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#1960s

100 entries tagged 1960s.

People (59)

  • Adriano Sofri Adriano Sofri was the leader of Lotta Continua who was convicted in the 1990s of ordering the 1972 murder of Milan police commissioner Luigi Calabresi, in a case that became one of Italy's most contested criminal proceedings.
  • Aldo Moro Aldo Moro was Italy's five-time Prime Minister and Democrazia Cristiana president who was kidnapped and murdered by the Brigate Rosse in March-May 1978, with his abduction occurring precisely on the morning he was to present a coalition government incorporating the Italian Communist Party - a political development that Gladio-linked investigators and the Red Brigades themselves sought to prevent.
  • Allen Dulles Allen Dulles served as CIA Director from 1953 to 1961, overseeing Operation AJAX (Iran, 1953), Operation PBSUCCESS (Guatemala, 1954), and the Bay of Pigs invasion (1961) that ended in catastrophic failure and his forced resignation.
  • Anatoli Golitsyn Anatoli Golitsyn was a KGB major who defected to the CIA in Helsinki in December 1961, provided intelligence that led to several confirmed Western penetrations, convinced James Angleton that a high-level Soviet mole existed in the CIA, and argued that subsequent defectors including Yuri Nosenko were KGB plants - a framework that paralyzed CIA Soviet operations for a decade without producing a confirmed mole.
  • Andrija Puharich Andrija Puharich was a physician and parapsychologist who founded the Round Table Foundation in 1949, conducted Army-contracted ESP research at Edgewood Arsenal, brought Uri Geller to Stanford Research Institute for CIA-funded testing in 1972, and died alone and impoverished in 1995.
  • Carlos Marcello Carlos Marcello was the boss of the New Orleans crime family who was identified by the HSCA as having both the motive and means to arrange President Kennedy's assassination - he had threatened Kennedy according to FBI informants, was deported to Guatemala by Robert Kennedy in 1961, returned illegally, and was eventually convicted on racketeering charges in the FBI's BRILAB sting in 1981.
  • Che Guevara Ernesto 'Che' Guevara was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary who witnessed the 1954 CIA-backed coup against Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, became a key military commander of the Cuban Revolution, served as Minister of Industries in Cuba, and was captured and executed in Bolivia on October 9, 1967 with CIA assistance - with agency officer Felix Rodriguez present at his death.
  • Clay Shaw Clay Shaw was a prominent New Orleans businessman and founder of the International Trade Mart who was arrested by District Attorney Jim Garrison in 1967 on conspiracy charges related to the Kennedy assassination, acquitted in 1969, and posthumously confirmed by declassified documents to have been a CIA domestic contact - a fact CIA Director Richard Helms denied under oath at the trial.
  • D. Ewen Cameron Ewen Cameron was a Scottish-Canadian psychiatrist and president of the American Psychiatric Association who ran CIA-funded MKULTRA Subproject 68 at McGill University's Allan Memorial Institute from 1957 to 1963, subjecting unconsenting psychiatric patients to multi-week drug-induced sleep, massive electroconvulsive shocks, and LSD under his theory of 'psychic driving' as behavioral depatterning.
  • David Atlee Phillips David Atlee Phillips was a CIA propaganda officer who ran La Voz de la Liberacion for the 1954 Guatemala coup, served as Chief of Cuban Operations at the CIA's Mexico City station during Lee Harvey Oswald's disputed September-October 1963 visit, and was identified in 2013 by Alpha 66 founder Antonio Veciana as the CIA officer 'Maurice Bishop' whom Veciana had seen with Oswald in Dallas two months before the Kennedy assassination - a claim Phillips denied under HSCA oath but that CIA officer Ron Crozier confirmed was a Phillips alias.
  • David Ferrie David Ferrie was a New Orleans pilot, CIA-connected operative, and Civil Air Patrol instructor whose unit included a young Lee Harvey Oswald in the mid-1950s, who worked with Guy Banister's anti-Castro network and as an investigator for Carlos Marcello's defense team, and who died on February 22, 1967 of a berry aneurysm two days after Jim Garrison announced he was under investigation.
