Few travelers passing through Dulles International Airport near Washington, D.C., know the story behind the name. It honors William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan, the brigadier general who ran the Office of Strategic Services during World War II.
Donovan's OSS conducted secret operations across Asia and Europe, recruiting civilians and active-duty military personnel as covert operatives. The wartime experience revealed the need for a permanent organization capable of intelligence gathering and covert action with plausible deniability.
The OSS was dissolved in October 1945, and its functions were transferred to the State and War Departments. Its successor, the Central Intelligence Agency, carried that legacy forward with mixed and often controversial results.
One figure stands at the center of that story. Allen Welsh Dulles was born on April 7, 1893, in Watertown, New York. He and his older brother, John Foster Dulles, would both serve at the highest levels of American government.
The Dulles family had a long tradition of public service. His younger sister, Eleanor Lansing Dulles, became a diplomat. His maternal grandfather, John W. Foster, was Secretary of State under President Benjamin Harrison, and his uncle by marriage, Robert Lansing, held the same post under Woodrow Wilson.
Dulles graduated from Princeton University and joined the State Department as a diplomat in 1916. He was first assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Vienna, Austria, then transferred to Bern, Switzerland, along with the rest of the embassy staff just before the United States entered World War I.
Dulles later claimed that while in Bern he was called by Vladimir Lenin, who wanted to meet with him on April 8, 1917, the day before Lenin left for St. Petersburg aboard a German train. It is believed that the meeting took place.
After surviving the Spanish flu, Dulles attended the American delegation at the Paris Peace Conference alongside his brother John. He was then assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Istanbul, Turkey.
In 1921, Dulles helped expose The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a forgery. The documents had been forged by Russians in 1897 to instigate anti-Jewish sentiment, purporting to show a global plan by Jews and Freemasons to destroy Christian nations.
The Protocols were published in Allied newspapers, and anti-Semite automaker Henry Ford's private newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, used them as proof of a Jewish threat. Dulles tried unsuccessfully to persuade the State Department to publicly denounce the forgery, but anti-Semitism in the government was strong.
From 1922 until 1926, Dulles served as chief of the Near East Division of the Department of State. He earned a law degree from George Washington University Law School in 1926 and took a job at the New York law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, where his brother was a partner.
Due to his overseas experience, Dulles became director of the Council on Foreign Relations in 1927, the first new director since the Council's founding in 1921. He served as the Council's secretary from 1933 to 1944 and again as its president from 1946 to 1950.
During the late 1920s and early 1930s, Dulles was a legal adviser to the Arms Limitation Delegation at the League of Nations. During his travels he met Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov, and various British and French prime ministers.
In April 1933, Dulles and Norman Davis met with Hitler and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels in Berlin. Afterward, Dulles reported that things were not as bad as had been reported in Germany and found both men quite forthright and communicable.
His opinion changed after he returned to Germany in 1935, following the passage of the Nuremberg laws. Due to the treatment of Jews, he convinced his law firm to discontinue doing business in Germany, and he helped some German Jews, such as banker Paul Kemper, immigrate to the United States.
As World War II escalated in Europe, Donovan brought Dulles into the OSS. On August 12, 1942, Dulles was headquartered in Bern, Switzerland, once again.
Dulles had made many contacts in Europe, many of them members of resistance movements. That was his value. His first primary contact was Austrian Catholic priest Heinrich Maier.
Maier had close relationships with scientists, designers, and engineers, and provided Dulles with military intelligence on new weapons such as the V-1 and V-2 rockets, the Me 262 jet, and the Me 163 rocket fighter, as well as details on the Tiger I tank and new U-boat designs like the Type IXC.
Maier also supplied the top secret locations where these weapons were being built, which was passed on to U.S. Army Air Force and Royal Air Force Bomber Commands. It was Maier and his group who provided the first concrete evidence of the death camp at Auschwitz in Poland, as well as the establishment of others such as Chelmno, Belsen, Treblinka, and Mauthausen.
One of Dulles's best contacts was the head of the Abwehr, German intelligence, the anti-Nazi Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. Canaris fed information to Dulles through mutual contacts, including German strategic plans and operational objectives such as Hitler's plan for Operation Citadel, which developed into the Battle of Kursk.
All of this information was passed to the Allies, including Stalin, who early in the war was reluctant to believe any intelligence he received. On this occasion, Stalin did believe the intelligence and acted upon it.
Donovan made tactical deployment decisions regarding his agents in Europe based on these reports, sending OSS assets into Yugoslavia to support Josip Broz Tito alongside the British Special Operations Executive.
Canaris was also involved in the July 20, 1944, bomb plot to kill Hitler and supplied information to Dulles long before the plot was launched. After Canaris was exposed, arrested, and later executed, Dulles's internal intelligence sources virtually dried up.
Dulles was also well informed on Hitler's wavering decision to kidnap Pope Pius XII and the College of Cardinals to use as a bargaining chip. SS Lieutenant General Karl Wolff opposed the plan and worked with Dulles to make sure it did not happen.
Dulles learned that Wolff had been placed as commander of all Waffen SS forces in northern Italy, was the German military governor of northern Italy, and was the plenipotentiary to Benito Mussolini during the last two years of the war.
Knowing that Wolff would have been condemned as a war criminal for his involvement in the Holocaust, Dulles reached out through a Swiss emissary. If Wolff could negotiate the surrender of SS forces, he would be insulated from war crimes trials afterward.
Wolff was very interested. In a 1984 interview, he said that Himmler had appointed him to command SS forces at the Gustav line and hold that area, and that he knew with the condition of their forces and the weight of the Allies pushing north it was only a matter of time. He met Dulles in March 1945 and they came to an agreement, as all knew the war was effectively over and it became a matter of saving lives.
After the war in Europe, Dulles served for six months as the OSS Berlin Station Chief and later as Station Chief in Bern. While in this capacity, Dulles ran Operation Paperclip, and Wolff helped.
Operation Paperclip brought former German scientists, engineers, technicians, specialists, and chemists to the United States to get a head start on the USSR. President Harry S. Truman wanted the best and brightest minds that had worked for Hitler captured by the Western Allies, not the Soviets.
The problem was that Truman did not want anyone connected to the Nazi party. That ruled out about 98 percent of the people he wanted, because unless you were a member of the NSDAP, you did not hold a high security clearance or a highly sensitive job in the Third Reich. The standout member of that collective was Dr. Wernher von Braun.
Dulles and Donovan then scrubbed the records of those in U.S. and British custody, removing information that would connect them to the party and Hitler in particular. Wolff also made that list.
Dulles and his brother John were advisers to Republican presidential nominee Thomas E. Dewey. They, along with former Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, who was also the first Secretary of Defense, helped form the Office of Policy Coordination.
In 1949, Dulles co-authored the Dulles-Jackson Report, which was highly critical of the new Central Intelligence Agency, established by the National Security Act of 1947. Truman was less than amused and appointed Lieutenant General Walter Bedell Smith as the new Director of Central Intelligence.
