Transcription
From the CIA magician to the FBI assassinations to the Pentagon's attempts to weaponize everything from exploding bats to fake goat poop, we're throwing open the American government's closet and exposing their skeletons. This is 50 insane declassified USA secrets you didn't know.
Number 50, the CIA literally had a torture training manual. The CIA had a torture training manual. It was called human resource exploitation training manual and it was given to the fine torturers of the Honduran military by the CIA during one of their many many South American excursions. If this didn't have enough super villain vibes already, you should see the opening note in the book. Quote, we will discuss some of those coercive techniques that have been used by many and the reasons why we are against the use of these techniques. We do not use these techniques nor do we condone the use of them. No offense, CIA, but we totally believe you.
Number 49. McCarthyism in the US didn't actually start with Senator Joseph McCarthy, and it certainly didn't end with him. The FBI wanted to keep tabs on any celebrities that they suspected were communist sympathizers or were against the Vietnam War. to give you an insanely abridged list. They spied on among many, many others, Charlie Chaplan, Groucho Marx, John Lennon, Frank Sinatra, Elvis, Michael Jackson, Bob Dylan, Marilyn Monroe, and the boxing goat Muhammad Ali.
Number 48. In October 1950, 11 people from the San Francisco Bay area were admitted to Stanford Hospital suffering very severe urinary tract infections. When the doctors took urine samples of the patients, they noted the presence of a strange red colored bacteria later identified as seratia marcessins. Tragically, one patient died from the infection. The grim outcome was traced back to operation sea spray, a US Navy experiment in which two types of bacteria, Zeratia Marcessins and Basilius Globy, were sprayed into the air over a major American city to test how a biological weapon might spread.
Number 47. The CIA has an actual kill list maintained by the Counterterrorism Center or CTC. This list of individuals is the top priority for assassination under the CIA's mandate. After the CTC puts the information together, the CIA's lawyers, the general council, and the head of the National Clandiststein Service make the determination on whether the hit will be carried out.
Number 46. A document uncovered by a 1993 Freedom of Information Act request by the New York Times revealed that Walt Disney worked with the FBI. He regularly ratted out fellow Hollywood workers with unamerican communist ties as well as enlisting their help in his personal strike and union busting efforts down at the Magic Kingdom. This wasn't some one-off arrangement either. He was actually so tight with the FBI that he was given the title full special agent in charge contact in 1954. He was even granted the extremely rare rights to film inside FBI buildings because they knew good old Walt would always give them favorable coverage.
Number 45. Project Mockingbird in the 1960s was a phone tapping operation where the CIA kept tabs on critical elements in the press. Operation Mockingbird is somehow even more weird and sinister. Well into the 1970s, the CIA had up to 100 journalists on the tick. They essentially contracted them to be spies on both foreign and domestic targets in exchange for feeding them exclusive scoops from the CIA front desk. This quidd proquo relationship was insanely unethical and was actually discovered by Carl Bernstein, one of the two famous reporters who blew up the Watergate story that sank Richard Nixon.
Number 44. The US might have deposed an Australian prime minister. The fact that the US has pushed for regime change in other countries is no secret by now, but it's still pretty shocking that they might have played a hand in the controversial downfall of an English-speaking world leader. Goff Whittam, an Australian prime minister from 1972 to 1975, made enemies of both MI6 and the CIA when he strove to make Australia a more independent nation, one free from the British and the United States. He went as far as threatening to shut down a CIA base in Pine Gap. The CIA insists it had nothing to do with Governor General Sir John Kerr's decision to dismiss Whittam and replace him with an opposition politician. But given their history, that is a little hard to believe.
Number 43. The FBI decided to do a little homegrown political interference in the 1930s, only 22 years after it was formed. The feds were caught wiretapping communications that came in and out of the Supreme Court conference room. You know, the place where the US's highest judges in the land convene to mediate on decisions. Jay Edgar Hoover, a man who is about as trustworthy as an authority figure as Ted Bundy would be as a lift driver, insisted it was just an effort to stop people from leaking Supreme Court decisions. Sure.
Number 42. The Office of Strategic Services or OSS was the precursor organization to the CIA. In 1944, they published the Simple Sabotage Field Manual, a guide showing how civilians sympathetic to the Allied cause could subtly disrupt Axis operations from behind enemy lines. It offers specific instructions on how fires might be accidentally started in occupying Nazi barracks. The manual also recommends that mechanics forced to work on Nazi vehicles should keep their tools dull and dirty to increase the likelihood of those vehicles breaking down later. It also suggests that people in administrative positions do their jobs as slowly as possible and find as many ways to mishere direct instructions as they can.