  • Desmond FitzGerald Desmond FitzGerald was the CIA's Chief of the Western Hemisphere Division from 1963 who personally managed the AM/LASH operation targeting Fidel Castro, meeting with Cuban official Rolando Cubela on the day of President Kennedy's assassination to provide him a poison pen, and died of a heart attack while playing tennis on July 23, 1967.
  • Dwight D. Eisenhower Dwight D. Eisenhower was the 34th President of the United States (1953-1961) who authorized Operation AJAX, Operation PBSUCCESS, and the U-2 aerial reconnaissance program, and whose farewell address warning against the military-industrial complex became foundational to critiques of Cold War national security state expansion.
  • Erich Honecker Erich Honecker (1912-1994) ruled East Germany from 1971 to 1989, having supervised the Berlin Wall's 1961 construction as a senior SED official, leading the GDR through the Stasi's pervasive surveillance until he was removed amid the 1989 collapse and fled to Chile, where he died.
  • Erich Mielke Erich Mielke (1907-2000) served as East Germany's Minister for State Security from 1957 to 1989, building the Stasi into one of history's most comprehensive surveillance systems with 91,000 employees and 189,000 informants, before being convicted after reunification for a 1931 double murder rather than for Stasi crimes.
  • Gamal Abdel Nasser Gamal Abdel Nasser was the second president of Egypt (1956-1970), the dominant figure of Arab nationalism and the Non-Aligned Movement, whose nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956 triggered the tripartite Anglo-French-Israeli invasion and whose death from a heart attack in 1970 was reportedly predicted by Uri Geller during a Tel Aviv telepathy demonstration.
  • George Blake George Blake was a British MI6 officer and KGB double agent, recruited during Korean War captivity, who betrayed approximately 40 agents and revealed Operation Gold before construction began, escaped a 42-year sentence from Wormwood Scrubs in 1966, and died in Moscow in December 2020 at age 98.
  • George de Mohrenschildt George de Mohrenschildt was a Russian-born Texas petroleum geologist who became Lee Harvey Oswald's closest Dallas friend in 1962-1963, maintained a documented relationship with CIA Domestic Contact Service officer J. Walton Moore, obtained a Haitian oil contract immediately after his closest period with Oswald, and died of a shotgun wound on March 29, 1977 - the same day HSCA investigator Gaeton Fonzi first attempted to contact him.
  • George Hunter White George Hunter White was a Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent who operated the CIA's Operation Midnight Climax safe houses in San Francisco and New York City from 1955 to 1963, administering LSD to unwitting civilian subjects for Project MKULTRA while working under CIA contract.
  • Günter Guillaume Günter Guillaume was a Stasi agent who emigrated to West Germany in 1956, built a career in the SPD, became Chancellor Willy Brandt's personal aide, and whose exposure as a spy in April 1974 forced Brandt's resignation in one of the Cold War's most politically damaging intelligence operations.
  • Guy Banister Guy Banister was a former FBI Special Agent in Charge who ran a private detective agency in New Orleans at 531 Lafayette Street - the same building whose 544 Camp Street entrance was stamped on Lee Harvey Oswald's Fair Play for Cuba Committee leaflets in summer 1963, a coincidence that placed him at the intersection of Oswald's activities and the city's anti-Castro intelligence networks.
  • Heinz Felfe Heinz Felfe was a former SS officer and KGB double agent who joined the CIA-funded Gehlen Organization in 1951, rose to chief of counterintelligence for the BND, and was exposed in November 1961 after a decade compromising CIA-BND joint operations.
  • Henry A. Kissinger Henry A. Kissinger served as National Security Advisor (1969-1975) and Secretary of State (1973-1977) under Nixon and Ford, and endorsed Israel's covert nuclear weapons program at Dimona while privately advocating that Japan and Israel were better served by having the bomb than submitting to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
  • Henry Belk Henry Belk was a North Carolina department store magnate and wealthy funder of Andrija Puharich's Round Table Foundation who brought Dutch psychic Peter Hurkos to Maine for testing in 1956 and helped finance Puharich's Brazilian expeditions.
