00:00
Hey, so you think you know America? Land of the free, home of the brave, the greatest experiment in democracy the world has ever seen. Sure, absolutely.
00:10
But here is the thing buried underneath all those textbooks, all those patriotic speeches and Fourth of July fireworks. There is a whole other story, one that got quietly filed away, stamped classified, or simply never made it into the curriculum. Tonight we are not building conspiracy theories. Every single thing you're about to hear has been confirmed by congressional hearings, declassified documents, or journalists who paid a very steep price just for asking questions. No tinfoil hats required. This is going to be a long one, so get comfortable.
00:41
Grab whatever you drink at this hour, coffee, tea, something stronger. No judgement here. And before we go any further, drop a comment right now and tell me where in the world you're watching this from. I genuinely want to know. All right, let us get into it. There is a particular kind of trust that exists between a patient and their doctor. You walk in, you describe your symptoms, they nod thoughtfully, maybe scribble something on a notepad, and you assume reasonably one would think that whatever happens next is in your best interest. For most of recorded history that trust has been the foundation of medicine.
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The Hippocratic Oath, written roughly 2,400 years ago, opens with a simple instruction. First, do no harm. It is about as clear a directive as you can give a profession. And yet, for several decades in the 20th century, the United States government looked at that oath and decided it was more of a suggestion than a rule, particularly when the person in the examining chair happened to be poor, black, imprisoned, or simply wearing a uniform.
01:41
What follows is not speculation. It is not a collection of rumours that circulated in fringe publications. Every programme described in this section was investigated by Congress, confirmed by declassified records, or formally acknowledged by the Federal Government often with an apology issued several decades too late to mean very much to the people involved. These were not rogue scientists acting without authorisation. They were funded, supervised, and in some cases enthusiastically endorsed by officials at the highest levels of the American medical and military establishment.
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The paperwork exists, the budgets were approved, and for a very long time, almost nobody outside the programmes knew any of it was happening.
02:23
Let us start in Alabama, because that is where one of the most well-documented cases begins and because it illustrates, with almost textbook precision, how institutional cruelty tends to function. It does not usually announce itself as cruelty. It arrives dressed in the language of science, public health and the greater good. In 1932, the United States Public Health Service launched a study in Macon County, Alabama. The official goal was to observe the natural progression of untreated syphilis in black men.
02:53
The study enrolled 399 men who had the disease and 201 who did not as a control group.
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The men were told they were receiving treatment for what researchers called bad blood, a vague, locally familiar term that covered everything from anaemia to fatigue to general unwellness. They were not told they had syphilis. They were not given penicillin, which became the standard and highly effective treatment for the disease in 1947. They received placebos, occasional aspirin, and, in a detail that still lands with a certain grim weight, free burial insurance, which under the circumstances was possibly the most honest thing the programme ever offered them.
03:31
The study ran for 40 years, 40 years of deliberately withholding a known cure from men who trusted the doctors showing up in their community. When some of the participants were drafted during World War II and local draft boards tried to refer them for syphilis treatment, the study organisers intervened to prevent it.
03:49
By the time a whistleblower named Peter Buxton, a public health service employee who had been raising objections internally for years without anyone taking him seriously, finally leaked the story to a journalist in 1972. At least 28 men had died directly from syphilis, 100 more had died from related complications, 40 wives had been infected, and 19 children had been born with congenital syphilis. The story ran in newspapers across the country. Congress held hearings. The program was shut down.
04:20
President Clinton issued a formal apology in 1997. The last survivor of the study died in 2004.
04:28
The Tuskegee study is the most famous example of this kind of program, which is both appropriate and a little misleading because it tends to get treated as an isolated incident, a shocking aberration in an otherwise responsible medical history. It was not. It was one node in a much larger network of programs that shared a common assumption that certain categories of people could be used as research subjects without their knowledge or consent, because the scientific value of the data outweighed whatever inconvenience or harm the subjects might experience in the process.
04:59
Around the same time the Tuskegee study was quietly enrolling its first participants, researchers at institutions across the country were conducting their own experiments on populations that had limited ability to refuse. Prisoners were a favorite. In the 1940s, researchers at a facility in Illinois infected inmates with malaria as part of a program to develop treatments for troops fighting in the Pacific. The prisoners were paid a small amount somewhere in the range of a few dollars for their participation.
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Whether they understood that participation meant being deliberately infected with a serious disease is, based on available documentation, somewhat unclear. The program was supervised by researchers from the University of Chicago and supported by the Committee on Medical Research, a federal body established to coordinate wartime scientific efforts.
05:46
Hepatitis was another disease that researchers found useful for these purposes.
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In the 1950s and 1960s, children at the Willowbrook State School in New York, a facility for children with intellectual disabilities that was, by most contemporary accounts, catastrophically overcrowded and understaffed, were intentionally infected with hepatitis as part of a research program.
06:08
Parents were sometimes told their children would receive special care and placement in a separate unit if they consented to enrolment. The unit in question was the hepatitis research ward. The researchers argued, with what one can only describe as impressive creative reasoning, that the children would probably be exposed to hepatitis anyway given conditions at the facility, so infecting them deliberately in a controlled setting was actually in their interest. The study ran for over a decade. The hepatitis research conducted there did eventually contribute to the development of a vaccine, which presumably felt like cold comfort to the families involved.
06:44
Pregnant women were not exempt from this kind of research either. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, researchers at Vanderbilt University enrolled poor pregnant women in a nutrition study in which they were given radioactive iron as part of what was described to them as a routine prenatal vitamin program.
07:02
The women were not told the substances were radioactive. Some of the children born to women in the study later developed rare cancers. When a journalist investigating radiation experiments filed a Freedom of Information Act request decades later, she found documentation of the program buried in federal archives alongside dozens of other radiation studies conducted on civilian populations during the Cold War era.
07:24
The Cold War, it turns out, provided enormous institutional motivation for this kind of research.
07:30
The logic such as it was went something like this. The Soviet Union was conducting research into chemical and biological agents, radiation effects and psychological manipulation.
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If the United States did not conduct equivalent research, it would fall behind in ways that could prove catastrophic.
07:48
National security, as a concept, has a remarkable ability to make otherwise unthinkable things seem not only thinkable but necessary.
07:57
And so, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, a series of programmes unfolded that tested that logic to its absolute limits. At Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, a facility that sounds, and in fact was, exactly as ominous as the name suggests the Army Chemical Corps ran an extensive programme of human experimentation using chemical agents.
08:17
Soldiers were told they were participating in tests of new protective gear and clothing. Some of them were. Others were exposed to nerve agents, psychochemicals and other compounds without being fully informed of what they were actually being given.
08:31
Estimates of the total number of soldiers involved in various phases of the programme range from 7,000 to 60,000, depending on how broadly you define participation.
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The program ran from roughly 1948 to 1975. A Senate subcommittee investigation in 1975 confirmed its existence and scope.
08:51
Many veterans who participated reported lasting neurological and psychological effects and spent years trying to get the Department of Veterans Affairs to acknowledge a connection between their health problems and their participation in the experiments, a process that required, as one might expect, a considerable amount of patience.
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The chemical agent most associated with Edgewood in the public imagination is LSD, partly because it fits a certain narrative about the era and partly because the CIA's parallel interest in the drug, which we will get to in considerable detail shortly, makes it feel like a connecting thread.
09:26
But the Edgewood program was not primarily about LSD. It was about understanding the effects of a wide range of agents on human performance, which in practical terms meant giving soldiers various substances and then running them through obstacle courses, asking them to perform tasks and documenting what happened. Nerve agents that affect the central nervous system, incapacitating agents that cause temporary confusion and disorientation, compounds that affect heart rate, vision or motor control, all of these were part of the research menu.
09:57
The soldiers who went through the programme were, by and large, young men who trusted that the army would not do anything to them that was genuinely dangerous. That trust was, to varying degrees depending on the specific compound involved, not always warranted. Radiation experiments occupied their own particularly extensive chapter in this history. Between roughly 1944 and 1974, the federal government conducted or funded hundreds of radiation studies on human subjects. The scope of these programs was documented in a 1994 report by the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, which was established by President Clinton after investigative journalist Eileen Welsom won a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on plutonium injection experiments conducted in the 1940s.
10:41
Yes, plutonium injections. 18 patients at hospitals in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Oak Ridge were injected with plutonium without their knowledge or consent. The purpose was to understand how the element behaved in the human body information that was relevant to the scientists working on the Manhattan Project and its successors.
11:01
The patients were selected in part because some of them were expected to die soon from other causes, which the researchers apparently felt made the experiment more ethically manageable, in the same way that serving someone a bad meal becomes more acceptable if they are already having a difficult day. The patients were not the only civilians subjected to radiation research during this period. Whole communities were too.
11:23
The Army and the Atomic Energy Commission conducted a series of atmospheric tests in the American West that exposed downwind communities to radioactive fallout.
11:32
The tests at the Nevada test site between 1951 and 1962 produced fallout that drifted across Utah, Nevada and Arizona.
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Residents of these areas who became known as downwinders were told by officials that the fallout levels were not dangerous. Documents declassified decades later showed that researchers had in fact been studying the health effects on these communities without informing them they were the subjects of observation. The government had in effect converted a multi-state region into an open-air laboratory and simply not mentioned it to the people living there. Some of the most disturbing radiation research was conducted on the most vulnerable populations. Inmates at Oregon and Washington state prisons had their testicles irradiated as part of studies on the effects of radiation on reproductive organs.