Number 41. A true relic from the CIA's long history of covert misdeeds. They helped arms dealers violate the weapons embargo on Iran, turning a secret arms deal into a lucrative payday. And their reason for doing it was even more sleazy. They wanted to use the proceeds to fund the Contras, a gang of anti-sandinista rebels in Nicaragua, where they were, yeah, you guessed it, pushing for regime change.
Number 40. In 1985, a US Congressional report on wiretapping and civil liberties revealed that between 1940 and 1960, the FBI had conducted surveillance on more than 7,000 American citizens. And thanks to both advances in technology and post 911 paranoia sweeping the United States, things got even worse with the passing of the Patriot Act. The FBI used the Patriot Act sunset provision as an excuse to track all US telephone calls. They also made wide use of exingent letters, a provision that allowed them to get around information gathering protocols by claiming it was an emergency.
Number 39. In February of 1968, a Soviet ballistic missile submarine called the K129 missed its designated check-ins and went radio silent. The ship was declared missing in March of that year. Turns out the ship had sunk. And in 1970, Defense Secretary Melvin Leair and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger made a Clandiststein proposal. What better way to study exactly what the Russians were up to than by lifting the wreck of the K129 and studying it. President Richard Nixon accepted the proposal and put the CIA on the case. The moonshot became known as Project Aoran. A ship was built specifically to retrieve the wreck, but the K129 ended up falling to pieces underwater in the process. Only one part was ever salvaged, and we don't know if any useful intel came about from it. But we do know that Project Aorian cost the equivalent of 5.1 billion in today's money.
Number 38. The CIA kept a document full of jokes about the Soviets for the organization's deputy director. Maybe to read out loud at a dinner party. Who knows? Here's one of the better ones, though. A man goes into a shop and asks, "You don't have any meat?" "No," replies the sales lady. "We don't have any fish. It's the store across the street that doesn't have any meat." "This comedy gold was declassified in 2013."
Number 37. The FBI doesn't need to think you're a threat to spy on you. The Black Student Union was a group looking out for the rights of African-Americans in universities across the states. This was especially important at the time because they'd actually only just been integrated with the fall of long-held segregationist Jim Crow policies. The FBI files on the group said it was dormant, incompetent, and showing quote no radical or militant ideas. Despite this, the file recommended that the agent still spy on, infiltrate, and gather blackmail material on the group.
Number 36. The Stargate Project was a government initiative aimed at weaponizing physics during the Cold War. It was operated under the Defense Intelligence Agency and had three stated goals. One, determine how to apply remote viewing to intelligence gathering against foreign targets. Two, figure out how other countries could be doing the same thing and using it against the US. And three, perform laboratory experiments to find ways to improve remote viewing for use in the intelligence field. For anyone who is hoping to join the US Army as some kind of psychic super soldier, we're sorry to tell you this project yielded no worthwhile results. Speaking of weaponizing magic, though, number 35, John E. Mclofflin, former deputy director of the CIA, once said, "Magic and intelligence are really kindred arts. This must be why they hired a magician, John Mhalland, to write a handbook on deception and trickery for 3,000 bucks in 1953. It was full of handy little tips. Things like agents who look dopey or disheveled are less likely to be noticed, how secret pockets are perfect for hiding weapons or documents, and how you can smuggle yourself out of a building inside of a crate. Maybe there was also a note in there about how you could beat a democratically elected South American leader to death with a rabbit you pulled out of a hat. Who knows?
Number 34. After Lieutenant Colonel Jim Channon got involved in the New Age Movement in California, he began pondering whether those principles could be weaponized. He wanted to create an army of so-called warrior monks that he dubbed the first earth battalion. This racially diverse group of soldiers would harness rainbow power and utilize the heightened perception of new age belief systems to get the edge over their enemies on the battlefield. However, these would be peaceful warriors who would always seek non-violent conflict resolution first and foremost because their loyalty would be to the planet itself above all nations. Naturally, upon hearing that, he was likely laughed out of the room.
