The_Info_Web/30 - PROGRAMS & PROJECTS/INTELLIGENCE_OPERATIONS/Operation CHAOS.md

title	aliases	created	updated	tags	category	summary	start	end	location	relations
Operation CHAOS	CHAOS Program CHAOS program MHCHAOS Operation CHAOS MH/CHAOS MHCHAOS program CHAOS	2026-05-17	2026-10-05	Program CIA Intelligence DomesticSurveillance Counterintelligence ColdWar Antiwar HYDRA ChurchCommittee RockefellerCommission	Intelligence Operation	CIA counterintelligence program of the Special Operations Group headed by Richard Ober, run from August 1967 to March 1974, which indexed some 300,000 names and kept about 13,000 files on Americans.	1967-08-15	1974-03-15	Washington, D.C.	type with reverse start end role fn head_of Richard Ober true 1967-08-15 1972 chief of the Special Operations Group, Counterintelligence Staff (1967 to 1972, per the Hoover Institution finding aid for his papers) 2 type with reverse end role fn investigated Rockefeller Commission 1975 true 1975-06 Chapter 11 of the commission report 1 type with reverse start end role fn investigated Church Committee true 1975-10-14 1976-04-26 Book III of the final report 2 type with reverse start end role fn participant_in Domestic Contact Service true 1969-10-01 1973-12-31 supplied more than 200 reports and leads to CHAOS 2 type with reverse fn subject_of Students for a Democratic Society true 1 type with reverse fn subject_of Black Panther Party true 1 type with reverse fn subject_of Grove Press true 1 type with reverse fn subject_of Women's Strike for Peace true 1 type with reverse fn subject_of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee true 1 type with reverse fn subject_of Nation of Islam true 1

Operation CHAOS, carried in Central Intelligence Agency cable traffic as MHCHAOS, was a counterintelligence program of the Agency's Counterintelligence Staff, run from August 1967 to March 1974 by the Special Operations Group under Richard Ober. Its declared task was to determine whether foreign governments directed or financed American antiwar, student and Black militant movements. The Rockefeller Commission 1975 reported that over six years the group compiled about 13,000 files, among them files on 7,200 American citizens, and that the documents mentioned more than 300,000 persons and organizations entered into a computerized index. The group ultimately had a staff of 52.¹ The Church Committee described the program as the centerpiece of a CIA effort that began in 1967 in response to White House pressure from Lyndon B. Johnson and later Richard Nixon.² The program was first reported by Seymour Hersh in the New York Times on December 22, 1974, nine months after it had been terminated.³

Origins, 1967

An early thread of the program was a counterintelligence inquiry into Ramparts magazine, which in early 1967 had published an account of CIA relationships with private institutions in the United States. The officer who ran the inquiry, Richard Ober, began a computerized file on dissident activists connected to the magazine. By August 1967 he estimated that he had indexed several hundred Americans and opened perhaps fifty files.²

President Johnson established the National Commission on Civil Disorders (the Kerner Commission) in July 1967, and the CIA furnished it 26 reports.¹² On August 15, 1967, Thomas Karamessines, Deputy Director for Plans, sent a memorandum titled "Overseas Coverage of Subversive Student and Related Matters" to James Jesus Angleton, chief of the Counterintelligence Staff. The memorandum followed discussions that day among Karamessines, Angleton and Richard Helms, asked Angleton to designate a staff officer to run the program, referred to "Dick Ober (or whatever officer you select)," and acknowledged the program's "domestic counterintelligence aspects." The Church Committee found no written directive from Helms to Karamessines establishing the program. Helms testified to the Rockefeller Commission that no specific presidential instruction was given and that Johnson raised the subject "almost daily and weekly": "it isn't a direct order to do something, but it seems to me it behooves the Director of Central Intelligence to find some way to improve his performance."² A contemporaneous FBI memorandum quoted by the Rockefeller Commission stated that the White House had told Helms to "exert every possible effort" to collect information on racial agitators traveling abroad and that a new desk had been created for the purpose.¹

An August 31, 1967 cable to field stations described the target as "radical students and U.S. Negro expatriates as well as travelers passing through certain select areas abroad," with the objective of finding "the extent to which Soviets, Chicoms and Cubans are exploiting our domestic problems." Chiefs of station were told to destroy the cable after reading it and to control knowledge of the program.²