12:19
Researchers wanted data on radiation thresholds for human reproductive tissue – information that was relevant to workers in the nuclear industry and military personnel who might be exposed to radiation. The prisoners were paid. The consent forms they signed described the studies in general terms. The long-term risks of scrotal irradiation were not fully disclosed partly because some of those risks were not yet known and partly because there is some evidence that full disclosure might have reduced enrolment, which would have been inconvenient. intellectually disabled children at Fernald State School in Massachusetts were fed radioactive iron in their breakfast cereal as part of a study funded by the Atomic Energy Commission and conducted by MIT researchers.
13:01
The study, which ran in the late 1940s and early 1950s, was examining how the body absorbed iron and calcium. Parents were told their children were joining a science club that would give them extra food and occasional outings. The consent letters sent to parents mentioned that the children would participate in nutrition research but did not specify that radioactive traces were involved.
13:24
The study came to public attention in the 1990s when a journalist filed a public records request and found the documentation.
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Several of the former students by then adults filed lawsuits.
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MIT and Quaker Oats, which had co-funded one of the studies, reached settlements.
13:40
What connects all of these programs, the syphilis study, the hepatitis infections, the radiation experiments, the chemical agent testing is not just the fact that they happened, though that alone would be significant enough. What connects them is a shared institutional logic that treated certain people as less fully entitled to the protections that medical ethics was supposed to guarantee.
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The men in Tuskegee were black, poor and rural. The children at Willowbrook had intellectual disabilities. The prisoners at Edgewood and in the reproductive irradiation studies were incarcerated. The downwinders were rural communities in states that, at the time, had limited political influence. In each case, the populations chosen for research were populations that, for one reason or another, had reduced capacity to raise objections, seek outside assistance or make trouble for the people running the programmes.
14:32
This pattern was not accidental. It was, in several documented cases, deliberate. Researchers chose prisoner populations specifically because they were available, controllable and could be monitored over time. They chose institutionalised children for similar reasons. They chose poor rural communities for the open-air test partly because those communities were unlikely to generate the kind of political noise that might attract congressional attention.
14:57
The logic of scientific efficiency and the logic of social inequality turned out to be, in this particular historical moment, remarkably compatible. There is also the question of what the government knew and when it knew it. This is not a simple question to answer, because the paper trail is uneven, some programs were meticulously documented, others were deliberately kept off the record, and the destruction of records was not unheard of.
15:23
What the available evidence does suggest is that the ethical problems with these programmes were not invisible to the people running them. The researchers at Tuskegee knew, from at least 1947, that penicillin was an effective treatment for syphilis and chose not to offer it to their subjects. The army knew that what was happening at Edgewood went beyond what had been disclosed to participants. The Atomic Energy Commission knew that the Downwinder communities were being studied without their knowledge. In some cases, internal memos show researchers debating the ethics of what they were doing and then proceeding anyway because the scientific value was judged to outweigh the ethical concerns, or because shutting a program down would have been administratively inconvenient, or simply because nobody in a position of authority was willing to be the person who pulled the plug.
16:07
The 1947 Nuremberg Code, established in the wake of the Nazi medical experiments that were tried at the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial, stated clearly that voluntary consent was absolutely essential for human experimentation. The United States was among the parties that endorsed those principles. The researchers conducting experiments on American citizens throughout the following decades were, in most cases, aware of the Nuremberg Code. Several documented instances exist of researchers explicitly noting the code in their correspondence and then articulating reasons why their particular study was an exception.
16:42
The code, it turned out, was more influential in international law than in domestic practice. It took until 1974 for the United States to pass the National Research Act, which established formal oversight requirements for federally funded research involving human subjects. The impetus was the public outrage over the Tuskegee exposure in 1972.
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The resulting Belmont Report, published in 1979, established three core principles for ethical research – respect for persons, beneficence and justice.
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These principles now form the basis of the Institutional Review Board system that governs human subjects research in the United States today.
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The IRB system has real limitations and critics, but its existence represents at least a formal acknowledgement that the previous arrangement, which was essentially to trust researchers to police themselves, had not worked out especially well.
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What is worth sitting with, before we move on, is the sheer duration of all of this. The Tuskegee study ran for 40 years. The Edgewood Arsenal programme ran for about 27. The radiation experiment spanned roughly three decades. These were not brief episodes of poor judgement. They were sustained institutional commitments, funded through regular budget processes, staffed by scientists with credentials and careers, reviewed by committees, documented in files, and continued year after year by people who showed up to work in the morning and went home at night and presumably did not think of themselves as villains.
18:11
That is, in some ways, the hardest part of the history to absorb. Not the individual acts, but the duration. Not the bad actors, but the systems that kept the programmes running long after anyone paying minimal attention should have noticed that something had gone seriously wrong.
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The victims of these programmes did not, in most cases, receive meaningful compensation. Some received settlements reached quietly and without admission of wrongdoing. Some received formal apologies issued by presidents who had not been born when the programmes began.
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many received nothing at all because they had died before the programs were exposed or because establishing a direct causal link between their health problems and their exposure was medically or legally difficult or simply because the statute of limitations had run out the scientists who ran most of these programs were not prosecuted Many of them continue their careers without significant professional consequences. Some of them are still cited in academic literature for their contributions to the fields they worked in, which is a particular kind of irony that the history of medicine has not yet fully resolved.
19:15
The story of government-sponsored experimentation on civilians also has a deeply uncomfortable geographical dimension that tends to get overlooked when the conversation focuses exclusively on individual programmes.
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These experiments did not happen in remote classified facilities that the public had no reason to know about. Many of them happened in public hospitals, state institutions, university research departments, and military bases located in ordinary American cities and towns.
19:44
The Fernald School was in Waltham, Massachusetts, not far from Boston. Willowbrook was on Staten Island. The hospitals where plutonium injections were administered were in major metropolitan areas. The soldiers at Edgewood were stationed at a facility in Maryland. The geography matters because it speaks to the degree to which this research was woven into the ordinary institutional fabric of American life, funded by the same government agencies that built highways and sent people to the moon, and conducted by scientists who published in peer-reviewed journals and attended professional conferences.
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It also matters because it complicates the comfortable narrative that tends to surround these programs in retrospect.
20:23
The standard story goes something like this. A few misguided scientists, operating in a specific historical context shaped by Cold War anxiety and pre-civil rights racial attitudes, made decisions that we would never make today, in a climate we no longer inhabit. Lessons were learned, reforms were implemented, the system corrected itself. That story is not entirely wrong, but it is incomplete in ways that matter. The reforms that followed the exposure of these programs were reactive rather than proactive.
20:54
They came after decades of harm. And the populations targeted were not random. They were consistently the populations with the least institutional power, which suggests that the problem was not just a handful of rogue scientists but something more structural.
21:08
Consider for a moment the logistics of running the Tuskegee study for four decades without public exposure. That required not just the cooperation of the researchers directly involved, but the silence of local health officials, the cooperation of black medical professionals in the community who had been enlisted to help with outreach, the institutional backing of the Public Health Service and the indifference of every federal official who reviewed the programme's budget and signed off on its continuation year after year.
21:35
The study did not survive for 40 years because of one bad actor.
21:40
It survived because dozens of people at various levels of the system either actively supported it or decided that asking hard questions about it was not worth the professional risk.
21:50
This is the feature of institutionalised harm that is genuinely difficult to communicate through individual case studies. It is almost never primarily about the individuals at the centre of it. It is about the environment that makes it possible. And that environment, in the case of American medical experimentation during the mid-20th century, was one in which the concept of consent was treated as an obstacle to efficient research rather than a fundamental ethical requirement in which certain categories of people were implicitly regarded as less fully deserving of the protections that medicine theoretically offered everyone, and in which the national security rationale we need this data to protect against threats from abroad functioned as a kind of ethical override switch that could be flipped whenever the research would otherwise have been difficult to justify.
22:37
The veterans of Edgewood Arsenal represent one of the more instructive examples of how this dynamic played out in human terms because their story extends over decades rather than resolving at a clear end point. Men who participated in the chemical agent testing program came home, resumed their lives, and in many cases began experiencing health problems years later. Neurological symptoms, mood disorders, cognitive difficulties that they suspected were connected to what they had been exposed to during their service. proving that connection was enormously difficult.
23:08
The records from Edgewood were classified for years. The specific compounds individual soldiers had been given were not disclosed to them. The VA initially denied that the programme had existed in the form veterans described. Some veterans formed advocacy organisations and spent years filing requests, attending congressional hearings and pushing for official acknowledgement of what had happened to them. The Senate Subcommittee investigation in 1975 confirmed the broad outlines of the programme. Further investigations and document releases in subsequent decades filled in more details.
23:42
The Army eventually established a medical follow-up programme for Edgewood veterans. But the process of obtaining that acknowledgement of having the government confirm that yes, you were given nerve agents without full disclosure, and yes, we understand you might have health concerns about that took longer than some of the veterans lived. others are still alive and still navigating a VA system that, by many accounts, remains slow to connect service-related exposures to current health conditions. The paperwork may acknowledge the past, but acknowledgement is not the same as remedy, and remedy is not the same as justice, and those distinctions matter enormously to the people on the receiving end.