Number 33. Considering the long-standing feud between China and Tibet, China wants to own it, and Tibet's not exactly thrilled about that, it's hardly shocking that the Daly Lama isn't feeling very zen about Chinese expansionism. Neither, as you probably guessed, are the CIA. So, it makes sense that they had worked together. Reports based on US intelligence accounts indicate that beginning in 1960, the CIA provided the Daly Lama with an annual stipend of $180,000. It was part of a broader effort to fund the Tibetan exile movement during the Cold War.
Number 32. A Portland Muslim named Yonas Figre attends a mosque where at least nine different people have been forbidden from flying. He's among the several people who claimed that the FBI was using a no-fly list as a threat for Muslims who aren't willing to become spies on their own community on the FBI's behalf. That is the choice. Either you agree to be a rat on the people who attend your mosque services or you kiss your flying privileges goodbye. But the FBI has also allegedly done a lot worse to Muslims who refused to become stool pigeons for them.
Number 31. Yonas Vikree also claimed that when he refused to become an informant for the FBI, he was dragged to a foreign jail where he was tortured as punishment. And he's not the only one who claimed this. Jamal Tarhuni and Michael Millor, to name at least two, may have gone through similar orals.
Number 30. The CIA tried and failed to kill Castro 634 different times. They spiked a bunch of cigars with a botulinum toxin, hoping that that would send the tobacco loving dictator to his grave, but the cigars were somehow lost in the shuffle and never reached Castro. To this day, no one knows what actually happened to them. Someone also floated the idea of hiding a bomb inside of a painted sea shell that they hoped would attract Castro's attention and lure him into his death. And if the shell didn't get him, maybe his diving suit would, which the CIA plans to fill with a fungus that would give him a debilitating skin disease. They also tried to hide a deadly syringe full of poison into a pen that could then be used to inject Castro if one of the assassins was able to get close enough.
Number 29. And you thought your doomscrolling problem was bad. The CIA has reported that it studies 5 million different posts on X each day. The agency sifts through content in dozens of languages to measure global reactions to major US foreign policy moves. In the aftermath of Bin Laden's assassination, the open- source center was wired into the collective reaction of the Middle East's Twitter feelings on the matter. That's probably worse for your average CIA agents mental health than all the extrajudicial torture and assassinations.
Number 28, Operation Paperclip. President Truman's 1945 immigration project ran for 14 years. Its goal was to extract rare minds from Nazi and Imperial Japanese science programs that well might have been involved in just a little touch of slavery and human experimentation. The most famous of those repatriated German scientists was Fner Von who developed the infamous V2 rocket for his former employers with the help of plenty of labor from unpaid concentration camp prisoners. But hey, at least it helped the US beat those commies in a race to the moon.
Number 27. The Tuskegee syphilis experiment was a scheme devised by the US Public Health Service in partnership with the Tuskegee Institute. It aimed to study the effects of untreated syphilis by turning around 600 black men into unwitting test subjects. All the while, they were told they were receiving treatment for their painful and debilitating conditions, a lie that lasted for decades. The study was kept under wraps for 40 years before the shameful exploitation of these men was revealed for all to see. In 1974, there was a $10 million payout to the surviving victims of the program, but nothing could ever give them back the years that were wasted in unnecessary suffering. But we can think of an even gnarier secret government science experiment.
Number 26. Project Sunshine is a 1950s study on the effects of radiation on human bodies. It goes without saying that this is extremely important research, but that doesn't mean it was conducted ethically. In order to have a varied collection of data, the scientists involved in this project had their personnel steal parts of corpses like Victorian grave robbers, including those of children and even infants. This would be macob but ultimately ethical if the families had consented to donate their relatives bodies to science. But when those tests were performed, the families had no idea.
Number 25, Joseph the Animal Barbosa Jr. was a brutal mob hitman who murdered at least 20 people from 1964 to 1970. He got pinched by the FBI and decided to become an informant to save his skin. But this didn't stop him from killing people. He did another assassination in 1965 while under the care of the FBI, but they didn't want to lose him as a valuable informant. So, four others were sent down for that murder instead.
Number 24. The US government really did consider making a gay bomb. The idea is simple. an aphrodisiac chemical weapon that makes enemy soldiers both attracted to one another and too horny to function effectively in combat. It seems so patently stupid compared to conventional weapons, but the US Air Force was really working on this as recently as 1994. If funded, the project would have cost $7.5 million. Naturally, it didn't get to that stage and would instead be leaked to the public where it received a lot of deserved ridicule.