The 1967 and 1968 studies

On October 31, 1967, Ober recorded that the CIA was to prepare a study on the "International Connections of the United States Peace Movement." Every field station was polled and every branch of the intelligence community was asked to submit holdings to the group; most of the material came from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The study was written by the CIA's Intelligence Directorate and Helms delivered it to Johnson on November 15, 1967. It found little evidence of foreign direction, but Helms's covering letter listed "significant holes": no information on the financing of principal peace groups, no evidence of contact between peace leaders and foreign embassies, and little on campus groups.² A second study, "Demonstration Techniques," was begun on November 20, 1967, an updated peace movement review followed on December 21, and "Student Dissent and Its Techniques in the U.S." went to the White House on January 5, 1968. Helms sent "Restless Youth" to Johnson and Walt Rostow on September 4, 1968, observing "the peculiar sensitivity which attaches to the fact that CIA has prepared a report on student activities both here and abroad." The version sent to Henry Kissinger on February 18, 1969 carried Helms's statement that the section on American students was "an area not within the charter of this Agency, so I need not emphasize how extremely sensitive this makes the paper. Should anyone learn of its existence it would prove most embarrassing for all concerned."¹²

Cryptonym and restricted channel, 1968

In June 1968 stations in Europe were asked to engage friendly liaison services in monitoring Americans overseas. In July 1968 a multi-station cable described a "sensitive high priority program concerning foreign contacts with US individuals and organizations of the 'Radical Left,'" naming radical students, antiwar activists, draft resisters and deserters, Black nationalists, anarchists and "assorted New Leftists," and merged the previously separate reporting channels under the cryptonym CHAOS.¹² Cable traffic was moved into restricted handling on instructions from the Deputy Director for Plans on May 23, 1969. A memorandum Ober wrote on May 29, 1969 specified that the traffic would be hand delivered to division chiefs, that access was limited to the division chief, deputy and a designated staff officer, and that "No MHCHAOS traffic will be destroyed by Divisions, nor will it be sent to RID."⁴

Expansion, 1969

On June 20, 1969, Tom Charles Huston of the Nixon White House asked the CIA for a report on foreign Communist support of revolutionary protest movements, with a ten day deadline. The CIA answered on June 30 that there was very little evidence of Communist funding or training and no evidence of direction or control, and that the 1967 Nicholas Katzenbach guidelines had inhibited access to some persons of interest. This was the first study produced by the CHAOS office itself. Two revisions followed, one prepared in 1970 for the interagency committee behind the Huston Plan and a revised version in January 1971, both with the same conclusion.¹² A July 14, 1969 cable to a station welcomed its intention to "greatly increase its efforts to cover MHCHAOS targets" in accord with "current very high priority this target," and asked about developing "penetrations of MHCHAOS types" jointly with liaison services.⁵

By mid-1969 the staff had grown to 36 (eventually 52), the group occupied a vaulted basement area, a deputy chief and three branch chiefs were appointed, and an exclusive channel to the FBI was established. On September 6, 1969, Helms circulated a memorandum to the heads of each CIA directorate directing them to support CHAOS, which had "the principal operational responsibilities" for the Agency's activities in the "radical milieu." The memorandum was also meant to answer dissent inside the CIA about the program.¹²

Agents, Project 2 and the Domestic Contact Service

A February 1968 proposal from the Office of Security and a Plans Directorate division, "Project 1," to acquire assets in the "Peace" and "Black Power" movements was rejected by Helms in March 1968 as beyond the Agency's jurisdiction. A successor, "Project 2," approved on April 14, 1970, recruited persons without prior dissident affiliations who would acquire "the theory and jargon" of the New Left while attending school in the United States, a process an officer called "reddening," before foreign assignment. Twenty-three agents were recruited between 1970 and 1974, eleven of whom completed the domestic phase. Copies of all Project 2 contact reports went to CHAOS, which indexed the content. William Colby, by then Director of Central Intelligence, approved the project on September 5, 1973.¹²