Smith then recruited Dulles to oversee the agency's covert operations as Deputy Director for Plans, a role he managed from January 4, 1951. On August 23, 1951, Dulles was promoted to Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, second in the intelligence hierarchy, running global operations as the Cold War heated up.
After Dwight Eisenhower's election in 1952, Bedell Smith was appointed to the Department of State, and Dulles became the first civilian director of the CIA.
Due to the damage being done, and at Dulles's request, President Eisenhower demanded that Senator Joseph McCarthy discontinue issuing subpoenas against the CIA. Documents made public in 2004 revealed that the CIA under Dulles's orders had broken into McCarthy's Senate office and fed information to him, fueling his belief that communists had infiltrated the CIA in order to discredit him. It worked.
In 1953, Dulles, along with Frank Wisner, ran the covert Operation Ajax, which led to the removal of the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, and installed the Western-friendly Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran.
The well-orchestrated coup spanned five days, from August 15 to 19, 1953, when the CIA, along with Britain's MI6, masterminded the operation to maintain control over Iranian oil and prevent Tehran from falling under Soviet influence after World War II.
It was feared that the Soviets planned a takeover of the country following Mosaddegh's nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. On August 18, 1953, Dulles met with the Shah while on vacation in Rome, the two meeting at the Hotel Excelsior while checking in. The meeting proved fortuitous, as Prime Minister General Fazlollah Zahedi, who was Western-friendly, remained in the country assisting the United States and the coup.
Mark Gasiorowski, a professor of political science at Tulane University, says that to many in Iran, the coup proved Washington's duplicity. The United States, which portrayed itself as the guardian of freedom, was seen as resorting to nefarious means to get rid of a democratically elected government to suit its own strategic interests.
Author Stephen Kinzer stated that the 1979 revolution was a long-term effect of the increasing repression from the Shah, who came to power as a result of the coup. That Islamic revolution brought to power a fanatically anti-American regime that has spent more than 30 years working to undermine American interests around the world.
The 1953 coup, the agency's first major successful overthrow of a foreign government, became a template for the future. The Soviets responded by increasing their political and military assistance and presence in the Middle East, especially in Syria and North Africa, supplying weapons to Egypt, Libya, and Iraq.
For decades, the United States denied playing any part in the Iranian coup, but that position ended in 2009 when President Barack Obama acknowledged Washington's role. In Britain, the government-funded BBC provided details in 2011 of how it broadcast anti-Mossadegh programs to undermine his government.
On March 30, 1949, Syrian Colonel Husni al-Za'im seized power from President Shukri al-Quwatli in a bloodless coup, with Western approval and support from James Hugh Keely Jr. and undercover CIA officer Stephen J. Meade.
Za'im enacted policies that benefited both Britain and the United States, such as construction of the Trans-Arabian Pipeline on Syrian territory, banning both the Communist Party and Islamic extremists, and signing an armistice with Israel.
But al-Za'im did not last long. Some of the officers involved in his coup, such as Adib al-Shishakli and Sami al-Hinnawi, staged another coup six months later in August 1949 and had their friend al-Za'im tried and executed by a firing squad.
Due to Dulles's fear of a communist takeover, he approached President Eisenhower, and an estimated $3 million in bribes were paid to facilitate the assassinations of Abdel Hamid al-Sarraj, head of military intelligence, Afif al-Bizri, army chief of staff, and Khalid Bakdash, leader of the Syrian Communist Party, with MI6 assistance.
The operational plan by U.S. and UK intelligence agencies would fund a Free Syria Committee and supply weapons to paramilitary troops, including the Muslim Brotherhood. Syria would be made to appear as the sponsor of plots, sabotage, and violence directed against neighboring governments, with these provocations serving as the pretext for an outside invasion led theoretically by the Kingdom of Iraq. The plan failed.
Dulles was also instrumental in the CIA-led coup code-named Operation PBSuccess, which removed President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán of Guatemala in 1954 and installed a more reliable and user-friendly government.
Dulles and the CIA were chastised for not being aware of the Soviet launch of the world's first satellite, Sputnik, on October 4, 1957. Eisenhower was less than amused to learn of it from the news media, with information supplied by the Kremlin.
U.S. Air Force General Curtis E. LeMay, then commander of Strategic Air Command, stated that Dulles was not impressing him and never did. He also criticized Dulles's brother, John Foster Dulles, saying he never thought much of him either.
Yet Dulles's ego overrode his common sense when he decided the CIA could handle the 1961 Bay of Pigs operation to oust Fidel Castro using mercenaries, giving the United States plausible deniability.
President John F. Kennedy reportedly said he wanted to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds. However, following a rigorous inquiry into the agency's affairs, methods, and problems, Kennedy did not splinter it and did not recommend congressional supervision.
Instead, Kennedy transferred the CIA to the Department of Defense under the close supervision and control of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which would also report on CIA plans and operations to the president. The CIA took the public hit for the failure, but Kennedy did not go unscathed.
One area where Kennedy was concerned shone: Dulles's great relationship with Lockheed as they worked with designer Kelly Johnson and his Skunk Works on developing the U-2 spy plane. On November 28, 1961, Kennedy presented Dulles with the National Security Medal at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
The next day, on November 29, the White House released Dulles's resignation letter, and he was replaced by John McCone.
After the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November 1963, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Allen Dulles as one of the seven commissioners of the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination.
Some historians later criticized the appointment, noting that Kennedy had fired him, so he was unlikely to be impartial in passing the judgments charged to the Warren Commission.
In the view of journalist and author Stephen Kinzer, Johnson appointed Dulles primarily so that Dulles could coach the commission on how to interview CIA witnesses and what questions to ask, because Johnson and Dulles were both anxious to ensure the commission did not discover Kennedy's secret involvement in the administration's illegal plans to assassinate Castro and other foreign leaders.
Ironically, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the president's brother, also urged Johnson to put Allen Dulles on the Warren Commission to mask the discovery of Kennedy's clandestine involvement in Cuba.
Despite his successes and failures, Allen Dulles's character was always being called into question. Despite being married to Martha Clover Todd since 1920 and having three children, he was less than faithful.
According to his own sister, Eleanor, Dulles had at least 100 extramarital affairs while in Europe, including many while serving as director of the CIA. He was apparently having several affairs while overseeing the Project MKUltra mind control program.
In 1966, Princeton University's American Whig-Cliosophic Society awarded Dulles the James Madison Award for distinguished public service. He published the book The Craft of Intelligence in 1963 and edited Great True Spy Stories in 1968.
Allen Welsh Dulles died on January 29, 1969, of influenza complicated by pneumonia at the age of 75 in Georgetown, D.C. He was buried in Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore, Maryland.
In April 1961, the United States launched a secret invasion of Cuba. It was supposed to be quick, surgical, and quiet, but instead it became one of the greatest foreign policy disasters in American history.
Over 1,400 CIA-backed exiles stormed the beaches of the Bay of Pigs, and within three days they were either captured, killed, or forced to surrender. The plan had been to overthrow Fidel Castro. What America got instead was a global embarrassment.