Number 23. During the decadel long search for Osama bin Laden, the CIA floated countless methods to track down the elusive terrorist leader. One of those was an undercover sting operation disguised as a hepatitis vaccination scheme. But the true aim was to get a DNA sample from one of Bin Laden's many children, confirming his presence in the area. The method was strongly condemned by Uni Karu Nakara, the former international president of the nonprofit Doctors Without Borders. He claimed it would encourage distrust between citizens and medical professionals.
Number 22. It sounds like a high-tech gadget more fitting for a James Bond movie than real life, but the CIA really made a heart attack gun. It was revealed during the Church Committee inquiries of the 1970s. How did it work? Well, the gun was designed to fire out frozen projectiles containing highly potent shellfish neurotoxin, which would induce a heart attack in the victim. Meanwhile, the projectile itself melted away without a trace.
Number 21. During the Vietnam War, the CIA engaged in a secret project called Operation Sober Popeye. This was a plot to control the very weather in Vietnam and use it as a weapon in the war against the Vietkong. For years, the CIA attempted to seed rainclouds in Vietnam that would extend the country's natural monsoon season, bogging down their forest dwelling commando enemies. They didn't fully succeed and in 1978's military applications of weather manipulating technology was classified as a war crime.
Number 20. The FBI helped assassinate Black Panther leaders. Black Panther leader Fred Hampton along with fellow organizer Mark Clark was killed in a pre-dawn Chicago police raid on December 4th, 1969, an operation widely believed to be a part of J. Edgar Hoover's campaign against so-called subversives. The story at the time was that there had been a brutal shootout that simply left the Black Panther leaders dead. In reality, the police had fired between 90 and 99 rounds and the Panthers had only returned one. The Panthers head of security, William O'Neal, was an FBI informant and slipped Hampton a sedative before the raid that took his life. The FBI also had a detailed floor plan of the apartment where the raid took place, indicating that they may have had some part in the planning of the whole sorted affair.
Number 19. The US almost conducted false flag terrorist attacks on itself. The plot was called Operation Northwoods and in the early 1960s when the US was just itching for a pretense to go to war with Cuba. One member of the plot, a high-ranking figure in the US military brass, suggested blowing up a US ship in Cuban waters to get the public riled up for war. The plan was shot down by JFK himself when it landed on his desk, but it is insane it ever got that far.
Number 18. The Congo has endured a brutal legacy of western colonialism and imperialism stretching back to the atrocities of King Leupold II's Congo Free State. For many Congalles, Patrice Lumumba's leadership represented a chance to finally break free from Belgium's grip. But the CIA worried that Lumumba's antic-colonialist policies might lead to communism. So, they tried to kill him by poisoning his food and maybe even his toothpaste. The plan failed and Lumumba was instead murdered by Katungan separatists in 1961.
Number 17. Under the guidance of the infamous chemist Sydney Gotautle, nicknamed the poisoner in chief, the CIA embarked on one of the most notorious experiments. Drawing on methods borrowed from Nazi and Imperial Japanese war criminals, the agency sought to explore whether LSD could be used to create mindcontrolled sleeper agents for cold war operations. And somehow that isn't the craziest part of MK Ultra.
Number 16. Operation Midnight Climax was carried out by CIA consultant George Hunter White and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in Boston, Massachusetts, along with a whole bunch of sex workers that were on the CIA payroll. Men were lured back into honeypot brothel where they were unknowingly dosed with LSD. The sex workers would test whether being under the influence of the drug made them divulge extremely personal secrets. But MK Ultra actually had an even more infamous application.
Number 15, James Whitey Bulier. The Boston gangster who was the basis for Jack Nicholson's character in The Departed, became one of MK Ultra's test subjects. He was dosed with LSD while in prison and had horrifying hallucinations as a result.
Number 14. The US created bat bombs during World War II. And we mean that literally. An experimental weapons initiative called Project X-ray, which cost the equivalent of around $35 million in today's money. It intended to strap bombs to bats and release them into Japan. The project was a disaster and in the most prominent test, the bats were released too early and not only exploded a barn, but the car of one of the generals attending the test.
