10: Project Azorian Project Azorian was a secret mission conducted
by the CIA during the Cold War to pick a Soviet submarine off the floor of the ocean using
a massive claw.
The plan involved a billionaire, a giant ship over 600 feet long, and a significant amount
of stealth.
It also took six years to complete.
The mission began in 1968 when the Soviet submarine K-129 went missing in the Pacific
Ocean.
The Soviets and the Americans were searching high and low for the missing sub.
After two months, the Soviet Union gave up.
But the United States did not.
They wanted to find the wreckage of the submarine to get their hands on the nuclear weapons
it was carrying.
They found the submarine 1500 miles from Hawaii at a depth of 16,500 feet.
At the time, no civilization on Earth had recovered such a massive piece of debris from
such an incredible depth.
This was a risky project, but the US believed it was worth it because of the information
they could get from the submarine.
This was at the height of the Cold War when everyone thought the nuclear bombs were going
to drop.
The US needed as much intelligence as it could get its hands on.
And projects like these could give either side the competitive edge.
The CIA used the cover of pretending to mine the sea floor for manganese nodules, sponsored
by the famous billionaire Howard Hughes.
In the end only part of the submarine ended up being retrieved because the huge claws
designed to lift it broke apart much of the vessel.
But the truth is we have no idea what information they got.
Much of the findings from the mission are still classified, but we do know that several
remains of crew members were brought up and given military burials, and the CIA gave the
video footage to Russia 20 years later.
9: Project Horizon Project Horizon was part of a study in 1959
to build a secret base on the moon.
This was a time when the United States Department of the Army, along with the Navy and the Air
Force, had total control over the space program.
The project aimed to create a lunar outpost from which the military could practice surveillance
of the Earth.
It was also supposed to be a base for moon exploration as well as military operations,
things like bombing the enemy from space.
Essentially, the U.S. wanted to figure out a way that they could take the moon for themselves,
build a military outpost on it, and then use that outpost as a kind of cosmic missile depot
where they could rain down nukes to anywhere on the planet.
The way the military was thinking at the time, a moon base was necessary for national security
and needed to be built as soon as possible.
The experts who conducted the study estimated it would take $6 billion to complete the moon
base.
However, Project Horizon never got off the ground.
President Eisenhower rejected the proposal and then transferred the space program into
the responsibility of the civilian agency we know today as NASA.
8: The Secret Army One of the weirdest secret military programs
ever has been underway for the past 10 years or more.
It doesn't have a name that we know of, but the program has managed to build the biggest
secret army in the world.
According to the report from Newsweek, the Pentagon has so far enlisted at least 60,000
men and women into its secret army.
These people are working among us in low-profile jobs with secret identities.
Any member of the secret army could even be your neighbor.
They are assigned with carrying out foreign and domestic assignments in the real world
and even on the Internet.
They have private businesses, some of them work in the upper echelons of big companies,
and they're all loyal to the United States government.
The need for the secret army has a lot to do with the modern world we live in.
It's why thousands of these individuals have fake personas and undertake operations online
as part of the Pentagon’s cyber warfare task force.
It's not clear what these people do, but if you’re up to something online that the government
doesn't like, chances are one of these secret soldiers will find out about it.
The truth is that nobody knows the full size of the program, what kind of jurisdiction
these secret civilians have, or just what companies government spies are operating in.
7: Iran Flight 655 In 1988, the US Navy made a horrible mistake.
They shot down Iran Air Flight 655 by accident, killing 290 people.
Not just any people, but innocent civilians.
The USS Vincennes was fighting with Iranian gunboats when it saw the plane on its radar
and confused the commercial liner for a fighter jet.
The commercial flight did not respond to the distress signal sent by the Navy, so they
fired a missile at it.
Everyone on board was killed within a handful of seconds.
This wasn’t exactly a secret project, but it was a terrifying moment in U.S. military
history that people don't really know about today.
One of the main reasons why it was so easy to mistake the commercial aircraft for a fighter
jet is that in the 1970s, the US had sold 80 F-14 fighter jets to Iran.
They knew they had a big arsenal of planes.
Plus, the airport where the fighter jet took off from was used by the military in Iran.
In any case, this fueled tensions between the countries for years.
It wasn't until almost a decade later in 1996 that the government paid Iran $131.8 million
in compensation for the mistake, with $62 million of it going to the families of the
victims.
It’s scary to think there are other militaries all over the world that could easily make
the same mistake.
6: Project Artichoke Project Artichoke was a secret research mission
undertaken by the CIA to find new interrogation methods.
It started in 1951 with scientists looking into how they could use things like hypnosis,
morphine injections, and LSD to put people into vulnerable states and even produce amnesia.
It was essentially a mind control program, with the Army, Navy, and Air Force all being
in on it.
A memo from the project, dated January of 1952, describes how the researchers were attempting
to gain control of a person so that they would do exactly what they were told even against
the laws of nature and self-preservation.
To see which methods worked best, the military procured racial minorities, homosexuals, and
prisoners – then took them to secret bases throughout Asia and Europe to do the actual
testing.
What they found was that by using certain drugs on a person, when the interrogation
was over, the subject would be left with a foggy sensation of amnesia.
This meant that the CIA could kidnap people, interrogate them, then wipe their brain so
that it was as if the kidnapping had never happened at all.
Project Artichoke officially came to an end in 1953, though the work was continued through
a new project that became known as MK Ultra.
5: Super Secret Command Bunker The Pentagon once planned to create a super
secret command bunker 3500 feet beneath the surface of Washington DC.