In the months that followed, something changed inside the U.S. national security apparatus. Publicly, Washington claimed restraint. Privately, it was a different story. Behind closed doors, military leaders believed the only way forward was war.
But with the American people still reeling from a failed invasion, public support was not guaranteed. That is when a new plan was drafted, one that would guarantee outrage and rally the nation, and one that if approved would cross a line no republic should ever entertain.
The plan called for hijackings, bombings, staged funerals, even a fake airliner explosion. None of it was coming from a foreign enemy. It came from the Pentagon.
This was not a rogue idea scribbled on a napkin. It was signed off by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They called it Operation Northwoods.
The Bay of Pigs was not just a military disaster. It was a psychological one. For the CIA, it was a gut punch. For the Pentagon, a humiliation. And for the Kennedy administration, a PR nightmare.
What most Americans did not realize was that President John F. Kennedy had only been in office for three months when the invasion began. He had not created the plan. He had inherited it, a CIA scheme hatched under the Eisenhower administration that was already in motion by the time he took the oath of office.
The invasion had been sold as airtight, but in reality it was underfunded, poorly coordinated, and based on wildly optimistic assumptions about the Cuban people rising up against Castro. They did not.
The world watched as America's covert operation fell apart in real time. Castro paraded prisoners in front of cameras. Khrushchev mocked U.S. weakness. And inside Washington, patience wore thin.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff, America's top military leaders, began pushing for something far more aggressive. They did not want another half-baked mission. They wanted a full-scale invasion of Cuba.
But there was a problem. The American people were not interested in another war, not after Korea, not after the Bay of Pigs. Without public outrage, there could be no political mandate for military action.
That is when a new idea emerged, not one based on intelligence or diplomacy, but on manipulation. If they could not win hearts and minds honestly, they would manufacture the crisis themselves.
In March 1962, the U.S. Department of Defense submitted a proposal that would send shockwaves through history. The public would not learn about it for another 35 years.
The proposal was called Operation Northwoods, and it came directly from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was not just one bad idea. It was a checklist of chaos.
The plan outlined a series of false flag operations, attacks that would appear to be carried out by Cuba but were actually staged by the U.S. government. The goal was to create a public justification for a full-scale military invasion.
Some of the suggestions read like scenes from a dystopian screenplay. They included fake hijackings of commercial airlines blamed on Cuban agents, bombings in Miami, Washington, and even inside U.S. military installations.
A drone airliner, painted to match a real passenger flight, would be remotely destroyed over Cuban waters. A list of fake victims, complete with staged funerals, would be published to sell the illusion.
They even considered sinking a U.S. Navy ship and faking Cuban sabotage, or staging a deadly riot among Cuban exiles in Florida, supposedly incited by Castro's agents.
The memo even referenced history itself, suggesting a new "Remember the Maine" incident, a nod to 1898, when the mysterious explosion of a U.S. warship triggered war with Spain. They wanted to follow the same blueprint: manufacture a tragedy, blame the enemy, and rally the nation.
One memo proposed assassinating Cuban refugees or American civilians to generate a helpful wave of indignation across the country. These were not theoretical suggestions buried in the footnotes. They were written in plain language, deliberate, cold, and methodical.
Most disturbing of all, the Joint Chiefs of Staff did not just brainstorm the plan. They signed off on it. The document was approved by General Lyman Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and delivered to the Secretary of Defense in March 1962.
The final decision now rested with one man, the president of the United States. The Northwoods proposal was submitted to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and from there it made its way to the president.
John F. Kennedy was just over a year into his first term, still weathering the blowback from the Bay of Pigs and still battling his own military leadership behind closed doors. But this time, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had gone too far.
Operation Northwoods was not a military plan. It was a blueprint for domestic terrorism. The document was signed and endorsed by the most powerful generals in America: General Lyman Lemnitzer, General Curtis LeMay, General George H. Decker, Admiral George W. Anderson Jr., and General David M. Shoup.
General Lyman Lemnitzer was not some loose cannon. He was a decorated World War II veteran, a key architect of Cold War defense strategy, and the most powerful military officer in the United States, which made his approval of Northwoods all the more chilling.
President Kennedy rejected it. No edits, no debate, no discussion. He shut the whole thing down. Lemnitzer was quietly pushed out months later, reassigned to a NATO command. Northwoods was buried, locked away in a classified vault of the Pentagon, where it remained hidden for over 35 years.
Operation Northwoods was never carried out, but its existence tells us something critical, not just about the Cold War, but about power. In 1962, the top military minds of America proposed terror attacks on its own people, and they did it so confidently because they believed the ends justified the means.
That alone should have sparked a national scandal, but it did not. Northwoods remained buried until 1997, when it was uncovered through a sweep of documents released by the JFK Assassination Records Review Board.
The plan sat untouched in the Pentagon archives for decades until a handful of researchers started asking the right questions. By then, all the architects were gone, and the Cold War they hoped to escalate was long over.
For historians, it became a case study in how far democracy can drift behind closed doors. For others, it raised darker questions. Why would a government even consider something like this? What else might have been proposed and buried?
Operation Northwoods was not some isolated idea. Elements inside the U.S. government had long considered psychological warfare and staged provocations. From World War II deception operations to Cold War contingency planning, the logic was always the same: if public opinion will not go where you want it, give it a push.
In the months after he rejected Northwoods, Kennedy's relationship with the Joint Chiefs deteriorated. He grew increasingly skeptical of the CIA, the Pentagon, and even his own advisers. He publicly stated he wanted to smash the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.
Then, on November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Officially, there is no connection, but unofficially, Operation Northwoods remains one of the most compelling exhibits in the long dark shadow of the JFK conspiracy theories.
In the mid-1970s, doctors in the small Connecticut town of Lyme began seeing patients with a baffling illness. Children developed severe arthritis, while others suffered neurological symptoms that physicians struggled to explain.
For decades, the disease was treated strictly as a natural outbreak. Yet the geography raised uncomfortable questions. Lyme sits on the northeastern edge of Long Island Sound, not far from Plum Island, and within reach of facilities that once supported the U.S. biological warfare program during the Cold War.
During the Cold War, both superpowers invested heavily in biological weapons research. Fort Detrick, Maryland, served as the center of the American program from 1943 until President Richard Nixon ordered its termination in 1969. Among the many areas of study were insect vectors, which researchers examined as potential delivery systems for pathogens.
The program expanded during the Kennedy administration following the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy authorized a covert campaign against Fidel Castro known as Operation Mongoose.
Plans developed through Fort Detrick's special operations division included a range of unconventional sabotage ideas, including poisoned cigars and contaminated diving equipment designed to target the Cuban leader.
The United States maintained an active biological warfare program from 1943 until 1969. During that period, researchers examined several potential delivery systems for pathogens, including insects that could spread disease among enemy forces.
The program was built around Camp Detrick in Maryland, later known as Fort Detrick, where the Army's Chemical Warfare Service established its biological warfare research center in 1943. Field testing took place at locations such as Horn Island in Mississippi and the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah.
