Hey there, so this is a mega-collaboration that we've been working on with four other
channels and it's all about the CIA.
So first up, over here, you've got This is Genius looking at the CIA's five bizarrest
operations of all time.
Then you've got All Time Conspiracies and their take on allegations that the CIA created
AIDs.
Then you've got Dark Five's and the five darkest experiments of MKUltra.
And finally, last but not least, you've got All Time Numbers doing the CIA in numbers.
But here is our take on the five worst CIA operations of all time.
So let's begin with The Phoenix Program.
The CIA's website says that this is one of the most misunderstood programmes undertaken
during the Vietnam War.
They say it's treated with suspicion because of the way the press, the antiwar movement
and scholars portrayed it.
You make up your own minds.
On the face of it, Phoenix was a program to pacify support for the Viet Cong and build
it for the south and US forces.
But even the CIA's description makes it sound pretty brutal.
From our present location, we've found a we've found another possible pick up zone.
Over
Lists of people believed to be VC members or collaborators by 100 provincial intelligence
committees and then they were sent to CIA paramilitary groups, police or military forces,
including Navy Seals and the US army.
The Phoenix field forces were then sent out to the villages, they then picked out the
people they were looking for and, in the CIA's own words remember, neutralised them.
Neutralising them involved arresting them, capturing them for interrogation, or, if they
just resisted a little bit, they were killed.
It's thought that Phoenix could have eliminated as many as 80,000 people through defection,
detention and death.
But why would we just take what the CIA says about it Let's have a look at the critics
too.
Douglas Valentine, who's a historian, says the program targeted civilians, not soldiers,
and that they could be kidnapped, tortured and detained for two years without trial or
even murdered.
He says there was no due process and it was open to corruption.
And he quotes one CIA officer as describing Phoenix as a very good blackmail scheme - saying:
"If you don't do what I want, you're VC."
Then there's the former soldiers.
Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Herbert wrote in his autobiography that "they wanted me to
take charge of execution teams that wiped out entire families and tried to make it look
as though the VC themselves had done the killing."
And then Bart Osbourne testified before congress in 1971, telling them Phoenix was a "sterile,
depersonalized murder program."
Phoenix was shut down in 1971.
And that leads us on to Operation CHAOS.
Seymour Hersh was the investigative journalist responsible for bringing Chaos to the public.
He wrote an article in the New York times revealing the large-scale intelligence operation
against the anti-war movement and various dissident groups within the US.
The activities targeted as many as 10,000 Americans and involved break-ins, wiretaps,
inspection of mail and dozens of illegal activities.
Agents were also allowed to follow and photograph people in the anti-war movement.
I got a silver star, a purple heart, army commendation medal, eight air medals, national
defense and the rest of this garbage.
It doesn't mean a thing.
Now, at the time, the CIA argued that the operation was operating in the context of
foreign counterintelligence.
As in they believed that foreign powers had influence over the anti-war movement.
But the thing is, Chaos directly contravened the CIA's charter, agreed in 1947, which forbade
the agency from having police, subpoena, law enforcement powers or internal security functions"
inside the US.
In one of their own retrospective histories, which represent their own side of events,
the CIA admits that without Hersh's article it's very unlikely there ever would have been
a Rockefeller Commission, a Pike report or a Church Commission.
There are links to those in the video description if you want to find out more about them.
Next up, it's PBSUCCESS.
Guatemala's President Arbenz was democratically elected in 1951.
He made it his mission to implement agrarian and land reforms.
One of the biggest land owners in Guatemala at the time was the US multinational corporation
United Fruit.
With US interests in danger, the CIA, with the help of Edward Bernays, set about a massive
PR and propaganda campaign in Guatemala and at home, trying to paint Arbenz as a dangerous
Communist.
Which he was not.
To do this the CIA was able to utilise another of its programmes - Operation Mockingbird.
Mockingbird was an international network of journalists in the CIA's pocket.
Through that network, the agency was able to distribute and disseminate its propaganda.
And gradually, the world began to accept the image of Arbenz as a communist.
He was not.
The CIA also engineered and backed a coup, led by Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas in 1954.
The Colonel and subsequent dictators led successive brutal regimes that disappeared or killed
thousands of citizens and led to decades of instability, political conflict and civil
war.
The conflict didn't end until 1996 and some people put the estimates of people disappeared
or murdered as high as 200,000.
Project MK Ultra ran from 1953 to 1964 and involved dozens of experiments on US citizens,
without their knowledge, using chemical and biological agents.
It was an experiment that sought to control minds and beings.
Just some of the stated objectives were to discover materials and methods that would:
increase the ease and usefulness of hypnosis; enhance the ability of individuals to withstand
torture, coercion and brain-washing; produce total amnesia for events surrounding
their use and produce physical disablement such as paralysis
of the legs.
And those were just some of the, frankly, evil objectives.
The most infamous of materials used was probably LSD.
That was administered to people without their knowledge.
The experiments led to long-term health effects, including paranoid schizophrenia and in some
cases death, which is just about the most long term of all long term health effects.
There were a total of 149 subprojects focusing on modifying behaviour, but as Senator Teddy
Kennedy noted, the CIA Director Richard Helms, ordered all records to be destroyed.
Now, MKUltra was evil, but what about Operation Northwoods?
Admittedly it never actually came to fruition, but the very fact that somebody could even
come up with these ideas, is terrifying!
And it very nearly was implemented - it was only Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and
President John F Kennedy who put a stop to it.
The plan was to create the impression that the US was under attack from Cuba using a
variety of methods, to present the Cuban government as an aggressive, rash and irresponsible threat
to peace in the Western hemisphere.
The now unclassified documents say the ultimate objective was overt military action against
Cuba.
The first part of the plan was to harrass, prod and provoke Cuba into a reaction, giving
the US a legitimate reason to send in the military.
They'd do that with a number of small-scale staged incidents with friendly Cubans acting
as saboteurs, starting fires and inciting riots around the US base at Guantanamo Bay.
There were plans to blow up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay, or better, near Havana.
There were also plans for a Cuban Communist terror campaign in Miami and other cities
in Florida, perhaps extending it as far away as Washington DC.
And it goes even further...
There were plans to sink a boatload of Cubans, to set off plastic bombs in Cuban areas, stage
Cuban Air Force attacks on US planes.
But perhaps most dastardly of all would be a staged attack on a US aircraft carrying
US civilians.
There was a convoluted plan to swap over planes, which meant that they wouldn't actually shoot
down a planeload of civilians, but nobody in the international community would have
had the faintest idea.
So that was our top five.
You may well disagree with some of them, why not suggest some more in the comments below,
God knows, there's plenty of them to go through, and we will see you again next time.