24:20
The children who passed through Willowbrook and Fernald grew up in a different way. Some of them learned, as adults, that they had been subjects of research they had not consented to and their parents had not fully understood. Some of them did not learn this until they were middle-aged, when journalists or researchers tracking down documentary evidence reached out to interview them.
24:40
Several describe the experience of that discovery as a kind of retroactive violation, not just the original experiment, but the decades of not knowing, of having had something done to your body that was never fully explained to you.
24:53
The settlements reached in some of these cases came with non-disclosure clauses, which is a legal arrangement that has its own particular flavour of irony given the context.
25:02
The plutonium injection patients deserve their own moment here, because their story illustrates something about the gap between official language and human reality that runs through all of these programs. The 18 patients who were injected with plutonium between 1945 and 1947 were, in many cases, seriously ill. Some had cancer, some had other terminal conditions, some were in the late stages of chronic diseases.
25:28
The researchers who designed the experiment specifically sought out patients with limited life expectancy, partly because they believed this reduced the ethical stakes and partly because it meant they were less likely to survive long enough to compare notes or cause administrative difficulties. The injections were coded under medical record numbers rather than names. The patients were not informed of what was happening. when the program came to light in the 1980s and 1990s some of the patients had been dead for decades the families of those patients discovered usually through journalists or researchers rather than through official notification that their relative had been used as a test subject without consent several families requested the medical records that would have documented the experiment In some cases, those records had been reclassified.
26:13
In others, they were provided after extended requests. The formal apology issued by the federal government applied to the families as well as any survivors, which in the specific case of the plutonium patients was largely an apology delivered to people about what had happened to their dead relatives, which is the kind of closure that has a distinctly finite emotional value.
26:34
What does not get discussed enough in the standard historical treatment of these programs is the secondary harm, the erosion of trust in medical institutions that these revelations produced, particularly within the communities that had been disproportionately targeted. The Tuskegee study, when it was exposed in 1972, had an immediate and measurable effect on black Americans' participation in medical research and, more broadly, their willingness to seek medical care from government-affiliated institutions. Studies conducted in the years following the exposure documented significant drops in clinical trial enrolment among black patients and increased scepticism toward public health programmes in black communities.
27:13
This was not irrational. It was a perfectly logical response to documented evidence that those institutions had, within living memory, deliberately deceived and harmed the people they were supposed to serve. That legacy of distrust persists. It shows up in health disparities data, in vaccine hesitancy statistics, in the documented tendency of black patients to receive less aggressive pain management in hospital settings and to have their symptoms taken less seriously by medical professionals.
27:42
The causal chain connecting the specific programmes of the mid-20th century to contemporary health outcomes is complex and cannot be drawn as a straight line. But the pattern of institutional behaviour that made those programmes possible, the combination of systemic inequality, reduced accountability for harm to marginalised populations, and the overriding authority of institutional interest did not disappear when the programmes were shut down. It changed form. And the people living with its downstream effects are not historical figures. They are alive now. This is one of the reasons why the history discussed in this chapter resists the comfortable framing of the past as a foreign country from which we have since returned.
28:20
The specific programmes ended. The formal frameworks have changed. Institutional review boards exist. Informed consent is legally required. But the social conditions that made those programs possible in equality, differential access to political power, the tendency of institutions to protect themselves when their interests conflict with those of the people they serve, have not been resolved by policy reform alone. The history of American medical experimentation on its own citizens is not, in other words, a closed chapter.
28:52
It is a chapter with ongoing consequences, and understanding it requires sitting with the discomfort of knowing that the people most harmed, were harmed not in spite of their relationship to American institutions, but in some ways because of it – because they were poor, because they were incarcerated, because they were black, because they were disabled, because they were in some category that the institutions of the day regarded as less fully entitled to protection.
29:18
There is one more dimension to this story that the declassified records have illuminated over the years, and it involves the international context in which some of these programmes developed.
29:28
After World War II, the United States government recruited a number of German and Japanese scientists whose wartime research had involved human experimentation.
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The German scientists came primarily through Operation Paperclip, a program that brought rocket engineers, weapons researchers, and in some cases medical researchers to the United States to work on defense-related programs.
29:51
The ethical evaluation of these scientists was, to say the least, inconsistently applied.
29:57
Some had been directly involved in experiments conducted in concentration camps. Their records were in several cases altered or obscured to facilitate their clearances. The logic was, again, national security. The research they had conducted was valuable. The Soviets might recruit them if the Americans did not, and the potential strategic benefit outweighed the ethical complications.
30:18
This reasoning is worth noting because it represents the same basic calculus that justified the domestic programs, the framing of human beings as means to a strategic end, with the strategic value of the research used to override the ethical cost of how it was conducted. The Japanese case is somewhat different and even less discussed.
30:37
After the war, the United States agreed not to prosecute the scientists of Unit 731, the Japanese army unit that conducted extensive and extensively documented experiments on prisoners, primarily Chinese, Korean and Russian civilians and prisoners of war, in exchange for the research data they had collected.
30:55
the data was considered scientifically valuable because it had been obtained through methods that American researchers could not legally replicate. The agreement was made at the level of General Douglas MacArthur's command and kept classified for decades. When it came to light, it provided a particularly pointed example of the gap between official American rhetoric about the Nuremberg principles and the actual decisions being made by American officials at the same historical moment. Those principles were being articulated. None of this is to suggest that the United States was uniquely or singularly responsible for government-sponsored medical abuse in the 20th century.
31:31
It was not. The Soviet Union ran its own programs. Other countries had their own histories of unconsented research on vulnerable populations. History, as a discipline, does not require countries to be uniquely guilty in order for their specific actions to be worth examining.
31:49
What makes the American case particularly worth examining in detail is the specific contrast between the country's stated values and its documented behaviour, the gap between the rhetoric of liberty and consent, and the institutional reality of programmes that violated both. funded by public money, administered by credentialed professionals and justified in the name of protecting a free society.
32:13
That gap is not an embarrassing footnote to the American story. It is part of the story, and the only way to understand it, really understand it rather than just note it and move on, is to look at it directly, without the reassuring distance that comes from treating it as ancient history.
32:29
There is one more programme worth mentioning before we leave this chapter, because it sits at the intersection of everything described above and what comes next.
32:38
In the early 1950s, the CIA began exploring the possibility that chemical and biological agents could be used not just to harm people physically, but to alter their psychological state to make them more compliant, more susceptible to suggestion, or more willing to disclose information they would otherwise protect.
32:56
The programme that grew out of this interest was not primarily a medical research programme, though it used medical researchers and operated partly through hospitals and universities. It was something else entirely an attempt to understand and control the human mind itself. It had a name, and that name was MKUltra, but that is a story for the next chapter, and it deserves the full attention a story of that particular scope requires.
33:20
MKUltra was authorised in April 1953 by Alan Dulles, who was then the director of the CIA. The programme grew directly out of earlier efforts projects with names like Artichoke and Bluebird that had been attempting since the late 1940s to develop reliable methods of extracting information from resistant subjects and influencing human behaviour through chemical and psychological means. The Cold War context, as was the case with the medical experiments described earlier, provided the institutional justification.
33:50
American prisoners of war returning from Korea had, in some cases, made statements that seemed inconsistent with their training and CIA analysts were convinced with varying degrees of actual evidence that the Soviet Union and China had developed techniques for altering beliefs and breaking down resistance.
34:06
The logical response in the institutional culture of the early CIA was to develop equivalent or superior capabilities before the other side perfected theirs. This was the same arms race logic that governed nuclear weapons and missile technology, simply applied to the human mind. Which sounds reasonable until you start looking at what it actually produced. The programme was divided into roughly 150 sub-projects, administered through a network of universities, hospitals, prisons and private research organisations, many of which did not know they were receiving CIA funding.
34:41
the agency channeled money through front organisations and foundations to maintain what is technically called plausible deniability, which is a formal way of saying that they wanted to be able to say they were not involved if the thing they were funding became a problem. This was, it should be noted, not the most airtight ethical position from the beginning. The substance most associated with MKUltra in popular memory is LSD, which the CIA became interested in after learning that Swiss chemist Albert Hoffmann had synthesized it in 1943 and reported extremely potent psychological effects at very small doses.
35:16
The agency purchased large quantities of the drug from a pharmaceutical company the entire world supply at one point, which must have been an interesting purchase order to file and began testing it on a wide range of subjects. Some of those subjects were volunteers who knew they were receiving an experimental drug. Many were not.
35:34
The non-consensual LSD administration took various forms. Soldiers at army facilities were given the drug and observed. Prisoners were dosed in exchange for payment, without full explanation of what they were being given.
35:47
Mental patients in hospitals that were receiving CIA funding through intermediary organisations were administered LSD as part of what they were told was treatment. And then there were the programmes run by a CIA officer named George White, which operated under the project name Midnight Climax and which have a certain quality of surreal comedy that would be genuinely funny if the actual circumstances were not quite what they were. George White was, by all accounts, a colorful individual, a former Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent who combined a talent for undercover work with a fairly expansive personal lifestyle and what one might charitably describe as an unconventional approach to research ethics.