From October 1969 CHAOS ran its own agents. The case officer, who testified under the name "Charles Marcules," contacted about 40 potential agents through July 1972; eighteen FBI informants were recruited for trips abroad, and three agents with entry to antiwar, radical left or Black militant groups were used over extended periods. The Rockefeller Commission found that three CHAOS agents were used to collect domestic intelligence, including one recruited in April 1971 and sent to Washington, D.C. to get "as close as possible" to coordinators of the May Day demonstrations. The commission found no evidence of wiretaps, electronic surveillance or unauthorized entries by agents of the program.¹²

The Domestic Contact Service supplied more than 200 reports and leads to CHAOS between 1969 and 1973 after Ober briefed its officials in October 1969. In early 1971 DCS sought a directive stating a secondary interest in domestic background; Ober refused to approve it and DCS reporting was narrowed to information "suggesting foreign involvement in U.S. radical activities."²

Collection, HYDRA and the files

Information reached CHAOS from CIA stations, from the FBI (more than 1,000 reports a month by June 1970), from the Agency's central registry, and from the CIA's New York mail intercept (HTLINGUAL), for which CHAOS supplied a watch list of 41 individuals and organizations. An international communications program of another agency, identified by the Church Committee as the National Security Agency, received watch lists from CHAOS and supplied approximately 1,100 pages, returned to the originating agency in November 1974 after a review raised a question of legality. In one period CHAOS also received copies of telephone call booking slips between the United States and foreign points.¹²

Every name was entered in a computerized index. Because access to the compartmented streams required separate passwords, the system was called HYDRA. The index held about 300,000 names. The Rockefeller Commission reported 13,000 files including 7,200 "201" personality files, nearly 1,000 subject files on organizations (Students for a Democratic Society, the Black Panther Party, the Nation of Islam, Women's Strike for Peace, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Grove Press, among others), and an index of "over 300,000 names and organizations." Its Grove Press example is a file opened because the company had published a book by Kim Philby, to which analysts added clippings on the film "I Am Curious Yellow." Church Committee staff estimated 7,500 files on Americans and noted that CIA comments counted the roughly 1,000 organization "files" as multiple volumes on 107 groups.¹²

CHAOS produced about 3,500 internal memoranda and more than 3,000 memoranda for the FBI; the Rockefeller Commission counted 37 memoranda for high officials and the Church Committee counted 34 "M memoranda," along with 4,400 memoranda and some 1,000 cable disseminations to the Bureau across the program's life. A CIA statistical review found that nearly 65 percent of the files were opened to handle FBI information.¹²

Compartmentation and internal objections

The Rockefeller Commission found that the Special Operations Group was physically removed from the Counterintelligence Staff, that a May 1969 memorandum recorded Helms instructing its chief not to disclose part of his activities to the Chief of Counterintelligence, and that both men considered actual supervision to rest with the Director of Central Intelligence. More than 600 CIA personnel were formally briefed. In November 1972 an Inspector General survey team was barred from reviewing CHAOS files; the CIA's General Counsel was apparently never consulted. A group of 14 mid-level officers wrote two memoranda in 1971 questioning the program. A September 10, 1971 cable from Ober told a station that named subjects "are not aware MHCHAOS and this subject should not be discussed with them."¹²⁶

Reduction and termination, 1972 to 1974

A July 1972 cable lowered the priority for New Left reporting while preserving a "residual counteraction capability." The Inspector General's survey of overseas stations, which stations' comments had led to question the program, produced a November 9, 1972 memorandum from CIA Inspector General William Broe to the Executive Director-Comptroller, Colby, that described concern about "a monitoring of the political views and activities of Americans not known to be or suspected of being involved in espionage." Helms ordered a priority on terrorism and reduced attention to dissidents; a December 5, 1972 Helms memorandum for the record said CHAOS "is a legitimate counterintelligence function of the Agency and cannot be stopped simply because some members of the organization do not like this activity." In 1973 the program passed to the new Operations Staff. After Director James Schlesinger's May 9, 1973 request for an inventory of "questionable activities," Colby on August 29, 1973 limited CHAOS to collection abroad of "information on foreign activities related to domestic matters."²

Colby terminated CHAOS as a specified collection program in March 1974. The Church Committee dated the order March 5, 1974 and cited a cable of March 6; the Rockefeller Commission gave March 15, 1974, and a cable in the CIA's released records dated March 15, 1974 states that "MHCHAOS program has been terminated and the MHCHAOS channel has been discontinued."¹²⁷