  • Howard Hunt E. Howard Hunt was a CIA officer who ran psychological warfare for Operation PBSUCCESS (1954 Guatemala coup), served as political officer for the Bay of Pigs invasion, and was one of the Watergate burglars arrested in June 1972, serving 33 months in prison, and in his final years made statements implicating CIA figures in the Kennedy assassination.
  • Jack Ruby Jack Ruby (born Jacob Rubenstein) was a Dallas strip club owner with organized crime connections who shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of Dallas Police headquarters on November 24, 1963 in front of live television cameras, was convicted of murder but died of cancer in January 1967 before retrial, and whose pre-assassination contacts with mob figures remained a focus of the HSCA's conspiracy investigation.
  • James Earl Ray James Earl Ray was the career criminal who pled guilty to the April 4, 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, recanted three days later claiming he was a patsy for a conspiracy organized by a mysterious figure called 'Raul,' and died in prison in 1998 with the conspiracy question still legally unresolved.
  • James Jesus Angleton James Jesus Angleton served as the CIA's chief of counterintelligence from 1954 to 1974, running the illegal HT/LINGUAL mail opening program, overseeing Operation CHAOS domestic surveillance, opening a 201 file on Lee Harvey Oswald in 1960 under a deliberately wrong name, maintaining the CIA's Israeli intelligence liaison under KK MOUNTAIN, and conducting a mole hunt triggered by his betrayal by Kim Philby that destroyed dozens of CIA officers' careers while the actual Soviet penetrations - Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen - operated undetected for years after his 1974 firing.
  • Janos Kadar Janos Kadar was the Hungarian communist leader installed by the Soviet Union after crushing the 1956 Hungarian Revolution who governed Hungary for 32 years under a relatively liberal 'goulash communism' economic model, having betrayed the revolution he had initially supported, and who died on July 6, 1989 - one day after the Hungarian parliament voted to rehabilitate Imre Nagy.
  • Jim Garrison Jim Garrison was the New Orleans District Attorney who launched the only criminal prosecution related to the Kennedy assassination, arresting businessman Clay Shaw in 1967 on conspiracy charges, losing the case in 1969 after what he argued was active CIA obstruction, and becoming the basis for Oliver Stone's 1991 film JFK.
  • Kim Philby Kim Philby was the most damaging member of the Cambridge Five, a KGB agent who penetrated MI6 to its anti-Soviet section chief and CIA liaison in Washington, directly causing the death or capture of hundreds of Western agents and precipitating James Angleton's decade-long mole hunt paranoia before defecting to Moscow in January 1963.
  • Larry Devlin Larry Devlin was the CIA Station Chief in Leopoldville from 1960 to 1967 who received assassination orders against Patrice Lumumba including poison delivered by Sidney Gottlieb, claims he refused to execute the order, and became the primary CIA sponsor of Mobutu Sese Seko's rise to power.
  • Lee Harvey Oswald Lee Harvey Oswald was the accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963 in Dallas - a former U.S. Marine stationed at the CIA's U-2 base at Atsugi who defected to the Soviet Union in 1959, returned to the United States in 1962, distributed Fair Play for Cuba Committee leaflets in New Orleans in summer 1963, visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City that September, and was shot by Jack Ruby two days after arrest; the CIA's counterintelligence division (CI/SIG) had maintained a 201 file on him since December 9, 1960, and a senior CIA officer who signed a key pre-assassination cable later stated she was 'signing off on something that I know isn't true.'
  • Licio Gelli Licio Gelli was the Venerable Master of the clandestine Italian Masonic lodge Propaganda Due (P2) from 1967 whose membership list of 962 senior Italian officials, politicians, and financiers was discovered in March 1981, and who was convicted of political conspiracy and fraud related to the Banco Ambrosiano collapse before dying in Arezzo in January 2015.