36:25
Under midnight climax, White rented apartments in San Francisco and New York City, furnished them to look like ordinary residential spaces, installed one-way mirrors and listening equipment, and hired women to bring men back to the apartments, where they would be unknowingly dosed with LSD while White observed from behind the mirror, apparently while drinking martinis, which is a detail included in his own personal diaries and which adds a certain atmosphere to the whole enterprise. The stated purpose was to observe how ordinary people responded to LSD in naturalistic settings, to assess whether the drug could be used as a tool in intelligence operations, and to study behaviour under chemical influence in ways that could not be replicated in a laboratory.
37:06
White reportedly found this work enormously enjoyable, which is the kind of information that makes you think the personnel evaluation process at the CIA may have had some gaps. The Midnight Climax operations ran from the early 1950s through 1965.
37:21
When they were eventually shut down, White wrote a letter to his CIA supervisor that has been cited in Congressional records and investigative histories, in which he reflected on his career with a candour that remained striking. He described himself as a willing captive of the program, noted that he had worked in the service of a noble cause, and expressed appreciation for having been given the opportunity to do, under official sanction, things that would otherwise have been illegal.
37:47
It is one of the more honest self-assessments in the history of American intelligence, if nothing else.
37:53
LSD was only one of many substances the program explored. Mescaline, heroin, barbiturates, amphetamines, scopolamine, and various combinations thereof were all tested at various points.
38:06
The underlying question was consistent. Could any of these substances reliably break down a subject's resistance, induce compliance, enhance suggestibility, or cause them to reveal information they were trained to protect?
38:19
The honest answer, which emerged gradually over years of research was, not really, not reliably, not in ways that could be systematically controlled.
38:28
LSD in particular produced wildly unpredictable responses. The same dose could make one person tranquil and another person extremely agitated, and the effects depended heavily on the subject's expectations, environment, and psychological state.
38:44
This made it a rather poor tool for the precise manipulation the CIA was hoping for. But the programme continued anyway, because the theoretical possibility of a breakthrough was always just around the corner, and because shutting down a well-funded covert operation requires a level of institutional willingness to acknowledge failure that intelligence agencies are not historically known for.
39:06
The non-drug aspects of MKUltra are less frequently discussed, but in some ways equally significant.
39:12
Hypnosis was investigated extensively. Researchers explored whether subjects could be hypnotized into carrying out actions they would normally refuse, retaining information in hypnotic states that could be retrieved on command. or being made to forget experiences through post-hypnotic suggestion. Sensory deprivation was studied researchers at McGill University in Montreal, funded through a CIA front organisation, conducted experiments in which subjects were isolated in darkened, soundproofed rooms for extended periods and observed for psychological effects.
39:45
The McGill experiments, conducted by a researcher named Donald Hebb, contributed genuinely to the scientific understanding of sensory deprivation and its psychological consequences. They also contributed to subsequent CIA interrogation manuals, which is a particular kind of research application that the academic community has spent considerable time discussing since the details became public.
40:08
The most extreme programme operating under the broader MKUltra umbrella was run by a Scottish-born psychiatrist named Ewan Cameron who directed the Allen Memorial Institute at McGill University and who pursued a theory of psychiatric treatment that can be summarised, perhaps somewhat uncharitably but not entirely unfairly, as the way to fix a disturbed mind is to first completely destroy it and then rebuild it from scratch.
40:32
Cameron called his method psychic driving. The treatment involved placing patients many of whom had relatively minor psychiatric conditions such as anxiety or depression and had checked into the hospital voluntarily into drug-induced sleep for weeks or months at a time, administering massive electroconvulsive shocks at doses many times higher than standard therapeutic use. playing recorded messages on loop-through speakers or under pillows thousands of times over the course of weeks, and in some cases pairing all of this with LSD administration.
41:03
The goal was to wipe the patient's existing psychological state clean and implant new behavioural patterns. The results were, in a word, catastrophic.
41:13
Patients emerged from the treatment with severe memory loss, regression to childlike behaviour, inability to perform basic daily functions, and in some cases permanent psychological damage. Cameron remained a well-regarded figure in his field throughout this period. He served as president of the American Psychiatric Association and the World Psychiatric Association. His funding from the CIA, which came through a foundation called the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, was not publicly known until decades later.
41:44
When Canadian investigative journalists began uncovering Cameron's work in the 1970s and 1980s, the survivors of his experiments, many of them still living in Montreal, dealing with the consequences of their treatment, filed a lawsuit against the CIA. The case was eventually settled in 1988 for approximately $750,000, distributed among nine plaintiffs, without any admission of wrongdoing by the agency. The Canadian government, which had also contributed funding to Cameron's institute, eventually provided an additional settlement to a broader group of former patients.
42:19
Cameron himself had died in 1967, which meant he was unavailable for the congressional hearings, the lawsuits and the considerable public discussion that followed the exposure of his work, which is the kind of timing that one can only describe as convenient.
42:34
Now, here is the part of the MKUltra story that has particular historical resonance.
42:40
In January 1973, CIA Director Richard Helms ordered the destruction of all MKUltra files. This was approximately one month before Helms was set to leave office, and it happened during the period when the Watergate scandal was generating increased congressional interest in intelligence agency activities.
42:58
The destruction was carried out and an unknown but clearly substantial volume of records was eliminated. The programme might have remained largely unknown if a routine document search in 1977 had not turned up approximately 20,000 documents in a financial records storage facility that had not been included in the 1973 purge because they had been filed as budget records rather than operational files and whoever organised the destruction had apparently not thought to check the accounting department.
43:25
This is one of history's more consequential filing errors and it led directly to a Senate Select Committee investigation and a series of public hearings that produced much of what is known about the programme today.
43:37
What those hearings revealed and what the surviving documents confirmed was that the 150 sub-projects had involved at least 80 institutions, including 44 universities and colleges, 15 research foundations, 12 hospitals and various other entities.
43:53
The financial records showed payments to researchers, facilities, and front organizations spread across the United States and Canada. The scope was significantly larger than even the more alarming contemporary estimates had suggested.
44:06
Senator Ted Kennedy, who chaired one of the investigating committees, described the findings as a fundamental assault on the dignity and rights of American citizens conducted by an agency that operated without proper oversight or accountability.
44:20
the CIA's response was, essentially, to acknowledge the facts while maintaining that the program reflected the anxieties of its era and that things were different now. This is a type of institutional response that appears repeatedly in the history covered in this video and it tends to land with diminishing persuasive force each time it is deployed. The figure most commonly associated with the human cost of MKUltra in a personal rather than aggregate sense is Frank Olson, a U.S. Army biochemist who worked at Fort Detrick in Maryland on biological weapons research and was connected to the CIA program through his Army role.
44:54
In November 1953, Olson attended a retreat at a cabin in Maryland with CIA and Army colleagues. Over dinner, without his prior knowledge, his drink was laced with LSD. This was, to be fair, consistent with the programme's general approach to the concept of consent.
45:11
Olsen had a severe psychological reaction in the days following the dosing. He was brought to New York City, where he was assessed by a CIA-connected psychiatrist.
45:20
On November 28, 1953, he fell from a window of the Staedtler Hotel 13 floors up and died.
45:28
The CIA told his family it was a suicide resulting from depression. His death was ruled a suicide.
45:35
In 1975, when the First Church Committee investigations into intelligence agency abuses revealed that the CIA had administered LSD to an army employee without his knowledge prior to a death, Olsen's son Eric recognised his father's case and began a decades-long effort to establish what had actually happened.
45:53
Olsen's body was exhumed in 1994. A forensic examination found evidence of blunt force trauma to the head inconsistent with a fall, which the examining pathologist described as suggesting Olsen had been knocked unconscious before going through the window. The case has never been conclusively resolved. A 1994 settlement with the federal government provided financial compensation to the family. In 2012, Eric Olsen filed a new lawsuit alleging murder. The case was dismissed on procedural grounds.
46:24
The official records still list the death as a suicide. The idea of the programmed assassin, a subject condition through psychological manipulation, to carry out actions on command without conscious awareness, or later memory, was one of the recurring theoretical interests of MKUltra researchers.
46:41
This is the concept sometimes referred to as the Manchurian Candidate, after the 1959 novel by Richard Condon.
46:49
The CIA's interest in this possibility was genuine and documented.
46:53
Whether any such conditioning was ever successfully achieved is, based on available evidence, doubtful. The research consistently ran into the same problem. Human psychology is not a software program. You cannot reliably install a behavior and expect it to execute on command, particularly in subjects who have their own psychological defenses, their own resistance, their own capacity for inconsistency.
47:17
The mind turned out to be considerably less programmable than the early researchers had hoped, which is probably reassuring to know, even if the attempt itself is not.
47:27
What did emerge from the wreckage of MKUltra in a grimly practical sense was a set of interrogation and psychological pressure techniques that made their way into CIA manuals and were used in various forms in subsequent decades.
47:41
The research on sensory deprivation informed interrogation protocols, The understanding of how sleep deprivation, disorientation and chemical stress affect psychological resilience was applied to the treatment of detained subjects in ways that went well beyond what any academic research ethics board would have approved.
47:59
The line from MKUltra to what Senate investigators later documented as enhanced interrogation techniques is not a straight line, but it is a traceable one, and that traceability is part of what makes the program historically significant beyond its immediate context.
