Domestic Surveillance: The History of Operation CHAOS
Why Frank Church* warned us:
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 (became) 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.
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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)
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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)
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http://www.serendipity.li/cia/lyon.html
* “That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.
I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capability that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.” -- Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho)
Frank Church and the Abyss of Warrantless Wiretapping
Secret government spying on We the People not only is un-American and un-Democratic; it's tyranny.
= new reply since forum marked as read
By S. Brian Willson
Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Spring 2006
M. Palmer and his twenty-four-year-old assistant, J. Edgar Hoover, conducted in 1919 what are popularly called the "Palmer Raids" or "Red Raids," developing a database and ordering the smashing of labor union offices and headquarters of communist and socialist organizations without search warrants, concentrating on "foreigners." That December, 249 of the arrested were forced onto a ship headed for the Soviet Union. In January 1920, another 6,000 were arrested without warrants, mostly members of the Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies). During one raid, 4,000 "radicals" were grabbed in a single night, and all "foreign aliens" were deported. By January 1920, Palmer and Hoover had arrested more than 10,000 Americans.
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The NSA kicked its large spy campaign into high gear in the 1960s, especially under President Johnson. The FBI demanded that the NSA monitor antiwar activists, civil-rights leaders, and drug peddlers.
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However, there is evidence that Operation CHAOS began much earlier—in 1959, when President Eisenhower used the CIA to seek exiles who were fleeing Cuba after Castro's triumphant revolution. The CIA sought contacts in the exile community to recruit them for use against Castro—arguably illegal, although Eisenhower ordered FBI director Hoover to accept it as a legitimate CIA function. The CIA considered this a normal extension of its authorized infiltration of dissident groups abroad, even though the activity was taking place within the United States. Disdain for Congress permeated the upper echelons of the CIA. Congress could not hinder or regulate what it did not know about, and neither the president nor the director of the CIA told them.
The Department of Defense, the Directorate for Civil Disturbance Planning and Operations, and the US Army Intelligence Command conducted domestic surveillance on thousands of US citizens throughout the 1960s. More than 1,500 Army plainclothes intelligence agents worked out of 350 separate offices and record centers to spy on ordinary US residents. They operated without authority from Congress, the president, or the Secretary of the Army. Databanks were kept on as many as 100,000 individual entries, focusing on the feared civil-rights movement and the "New Left" anti-Vietnam War movement. The assumption was that there were foreign influences on the civil-rights and antiwar movements. During 1967 to 1974, presidents Johnson and Nixon repeated Wilson's World War I OMI activities through the Army Security Agency, which worked with other military intelligence units to illegally survey the communications and activities of US citizens who expressed opposition to the war. Called Operation MINARET, it kept a watch list of suspected Americans and collected their phone calls and telegrams made in and out of the country. The names were submitted to the NSA by other agencies, because the targets were suspected of involvement in terrorism, drug trafficking, threats to the president, and civil disturbances.
The Department of Justice's Internal Security Division, established under President Nixon, worked with a vast network of domestic intelligence agencies, including Nixon's own Huston Plan (the "White House Plumbers"
, acquiring information and conducting dirty tricks on "persons and organizations not affiliated with the Department of Defense."
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http://www.vvaw.org/veteran/article/?id=620
Nixon the Plumber was veep for Ike. Before that job, he was the hired congressboy for one Prescott S. Bush, Sr.
