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 emigré 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)
Cont ...