48:14
That is the arc of MKUltra, a program conceived in Cold War panic, funded through deliberate deception, conducted without meaningful consent, documented in files that were mostly destroyed, partially reconstructed through a bureaucratic oversight, investigated by Congress, settled in court and never fully accounted for in any legal sense. Nobody was prosecuted for running it. Several of the key figures had died by the time the full scope was known. The institutions that hosted the research, the universities, the hospitals generally settled any claims quietly and moved on.
48:48
The scientific community's reckoning with what happened at places like McGill took decades and is, in some respects, still ongoing.
48:56
What makes the transition to the next part of this story so unsettling is the shift in scale. MKUltra was, at its core, an attempt to control individual minds one subject at a time in a room through direct administration of substances or psychological techniques.
49:12
What came next operated on a completely different order of magnitude. Instead of dosing one unsuspecting person in a San Francisco apartment, the army began dosing entire cities. Not with LSD, but with other substances, bacterial, aerosols, chemical tracers, compounds whose long-term health effects were, at the time of testing, not fully understood. The experimental subjects were not prisoners or mental patients or soldiers who had been given misleading paperwork. They were just people who lived in certain cities, who woke up one morning and went to work and breathed the air and had no idea that the air had been deliberately altered as part of a military research programme.
49:49
The number of people involved was not in the dozens or the hundreds. It was in the millions.
49:55
The programmes that produced this outcome fall under the general category of open-air biological and chemical warfare testing, and they represent one of the more remarkable chapters in the history of the relationship between the American government and its own population.
50:09
From roughly the late 1940s through the early 1970s, the United States Army conducted a series of tests in which various substances, some biological, some chemical, some radioactive, were released into the air over populated areas to study how they dispersed, how far they travelled, and how effectively they could cover a target zone. The stated rationale was defensive. The military needed to understand how an enemy biological or chemical attack would behave in order to develop effective countermeasures.
50:38
The actual testing methodology was to pick a city, set up release points, disperse the substance, and then measure concentrations at various distances downwind. The cities selected for this were not informed that they had been chosen, the residents were not asked for their consent, and the substances used were, in several cases, not as harmless as the Army maintained. The San Francisco operation in 1950 is one of the earliest and most thoroughly documented cases.
51:06
Over a period of about a week in September of that year, navy vessels operating off the coast released large clouds of Cerutia marsissens, a bacterium that was considered a simulant for more dangerous biological agents, along with Bacillus globigii and a few other compounds.
51:22
The clouds drifted over the city.
51:25
Within days, 11 patients at Stanford University Hospital were admitted with unusual bacterial infections.
51:32
One of them, a man named Edward Nevin, who was recovering from a urinary tract infection, developed Serracia marcesan's endocarditis, a rare and serious heart condition, and died.
51:43
His family later sued the federal government after learning about the test. A federal judge ruled against them, finding that the army had discretionary authority to conduct the tests and that the harm was not legally actionable. The ruling was essentially, yes, the government did this, and it had the legal authority to do it, which is the kind of legal reasoning that raises certain questions about the limits of authority. Ceratia Marsessens, it should be noted, is not entirely harmless particularly for immunocompromised individuals. The army's classification of it as a safe simulant was based on incomplete understanding of its effects.
52:18
Subsequent research has established that it can cause serious infections in vulnerable people. This was not known with certainty in 1950, which is more or less the point. The Army was releasing substances whose safety profile was not fully understood into populated areas without telling anyone, which is a research methodology that has some fairly obvious problems. The San Francisco test was not an isolated event.
52:41
Over the following two decades, the Army conducted similar tests in Minneapolis, St Louis, New York City, the Pennsylvania Turnpike Corridor and well over 200 other locations across the United States.
52:53
The scale of the program was documented in a 1977 Senate Subcommittee hearing at which Army officials acknowledged that open-air testing with biological simulants had been conducted in populated areas on a much larger scale than had previously been publicly known. The hearing produced a report that identified 239 populated areas that had been used as test sites between 1949 and 1969.
53:17
New York City received particular attention in this program.
53:21
Beginning in 1966, Army personnel entered the New York City subway system and released Bacillus subtilis variant Niger, another supposed simulant from light bulbs dropped onto the tracks. where the rush of subway trains would disperse the bacteria through the tunnel network and through ventilation systems, potentially into the streets above.
53:40
Approximately one million people passed through the affected stations in a single day. The purpose was to model how a biological attack on a major urban transit system would spread through a densely populated area. The transit authority was not informed. The mayor's office was not informed. The approximately one million daily commuters were definitely not informed. though in fairness the New York City subway in the 1960s had enough ambient unpleasantness that one more invisible airborne substance may not have registered as notably different.
54:11
The St. Louis case is particularly striking because of both the nature of what was released and the demographic characteristics of the target areas.
54:19
Between 1953 and 1954, and again in a separate series of tests in the early 1960s, the Army sprayed zinc cadmium sulphide from rooftops, motorised blowers and aircraft over St. Louis.
54:32
Zinc cadmium sulphide was used as a fluorescent tracer to allow researchers to track dispersion patterns. The spray was applied across the city, but the highest concentration of release points was located in the Pruitt-Igoe Public Housing Complex and surrounding predominantly black neighbourhoods in the northern part of the city. These areas received a disproportionate share of the testing. Residents who were alive during the test period later reported noticing the spraying, but being told by officials who they asked that it was a smokescreen related to Cold War defence preparations, which was technically a more benign explanation than the truth, though not exactly accurate.
55:08
The health consequences of zinc cadmium sulphide exposure are a matter of ongoing scientific discussion. Cadmium is a known carcinogen. The army's position was that the concentrations used in the test were below dangerous thresholds and that the zinc component of the compound stabilised the cadmium in ways that reduced its toxic potential.
55:27
Critics, including a professor at Wheaton College named Lisa Martino Taylor, who spent years researching the St. Louis tests and published extensively on them, argue that the Army's safety calculations were based on incomplete data and that the concentration levels in certain areas may have been higher than official records indicate. A 2012 congressional inquiry prompted by Martino Taylor's research resulted in the Army providing additional documentation, some of which supported her findings about the geographic distribution of the testing.
55:57
A definitive causal link between the tests and specific health outcomes in the affected communities has not been established to a legal standard of proof, which is a sentence that appears frequently in the histories of programmes like this and which tends to do a particular kind of work in limiting accountability.
56:14
What makes the St. Louis case additionally significant is that it illustrates a pattern visible throughout the open-air testing programme. The communities selected for the highest concentration of testing were consistently communities with limited political power and reduced capacity to raise effective objections. Poor neighbourhoods, black neighbourhoods, rural areas, heavily trafficked transit corridors used by working-class commuters. The suburban neighbourhoods of St. Louis were not the primary target areas. The housing projects were.
56:45
This was not apparently accidental.
56:47
Documents from the testing programme indicate that researchers valued areas with dense populations. More subjects means more data points. and areas where residents were unlikely to notice or report unusual activity, or where, if they did notice, their complaints were unlikely to generate significant political response.
57:06
The declassification of documents related to the open-air testing programme came in stages, spread across several decades, typically in response to Freedom of Information Act requests filed by journalists, researchers and advocacy groups.
57:21
The 1977 Senate hearing was a watershed moment. Additional documents emerged through FOIA requests in the 1980s and 1990s. The Martino Taylor research in the 2000s and 2010s generated another round of disclosures. This incremental pattern of revelation is characteristic of how classified programs tend to become public.
57:42
not through a single dramatic disclosure, but through years of accumulated requests, partial releases, investigative journalism and the work of individual researchers who found the subject important enough to pursue over long periods.
57:56
The communities that were tested on without their knowledge have, with limited exceptions, received neither compensation nor meaningful official acknowledgement.
58:05
The Senate hearings confirmed the facts but did not produce legislation establishing remedies for affected populations.
58:12
FOIA disclosures established the documentary record but did not translate into legal accountability. The Army's position, in the decades since the programme became public, has been that the testing was conducted under the authority granted to the military for national defence purposes that the simulants used were considered safe based on the scientific understanding of the time, and that the programme was discontinued after the Church Committee investigations and the subsequent executive orders limiting domestic intelligence and military activities. This is a position that is legally defensible and humanically somewhat unsatisfying.
58:47
There is a thread connecting the programmes in this chapter and the previous one that is worth naming explicitly before moving forward.
58:54
In both cases, the medical experiments and the open-air testing the populations used without consent were selected through a process that implicitly ranked their interests below the interests of the programme.
59:06
The ranking was not articulated in those terms in official documents. It was expressed through resource allocation, geographic selection, subject recruitment criteria and the absence of any meaningful oversight mechanism that might have asked whether the people being affected had any say in the matter. The Cold War provided the overarching justification in both cases. The specific implementation in both cases reflected the inequalities of the society running the programmes. And in both cases, the people responsible were not shadowy villains operating outside the system.
59:37
They were career professionals operating within it, with institutional backing, peer review of a kind, and the reasonable expectation that what they were doing was acceptable, because nobody in authority was telling them otherwise.
59:49
Before leaving the subject of open-air testing entirely, it is worth dwelling briefly on what the documentary record reveals about institutional awareness of these programmes at various levels of government.
60:01
The fact that the testing occurred at all required the cooperation or at minimum the silent acquiescence of a fairly extensive network of officials. Somebody authorised the release of funds, somebody approved the selection of target areas, somebody reviewed the test reports and signed off on continuing the programme year after year.