One of the earliest demonstrations of insect-based delivery systems occurred in 1954 during Operation Big Itch. The test followed earlier Japanese wartime research conducted by Unit 731 in occupied Manchuria, where insects had been used to spread disease among civilian populations.
During the American experiment, the Army released approximately 670,000 fleas from cluster munitions to determine whether the insects could survive aerial dispersal and seek hosts on the ground. Military reports concluded that the test showed insect vectors could cover a battalion-sized target area and disrupt operations for extended periods.
Tick research also developed during Cold War work connected to Plum Island off the coast of New York, involving the study of various tick species and their ability to carry pathogens. Investigators later reported that some experiments were conducted outdoors, creating opportunities for contact between test animals and local wildlife.
Entomologist Richard Endris maintained large colonies of both soft and hard ticks on Plum Island, collecting specimens from locations as distant as Cameroon in Central Africa for study. Wildlife regularly moved between Plum Island and the mainland. Deer were known to swim the channel while birds traveled freely between the island and the Connecticut shoreline.
Cuba's alignment with the Soviet Union led the Kennedy administration to approve a covert campaign designed to weaken Fidel Castro's government. On March 13, 1962, the Department of Defense provided a status report on Operation Mongoose to Brigadier General Edward Lansdale, who was coordinating the program.
That same year, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara authorized Project 112, a classified program that expanded U.S. biological weapons testing during the Cold War. The program scheduled 134 tests between 1962 and 1974 and included facilities capable of producing large quantities of insects for research, including mosquitoes, fleas, and ticks.
Some proposals examined the possibility of dispersing disease-carrying insects against agricultural workers. The concept involved infecting laborers in Cuba's sugarcane and tobacco fields in order to disrupt the island's economy.
Decades later, some investigators speculated that tick-based delivery systems explored during that era might have contributed to later disease outbreaks. Lyme disease itself was identified in 1981 by Dr. Willy Burgdorfer, who discovered that the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi, named after him, was responsible for the illness.
Scientific evidence indicates that Lyme-related bacteria existed long before the Cold War, with genetic studies suggesting their presence for tens of thousands of years.
What has been alleged is that the military, working with the CIA, released 282,800 radioactive ticks as well as ticks carrying Lyme disease as part of a suppressed co-infection research project used in Cuba.
One operative interviewed told researchers that the strangest thing he ever did was drop infected ticks on Cuban sugarcane workers using C-123 transport aircraft flying nighttime missions almost skimming the surface of the Caribbean to avoid Cuban radar. He also said the deployment was canceled when Cuba's shifting winds made accurate payload delivery difficult.
After returning from Cuba, the operative stated that his CIA commander advised him to burn all the clothes he took to Cuba out of concern for possible contamination. He later reported that his four-month-old son developed a life-threatening fever requiring hospitalization, which he believed might have been connected to the ticks.
These operations included maritime insertions and exfiltrations of sabotage and intelligence agents, strikes on economic targets such as sugar mills, radio propaganda broadcast from Swan Island, and deception operations. Some investigators believe these activities continued for decades.
Between 1966 and 1969, the U.S. military released 282,800 ticks marked with carbon-14 across sites in Virginia along bird migration routes. The radioactive labeling allowed researchers to track the spread of the ticks with Geiger counters over several years.
The Long Island Sound region experienced an unusual rise in tick-borne diseases beginning in 1968. That same year, the first Eastern U.S. human babesiosis cases appeared on Nantucket, and Rocky Mountain spotted fever was identified in the Cape Cod region.
In 1970, hundreds of Rocky Mountain spotted fever cases were documented on Long Island, along with the first 51 documented Lyme arthritis cases in Old Lyme, Connecticut. Before these experiments, lone star ticks were not found above the Mason-Dixon Line. Within years of the Virginia releases, they had established populations on Long Island for the first time.
What became known as Lyme disease was first recognized as a distinct outbreak in Lyme, Connecticut, during the 1970s. Later scientific literature describes the disease as first clinically recognized there in 1976. The National Institutes of Health summarizes this discovery as the key breakthrough that established Lyme as a bacterial disease spread by ticks.
However, many believe that Lyme disease was created at either Fort Detrick or Plum Island and subsequently escaped, though that theory is not supported by the evidence. Even experts connected to early Lyme research and the Department of Homeland Security have rejected the Plum Island origin claim.
If the disease was not created in a laboratory, the question remains whether it may still have been explored as a Cold War biological tool. One analysis noted that by the 1990s, the eastern end of Long Island had by far the greatest concentration of Lyme disease. The same study observed that if a circle were drawn around the region of the world most heavily impacted by Lyme disease, the center of that circle would fall near Plum Island.
On October 21, 1996, Cuba alleged that a U.S.-registered aircraft released biological material over Cuban territory and later linked the event to a Thrips palmi infestation affecting agriculture. Cuba brought the accusation before the United Nations through the Biological Weapons Convention process.
The United States denied the allegation and stated that the aircraft had been on a narcotics-related mission to Colombia and had crossed Cuban airspace with permission. The dispute became a formal diplomatic confrontation, but no conclusive public proof has emerged that the United States conducted a biological attack.
In 2014, researchers discovered extensive unpublished materials in the garage of Willy Burgdorfer, who was deceased by that time. The materials indicated that Burgdorfer had identified a second pathogen known as Swiss agent in blood samples taken from Lyme patients in Connecticut and Long Island during the late 1970s.
Testing reportedly showed very strong reactions to Swiss agent, yet the finding was not included in Burgdorfer's landmark 1982 study that identified the Lyme disease bacterium. The suppression of this research for more than 40 years may have contributed to treatment failures reported by some chronic Lyme patients.
Dr. Jorge Benach and Dr. Allen Steere, co-authors of the 1982 study, have since acknowledged that Swiss agent research should be done because public health concerns warrant a closer look. The controversy surrounding the omitted findings later became known as the Swiss agent cover-up.
In late 2025, Congress directed a Government Accountability Office review through the fiscal year 2026 Defense Authorization Law to examine Cold War-era research involving tick-borne pathogens. Lawmakers pressed for answers.
Representative Chris Smith introduced an amendment requesting that the GAO determine whether the military had ever experimented with ticks and tick-borne pathogens. The investigation describes what some interpret as a pattern of concealment spanning six decades, including the suppression of medical research and the release of nearly 300,000 radioactive ticks across Virginia.
In 2019, the House of Representatives passed an amendment requiring the Pentagon to investigate whether the military experimented with ticks and other insects for use as a biological weapon between 1950 and 1975 and whether any were released outside a laboratory by accident or experiment design.
The program's existence was categorically denied by the military until 2000, when a CBS News investigation forced official acknowledgement. Documents later showed that the program involved every branch of the U.S. Armed Forces and intelligence agencies, with testing sites spanning multiple countries.
