Anthony Frank - DESTROYING AMERICA: The CIA’s Quest to Control the Government

The first thing people need to understand is that, according to official documents, the CIA has been conducting massive operations inside the United States since the 1950s.

In 1975, President Fords Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States (the Rockefeller Commission) revealed that the CIAs Directorate of Science and Technology had been putting LSD and other potential behavior-influencing substances into the food of unsuspecting Americans from 1953 to 1963. They first began doing it on the West Coast in 1953, and by 1961, they were drugging unsuspecting Americans on the East Coast.

The Rockefeller Commission, which consistently tried to gloss over the CIAs domestic operations, claimed that the ten-year program of putting LSD and other drugs into the food of unsuspecting Americans in normal social situations was some kind of CIA testing operation, but the CIA eventually acknowledged that the alleged testing made little scientific sense.

In one drugging incident in 1953, a CIA officer met with Dr. Frank Olson, a civilian biochemist working for the Department of the Army in Maryland, and surreptitiously slipped LSD into his drink. Dr. Olson was none-too-pleased with it and made an issue of it with his immediate superior, Colonel Vincent Ruwet. Five days after the drugging incident, Olson was still making an issue of it and not getting any answers, which resulted in Colonel Ruwet calling the CIA officer who drugged Dr. Olson.

The CIA officer then took Olson to New York, allegedly for psychiatric treatment, but they instead met with an allergist and immunologist.

Three days after arriving in New York, the CIA officer and his victim checked into a tenth-floor hotel room. The CIA officer wrote in his intelligence report that

Someone wrote a CIA Field Office Report claiming Dr. Olson committed suicide, and the Rockefeller Report maintains that Olson jumped from the tenth-floor window. But the CIA officer who drugged Olson and reported on his death a week later never said anything about Olson committing suicide, nor did he say that Olson jumped from the tenth-floor window.

No other details of the CIAs ten-year drugging operation have ever been made public because the CIA allegedly destroyed its records of the operation.

A CIA Inspector Generals report, which had not been destroyed, addressed the LSD operation in 1957, four years after it was launched and six years before it would end. The Inspector General wrote, Precautions must be taken to conceal these activities from the American public.... Knowledge that the Agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities would have serious repercussions, which explains why they had to get rid of Dr. Frank Olson.

In 1963, the last year the CIAs LSD program, former CIA Director Allen Dulles, who led the CIA during the first eight years of the LSD program, wrote a book titled The Craft of Intelligence in which he boldly proclaimed, Espionage is not tainted with any legality.

In other words, when the CIA secretly targets U.S. citizens with clandestine operations, CIA officers have the option of getting assistance and cooperation from other U.S. departments and agencies if they need it, and the CIA will take advance steps to prevent other government agencies from complaining that the CIA has no jurisdiction in the United States.

One agency with which the CIA has had jurisdictional conflicts when secretly conducting its operations in the United States is the FBI. A high-ranking FBI official met with CIA Director John McCone in May 1964 and brought up the CIAs DDP operations in the United States, which are conducted by the CIAs Deputy Director for Plans, telling the CIA Director that the operations are taking up much of my time these days. The FBI official also told McCone, Your people are more operational than ever in the U.S. right now.

Richard Helms, who wrote the 1959 memorandum on the CIAs Clandestine Services Operations in the United States, had been the CIAs Deputy Director for Plans (DDP) for two years before the FBI official noted the huge DDP operations in the United States.

In May 1973, nine years after the FBI official met with McCone and just a few months after Helms wrapped up a seven-year tenure as CIA Director, the new CIA Director, James Schlesinger, issued instructions to each directorate to come forward with descriptions of activities, especially those involved in the domestic scene, that had flap potential.

1973 was the year that the CIA allegedly destroyed all the records of its ten-year LSD operation, but the Rockefeller Commission obviously accessed the LSD records that had allegedly been destroyed. Even the report of the CIA officer who drugged Dr. Frank Olson and then reported on his death a week later had not been destroyed.

Some of the CIAs flap potential activities were brought to light less than three years after Director Schlesingers memorandum. Both the United States Senate and the Ford Administration produced reports in 1975 following public revelations about the CIAs illicit activities inside the United States.

Seymour Hersh wrote in the New York Times in December 1974 that the 1973 check of the CIAs domestic files revealed illegal activities by members of the CIA inside the United States, beginning in the 1950s, including break-ins, wiretapping and the surreptitious inspection of mail.

Seven days later, Senator William Proxmire stated, I can say on the basis of the information I have, and I think it is very good information, that the stories and allegations about people who had been under investigation by the CIA, about the surveillance, about the breaking and entering, and about wiretaps, that those are accurate and correct.

To deal with the exposure, President Ford established the previously cited Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States, chaired by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, and three weeks later, the U.S. Senate established the Senate Church Committee, headed by Senator Frank Church.

(The Watergate scandal originated in June 1972 when operatives in the Nixon re-election campaign broke into the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C.)

Hunt, himself, submitted an affidavit to the Rockefeller Commission stating that back in November 1963, he was an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency assigned to the Domestic Operations Division, located in a commercial building in Washington, D.C. adding that the Domestic Operations Division was part of the CIAs Deputy Directorate for Plans.

Regarding the CIAs domestic operations, the Rockefeller Commission stated that CIA officers operate in the United States with official covers and nonofficial covers.

Those with official covers are assigned to be employees of other United States government agencies, which means they are given official U.S. government positions to cover the fact that they are CIA officers gathering intelligence and conducting secretive operations inside the United States. CIA officers with nonofficial covers have no official position with the federal government to cover their secretive operations, hence, the term nonofficial cover.

All CIA officers operating domestically, whether they have official covers or nonofficial covers, are required to fill out intelligence reports every day on the people with whom they interact.

The 1975 Rockefeller Report also states that there are U.S. businesses that are created and controlled by the CIA and used for CIA activities and operations in the United States. Many CIA officers have nonofficial covers as employees of companies that are owned by the CIA and operated by CIA officers.

There are also United States citizens who assist the CIA by serving as officers and directors of some of the CIA-owned companies. All CIA-owned companies are legally constituted corporations, partnerships, or sole proprietorships. (Any location where the CIA sets up shop in the United States becomes a CIA field station.)