Dossier mode
CIA Crimes
The hub, restaged as a presenter deck: the pattern it keeps finding, the cases on the record, and the questions still open. The roster reads from the live index, so it stays current as investigations land. Open the full hub.
CIA Crimes
An intelligence agency built to answer to a democracy keeps finding ways to operate outside its reach — running programs the public never approved, and keeping them secret for decades until a lawsuit, a subpoena, a prosecution, or a dying officer's confession forces them out.
Four programs — MKUltra, Operation CHAOS, Phoenix, and the Contra-cocaine pipeline — are established fact. Their establishment refutes the story of the CIA as a straightforwardly lawful institution.
Not a claim that everything the agency does is unlawful. A claim that these four, documented in the agency's own record, happened.
What this hub is, and is not.
- The record is primary-source and graded on a five-tier scale; FACT means a memo, a transcript, an inspector-general finding, or a court judgment.
- Not a claim the CIA is uniquely evil among intelligence services, or that every operation is unlawful — the four programs are a subset, and they are enough.
- Where the popular version outruns the documents, the boundary is drawn and the speculation is labeled — never smuggled in as fact.
The record is primary-source.
Every claim grades to one of five tiers. FACT means primary documentation — a memo, a transcript, an IG finding, a court judgment. PROBABLY TRUE means multiple corroborating reputable sources. SOME SMOKE means single-source, inferential, or contested. The grade is on the badge, not buried in the prose.
Confession, not investigation.
The agency almost never discloses on its own initiative. What is documented here was extracted — by a committee with subpoena power, an inspector general it was forced to commission, a criminal prosecution, or a FOIA suit it fought for years. We are not the ones alleging this; its own investigators, under compulsion, are.
Where speculation begins, it says so.
Every program here has a popular version that outruns the record, and a specific point where documented fact ends and inference begins. Those boundary lines are drawn case by case. Where we cross them, the box is labeled and the prose does not hedge inside it.
The people responsible are usually gone by the time the record is public.
Disclosure runs on a decades-long clock. Officers retire, are pardoned, or die before a program they ran becomes public record. Accountability, when it arrives at all, lands on an institution and its paperwork more often than on a person.
people killed under the Phoenix Program by CIA director William Colby's own July 1971 testimony to Congress — a figure critics call a floor, not a ceiling.
Colby testimony, House Government Operations Subcommittee (CIA-CREST)
Allen Dulles established MKUltra by memo on April 13, 1953 — a charter that grew to 149 subprojects across dozens of institutions, funding drug, hypnosis, and behavioral-control research on often unwitting subjects.
The charter and subproject count are in the CIA's own FOIA reading room and the Church Committee record.
Under MKUltra Subproject 68, Dr. Ewen Cameron erased patients' minds at Montreal's CIA-funded Allan Memorial Institute — 'depatterning' with massive electroshock, drug-induced sleep, and taped-message loops.
The Guardian and CBC longform reporting on the Allan Memorial experiments, corroborated by the Senate MKUltra hearing record.
Army scientist Frank Olson was dosed with LSD without his knowledge at a 1953 CIA retreat and fell to his death from a New York hotel window days later — a death the Rockefeller Commission tied back to the program.
The Rockefeller Commission report and the family's evidence archive document the dosing and the fall.
In January 1973, on Richard Helms's order, the CIA destroyed the MKUltra files — which is why the public record is what survived the shredder, not what the program actually did.
The destruction is documented in Church Committee Book I and Helms's own 1977 Senate testimony.
The 1947 National Security Act barred the CIA from domestic policing. Operation CHAOS did it anyway: ~13,000 files, dossiers on 7,200+ U.S. citizens, and 300,000+ names indexed — and the agency's own analyses found no foreign control of the anti-war movement the program existed to prove.
The statutory bar, the scale, and the null finding are documented by the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission.
CHAOS ran in secret until Seymour Hersh exposed it on the front page of the New York Times on December 22, 1974 — the report that triggered the Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission.
Hersh's contemporaneous NYT investigation, and the histories tracing the oversight response to it.
The confession is the agency's own: the CIA Inspector General's 1998 report acknowledged the agency worked with Contra-tied networks it knew were moving cocaine. The Iran-Contra prosecutions that might have gone higher ended on Christmas Eve 1992, when President Bush pardoned six defendants.
The CIA IG's Volume II on Contra cocaine, and Bush's clemency proclamation with Walsh's Iran-Contra final report.
Donald Rickard — a CIA officer under State Department vice-consul cover in Durban — confessed on tape to filmmaker John Irvin in 2016, weeks before his death, that his tip led to Nelson Mandela's 1962 arrest, reversing his 2012 denial.
Rickard's officer role and the taped confession are documented; the causal 'his tip led to the arrest' rests chiefly on his own late account, so the claim is graded down to PROBABLY_TRUE. The CIA has never confirmed or denied.
The story vs. the record.
- An intelligence service answering to elected oversight.
- Barred by statute from spying on Americans.
- Operating within the law it was chartered under.
- Mind-control experiments on unwitting citizens; files destroyed to hide them.
- 300,000+ Americans indexed in a program its own charter forbade.
- A body count in the tens of thousands, and a pardon list that closed the case.
The documented record, program by program. Each opens in a new tab.
- The Palmer Raids: how a 1919 dragnet built the first federal domestic-radical index and the operational template that followed ↗▶FACT
- Perversion of Justice: how Jeffrey Epstein bought his way out of federal prosecution in 2008 ↗FACT
- The CIA and Mandela ↗▶FACT
- SDS, MI5, and BOSS: UK Spies for Apartheid ↗▶FACT
- The Enterprise: Oliver North, Richard Secord, and the NSC's off-books network ↗▶SOME SMOKE
- The Panther/US letters: how the FBI wrote forged death threats between two Black organizations and watched the bodies fall ↗▶FACT
- The Fort Bragg Cartel ↗▶PROBABLY TRUE
- Iran-Contra and the contra cocaine tolerance: two confessions, one theater ↗▶FACT
The full scope of MKUltra is destroyed — the 1973 file purge means the surviving record is a fraction of the program.
What the shredded subprojects contained. Financial records that escaped the purge are how much of MKUltra is known at all.
Help us fill it →The records behind the disputed 40-box ODNI declassification are withheld.
The status of the withheld material remains SOME_SMOKE — contested, not confirmed, pending disclosure.
Help us fill it →Whether MKUltra ever touched figures like Oswald or others in the popular retellings is unproven.
These are SOME_SMOKE boundary lines where the documented record stops and inference begins — named, not asserted.
Help us fill it →Why it matters now.
None of this rests on our word. It rests on the agency's own memos, its own inspector general, a Senate committee's subpoenas, and a dying officer's tape. The pattern is not just the crimes — it's the clock: exposure arrives decades late, and the people responsible are usually gone before it does.
Help us fill these lines.
- OpenThe contents of the MKUltra subprojects destroyed in the 1973 file purge.
- OpenThe material behind the disputed 40-box ODNI declassification.
- OpenThe boundary questions the record raises but does not resolve — kept at SOME_SMOKE, not upgraded.