Project 112 had been denied for nearly 50 years despite extensive documentation, and Swiss agent research had remained suppressed despite public health concerns. Congressional investigation requirements were strongly resisted by the Department of Defense while surviving documents related to the program remained classified long after the original security justifications had expired.
Even the Department of Agriculture, which had been involved with Plum Island operations, maintained that Lyme disease was never a topic of research at Plum Island. That claim was challenged in 1993 when Newsday uncovered classified documents showing that biological warfare research had taken place at the facility.
The latest analysis compared three laboratory leak investigations: the U.S. Lyme case, Chinese SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 origins, and Spain's recent African swine fever outbreak. According to that analysis, each case displayed similar patterns regardless of the political system in which it occurred.
Investigators pointed to obstruction of inquiries, restricted access to evidence, and institutional resistance to outside oversight as recurring features. Critics also argue that officials promoted alternative explanations that diverted attention away from laboratories conducting high-risk pathogen research.
Even now, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is analyzing roughly 30,000 blood samples from people suspected of tick-borne illness using modern molecular techniques. The work could potentially validate Burgdorfer's suppressed Swiss agent findings decades after the original research.
Lyme disease continues to affect hundreds of thousands of Americans each year. Whether its emergence was purely natural or influenced in some way by Cold War biological research remains a subject of great debate. What is clear is that many of the programs surrounding insect-borne pathogens remained hidden for decades, leaving unanswered questions that investigators are still trying to resolve.
Television news in the United States first began to take shape in the late 1940s, shortly after World War II. Back then, the news felt sacred. Every evening, Americans tuned in to the same voices, men like Walter Cronkite, Edward R. Murrow, and Dan Rather, trusted faces who spoke with calm authority.
They were not just reporters. They were the nation's conscience. And when Cronkite said something, people believed it. But what if even that trust was manufactured? What if behind those polished desks and deep voices, someone else was pulling the strings?
As we now know, CBS, Time magazine, and a dozen other outlets were quietly working with the CIA. It was not to keep you safe. It was to shape what you believed. And the part no one wants to admit is that it did not stop. It just went digital.
Today, the lines between the media and intelligence are more blurred than ever. It all started with a little-known program called Operation Mockingbird.
In the wake of World War II, the United States had two things: power and paranoia. The Soviet Union was no longer an ally. It was the enemy. And in Washington, a new kind of warfare was being born: information warfare.
The CIA was formed in 1947 under the National Security Act. It was not just created to gather intelligence. It was built to shape it. Inside this new agency, a man named Frank Wisner was given a blank check to run covert psychological operations.
His mission was to make sure the world heard America's version of the truth and to silence anything else. Wisner referred to it as his mighty Wurlitzer, a metaphor for a massive instrument that once played could make any country dance to America's tune.
How would he play it? Not with tanks or troops, but with journalists. This was not a rogue plot. It was official U.S. policy signed off at the highest levels.
By the early 1950s, Operation Mockingbird was fully operational. Funded through black budgets and hidden accounts, at its peak the CIA had relationships with over 400 journalists across the globe, and not just reporters, but editors, publishers, broadcasters, and media executives.
Some were recruited through back channels. Others did not even realize who they were working for. One of their first targets was the Associated Press. Soon the operation expanded to include CBS, Time, Life magazine, Reuters, and even foreign outlets.
They were not reporting the truth. They were reporting what the CIA wanted the world to believe. And the most disturbing part was that almost no one questioned it.
Many were paid under the table, some in cash, others through lucrative book deals, speaking gigs, or consulting work. In some cases, the CIA did not just influence the story. They wrote it themselves.
A journalist would receive a pre-written script already framed with the right political spin. All they had to do was slap their name on it and publish it. It was not just news. Films, magazines, and even academic journals were shaped by CIA talking points.
If it could sway public opinion, it was in play. The agency also created entire front organizations, phony press agencies that looked legitimate but existed solely to pump out U.S. propaganda overseas. If a journalist refused to play ball, they would be discredited, blackballed, or quietly replaced.
The idea was not to control all the media, just enough to guide the narrative domestically and abroad. And it worked. From the Korean War to the Cuban Missile Crisis, from Latin American coups to the jungles of Vietnam, Mockingbird was not just a covert program. It was an information war waged on the American people.
During Korea, CIA front groups like Radio Free Press Asia flooded the airwaves with horror stories of communist atrocities, many unverified, only to have some of those same stories echoed in Life magazine and CBS broadcasts.
In Latin America, the CIA orchestrated coups in Guatemala in 1954 and in Chile in 1973. Major outlets like the New York Times and Time magazine ran editorials framing democratically elected leaders as communist threats.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, selective leaks and scripted fear pieces helped build the narrative of Kennedy's moral high ground while ignoring America's own secret missile deployments in Turkey. And in Vietnam, embedded correspondents often repeated military talking points provided by CIA liaisons, selling the war as winnable long after it had become a political quagmire.
For more than two decades, Operation Mockingbird operated in the shadows, completely unknown to the public, until cracks started to form. In the early 1970s, the Vietnam War had collapsed into chaos, Watergate was unraveling the presidency, and Americans were finally asking questions they should have asked years earlier.
That pressure led to the creation of the Church Committee in 1975, a Senate investigation led by Democratic Senator Frank Church, tasked with uncovering abuses by the intelligence community. What they found was worse than expected.
From illegal surveillance to assassination plots, the CIA was exposed as operating well beyond its charter. They had called them conspiracy theorists until the documents proved they were right. One of the most disturbing revelations was that the CIA had infiltrated the media.
Senator Church confirmed that the CIA had secretly placed journalists inside nearly every major news organization, using them to influence domestic and international reporting. The public was shocked, and the CIA promised it would never happen again.
Just like that, it was buried. The media moved on. No one was held accountable. And Americans were told to go back to sleep.
But there was a problem. No law was passed to stop the CIA from influencing the media. No executive order, no internal purge, just a quiet promise from an agency built on secrecy. In other words, Mockingbird was not shut down. It was renamed, rebranded, and modernized.
By the 1980s and 1990s, the CIA did not need to slip envelopes to journalists anymore. They had built relationships inside corporate newsrooms. They had former agents working as consultants for major networks. And more importantly, the media had become centralized, with fewer companies owning more outlets, less oversight, and fewer choices.
By the time the 2000s arrived, Mockingbird did not need to call a newsroom. They could just let the narrative trickle down from the top. And in the age of social media, everything got faster. Leaks, talking points, and anonymous sources all became tools in a war for control of the public mind.
Today, the same intelligence figures who once operated in the shadows are now on TV telling you what to think. John Brennan, James Clapper, and Michael Hayden, all former CIA or NSA, are now rebranded as expert commentators.
The old tactics were already back. Iraq was sold on lies: yellowcake uranium, aluminum tubes, mobile weapon labs, pushed by anonymous sources and plastered across every major network. Afghanistan was framed as a righteous war on terror, even as it became a 20-year money pit fueled by contractors and false progress reports.
And in Ukraine, dissent is once again taboo. The press does not ask if we are escalating a proxy war. They ask why you are not on board. Different decade, same script. The CIA did not need to restart Mockingbird. It just needed a new reason for you to look away.