Number 13. The space race was basically one of the biggest manhood measuring contests in human history. When Russia took the lead by launching the Sputnik satellite in 1957, the US wanted to get its honor back in the most insane way possible by nuking the moon. The hope was it would create a mushroom cloud for the whole world to see and show off US dominance. The plan was rejected because it's one of the dumbest ideas ever. But sometimes, like our next plan, a dumb idea can actually work.
Number 12. The CIA faked a vampire attack in the Philippines. In order to squash a rebellion, a scop was conducted to grab one of the rebels patrolling near a deeply embedded rebel fort. He was hung upside down and his throat punctured to drain him of blood. The plan was to draw on the deep cultural fear of the aswang, a Filipino vampire variant. Shockingly, it worked. And it's also deeply messed up. And this was not the only time they tried something like this.
Number 11. Operation Fantasia was another plot that aimed to draw on deep cultural fears of its victims. In this case, the fear of the kitsune, a diabolical Japanese fox spirit. The US planned to use glowing fox balloons and fox cries to achieve this. Unsurprisingly, the idea was terrible and it did not work.
Number 10. The US government was considering nuking Alaska, a less ambitious target than the moon, but it's still absolutely nuts. It was part of a wider operation called Project Chariot, which hoped to find non-weapon uses for nuclear explosives. In this case, they pondered whether a nuke could blow up a part of Alaska and make an artificial harbor. It's a miracle that the US has survived this long.
Number nine. As part of the Edgewood Arsenal program, the project director L. Wilson Green wanted to test any chemicals that would induce seizures, panic, hysteria, hallucinations, and delirium. And he did, testing them on volunteering soldiers who had no idea what they were signing up for.
Number eight. One of the key fronts during World War II was North Africa, where Allied soldiers faced off against the deadly Nazi Africa Corps under General Erin Raml. One OSS officer suggested weakening the Nazis by spreading disease among their division using synthetic goat dung loaded with pathogens. A plan called Project Capricious. Get it? Capricorn goats. The plan was rejected and they used bullets instead.
Number seven. During the early 1950s, the CIA pursued any angles of resistance against the Soviets that they could find, and one of those was promoting American ideals through art. To this end, the CIA helped fund galleries showing abstract art from figures like Jackson Pollock and Villim Doning across the world. Their logic was that such art could never be produced under a communist state where free thought was suppressed. By promoting this art, they were promoting the American ideal.
Number six, both the CIA and the KGB wanted to use sex tapes as compromat against the extremely popular Indonesian president, Sukarno. Some reports even alleged that the CIA did this by using a performer in incredibly realistic rubber masks and a Sukarno lookalike. The plot was a failure, however, and possibly for an extremely funny reason. Some reports indicate that Sucarno was strangely flattered by the sex tapes and asked the KGB and CIA to send him copies.
Number five, the Pentagon has a program for investigating UFOs. It's called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program and it is the contingent of military brass researching unidentified aerial phenomena or UAPs.
Number four, back in 2011, a group of CIA informants was rumbled by Hezbollah in Beirut after they used the code word pizza to describe a secret intelligence meeting at a Pizza Hut. While an anonymous US official denies that the meeting happened in an actual Pizza Hut, retired CIA official Robert Bear was quoted as saying, "If they were genuine spies spying against Hezbollah, I don't think we'll ever see them again."
Number three, during the 1970s, CIA spies in Moscow needed a quick distraction when they were being pursued by Soviet counterpies. One proposed idea was known as the Jack in the Box or JIB. Inspired by inflatable sex dolls, it would be a small device that upon the press of a button would essentially inflate a fake agent to momentarily confuse the pursuer.
Number two, in a process disturbingly described as torture light, Iraqi prisoners were interrogated by the CIA in rooms sealed tight and blasted with music at earsplitting volumes. The playlist at this nightmare disco included among many others Metallica's Enter Sandman, Queens We Are the Champions, and I Love You by Barney the Purple Dinosaur.
Number one, a declassified memo showed that the agency had influence over the 2012 film Zero Dark 30, a biopic about the hunt for Osama bin Laden. They wanted to make sure that they were presented in a positive light by demanding changes such as making the protagonist an observer rather than a participant in a waterboarding scene. They also removed a scene where vicious dogs are used to interrogate a prisoner. And they cut a scene where agents party with AK-47s on a rooftop. The USA has its fair share of secrets, but no agency guards them more fiercely than the CIA. Watch 50 insane facts about the CIA you never knew to uncover what they don't want you to find out. or click on this video instead.