  • Luigi Calabresi Luigi Calabresi was the Milan police commissioner present during Giuseppe Pinelli's fatal fall from a fourth-floor window during Piazza Fontana interrogations in 1969, who was subsequently murdered in 1972 in an assassination ordered by Lotta Continua leaders Adriano Sofri and Giorgio Pietrostefani.
  • Lyman Lemnitzer General Lyman Lemnitzer was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1960 to 1962 who signed the Operation NORTHWOODS document proposing staged false-flag attacks against Americans to justify an invasion of Cuba, was transferred to command NATO forces in Europe after President Kennedy rejected the proposals and declined to reappoint him.
  • Markus Wolf Markus Wolf (1923-2006), known as 'the man without a face,' directed the Stasi's foreign intelligence directorate (HVA) from 1952 to 1986, building one of the Cold War's most effective intelligence services through penetrations of West German government including the Guillaume operation that brought down Chancellor Willy Brandt.
  • Martin Luther King Jr Martin Luther King Jr. was the preeminent leader of the American Civil Rights Movement, who organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Birmingham Campaign, and the 1963 March on Washington, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, was subjected to an extraordinary FBI surveillance and harassment campaign under COINTELPRO, and was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968.
  • Michele Sindona Michele Sindona was a Sicilian financier, P2 member, and Vatican Bank associate known as 'the Pope's Banker' whose acquisition of Franklin National Bank produced its 1974 collapse - then the largest U.S. bank failure - and who was murdered in Voghera prison by cyanide poisoning in March 1986 while serving sentences for fraud and for ordering the assassination of Italian liquidator Giorgio Ambrosoli.
  • Nikita Khrushchev Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971) led the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, delivering the 1956 Secret Speech denouncing Stalin, authorizing the Berlin Wall's construction in 1961, navigating the Cuban Missile Crisis, and being removed in a 1964 Politburo coup.
  • Paul Nitze Paul Nitze was the U.S. foreign policy official who authored NSC-68 in 1950 - replacing George Kennan's political containment with a militarized framework - and remained a central figure in American arms control and nuclear strategy debates for five decades, from the Truman administration through Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative.
  • Peter Hurkos Peter Hurkos was a Dutch psychic who gained international fame for psychometry - divining information from objects by touch - and was studied by Andrija Puharich at the Round Table Foundation in 1956 before achieving notoriety as a police psychic consultant in the United States.
  • Rafael Trujillo Rafael Trujillo was the dictator of the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination on May 30, 1961, who received CIA support through much of his rule until his sponsorship of assassination plots against Venezuelan President Romulo Betancourt led the CIA to supply weapons to the opposition conspirators who killed him - making him a Church Committee case study in CIA involvement in foreign leader assassination.
  • Richard Bissell Richard Bissell was the CIA's Deputy Director for Plans from 1958 to 1962 who managed development of the U-2 spy plane program, authorized ZR/RIFLE (the assassination planning unit) under William Harvey, and organized the Bay of Pigs invasion - resigning in February 1962 after the invasion's failure.
  • Richard Helms Richard Helms served as Director of Central Intelligence from 1966 to 1973, authorizing Operation CHAOS domestic surveillance and ordering destruction of CHAOS and MKULTRA records before congressional investigation.
  • Richard Ober Richard Ober (c.1921-2001) was the CIA officer who directed Operation CHAOS (MHCHAOS) from its 1967 creation through its 1974 termination, reporting to James Angleton and maintaining a covert White House office with access to Nixon administration principals.
  • Robert Maheu Robert Maheu was a former FBI agent who became the CIA's primary cutout for sensitive operations requiring criminal networks, recruited Sam Giancana, Johnny Roselli, and Santo Trafficante Jr. into the CIA's anti-Castro assassination program in 1960, and simultaneously served as Howard Hughes's most trusted executive managing his Nevada operations from 1966 to 1970.
  • Sam Giancana Sam Giancana was the boss of the Chicago Outfit from 1957 who was recruited by the CIA through Robert Maheu and Johnny Roselli in 1960 to plan the assassination of Fidel Castro under ZR/RIFLE, and who was shot seven times in his Oak Park, Illinois home on June 19, 1975, days before he was scheduled to testify before the Church Committee.