They do not hide it anymore because the public stopped asking hard questions. That is, until 2016. That is when someone came along who did not trust the press, who did not play by the rules, and who called the media what it had quietly become: the enemy of the people.
When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, he was not just fighting Democrats. He was fighting something older, something deeper. He was not a politician. He did not owe favors to the media. He did not respect the rules. And worst of all, he called them out.
Fake news, corrupt press, enemy of the people. It was a declaration of war against a system that had gone unchecked for decades. And suddenly, the tactics of Operation Mockingbird came roaring back to life.
Anonymous sources flooded the headlines. Stories based on leaked intelligence dominated the news cycle. Former CIA directors like John Brennan and Michael Hayden went from silent operatives to loud political pundits painting Trump as a threat to democracy.
The sitting president was accused of being a Russian asset on the word of unnamed sources from the same agencies that once ran Mockingbird. Major tech platforms began flagging, suppressing, and outright banning dissenting voices. Narratives that challenged the intelligence community's version of events were labeled misinformation.
The same journalists who once asked tough questions stopped asking altogether. The old operation was back, this time dressed in hashtags and digital fact-checkers. Whether you like Trump or not, it did not matter. What mattered was what you were not allowed to say.
Operation Mockingbird was never about keeping you safe. It was about keeping you in line. And the most dangerous part is that it worked. For decades, people trusted the headlines. They trusted the anchors. They trusted the government to tell them the truth.
Today, the same agencies that ran Mockingbird now shape the online world you live in. They do not need to burn books. They just bury stories. So ask yourself, if the press is free, why do they all say the same thing? If the truth is dangerous, who is deciding what you are allowed to hear?
Afghanistan, with its harsh mountains, endless deserts, and very little the world wanted except for one thing: location. Sitting at the crossroads of the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Indian subcontinent, Afghanistan was the ultimate strategic chess piece.
Control it and you control the gateways to Pakistan, Iran, and even the Persian Gulf. For the Soviet Union in the late 1970s, this meant more than just pushing out influence. It meant denying the United States a staging ground in its own backyard, locking down a buffer against Islamic movements that threatened the Soviet Republics, and keeping a firm grip on a country already leaning toward Moscow.
When Afghanistan's pro-Soviet leader was overthrown by his communist rival, the Kremlin saw chaos and opportunity. On Christmas Eve 1979, Soviet troops rolled in under the guise of stabilization. In reality, it was a takeover.
For Washington, it was a nightmare. Soviet-controlled Afghanistan meant Soviet pressure on Pakistan, a pathway to warm-water ports, and a direct threat to the Persian Gulf, where much of the world's oil flowed. So the United States decided to bleed the Red Army dry without ever putting an American boot on the ground.
Before the Soviet tanks rolled in, Afghanistan was a country of contrasts. In Kabul during the 1970s, university students walked to class in bell bottoms, women worked as doctors and teachers, and the capital buzzed with modern cafes and cinemas.
Outside the cities, much of Afghanistan remained tribal, conservative, and deeply religious, places where modern reforms were met with suspicion or outright hostility. This cultural divide would soon become a fault line in the country's collapse.
Then, in April 1978, Afghanistan's Communist Party, the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, or PDPA, seized power in a bloody coup known as the Saur Revolution. Backed by Moscow, the PDPA overthrew President Mohammad Daoud Khan, slaughtering him and his family inside the presidential palace, and installed Nur Mohammad Taraki, leader of its radical Khalq faction.
But the unity did not last. Taraki's own prime minister, Hafizullah Amin, had bigger ambitions. The Soviets backed Taraki, seeing him as more stable. Amin was seen as reckless. But in September 1979, Amin overthrew Taraki, had him killed, and seized power for himself.
Almost immediately, Afghanistan descended into chaos. Amin's brutal crackdowns on Islamic leaders, tribal elders, and political rivals sparked a nationwide insurgency. By late 1979, Moscow feared Afghanistan was slipping away and that Amin might turn to the United States if his regime collapsed.
So, on Christmas Eve 1979, the Soviets struck. Moscow sent over 50,000 troops supported by T-55 tanks, artillery, and the feared MI-24 Hind helicopter gunships.
In Kabul, the KGB's Alpha Group and Zenit special forces, under the cover of stabilization, launched Operation Storm 333, assaulting the heavily guarded Tajbeg presidential palace and killing Amin in less than an hour. Then they installed their own man, Babrak Karmal, from the rival Parcham faction.
The day the Soviets crossed the border, Washington's strategy shifted overnight. President Jimmy Carter authorized a covert CIA program to funnel money, weapons, and intelligence to the Afghan resistance, the Mujahideen.
But the United States would not deal with the fighters directly. Every dollar, every rifle, every bullet would flow through Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI. It gave Washington deniability and gave the ISI enormous power to decide which factions got the lion's share of the aid.
Pakistan's military ruler, General Zia-ul-Haq, saw the war as both a religious duty and a strategic opportunity. By controlling the flow of U.S. aid, the ISI could ensure Afghanistan would be led by groups aligned with Pakistan's interests, often favoring hardline Islamists like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar over more moderate commanders.
The CIA kept only a handful of operatives in the region, based almost entirely in Pakistan, far from the fighting. They trained ISI officers, funneled cash and weapons, and fed satellite intelligence into the pipeline, but rarely, if ever, set foot inside Afghanistan itself.
When President Ronald Reagan took office, the gloves came off. Funding jumped from tens of millions under Carter to hundreds of millions a year, peaking at over $600 million annually by the mid-1980s. The program, code-named Operation Cyclone, became the largest and longest covert operation in CIA history.
The weapons were game-changers: AK-47s, explosives, mortars, and most famously, the FIM-92 Stinger missile, which turned the skies into death traps for Soviet pilots. The Stinger's infrared guidance system allowed even an untrained fighter to bring down a helicopter or low-flying aircraft with a single shot.
Soviet air crews began flying higher and less often, ceding more ground to the Mujahideen. The CIA's money and training did not just arm Afghans. It drew thousands of foreign volunteers from across the Muslim world, young men answering the call to wage jihad against the godless Soviets.
Among them was a wealthy Saudi named Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden built roads, financed training camps, and funneled Arab fighters into Afghanistan, often working alongside commanders the CIA indirectly supported through the ISI.
In American media, they were freedom fighters. Hollywood even gave them a cameo, with Rambo himself fighting alongside them in Rambo 3. But on the ground, many of these men were radical Islamists whose vision for Afghanistan had nothing to do with democracy.
Washington did not ask too many questions. The mission was to bleed the Red Army, and it was working. What no one wanted to think about was what these men would do once the Soviets were gone.
After nearly a decade of war, the Red Army was bleeding out. More than 15,000 Soviet soldiers were killed, over 35,000 wounded, and thousands more crippled by disease or injury. The war cost Moscow an estimated $8 billion a year, drained its morale, and earned the nickname "Our Vietnam" back home.