60:20
The individuals who made those decisions were not, in the vast majority of cases, rogue operators working outside sanctioned channels. They were doing their jobs as they understood them, within an institutional culture that had decided the testing was necessary, that the risk to the public was acceptable, and that the inconvenient question of consent was not one that needed to be formally addressed. This institutional culture had a particular relationship to secrecy that is worth understanding. The classification system that made these programmes invisible to the public also made them largely invisible to elected officials who were not specifically briefed on them.
60:54
Congress, throughout most of the period when these programmes operated, had no meaningful oversight mechanism for classified military and intelligence activities.
61:04
The Church Committee, which investigated intelligence agency abuses in 1975 and 1976, was essentially the first time Congress had systematically attempted to understand what the CIA, the Army and related agencies had actually been doing in the preceding decades.
61:20
What the committee found was that the gap between what elected officials knew and what the executive branch had been doing was, in several cases, substantial. Programs had been running for years, sometimes decades, that no congressional committee had reviewed, that no elected official outside a small circle had been informed of, and that had been funded through budget mechanisms that obscured their actual purpose. The Church Committee hearings and the parallel Pike Committee investigations in the House produced a set of reforms intended to close some of these gaps.
61:51
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was passed in 1978, creating a court to oversee certain intelligence activities.
61:59
Executive Order 12333, signed by President Reagan in 1981, established formal rules governing intelligence activities including prohibitions on assassination of foreign leaders and restrictions on domestic surveillance. these reforms were real. They changed the formal structure of oversight in meaningful ways. Whether they fundamentally changed the institutional culture that had produced the programmes described in this and the previous chapter is a question that subsequent history has continued to examine. The open-air testing programme also intersected, in ways that are not always recognised, with the broader history of how the federal government communicated with the public about risk during the Cold War period.
62:40
The same years that saw the army spraying bacterial aerosols over San Francisco and zinc cadmium sulphide over St Louis also saw the federal government running extensive public information campaigns about the risks of nuclear war and the importance of civil defence preparedness.
62:56
Civil defense pamphlets told Americans how to build bomb shelters, how far to stay from blast zones, and how to recognize the symptoms of radiation exposure. The government was simultaneously telling Americans to prepare for external threats and secretly testing their resilience to substances released from the inside.
63:13
The gap between the public-facing messaging and the classified operational reality was not a small one. There is also the question of what the residents of the affected cities experienced when they eventually learned what had happened. For most people, the discovery came through newspaper articles reporting on congressional hearings or FOIA disclosures, often decades after the tests had been conducted.
63:34
The reaction tended to follow a recognisable pattern. Initial disbelief, followed by anger, followed by a protracted process of trying to establish whether their specific health problems could be connected to their specific exposure, followed in most cases by a legal and bureaucratic dead end.
63:52
The causal link problem is genuinely difficult linking a specific health outcome to a specific exposure that occurred 40 years ago in a context where many other variables were also in play requires a level of epidemiological evidence that is very hard to assemble retroactively. The government's position in virtually every case was that the link had not been established to a legal standard, which may be technically accurate, but does not feel particularly adequate to someone who grew up in Pruitt-Igoe and is now dealing with a rare cancer.
64:22
One of the more striking aspects of the open-air testing programme, as viewed from the present, is how thoroughly it contradicts the official narrative that was operating simultaneously. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the United States government was presenting itself internationally as the defender of individual rights against totalitarian systems that treated their citizens as instruments of state policy. The contrast between that narrative and the reality of programs that treated American cities as open-air laboratories, selecting target populations based in part on their limited ability to object, releasing substances whose safety was uncertain, and maintaining secrecy for decades is, to put it mildly, significant.
65:05
the Soviet propaganda apparatus would have found this material extraordinarily useful if they had known about it, which, given the CIA's consistent concern about Soviet intelligence penetration of American institutions, raises the question of whether they did. That question remains, as far as publicly available records indicate unresolved, The revelation of these programmes also had a particular effect on the communities of scientists and public health officials who had not been involved in them. The disclosure that the Army had used populated urban areas as test sites without consent or transparency, generated substantial debate within the scientific community about the ethics of classified research and the limits of national security justification for human subjects research.
65:49
The debate fed into the broader set of bioethics reforms that were already underway in the wake of the Tuskegee exposure and the post-Nuremberg reckoning, contributing to a more robust framework for evaluating the ethics of research involving human populations. Whether that framework would have developed at the same pace without the specific pressure of these revelations is impossible to know. What is clear is that the disclosure of what the Army had done made it significantly harder for researchers to argue that the national security exception to ethical oversight was open-ended and self-regulating.
66:21
The broader pattern of behaviour documented across the programmes in these two chapters, the medical experiments and the atmospheric test raises a question that the historical record cannot fully answer but that the available evidence makes unavoidable. How much of this activity reflected deliberate policy choices made at the highest levels of government, and how much reflected the autonomous momentum of bureaucratic programmes that, once started, became self-perpetuating in ways that elected officials may not have fully understood or controlled?
66:51
The honest answer appears to be some of both. Some programmes were explicitly authorised at senior levels. Others appear to have operated in institutional spaces where the question of explicit authorisation was never clearly resolved, sustained by budget allocations that passed through oversight processes without generating serious scrutiny, staffed by people who assumed the programme had been properly sanctioned because it was continuing to be funded. This ambiguity is itself historically significant. It suggests that the harm produced by these programmes was not solely the result of deliberate bad faith at the top, though deliberate bad faith was certainly present in some cases.
67:29
It also resulted from a structural feature of large bureaucratic organisations operating under conditions of secrecy. The absence of meaningful external oversight creates conditions in which programmes can persist long after any reasonable external review would have identified serious problems, because the people inside the system are simultaneously the only ones with access to the relevant information, and the ones with the strongest institutional interest in the programme continuing. Secrecy, in this context, is not just a mechanism for keeping information from adversaries.
68:01
It is also, functionally, a mechanism for insulating institutional behaviour from the kind of accountability that might otherwise limit it. What comes next in this account moves from the domestic to the international. from what the government did to its own citizens to what it did over several decades and across dozens of countries to the citizens of other nations who had the misfortune of living in places that american strategists had decided were strategically significant the scale expands the methods diversify and the justifications remain with remarkable consistency variations on the same themes national security the containment of communism the protection of american interests The gap between those justifications and what they actually produced in human terms is, if anything, even larger than what we have already seen.
68:50
The previous chapters established a pattern. Institutions making decisions about people without those people's knowledge or consent, justified by a framework of national interest that consistently placed certain lives lower on the priority scale than others. That pattern did not originate in the Cold War. It did not begin with the CIA or the Army Chemical Corps or the Public Health Service. It was built into the architecture of the American project from its earliest years and nowhere is that more visible than in the history of what was done to the people who were already living on this continent when European settlers arrived and what continued to be done to their descendants for centuries afterward.
69:27
This is a chapter that covers a long span of time from the colonial period through the 20th century and a wide range of policies, practices and events.
69:37
Some of what is documented here is the result of deliberate decisions made by identifiable officials. Some of it was structural, produced by laws and institutional arrangements that operated systematically over generations. All of it is documented, and most of it appeared in school curricula, if it appeared at all, in forms that substantially softened what the records actually show. Start with 1763 and a set of letters that have been sitting in archives and occasionally discussed by historians for over 200 years.
70:06
In the summer of that year, during the conflict known as Pontiac's Rebellion, British forces were under significant pressure in the Great Lakes region. A coalition of native nations, frustrated with British policy following the end of the French and Indian War, had launched coordinated attacks on British forts across a wide area.
70:24
The commander of British forces in North America at the time was General Geoffrey Amherst, Among the letters preserved from his correspondence that summer is a remarkable exchange with Colonel Henry Bouquet, a Swiss-born British officer who was preparing an expedition to relieve besieged British forts.
70:41
In one letter, Amherst raised the idea of distributing blankets from the smallpox hospital at Fort Pitt to the native people attacking British positions. With the explicit intent of spreading the disease among them, Bouquet replied that he would try to execute the plan.
70:56
Shortly afterward, officers at Fort Pitt recorded in their own journals that they had given blankets and a handkerchief from the smallpox ward to representatives of Delaware and other Native nations during a diplomatic meeting at the fort, noting that they hoped the items would have the desired effect.
71:12
Amherst wrote back to Bouquet, endorsing the idea and suggesting that every possible method should be tried to extirpate this execrable race.
71:21
That last phrase is in the original letters. It is not an interpretation or a paraphrase. The documents are held at the British Library and at the Huntington Library in California, and they have been in the historical record for quite some time. Amherst as a historical footnote has a county in Massachusetts named after him, along with a well-regarded liberal arts college, which is a detail the college has been reconsidering with some seriousness in recent decades.
71:46
Whether the blankets at Fort Pitt actually caused a smallpox outbreak is a matter of ongoing historical debate, partly because smallpox was already circulating in the region and it is difficult to establish that specific blankets were the proximate cause of any particular cases. The historical significance of the episode does not depend on resolving that question. The significance is in the documented intent. Senior British military officers, informal written correspondence, proposing and endorsing the deliberate use of disease as a weapon against a civilian population.