It was to be unlike any fortification built by human hands.
It would be a deep underground command center where they could withstand multiple hits from
nuclear warheads in case of an attack.
The proposal was made by Assistant Secretary of Defense, Charles Hitch, in January of 1962.
The proposal involved detailed plans to create the command post beneath Washington DC that
would be easily accessible to the National Command Authority.
These are the top brass people who make all the most important decisions in government.
They are also the people who need to be involved when it comes to ordering a nuclear strike.
These people include the president, the secretary of defense, and a handful of approved deputies.
In case of nuclear war, it would be critical that these individuals remain alive.
What better way to keep them alive than by stuffing them in a super secret bunker!
The bunker never did get built, especially since in 1961 the military had already started
building a pair of hardened command centers that served a similar purpose as the proposed
DC base.
4: 6593rd Test Squadron The 6593rd Test Squadron and everything they
did was classified information up until 1995.
We now know that the test squadron carried out covert operations to recover mysterious
capsules ejected from satellites orbiting the planet.
These satellites were operated by both the Air Force and the CIA, designed to take images
of sensitive parts of enemy territory from space.
The issue back then in the 1960s was that they had no way to get the information from
the satellite back to the people on Earth.
So, reconnaissance satellites had to gather information in space and then eject capsules
that would fall back to the planet.
These capsules contained highly classified information that the government desperately
needed.
This is where the 6593rd Test Squadron came from.
They flew in modified C-119J Flying Boxcars that came equipped with ropes, winches, and
hooks.
They used these instruments to snag the parachute of the ejected capsule and bring it back to
base.
Even more amazing is that they usually grabbed the parachute while the capsule was still
falling.
It was only every now and then that they had to fish the packages out of the Pacific Ocean.
It was this brave team of secret airmen who brought back the Discoverer 14 payload in
1960, which contained the very first pictures ever taken of the Earth’s surface from space.
3: Provoking War with Cuba One of the most haunting secret missions ever
considered by the United States was in the early 1960s when they thought about provoking
war with Cuba.
The top military leaders of America got together and drafted a plan to provoke fake acts of
terrorism to create mass public support for a war and possible invasion of Cuba.
If this sounds oddly familiar, that’s because it's the exact same scheme that some people
say was responsible for the 9/11 attacks in New York at the World Trade Centers.
The code name for this terrible mission was Operation Northwoods.
Different methods of manipulating the public were outlined in the report.
Military leaders suggested sinking boats with Cuban refugees on them, hijacking planes,
and even blowing up a United States ship filled with civilians.
It was a sneaky way that the government could trick the American public and the rest of
the international community into supporting a direct and very violent attack on Cuba.
At the time, the US desperately wanted to get Fidel Castro- and by default the Soviet
Union- out of their backyard, as they hated that the communist leader was so close to
the American shores.
They debated blowing up a ship in Guantanamo Bay filled with U.S. citizens and blaming
Cuba.
They understood that the more casualties there were, the more the American public would be
behind them.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff had all approved the plans.
They were then handed over to President Kennedy’s defense secretary, Robert McNamara.
This was in March of 1962 and proof that balance of powers actually works.
The plans were officially rejected and then buried for almost 40 years until finally being
exposed.
2: Acoustic Kitty In the 1960s, the CIA was doing more than
just trying to blow up their own people to start wars.
They were also experimenting on animals, and I'm not talking about monkeys.
Operation Acoustic Kitty was when the CIA tried to turn cats into covert operatives.
The CIA was completely out to lunch on this one, believing that if they trained cats properly,
they could turn them into spies.
The plan was to let them loose in Russia and get them to invade places where Soviet leaders
were having important meetings.
Because they were just cats, the Soviets would never expect that they were implanted with
listening devices.
If successful, the plan would allow for the military to collect secret information on
the enemy.
Anyone who's ever owned a cat will tell you right now that the project was not successful.
Cats are not obedient animals and don't really like to be trained.
Still, the CIA tried their hardest.
They tried to get cats to go where they wanted by using audio cues.
According to Victor Marchetti, former assistant to the director of the CIA, they went so far
as to cut cats open, stuff them full of batteries, and then wire them to a listening device like
some kind of robotic Frankenstein’s cat.
It took five years to create a cyborg cat that would be suitable for the mission.
When they tried to take the cat out on a practice run, it was hit by a taxi and killed.
It never even reached the intended target.
The operation was finally scrapped in 1967 after wasting tens of millions of dollars.
1: Operation Merlin Operation Merlin was a plan cooked up by the
Clinton Administration to provide Iran with fake designs for a nuclear weapon.
The purpose of the mission was to delay the completion of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
The CIA used a defected Russian scientist to create a flawed blueprint of a nuclear
warhead that would be leaked to Iranian officials.
And this secret mission wasn't that long ago, only in the year 2000.
CIA documents reveal that work on the fake blueprints began in 1996, the weapon being
based on the Russian TBA-480 Fire Set.
The design for the weapon was completely legit except in several key places that would make
it flawed and not work.
But the secret mission backfired.
The Russian engineer hired to make the blueprints wasn’t in on the scheme.
He noticed there were flaws in the schematics that he himself had helped create after he
already handed them over to Iran.
Naturally, he told the Iranians about the flaws.
Instead of setting Iran’s nuclear program back, Operation Merlin actually accelerated
it by providing them with extremely useful information.
Since they identified the flaws immediately, they used the plans that the US handed them
to design real working nukes.
How do you feel about some of these sneaky missions?
Let me know in the comments and thanks for watching.
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