anything less, we will remain vulnerable to
these abuses and face the risk of decaying into a
lawless state destined to self-destruction.
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