  • Santos Trafficante, Jr. Santo Trafficante Jr. was the Tampa organized crime boss who held pre-revolutionary Cuba casino interests, was recruited by the CIA in 1960 for anti-Castro assassination plots alongside Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli, and whose attorney Frank Ragano claimed he made a deathbed confession of involvement in John Kennedy's assassination.
  • Sidney Gottlieb Sidney Gottlieb was the CIA's Technical Services Division chief who created and directed Project MKULTRA, ran Operation Midnight Climax and the Ewen Cameron subprojects, carried biological assassination materials to the Congo targeting Patrice Lumumba, and ordered destruction of nearly all MKULTRA records before congressional investigation.
  • Stanley Levison Stanley Levison was a New York attorney and businessman who was one of Martin Luther King Jr.'s closest advisors and who had Communist Party USA ties in the early 1950s - providing the FBI's legal justification for wiretapping King and the SCLC beginning in 1962, despite the FBI's own evidence that Levison had severed his Communist Party ties before he became associated with King.
  • Ted Shackley Ted Shackley (1927-2002), ‘The Blond Ghost,’ was a CIA operations officer who served as station chief at JMWAVE, Laos, and Saigon, rose to Associate Deputy Director for Operations, was forced out by DCI Turner in 1979, and became a central node in the Safari Club and Iran-Contra private network.
  • Tracy Barnes Tracy Barnes was a CIA officer and OSS veteran who served as the Washington coordinator of Operation PBSUCCESS (the 1954 Guatemala coup) and head of the Domestic Operations Division for the Bay of Pigs invasion, and a member of the Georgetown social circle around Frank Wisner and Allen Dulles that defined the early Cold War CIA's covert action culture.
  • Walter Ulbricht Walter Ulbricht (1893-1973) was East Germany's dominant political figure from its 1949 founding until 1971, overseeing the Berlin Wall's 1961 construction to halt mass emigration, enforcing Stalinist party rule against de-Stalinization pressure, and being removed by Erich Honecker with Soviet backing.
  • William Colby William Egan Colby served as Director of Central Intelligence from 1973 to 1976, dismissing James Angleton, cooperating with the Church Committee, and revealing the Family Jewels, having earlier directed the Vietnam-era Phoenix Program under the CORDS framework.
  • William Sullivan William C. Sullivan was the FBI's Assistant Director for Domestic Intelligence who architected COINTELPRO, drafted the 1964 anonymous 'suicide letter' to Martin Luther King Jr., was fired by Hoover in 1971, and was shot in a ruled hunting accident on November 9, 1977, the day before he was to testify to congressional investigators.
  • Willy Brandt Willy Brandt (1913-1992) was West German Chancellor from 1969 to 1974, architect of Ostpolitik and 1971 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who resigned when his personal aide Günter Guillaume was exposed as a Stasi agent in one of the Cold War's most politically damaging espionage operations.
  • Yasser Arafat Yasser Arafat (1929-2004) was PLO chairman from 1969 until his death, building Fatah into the dominant Palestinian political-military faction, leading the PLO through exile in Jordan, Lebanon, and Tunisia, and negotiating the 1993 Oslo Accords that earned him a share of the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize.
  • Yuri Nosenko Yuri Nosenko was a KGB officer who defected to the CIA on February 4, 1964 and claimed to have reviewed the KGB's file on Lee Harvey Oswald and found no KGB connection to the Kennedy assassination - a claim that led James Angleton and Anatoli Golitsyn to insist he was a Soviet plant, resulting in Nosenko's illegal imprisonment in a specially built CIA cell for three and a half years before the agency concluded he was genuine.

Organizations (16)

  • Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz The Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV) is West Germany's domestic counterintelligence service, established September 7, 1950, whose most significant Cold War achievement was exposing Günter Guillaume as a Stasi agent in April 1974, precipitating Chancellor Willy Brandt's resignation.