Exposure, 1974

Hersh's article of December 22, 1974 reported that intelligence files on at least 10,000 American citizens were kept by a special CIA unit reporting directly to Helms, then Ambassador to Iran, and quoted an official saying: "This is explosive, it could destroy the agency." It reported that Colby, at an off the record Council on Foreign Relations meeting, said he thought family skeletons were best left where they are, in the closet.³ Helms issued a statement on December 24, 1974 that "categorically denied" that the CIA under his direction conducted illegal domestic operations against war protesters.⁸

Commission findings and congressional reports

The Rockefeller Commission concluded that some domestic activities of CHAOS "unlawfully exceeded the CIA's statutory authority" though the declared mission was proper, that the program became "a repository for large quantities of information on the domestic activities of American citizens," and that the use of agents on three occasions was beyond CIA authority. It recommended that Presidents refrain from directing the CIA to internal security tasks.¹ The Church Committee published its CHAOS report in its Book III (S. Rept. 94-755, April 26, 1976), with testimony from Ober (October 28 and 30, 1975), Ober's deputy testifying as "James Eatinger" (October 14, 1975), and Karamessines (October 24, 1975), and citing the testimony of Angleton and Helms to the Rockefeller Commission. A CIA Inspector General memorandum of June 19, 1975, titled "Letter to the Vice President," speculated that an unnamed person's objections to the commission's report on MHCHAOS concerned its emphasis on domestic aspects of what that person considered a matter of foreign counterintelligence.²⁹

Disposition of the files

The Rockefeller Commission stated in 1975 that "The files and computerized index are still intact" and were held by the Agency pending the investigations, with a recommendation that files lacking foreign intelligence value be destroyed afterward.¹ Church Committee staff reviewed the CHAOS individual and organization files, the agent files and the "M" memoranda directly.² On January 26, 1976 press reports described 141 pages of CHAOS documents, the first released, handed to the Political Rights Defense Fund, which represented the Socialist Workers Party in its damage suit against the CIA and FBI under a court order; they showed infiltration of groups at Utah State University, Brown University and Boston University in 1970 and 1971 and a CIA station's circulation of information on party leader Peter Camejo as late as November 1974.¹⁰ On June 16, 1976 the Washington Star reported that U.S. District Judge June Green had ordered CIA Director George H. W. Bush not to destroy the files pending the outcome of an American Civil Liberties Union civil action seeking access to them.¹¹

The 1973 order to destroy records given by Helms concerned Project MKUltra, not CHAOS. The Senate's 1977 hearing recorded that MKULTRA documents were destroyed in early 1973 on Helms's verbal order, carried out by the Technical Services staff of Sidney Gottlieb, and that Stansfield Turner reported the later discovery of seven boxes of MKULTRA financial records, sent to the Retired Records Center in 1970 and filed under a different heading.¹²

Angleton, the trash proprietary and the personal files

Hersh wrote in The Samson Option (1991) that Angleton "was a sponsor, through the chaos program, of a highly secret CIA operation involving the Agency's purchase of a Washington trash collection company," a proprietary with contracts to pick up garbage at various Third World embassies, including the Israeli Embassy, and at the downtown Washington offices of B'nai B'rith, with the trash "systematically sorted and analyzed for any possible intelligence." Hersh also wrote that investigators were surprised to discover "at the end of the chaos inquiry" a cache of Angleton's personal files, secured with black tape, containing a matrix of the position and "Jewishness" of senior officials with access to classified information. Hersh named no source for the trash operation. He wrote that the personal files "were not investigated further or even brought to the attention of the House or Senate intelligence committees," and quoted an unnamed government investigator: "We decided not to do anything with it." Neither the Rockefeller Commission chapter nor the Church Committee's Book III chapter mentions a trash collection company or an embassy.¹³ Hersh also wrote that Angleton telephoned him before the December 1974 article was published and offered other stories if it was withheld.¹³