Their Afghan allies in the PDPA government had lost between 18,000 and 20,000 troops, while Mujahideen casualties may have topped 90,000 dead with hundreds of thousands more wounded.
By the late 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev called Afghanistan a bleeding wound and signed the 1988 Geneva Accords, agreeing to a state withdrawal. On February 15, 1989, under a cold gray sky, the last Soviet column crossed the Amu Darya River back into the USSR, ending a war they could not win and at a price they could not afford.
For Washington, Operation Cyclone looked like a masterpiece of Cold War strategy, a victory bought without a single American combat death. But the PDPA under President Mohammad Najibullah held on, propped up by Soviet weapons, fuel, and billions in aid. That lifeline snapped with the collapse of the USSR in 1991.
By 1992, Najibullah's regime fell to the Mujahideen, plunging Afghanistan into a new, even bloodier civil war that would pave the way for the Taliban's rise. In the chaos, lawlessness ran rampant. Banditry plagued the highways, and local warlords carved out their personal kingdoms.
For many Afghans, exhausted by years of instability, the arrival of a new force in 1994, the Taliban, felt like a relief. Composed largely of young men educated in Pakistani madrassas and veterans of the Mujahideen, they promised order through strict Sharia law and quickly captured Kandahar before sweeping north.
Out of this movement emerged the Taliban's iron grip on most of the country by 1996. Many of their fighters had once been trained and armed during the CIA and ISI-backed jihad. And from the foreign fighters who came to Afghanistan during Operation Cyclone, a new network formed: Al-Qaeda.
Led by Osama bin Laden, they turned their sights away from the Soviets and toward the United States. After the Soviets withdrew in 1989, bin Laden saw the jihad as victorious, proof that a small committed force of believers could defeat a superpower.
But when the United States stationed troops in Saudi Arabia during the 1990-1991 Gulf War, he saw it as a desecration of Islam's holiest land. To bin Laden, the American military presence in the Middle East was not just politics. It was an occupation.
He believed the United States propped up corrupt regimes like the Saudi monarchy and oppressed Muslims worldwide through sanctions, wars, and alliances with Israel. By the mid-1990s, bin Laden had rebranded the jihadist mission. America had replaced the Soviet Union as the far enemy.
The blowback was devastating. Embassy bombings in Africa, the USS Cole, and on September 11, 2001, the deadliest attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor, carried out by the men whose movement was born in the very war Washington had helped wage.
When U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan in late 2001 to destroy al-Qaeda and overthrow the Taliban, they were entering the same mountains, valleys, and villages where the CIA's proxy fighters had battled the Soviets two decades earlier, now fighting against many of the same networks they had once helped create.
Over the next 20 years, the United States poured over $2 trillion into the war, lost more than 2,400 American service members, saw over 20,000 wounded, and buried thousands more veterans who would later take their own lives. Tens of thousands of Afghans and Soviets were killed in the crossfire, and whole generations grew up knowing nothing but war.
For Russia, the cost of the war went far beyond the battlefield. In the former Soviet Union, Afghanistan was remembered as "our Vietnam," a war few understood and most came to resent. The conflict bled the USSR financially and militarily, but it also left deep social scars.
Battle-hardened Soviet veterans returned to a collapsing homeland in 1991, many finding themselves unwanted and struggling to reintegrate. Some formed veterans unions for support, while others swelled the ranks of organized crime, fueling a wave of racketeering across the former Soviet republics.
The war also became a seedbed for future conflicts inside Russia itself. Foreign fighters and radicalized veterans helped ignite the first and second Chechen wars in the 1990s, where Sunni militants, including the notorious warlord Khattab, a Saudi veteran of Afghanistan, brought the tactics and brutality of the Afghan jihad onto Russian soil.
And so, 40 years after Operation Cyclone began, the Taliban once again controlled Afghanistan. Billions spent, countless lives lost, and the same flag flew over Kabul. The war that began as a Cold War chess move became a generational tragedy, written in blood by all sides.
In the 1950s and 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, the U.S. government feared that Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean agents were using mind control to brainwash U.S. prisoners of war in Korea who were now coming home.
Fearing a Manchurian Candidate, a person who is not loyal to or who harms their own country because they are under the control or influence of another country, the CIA decided to step in.
MKUltra was a top-secret CIA project in which the agency conducted hundreds of clandestine experiments, sometimes on unwitting U.S. citizens, to assess the potential use of LSD and other drugs for mind control, information gathering, and psychological torture.
Though Project MKUltra lasted for almost 20 years, from 1953 until about 1973, details of the program did not become public until 1975 during a congressional investigation. According to CIA Director Allen Dulles, fear of Soviet brain perversion techniques was palpable.
The CIA wanted to familiarize itself with this type of mind control, to be able to recognize and use it in case of a conflict with the USSR. Fear of the enemy ran rampant among Americans, especially because of the sharp increase in PTSD in Korean POWs. The damage incurred on these survivors was so severe that mind control was thought to be the culprit.
So, in response, Dulles approved Project MKUltra in 1953. The covert operation aimed to develop techniques that could be used against Soviet bloc enemies to control human behavior with drugs and other psychological manipulators.
The program involved more than 150 human experiments involving psychedelic drugs, paralytics, and electroshock therapy. Some test subjects knew they were participating in the study, but others had no idea even when the hallucinogens started taking effect.
According to a 2009 report by ABC News, over 7,000 American veterans took part in these experiments non-consensually during the 1950s through the 1970s. Many of the tests were conducted at universities, hospitals, military bases, and even prisons in the United States and Canada.
It is not clear how many people in total were involved in the tests, as the CIA kept notoriously poor records and destroyed most of MKUltra's documents when the program was officially halted in 1973.
The CIA began to experiment with LSD, MDMA, mescaline, heroin, barbiturates, methamphetamines, and psilocybin under the direction of agency chemist and poison expert Sidney Gottlieb. He believed the agency could harness the drugs' mind-altering properties for brainwashing or psychological torture.
Studies at Columbia University, Stanford University, and other colleges began experiments, and after a series of tests, the drugs were deemed too unpredictable for use in counterintelligence.
Operation Midnight Climax was an MKUltra project in which government-employed prostitutes lured unsuspecting men to CIA safe houses where the drug experiments took place. The CIA dosed the men with LSD and then, while at times drinking cocktails behind a two-way mirror, watched the drugs' effect on the men's behavior. Recording devices were installed in the prostitutes' rooms disguised as electrical outlets.
Most of the Operation Midnight Climax experiments took place in the San Francisco and New York City areas. The program had little oversight, and the CIA agents involved admitted that a freewheeling, party-like atmosphere prevailed.
An agent named George White wrote to Gottlieb in 1971, saying that he was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but that he toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun. He asked where else a red-blooded American boy could lie, kill, cheat, steal, deceive, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All Highest.
Another black stain for the CIA during MKUltra was the death of Frank Olson. Olson was a scientist who worked for the CIA. At a 1953 CIA retreat, he drank a cocktail that had been secretly spiked with LSD.