  • Democrazia Cristiana Democrazia Cristiana (DC) was Italy's dominant postwar political party, governing continuously from 1945 to 1994 with CIA support during the Cold War, whose leading figures included Alcide De Gasperi, Aldo Moro, and Giulio Andreotti, and which dissolved in 1994 under the weight of the Tangentopoli corruption investigations.
  • Fair Play for Cuba Committee The Fair Play for Cuba Committee was a pro-Castro political organization founded in 1960 whose primary historical significance is that Lee Harvey Oswald distributed its leaflets in New Orleans in the summer of 1963, raising unresolved questions about whether his activities were genuine political expression, an intelligence operation, or an attempt to establish a pro-communist cover identity before the Kennedy assassination.
  • FARC The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) was a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla organization founded in 1964 that financed operations through cocaine taxation and drug trafficking, fielding approximately 20,000 fighters at its peak before a 2016 peace agreement produced a formal dissolution.
  • Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung The Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (HVA) was East Germany's foreign intelligence directorate, directed by Markus Wolf from 1952 to 1986, renowned for penetrating West German government including placing Günter Guillaume as Chancellor Willy Brandt's personal aide, and dissolved following German reunification in 1990.
  • Italian Communist Party The Italian Communist Party (PCI) was Western Europe's largest communist party, achieving 34 percent of the Italian vote in 1976 under Enrico Berlinguer's Eurocommunist leadership, whose proposed historic compromise with the Democrazia Cristiana was ended by Aldo Moro's murder in 1978 and which dissolved in 1991 to become the Democratic Party of the Left.
  • Italian Socialist Party The Italian Socialist Party (PSI) was Italy's third major postwar political force, which ran a joint electoral front with the Communists in 1948 before gradually moving to center-left autonomy, reached its peak of influence under Bettino Craxi's prime ministership from 1983 to 1987, and was destroyed by the Tangentopoli corruption investigations in 1992-1994.
  • KGB The KGB (Committee for State Security) was the Soviet Union's main security agency from 1954 to 1991, serving as its foreign intelligence service, secret police, and internal security apparatus, and the institutional counterpart to the CIA throughout the Cold War.
  • Ordine Nuovo Ordine Nuovo was an Italian neofascist organization whose members Franco Freda and Giovanni Ventura were convicted of responsibility for the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing, Italy's opening strategy of tension attack, and whose operational relationship with SID military intelligence personnel was documented in subsequent parliamentary investigations.
  • Palestine Liberation Organization The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), founded 1964 and led by Yasser Arafat's Fatah from 1969, conducted guerrilla campaigns from Jordan, Lebanon, and Tunisia before the 1994 Oslo Accords established it as the recognized Palestinian representative body and created the Palestinian Authority.
  • Propaganda Due Propaganda Due (P2) was a clandestine Italian Masonic lodge headed by Licio Gelli from 1967 whose 962-member list discovered in March 1981 included the heads of all three Italian intelligence services, senior military officers, magistrates, politicians, and financiers including Roberto Calvi and Silvio Berlusconi, and which Italian parliamentary investigators linked to Operation Gladio and the strategy of tension terrorist bombings.
  • Radio Free Europe Radio Free Europe was a CIA-funded broadcast organization established in 1949 to broadcast into Soviet-bloc countries, operated under the cover of private funding until its CIA financing was publicly revealed in 1967, and whose broadcasts to Hungary during the 1956 revolution - which some analysts argue implied American support that was never forthcoming - contributed to CIA officer Frank Wisner's psychological breakdown.
  • Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology The Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology was a CIA front foundation established around 1955 in New York City to channel MKULTRA funding to academic and institutional researchers, including Ewen Cameron at McGill University, under the cover of legitimate behavioral science research grants.
  • Southern Christian Leadership Conference The Southern Christian Leadership Conference was the civil rights organization founded in 1957 with Martin Luther King Jr. as president that coordinated the major nonviolent direct action campaigns of the 1960s - the Birmingham Campaign, the March on Washington, the Selma-to-Montgomery marches - while being subjected to systematic FBI surveillance and COINTELPRO disruption operations.