72:18
This predates the United States as a political entity, but it occurred on territory that would become the United States. It involved populations whose descendants would be governed by the American state. and it established a mode of thinking about native peoples as a problem to be eliminated rather than a population to be negotiated with that carried forward into the policies of the american government for generations the first century of the american republic produced a series of federal policies toward native peoples that were in terms of their documented effects devastating The Indian Removal Act of 1830, signed by President Andrew Jackson, authorized the forced relocation of native nations from their ancestral territories in the southeastern United States to lands west of the Mississippi.
73:02
The removal of the Cherokee Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole peoples over the following decade is documented in contemporaneous records from multiple sources, government correspondence, military reports, missionary accounts and the testimonies of survivors.
73:17
The Cherokee removal in 1838 and 1839, the event that became known as the Trail of Tears, was carried out by the US Army and resulted in the deaths of an estimated 4,000 of approximately 16,000 Cherokee people who were forcibly marched over hundreds of miles during winter conditions that would have been challenging even with adequate food, clothing and shelter. The provisions were inadequate. The weather was severe. The pace of the march allowed little time for the sick or elderly to recover. A report submitted to Congress by a physician named Eliza Butler, who accompanied the removal, described conditions in terms that left nothing ambiguous about what was happening.
73:56
The legal framework for removal rested on a series of Supreme Court decisions that define the status of native nations in relation to the federal government in ways that have shaped federal Indian law ever since. Chief Justice John Marshall, in a trio of cases decided between 1823 and 1832, established a doctrine under which native nations were described as domestic-dependent nations, a phrase that had the effect of simultaneously acknowledging their distinct political status and placing them in a subordinate relationship to federal authority.
74:27
The practical consequence of this framework was that the federal government could, through legislation and executive action, override treaties made with native nations when political circumstances made doing so convenient, and the courts would generally find that it had the legal authority to do so.
74:44
Over the course of the 19th century, the United States made more than 500 treaties with native nations. By the end of that century, virtually every one of them had been violated, modified or abrogated by subsequent federal action. This is not a contested historical claim. It is documented in federal records. The wars fought against native peoples throughout the 19th century produced their own documented record of events that the standard historical curriculum has treated with varying degrees of frankness.
75:13
the massacre at Sand Creek in Colorado in November 1864, where a unit of Colorado militia under the command of Colonel John Chivington attacked a Cheyenne and Arapaho encampment that was flying an American flag and a white flag, killing between 150 and 200 people, the majority of them women, children and elderly, was investigated by Congress at the time.
75:36
Three separate congressional investigations concluded that what had occurred was a massacre rather than a battle and that the victims had been promised protection by federal officials. Chivington was never prosecuted.
75:49
He left the military shortly afterward and spent the rest of his life in various civilian occupations in the West.
75:56
the Wounded Knee Massacre in December 1890, the killing of between 250 and 300 Lakota Sioux people by the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the U.S. Army is documented in Army records, survivor testimonies, and contemporary newspaper reports.
76:11
The Army awarded 20 Medals of Honour to soldiers who participated in the engagement, which is the highest military decoration available and which Congress voted in 2019 to review, without as of this writing having formally rescinded any of them.
76:25
The site of the massacre is on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. A mass grave on the site contains the remains of the victims. These military events were part of a broader policy framework whose explicit goal was described with considerable candour by officials at the time. General Philip Sheridan, who commanded the military campaign against Plains Nations in the late 1860s, is credited with a sentiment that was widely circulated at the time that the only good Indian was a dead one. Whether he said those exact words is debated, that the sentiment was consistent with official policy as operationally implemented is considerably less debated.
77:03
The army's strategy in the Plains campaigns deliberately targeted food supplies.
77:08
The bison herds that Plains nations depended on were hunted to near extinction with official encouragement, partly as a military tactic to force capitulation by eliminating subsistence.
77:18
In 1875, Congress passed a bill that would have protected the bison from commercial hunters. President Ulysses Grant allowed it to die without his signature. The herds, which had numbered in the tens of millions, were reduced to a few hundred animals by the late 1880s. All of this, the removals, the treaty violations, the wars, the elimination of food sources set the context for what the federal government then decided to do with the surviving native population in the second half of the 19th century and well into the 20th.
77:48
The policy that took shape in this period is described in official documents as assimilation, which is the kind of word that sounds relatively benign until you read what it actually entailed. In 1879, a former army officer named Richard Henry Pratt opened the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania in a repurposed military barracks and established the template for what became a nationwide system of Indian boarding schools. Pratt's founding philosophy was expressed in a phrase he used repeatedly in speeches and correspondence. kill the Indian, save the man.
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He meant this to be understood as a reformist position, as opposed to the extermination policy that had characterised much of the preceding century. Pratt was proposing to absorb native peoples into mainstream American society by systematically removing everything that made them distinctly native. The children sent to Carlisle and to the hundreds of schools modelled on it were stripped of their clothing on arrival and given uniforms. Their hair was cut. Their native names were replaced with English names, often assigned arbitrarily. They were forbidden to speak their languages, under threat of physical punishment that ranged from having their mouths washed out with soap to more severe forms of discipline depending on the school and the era.
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They were taught trades, cooking, farming, carpentry, domestic service considered appropriate to their expected station in American society, which was not expected to be a particularly elevated one. The federal government funded and operated this system through the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
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At its peak, the boarding school network included over 300 schools serving tens of thousands of native children.
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Many of the children were not enrolled voluntarily. Federal agents and local officials pressured families to surrender their children and in some cases simply took them.
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The legal authority to remove children from their families was exercised through a combination of federal statutes and the practical reality that families on reservations had very limited means of legal resistance.
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Children as young as four and five were taken from their homes and sent to schools hundreds or thousands of miles away.
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Some of them did not see their families again for years. Some never returned at all.
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The Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report, published by the Department of the Interior in 2022, is the most comprehensive official examination of this history conducted to date.
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The report identified 408 federal Indian boarding schools that operated across 37 states between 1819 and 1969.
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It documented at least 53 burial sites associated with these schools, containing the remains of children who died while enrolled. The minimum confirmed death count from the documented burial sites at the time of the report's publication was 973 children.
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The report explicitly noted that this figure was likely a significant undercount. As records were incomplete, many burial sites had not yet been located and some schools had maintained minimal documentation of student deaths.
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A second volume of the report, published in 2024, identified additional burial sites and raised the confirmed count further. The causes of death documented in the available records included tuberculosis, influenza, measles and other infectious diseases that spread through the overcrowded and often poorly ventilated school facilities. physical abuse, accidents, causes listed in records simply as unknown. Some children died trying to escape and were exposed to winter conditions. The schools varied considerably in their physical conditions and the severity of their practices, but the documentation from multiple schools across multiple decades consistently shows children living in inadequate facilities, receiving insufficient food and medical care, and experiencing physical punishment for behavioural infractions that included speaking their native language.
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The suppression of languages was not simply a disciplinary measure. It was understood by its architects as a strategy for severing cultural transmission.
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Language is how knowledge, values, stories and identity are passed between generations. Remove the language and you disrupt that transmission at its source. The results of this policy, assessed across the 20th century, are visible in the documentation of language loss among native communities.
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Of the several hundred native languages spoken in North America at the time of European contact, a substantial number became extinct or critically endangered during the boarding school era.
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Languages that had been spoken by tens of thousands of people for thousands of years were reduced to a handful of elderly speakers within a few generations. Some languages were lost entirely. The revitalisation efforts now underway in many native communities, language immersion schools, recording projects, curriculum development are working against the specific damage that the boarding school policy deliberately inflicted, using resources and energy that those communities could be directing toward other purposes if the policy had never existed. The boarding school system also had documented effects on the transmission of parenting practices and family structures.
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Children who grew up in institutional settings, separated from their families during their formative years, sometimes returned to their communities without the knowledge of how to raise children within their own cultural frameworks.
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This effect compounded across generations children of boarding school survivors raising their own children with disrupted or absent cultural reference points, those children then having their own children, and so on through the 20th century.
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The intergenerational trauma literature that has developed in recent decades, drawing on research in psychology, public health and sociology, documents these transmission patterns in some detail. The Indian Child Welfare Act, passed by Congress in 1978, was a direct response to the recognition that the removal of native children from their families and communities had continued well beyond the formal boarding school era. with native children being placed in non-native foster and adoptive homes at dramatically disproportionate rates.
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Before the Act's passage, approximately 25 to 35 percent of all native children were being removed from their families by state welfare agencies and placed in non-native homes, a pattern that welfare officials and native advocates described as the continuation of the assimilation policy by other means.
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The land loss that ran parallel to all of this deserves its own attention because the economic dimension of native dispossession is inseparable from the political and cultural dimensions.
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The Doors Act of 1887, also known as the General Allotment Act, broke up the collective land holdings of native nations and assigned individual allotments to tribal members with the declared intent of encouraging individual land ownership and agricultural independence.
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The unstated but practically significant consequence was that land held collectively by native nations could not be purchased by non-native buyers, land divided into individual allotments could.
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After the allotments were assigned, the remaining unallotted reservation lands were declared surplus and opened for purchase by non-native settlers.
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Between 1887 and 1934, native nations lost approximately 90 million acres of land through the allotment process. That is roughly two-thirds of the total land base that had remained in native hands before the Act.
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The land lost was not sold at market rates through voluntary transactions. It was transferred through a system that stripped collective ownership. created individual allotments that were then subject to taxation, and fee simple transactions that many native landholders were in no position to navigate, and then classified whatever remained as surplus available for general homesteading.
