Central Intelligence Agency
Operation CHAOS
Active: 1967 to 1974
Editorial summary
For seven years, the Central Intelligence Agency ran a domestic spying program against American citizens. Project CHAOS opened in August 1967 at the request of President Lyndon Johnson, who suspected the anti-Vietnam War movement was secretly funded by foreign governments. The program continued under President Nixon and grew until its exposure in late 1974.
CHAOS was housed inside the CIA's Counterintelligence Staff, then run by James Jesus Angleton. By the time it closed, the agency had opened files on roughly 7,200 American citizens and built a computerized index of about 300,000 names and organizations. Among the targets were the antiwar group Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Panther Party, the Women Strike for Peace, and individual journalists and members of Congress.
The investigation never produced credible evidence that the antiwar movement was foreign-directed. What it produced instead was a charter violation. The 1947 National Security Act, which created the CIA, explicitly forbade the agency from conducting law-enforcement or internal security functions inside the United States. CHAOS pierced that line.
Beginning in 1968, CIA officers were sent under cover to infiltrate domestic dissident groups. Some attended meetings, joined demonstrations, and reported back. Files were opened on Americans whose only connection to a foreign power was attending a peace conference abroad.
The program was halted in March 1974 under William Colby, who had become Director of Central Intelligence the previous September. The public learned of it on December 22, 1974, when Seymour Hersh broke the story on the front page of the New York Times. That article, more than any other single event, triggered the congressional investigations of 1975 that produced the Church Committee in the Senate and the Rockefeller Commission appointed by President Ford. Both bodies confirmed the basic facts of CHAOS and described it as a clear breach of the agency's statutory authority.
Editorial summary by govweird, grounded in the declassified record and the Church Committee public hearings.
Originating agency
Central Intelligence Agency
Activity period
1967 to 1974
Source document
CIA Family Jewels (702 pp.)
Public release
June 25, 2007
Originating directive
Schlesinger memo, May 1973
Source page range
p. 419, p. 435, p. 554, pp. 601 to 603
Topics