  • Stasi The Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Stasi) was East Germany's combined domestic security and foreign intelligence agency (1950-1990), maintaining approximately 91,000 employees and 189,000 informants and operating the HVA foreign intelligence directorate that penetrated West German government through agents including Günter Guillaume in Chancellor Willy Brandt's personal staff.
  • Walter Reed Army Institute of Research The Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) is the U.S. Army's principal biomedical research laboratory, involved during the Cold War in classified Project Pandora investigations into the biological effects of the Moscow Signal microwave emissions on primates at its Forest Glen Section.

Programs (9)

  • COINTELPRO COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) was a covert FBI domestic operations program (1956-1971) targeting political organizations through infiltration, psychological warfare, fabricated mail, wrongful prosecution, and coordination with local law enforcement, exposed by the 1971 Media FBI office break-in.
  • HTLINGUAL HTLINGUAL was the CIA's covert mail-opening program that operated from 1952 to 1973, intercepting and photographing approximately 215,000 pieces of first-class mail between the United States and the Soviet Union at the New York international mail facility without judicial authorization, in violation of federal postal statutes.
  • Operation CHAOS Operation CHAOS (MHCHAOS) was a CIA domestic counterintelligence program (August 1967-March 1974) that infiltrated antiwar and counterculture organizations, maintaining files on approximately 7,200 Americans and a 300,000-name index before exposure by the Church Committee.
  • Operation Gladio Operation Gladio was the Italian component of a NATO-sponsored network of secret stay-behind armies established across Western Europe by the CIA and British intelligence after World War II to conduct resistance and sabotage operations in the event of a Soviet invasion, whose members in Italy were linked to the right-wing terrorist bombings of the 'strategy of tension' from the late 1960s through the 1980s, exposed publicly by Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti in October 1990.
  • Operation Midnight Climax Operation Midnight Climax was the CIA's MKULTRA subprogram (1955-1963) in which Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent George Hunter White operated safe houses in San Francisco and New York City where unwitting men were dosed with LSD by CIA-recruited prostitutes while CIA observers watched through one-way mirrors.
  • Operation Mongoose Operation Mongoose was the Kennedy administration's post-Bay of Pigs covert action program against Cuba (November 1961 to late 1962), directed by Edward Lansdale under Robert Kennedy's Special Group (Augmented) oversight, run operationally by William Harvey at the CIA's JM/WAVE Miami station, and suspended following the Cuban Missile Crisis after Harvey unilaterally sent teams into Cuba during the crisis.
  • Phoenix Program The Phoenix Program was the CIA-organized counterinsurgency targeting program in Vietnam (1968-1972) that used intelligence-driven identification and systematic neutralization - through capture, defection, or killing - of Viet Cong political and military infrastructure, resulting in the reported neutralization of 81,740 people including approximately 26,369 killed, under the direction of William Colby and later Ted Shackley.
  • Project MERRIMAC Project MERRIMAC was a CIA Office of Security program (approximately 1967-1974) that infiltrated antiwar and civil rights organizations in Washington D.C., feeding intelligence to Operation CHAOS through the CACTUS pipeline before exposure by Seymour Hersh and the Church Committee.
  • Project MKUltra Project MKUltra was the CIA's classified behavioral modification program (1953-1973) directed by Sidney Gottlieb, which administered LSD and other methods to unconsenting subjects across approximately 150 subprojects before its records were destroyed in January 1973 and partially reconstructed from misfiled documents in 1977.

Events (9)

  • Bay of Pigs The Bay of Pigs invasion was the CIA's failed April 17-19, 1961 covert operation deploying approximately 1,400 Cuban exiles of Brigade 2506 against Fidel Castro, collapsing after Kennedy cancelled the follow-up air strikes and Castro's forces captured 1,179 survivors - prompting CIA Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick's suppressed postmortem conclusion that 'plausible denial was a pathetic illusion.'
  • Berlin Wall The Berlin Wall (Berliner Mauer) was the fortified barrier erected by East Germany on August 13, 1961, to halt mass emigration, killing an estimated 140 people who attempted to cross before it fell on November 9, 1989, following a Stasi press conference miscommunication that accelerated German reunification.
