Student protest and counter-subversion: The lessons of Operation CHAOS
CIA Director Richard Helms with President Lyndon Johnson in 1965, two years before Helms launched Operation CHAOS at Johnson’s behest (Yoichi Okamoto, public domain, via Wikipedia).
Welcome! I’m Tom Griffin and this is my intelligence history newsletter. Feel free to share this post with the button below.
‘When officials exaggerate the efficacy and impact of foreign influence operations, the ones who benefit the most are the very regimes that produce it.’1 That is the warning delivered by a group of academic experts on covert action in Foreign Affairs on Friday.
They highlighted recent examples from both sides of the US political system, but one in particular has a strong historical resonance.
In a CNN interview in January, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested that protests against Israel’s military operation in Gaza were inspired by Russia.
what we have to do is try to stop the suffering in Gaza. This is women and children, people who don't have a place to go. So let's address that. But for them to call for a ceasefire is Mr. Putin's message, Mr. Putin's message.
Make no mistake, this is directly connected to what he would like to see. Same thing with Ukraine. It's about Putin's message. I think some of these protestors are spontaneous and organic and sincere. Some I think are connected to Russia. And I say that having looked at this for a long time now, as you know --
BASH: Do you think some of these protests are Russian plants?
PELOSI: I think they're plants. I think some financing should be investigated. And I want to ask the FBI to investigate that.2
There are increasingly unavoidable parallels between today’s Gaza protests and those that wracked the US over Vietnam more than half a century ago. Then as now, a president who a progressive domestic record faced student opposition to his foreign policy. Then as now, it seems, his supporters were tempted to attribute that opposition to foreign machinations.
In the late 1960s, that tendency had disastrous results. Under pressure from President Johnson, CIA director Richard Helms established Operation CHAOS within the agency’s Counterintelligence Staff.3 According to an August 1967 cable this was intended ‘to find out [the] extent to which Soviets, Chicoms (Chinese Communists) and Cubans are exploiting our domestic problems in terms of espionage and subversion.’ 4 In July 1968, the the CIA’s Deputy Director for Plans, Thomas Karamessines, told field stations abroad that CHAOS was a ‘high priority program’ concerning foreign ‘contacts’ with the ‘Radical Left,’ defined as ‘radical students, antiwar activists, draft resisters and deserters, black nationalists, anarchists, and assorted “New Leftists.”'5 This remit continually expanded over the following years, encompassing the domestic activities of American activists. Successive presidents gave the operation strong support, despite the provisions of the National Security Act of 1947 which explicitly prohibited the CIA from exercising internal security functions.
In February 1969, the agency produced ‘Restless Youth’, an analytical paper which included a 12-page section on ‘Radical Students in America.’
In a covering note to Henry Kissinger, Helms warned that this section 'is an area not within the charter of this Agency, so I need not emphasize how extremely sensitive this makes the paper. Should anyone learn of its existence, it would prove most embarrassing for all concerned.'6
Helms would later testify that broad surveillance was necessary to convince the President that there was no foreign hand behind US protests.7 In the face of successive CIA reports which attributed student protest to organic domestic sources, Nixon and his staff assistant Tom Huston continued to demand more intelligence coverage. 8
The most developed phase of Operation Chaos took place between 1969 and 1972, a period which saw increasing concern from CIA stations overseas about the amount of collection they were asked to undertake on US citizens not involved in espionage.9
In the wake of the Watergate scandal in 1973, the CIA became sufficiently worried about its legal vulnerabilities to compile a record of potential breaches of its charter. Operation CHAOS was a key item in the resulting ‘Family Jewels’ report, which caused a firestorm of controversy when it was leaked to Seymour Hersh of the New York Times the following year.10
Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller was appointed to head a commission examining the CIA’s domestic activities. It concluded that although the declared mission of gathering intelligence abroad about foreign influence on American dissidents was proper, some aspects of Operation CHAOS were unlawful, particularly the accumulation of 'large quantities of information on the domestic activities of American citizens.'11
CHAOS came under similarly intense scrutiny from the Church Committee of the US Senate, which recommended that the CIA should be prohibited from conducting domestic security activities, with certain specified exceptions.12
The over-reach of the late 1960s and early 1970s would be followed by years of retrenchment, which saw many departures from the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, beginning with the top layer of the Counterintelligence Staff, which resigned within days of the Family Jewels exposé.
The scandals of the 1970s have provided ammunition down to the present day for critics of the US in general and the CIA in particular. The example of Operation CHAOS is powerful illustration of the risk of exaggerating foreign covert action capabilities. The warning by Thomas Rid and his colleagues is a salutary one.
Olga Belogolova, Lee Foster, Thomas Rid, and Gavin Wilde, Don’t Hype the Disinformation Threat, Foreign Affairs, 3 May 2024. See also Wilde’s ‘From Panic to Policy: The Limits of Foreign Propaganda and the Foundations of an Effective Response,’ Texas National Security Review, Vol 7, Issue 2, Spring 2024.
Report to the President by the Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States (Rockefeller Commission), June 1975, Chapter 11, p.130. Archived at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum.
Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, 1975-76 (Church Committee), Final Report, Book II, Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, 1976, p.100.
Ibid.
Rockefeller Commission report, p.134.
Church Committee Report, Book II, p.101.
Rockefeller Commission report, p.135.
Rockefeller Commission report, p.136. Church Committee Report, Book II, p.102.
Seymour M. Hersh, HUGE C.I.A. OPERATION REPORTED IN U.S. AGAINST ANTIWAR FORCES, OTHER DISSIDENTS IN NIXON YEARS, New York Times, 22 December 1974.
Rockefeller Commission report, p.149.
Church Committee Report, Book II, p.298.
Former CIA counterintelligence head James Olson refused to answer what his first assignment was in an interview with The Team House, and he joined the CIA after law school circa 1970, and so I've always wondered if CHAOS was the assignment he refused to acknowledge.
Among the CIA's "family Jewels" lies the crown jewel: the blood diamond that was the "Big Event." (Their term, not mine).