A few days later, on November 28, 1953, Olson fell to his death from the window of a New York City hotel room in an alleged suicide. The family of Frank Olson decided to have a second autopsy performed in 1994. A forensic team found injuries on the body that had likely occurred before the fall.
The findings sparked controversy and theories that Olson might have been assassinated by the CIA. After prolonged legal proceedings, Olson's family was awarded a settlement of $750,000 and received a personal apology from President Gerald Ford and then CIA Director William Colby.
Some famous people willingly participated in MKUltra as well. Ken Kesey, the author of the 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, volunteered for MKUltra experiments with LSD while he was a college student at Stanford University.
Kesey later went on to promote the drug, hosting LSD-fueled parties that he called acid tests. Acid tests combined drug use with musical performance by bands including the Grateful Dead and psychedelic effects such as fluorescent paint and black lights. These parties influenced the early development of hippie culture and kickstarted the 1960s psychedelic drug scene.
Other notable people who reportedly volunteered for CIA-backed experiments with LSD include Robert Hunter, the Grateful Dead lyricist, Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, and James "Whitey" Bulger, the notorious Boston mobster.
In 1974, New York Times journalist Seymour Hersh published a story about how the CIA had conducted non-consensual drug experiments and illegal spying operations on U.S. citizens. His report began the lengthy process of bringing long-suppressed details about MKUltra to light.
The following year, President Ford, in the wake of the Watergate scandal and amid growing distrust of the U.S. government, set up the United States President's Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States to investigate illegal CIA activities, including Project MKUltra and other experiments on unsuspecting citizens.
The commission was led by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and is commonly referred to as the Rockefeller Commission. The Church Committee, held by Idaho Democratic Senator Frank Church, was a larger investigation into the abuses of the CIA, FBI, and other U.S. intelligence agencies during and after the resignation of President Richard Nixon.
The Church Committee delved into plots to assassinate foreign leaders including Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba. It also uncovered thousands of documents related to MKUltra.
These revelations resulted in Ford's 1976 executive order on intelligence activities that prohibited experimentation with drugs on human subjects except with the informed consent in writing and witnessed by a disinterested party of each such human subject.
In 1977, a Freedom of Information Act request uncovered a cache of 20,000 documents related to MKUltra, which led to Senate hearings. Some surviving information about MKUltra was declassified in July 2001.
MKUltra, the brainchild of the CIA, is a dark period within the agency, covertly and unashamedly taken against its unknowing citizens, causing death and disabilities that still reverberate with its many victims today.
In Philippine folklore, Aswang is a term for different evil creatures, like vampires, ghouls, witches, and werewolves. These mythological creatures are feared in the Philippines, and the stories of the Aswang date all the way back to the 16th century.
The Aswang lore is well known in the southern parts of Luzon and Mindanao, but most particularly in the province of Capiz in the Visayas. The names of the creatures may vary, like the Suligan on the island of Catanduanes, said to tear out its victim's liver and eat it.
There is also the Manananggal, a woman with huge bat wings who could separate her upper body from her lower body at the waist so that she could fly and eat people during the night, while in the morning she disguised herself as a beautiful lady.
But the Aswang itself is a vampire-like creature who could suck the blood of its victim through a proboscis-like tongue. Sometimes, it is said that the Aswang uses its proboscis-like tongue to suck fetuses out of their mother's womb.
After the conclusion of World War II, there was a huge spike in reported Aswang attacks, and there were even bodies piled on the streets as proof. But why the sudden spike? Why were these demonic creatures going rampant? And what did the American CIA have to do with it?
This story starts at the conclusion of World War II and involves the Filipino insurgent group known as the Hukbalahap, or the Huks, led by the guerrilla leader Luis Taruc.
Taruc was born a peasant on June 21, 1913. He would be imprisoned three times before the war for his struggle for militant workers and peasant unions. He was a well-known hero to the Filipino people at the time and was instrumental in helping the Philippines gain its independence after World War II ended.
The Huks were originally created to fight the Japanese invaders and often fought side by side with U.S. forces until the liberation from the Japanese at the end of the war. At the height of its popularity, the Huks reached a fighting strength estimated at 30,000 guerrillas.
Upon the conclusion of World War II, the Philippines was completely devastated, needing almost all of its infrastructure rebuilt, including its railways, waterworks, roads, bridges, and power plants.
However, the Philippines had a vast amount of natural resources like timber, oil, and minerals, but it lacked the capital and heavy industrial ability to get at them. Philippine law also forbade foreigners from owning any business operating in the islands, which all but cut off any hope of foreign investment.
As a result, the Bell Trade Act was passed by Congress in 1946. It gave the Philippines $800 million in aid and tariff-free trade between the United States and the Philippines for 12 years. But it required that Philippine law allow United States citizens to own companies on the islands as a way to attract foreign investment into their economy.
To the Huks, this looked as if the Philippines were once again surrendering their sovereignty to a foreign power, as they had with Spain. They pictured U.S. citizens owning vast swaths of their economy, and they did not like that at all.
President Roxas wanted U.S. aid, so he kicked the Huks out of Congress. In turn, the World War II veteran Huks rebelled both against the Philippine government and U.S. forces.
When Roxas died in 1948 from a heart attack, he was replaced by Elpidio Quirino, whose administration was ineffective in fighting the Huks. And this is where the story gets interesting.
The absence of a strong figure in Filipino national politics saw the CIA enter the scene to counter what was emerging as a communist revolution led by Luis Taruc and the Democratic Alliance Party.
The CIA knew that sometimes a search-and-destroy approach was not the best course of action in defeating your enemies. Psychological warfare was sometimes even more effective.
That is when the CIA brought in U.S. Air Force Colonel Edward Lansdale, who used his knowledge of Filipino culture and folklore to defeat the Filipino communist insurgents.
Lansdale was a pioneer in clandestine operations and psychological warfare. He served with the Office of Strategic Services in World War II and extended his tour to remain in the Philippines after the war, helping the Philippine army rebuild its intelligence services and resolve cases involving large numbers of prisoners of war.
Lansdale became friends with Ramon Magsaysay, then the Secretary of National Defense, and with his help Magsaysay eventually became president of the Philippines on December 30, 1953.
From 1948 to 1954, Lansdale used Filipino folklore to stop the Huks. Silently working in the background, using the Aswang to stop the incoming communist tide, the CIA began abducting Huk members, killing them, and then piercing their necks and hanging them upside down until their bodies were drained of all blood.
Then the CIA placed the mangled bodies with the holes in their necks on the side of the road, usually in busy province areas. The superstitious Huk members were scared stiff, believing that it was the evil Aswang who had done in their comrades.
Lansdale's plan worked like a charm. The residents of Luzon lived in fear of being the Aswang's next victim. The communists would often move from one location to another trying to avoid these nightmarish creatures, but the bodies kept piling.
The CIA knew the psychological operation was working, and eventually the Huks surrendered in 1954 and received a pardon from the Philippine government. Magically, after their surrender, the Aswang attacks immediately stopped.