  • Cuban Missile Crisis The Cuban Missile Crisis (October 16-28, 1962) was a thirteen-day nuclear confrontation resolved when the Soviet Union agreed to remove missiles from Cuba in exchange for an American non-invasion pledge and a secret commitment to remove Jupiter missiles from Turkey.
  • Gulf of Tonkin Incident The Gulf of Tonkin Incident refers to the August 2 and 4, 1964 incidents in which a genuine North Vietnamese attack on the USS Maddox was followed by a second 'attack' on August 4 that almost certainly never occurred, yet was used by the Johnson administration to obtain the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution authorizing open-ended military escalation in Vietnam - a deception confirmed by NSA declassified documents released in 2005.
  • Lavon Affair Covert 1954 Israeli operation in Egypt involving bombings of American, British, and Egyptian targets designed to damage Western-Egyptian relations.
  • Operation NORTHWOODS Operation NORTHWOODS was a March 13, 1962 document signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff proposing a series of staged false-flag attacks against American citizens and military assets that could be blamed on Cuba to justify a U.S. invasion, rejected by Secretary of Defense McNamara and President Kennedy, and declassified in 1997 through the JFK Records Act as one of the most significant disclosures of Cold War government deception planning.
  • Piazza Fontana bombing The Piazza Fontana bombing of December 12, 1969, in which a bomb at the Banca Nazionale dell'Agricoltura in Milan killed 17 people and wounded 88, was the opening act of Italy's strategy of tension and was ultimately attributed to the neofascist network Ordine Nuovo operating with the knowledge of elements of Italian military intelligence.
  • U-2 Incident 1960 shooting down of an American U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union, causing a major diplomatic crisis and collapse of the Paris Summit.
  • Warren Commission The Warren Commission was the official body appointed by President Johnson in November 1963 to investigate the Kennedy assassination, whose September 1964 report concluded Oswald acted alone - a finding undermined by the CIA's deliberate concealment of ZR/RIFLE and the anti-Castro assassination programs from the commission, and later challenged by the HSCA's 1979 conclusion that 'probable conspiracy' existed.

Concepts (2)

  • Hypnotism Hypnotism was a significant area of government research in the twentieth century, particularly in CIA MKUltra experiments exploring induced amnesia, personality alteration, and the creation of unwitting operatives through hypnotic suggestion.
  • KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation is the CIA's classified July 1963 interrogation manual that codified MKULTRA-derived techniques including regression induction, sensory deprivation, and psychogenic manipulation, declassified in 1997 and cited as the basis for interrogation techniques used in CIA operations from Vietnam through the post-9/11 enhanced interrogation program.

Places (5)

  • East Germany The German Democratic Republic (GDR, East Germany, 1949-1990) was the Soviet-aligned German state defined by the Stasi's pervasive surveillance, the Berlin Wall's 1961 construction to halt emigration, and the HVA's penetration of West German government including placing Günter Guillaume in Chancellor Willy Brandt's personal staff.
  • Hungary Hungary is a Central European country and Soviet-bloc satellite state from 1945 to 1989 whose 1956 revolution against Soviet control was crushed by Red Army intervention.
  • JM-WAVE JM/WAVE was the CIA's massive Miami station operating under the cover of 'Zenith Technical Enterprises, Inc.' at the University of Miami's South Campus, which at its Operation Mongoose peak employed over 400 CIA officers and several thousand Cuban exile agents, making it temporarily the second-largest CIA station in the world.
  • North Korea North Korea (DPRK), established in 1948 in the Soviet occupation zone of the Korean peninsula, launched the Korean War in 1950, has been ruled by the Kim dynasty since founding, and its capture of MI6 officer George Blake during the war enabled his KGB recruitment.
  • West Germany The Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany, 1949-1990) was NATO's frontline Cold War state, base of the BND and Gehlen Organization, site of major CIA and Soviet intelligence operations and Red Army Faction terrorism, before reunification with East Germany on October 3, 1990.