Charles Manson

In Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties (2019), Tom O'Neill wrote that Charles Manson was released from Terminal Island federal prison on March 21, 1967, left Los Angeles for Berkeley within days in violation of his parole, was transferred to the supervision of the federal parole officer Roger Smith, and afterward met Smith at the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic; O'Neill places the MKULTRA psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West's "hippie crash pad" laboratory on nearby Frederick Street. O'Neill wrote that he focused on the FBI's COINTELPRO and the CIA's CHAOS as operations then under way in Los Angeles, that he "had reliable sources suggesting that he was an informant, or at least hanging around with others who could've been," that he was "only speculating," and, in the epilogue, "I don't know" what happened, adding that his goal was not "to say what did happen" but "to prove that the official story didn't." The book cites no CHAOS record naming Manson.¹⁴ The Rockefeller Commission and Church Committee chapters on CHAOS do not mention Manson.¹²

Relation to MERRIMAC and RESISTANCE

Project MERRIMAC, the infiltration of Washington peace and Black activist groups, and Project RESISTANCE, a collection effort on campuses from 1967 to 1973, were run by the CIA Office of Security, not by the Special Operations Group. Church Committee Book III states that both "supplied information for the CHAOS program." Howard Osborn, the Director of Security, testified that Ober asked for all information on dissident groups from both projects and not only items suggesting foreign connections.²

Footnotes

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1. Rockefeller Commission, Report to the President by the Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States (June 1975), Chapter 11, "Special Operations Group, 'Operation CHAOS,'" pp. 130 to 151. https://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/rockcomm/pdf/RockComm_Chap11_CHAOS.pdf ↩︎

2. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Final Report, Book III, "CIA Intelligence Collection About Americans: CHAOS and the Office of Security," S. Rept. 94-755, April 26, 1976, pp. 679 to 730. https://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/book3/pdf/ChurchB3_9_CHAOS.pdf ↩︎

3. Seymour M. Hersh, "Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years," New York Times, December 22, 1974, as reprinted in CIA, "News, Views and Issues," No. 21, December 27, 1974 (CIA-RDP77-00432R000100340001-9). https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp77-00432r000100340001-9 ↩︎

4. Richard Ober, Memorandum for the Record, "Procedures for Restricted Handling of RYBAT MHCHAOS Traffic," May 29, 1969, CIA Reading Room doc. C01475738. https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-01475738 ↩︎

5. CIA cable, July 14, 1969, "RYBAT MHCHAOS," CIA Reading Room doc. C01475732. https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-01475732 ↩︎

6. CIA cable from Richard Ober, September 10, 1971, "RYBAT MHCHAOS," CIA Reading Room doc. C01482292. https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-01482292 ↩︎

7. CIA cable, March 15, 1974, on termination of the MHCHAOS program and channel, CIA Reading Room doc. C01482066. https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-01482066 ↩︎

8. George C. Wilson, Washington Post, June 11, 1975, as clipped in CIA-RDP90-01208R000100170047-4. https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp90-01208r000100170047-4 ↩︎

9. S. D. Breckinridge, Inspector General, memorandum for E. H. Knoche, "Letter to the Vice President," June 19, 1975, CIA Reading Room doc. C01481952. https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-01481952 ↩︎

10. Associated Press, Baltimore Sun and Washington Star, January 26, 1976, clippings CIA-RDP90-01208R000100170037-5 and CIA-RDP90-01208R000100170035-7. https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp90-01208r000100170037-5 ↩︎

11. "'Operation Chaos' Files Ordered Held," Washington Star, June 16, 1976, clipping CIA-RDP90-01208R000100170029-4. https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp90-01208r000100170029-4 ↩︎

12. Project MKULTRA, the CIA's Program of Research in Behavioral Modification, joint hearing, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research, 95th Congress, 1st Session, August 3, 1977 (testimony of Stansfield Turner and staff summary). https://archive.org/details/project-mkultra-the-cias-program-of-research-in-behavioral-modification ↩︎

13. Seymour M. Hersh, The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy (Random House, 1991), Chapter 11, "Playing the Game," pp. 144 to 146. Sole source for the passages so cited on the trash company and the Angleton files. https://archive.org/details/Sampson_Option ↩︎

14. Tom O'Neill with Dan Piepenbring, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties (New York: Little, Brown, 2019), ch. 7 ("Neutralizing the Left"), ch. 9 ("Manson's Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card"), ch. 10 ("The Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic"), ch. 11 ("Mind Control") and Epilogue. https://archive.org/details/tom-o-neill-chaos-charles-manson-the-cia-and-the-secret-history-of-the-sixties_2 ↩︎