• Military
• WMD

• Intelligence Menu               

• Systems
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Imagery
• Links

• Homeland Security
• Space

CHAOS

During the 1960s as President Lyndon Johnson fought to retain domestic support for the Vietnam War, he became convinced that the antiwar and Black Power movements were controlled by foreign communists. He ordered the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to monitor American citizens in the United States to detect this foreign subversion. Called CHAOS, the operation compiled files on thousands of Americans.

Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms reported to President Johnson in November 1967 that the program had not uncovered evidence that antiwar activists were in contact with foreign embassies in the United States or abroad, but the program continued and was later expanded by President Nixon who expressed the same concern about foreign ties.

The CIA sometimes collaborated with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which was concurrently running a program called COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program)36 that was ostensibly created to counter subversion. The program involved agents harassing and discrediting domestic groups as diverse as the antiwar movement, Communist Party USA, and Ku Klux Klan.

COINTELPRO was officially terminated in 1971, but was exposed in 1973 on the heels of the Watergate scandal, which also involved government agents (actually, former CIA officers).

CHAOS was closed down after Watergate prompted an internal study commissioned by the CIA director, who ordered employees to self-report possible violations of the Agency’s charter. When the director’s study was completed in May 1973, it came in at 693 single-spaced pages, each one of which described a possible violation.