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Senator Henry Dawes, who authored the Act, described his intentions as entirely benevolent. He wanted, he said, to give Native Americans the opportunity to become self-supporting citizens through individual land ownership, The practical effect of the legislation he authored was to transfer tens of millions of acres from native to non-native ownership within a generation, in a process that was administered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs with a level of transparency and accountability that subsequent investigations described as severely inadequate.
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A 1928 report commissioned by the federal government known as the Merriam Report, after its lead author Lewis Merriam documented the conditions of native communities after four decades of allotment policy and described them with clinical precision, extreme poverty, malnutrition, disease, inadequate housing, and the near total failure of the allotment system to produce the self-sufficient farming communities it had promised.
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The report recommended fundamental reforms. Some of those recommendations were eventually incorporated into the Indian Reorganisation Act of 1934, which ended further allotment and attempted to rebuild tribal government structures.
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The land that had already been transferred was not returned. the 20th century brought a new set of federal policies that continued the pattern of disruption under different names. The Indian termination policy of the 1950s and early 1960s, a congressional initiative to terminate the federal government's recognised relationship with specific tribal nations, ending their status as dependent nations and subjecting their members and lands to state jurisdiction, was presented as a move toward equality and self-determination.
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It was experienced by the communities it affected as the elimination of treaty rights, the transfer of reservation lands to private ownership, the loss of federal health and education services and the dissolution of tribal governmental structures that had been painstakingly rebuilt in the preceding decades.
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Approximately 109 tribal nations and bands had their federal recognition terminated under this policy before it was reversed by the Nixon administration in 1970.
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Some of the terminated tribes spent decades in legal and administrative efforts to restore their recognised status. The restoration process was, in a number of cases, not completed until the 1980s or later.
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The urban relocation programme that ran alongside termination encouraged and in some cases economically pressured native people to move from reservations to cities through promises of job placement assistance and housing support that often did not materialise in the forms promised.
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Tens of thousands of native people relocated to Chicago, Los Angeles, Denver and other cities under this program in the 1950s and 1960s, sometimes arriving to find that the jobs they had been told would be waiting for them were not, that the housing assistance was minimal and temporary and that they were now far from their home communities and reservation-based support structures.
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The urban native population that exists in American cities today grew partly from this relocation program and its aftermath people and their descendants who ended up in cities not through purely voluntary migration but through a policy that pushed them off land and toward urban environments with inadequate support for the transition.
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Throughout all of these policy periods, the legal framework governing native nations continued to evolve in ways that consistently limited tribal sovereignty and treaty rights while formally acknowledging their existence. The doctrine of plenary power, established in 19th century Supreme Court decisions, gave Congress essentially unlimited authority over tribal nations, including the power to unilaterally abrogate treaties, a power that courts have repeatedly upheld on the grounds that native nations occupy a unique constitutional status that places questions of their governance primarily in the political rather than the judicial domain.
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This means, in practical terms, that when the federal government violated a treaty, the affected tribal nations' primary legal recourse was to petition the very institution that had violated the treaty, rather than seeking an independent judicial remedy. The Court of Claims and later the Indian Claims Commission established in 1946 provided a venue for adjudicating claims arising from treaty violations and land takings but the remedies available were limited to financial compensation and did not include the return of land.
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The total amount paid out through the Claims Commission process over its 32-year existence was approximately $818 million distributed across hundreds of claims representing land and resources whose value, even in mid-20th century terms, vastly exceeded that figure.
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The 2022 Interior Department report on boarding schools made a series of recommendations for further research and policy responses. It called for additional investigation to identify all burial sites, for the return of any native children's remains held by schools or other institutions to their tribal nations, and for a formal acknowledgement of what the boarding school system did and what it cost.
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these recommendations were made to an administration that had already through the report itself taken a more direct look at this history than most previous administrations had whether the recommendations produce substantive policy changes is a question that remains open There is an aspect of the boarding school system that deserves separate attention because it connects directly to questions of evidence and institutional memory that run throughout this entire account.
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The documentation of what happened in these schools is uneven. Some schools kept meticulous records, others kept almost none, and some records were destroyed or lost over the decades since the schools closed. The 2022 report identified this as a significant obstacle to a full accounting. death records at many schools were incomplete, causes of death were sometimes listed in terms that obscured the actual circumstances and the burial sites documented in the report were identified through a combination of archival research, oral history from native communities and, in some cases, ground-penetrating radar surveys of school properties that had been repurposed, sold or developed in the intervening decades.
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The children buried on school grounds were not in most cases given marked graves. Many were interred without notification to their families. Families who wanted to reclaim the remains of their children were often told that records did not exist, that the locations were unknown, or that the graves could not be identified. Some families searched for decades. In several documented cases, parents died without ever learning what had happened to children who had been sent away and never came home. This particular detail, the deliberate or negligent failure to notify families of a child's death, the burial in unmarked graves far from home sits in a category of action that goes beyond the already serious harm of the school system itself.
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It is the severing of a specific and irreplaceable human connection, the right of a family to mourn their dead, to know where their child was laid to rest, to maintain a relationship with that resting place over generations.
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Native scholars and advocates have been raising the history of the boarding schools in public discourse for many decades before the 2022 report.
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The report itself was the product of Indigenous advocacy. It was commissioned in response to persistent pressure from tribal nations and native rights organisations who had been documenting and publicly discussing this history without seeing it formally acknowledged at the federal level.
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This is a consistent pattern in the broader history of American accountability for historical harms. The communities most affected spend years, sometimes generations, pushing for documentation and acknowledgement that institutions are reluctant to provide, and when that documentation finally arrives, it tends to confirm what those communities had been saying all along.
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The documentation does not come first and produce the advocacy. The advocacy comes first and eventually sometimes produces documentation. The specific question of what happened to children who died at boarding schools also intersects with the history of how those schools were run on a day-to-day basis, which the surviving records illuminate in considerable detail. Survivors who gave testimony to researchers, congressional investigators and journalists over the decades described a range of experiences.
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Some schools were run by administrators who made genuine efforts to provide adequate conditions for the children in their care within the constraints of the system. Others were run in ways that the available documentation, including the school's own records, indicates were abusive in systematic and deliberate ways. Children who spoke their native languages were beaten. Children who attempted to contact their families without permission were punished. Children who tried to run away were brought back by force and subjected to disciplinary measures described in school records in terms that leave little doubt about their nature.
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The religious dimension of the boarding school system is an important part of the documented record. While some schools were government-operated, a substantial portion of the network, particularly in the earlier decades, was run by religious organisations, primarily Catholic and Protestant missions, under contracts with the federal government. The Bureau of Indian Affairs provided per capita funding for students enrolled in mission schools, which gave religious organisations both an economic incentive to recruit native children and the institutional authority of the federal government behind their operations.
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This partnership between federal Indian policy and religious organisations is documented in bureau records, in church archives, and in congressional debates of the period, where it was occasionally criticised by members who raised concerns about using federal funds for religious education.
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The specific abuses documented at mission-run schools, which began receiving serious public attention in the early 2000s following similar investigations in Canada, included physical and sexual abuse by staff that in some cases occurred over extended periods and involved multiple perpetrators.
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The Catholic Church's response to these revelations followed a pattern that became familiar in other contexts during the same period – acknowledgement of some specific instances, expressions of regret and settlement of civil claims combined with institutional resistance to systematic accountability or full disclosure of what was known about the scope of the abuse. A number of dioceses that ran boarding schools participated in settlement agreements with survivor groups that included both financial compensation and restrictions on disclosure, the same combination that appeared in MK Ultra settlement negotiations and Tuskegee compensation proceedings.
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The pattern of pairing acknowledgement with confidentiality is one of the more consistent features of American institutional responses to this kind of history.
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The water rights dimension of native dispossession is another area that received limited attention in standard historical accounts, but is documented in legal records and federal agency reports going back over a century.
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The Winters Doctrine, established by a 1908 Supreme Court decision, held that when the federal government created Indian reservations, it implicitly reserved sufficient water rights to make those reservations viable.
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This was an important legal protection in the arid west, where water access determined whether agriculture and livestock raising were possible. The doctrine was regularly ignored in practice. Federal water projects throughout the 20th century, the dams, irrigation systems, and water allocation agreements that shaped the development of the western United States consistently prioritized non-native agricultural and municipal interests over the water rights that native nations were legally entitled to under the Winter's Doctrine. Cases litigating native water rights have been in various stages of legal proceedings for generations.
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Some have been settled in recent decades through negotiated agreements that provide native nations with a portion of the water they were legally entitled to in exchange for releasing other claims. Others remain unresolved. The water rights at stake in these cases represent enormous economic value in a region where water scarcity increasingly defines what is possible.
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The Public Law 280, passed by Congress in 1953 as part of the Termination Era Policy Framework, transferred criminal and some civil jurisdiction over reservation lands from federal to state authority in six states, and gave others the option to assume similar jurisdiction.
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The law was passed without the consent of the tribal nations affected, which was a fairly significant oversight given that it directly altered the governance structures that affected their daily lives.
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The practical consequences included the application of state laws to reservation activities that had previously been governed by tribal or federal law, the extension of state jurisdiction over crimes occurring on reservations, and in some areas the undermining of tribal authority to regulate activities within reservation boundaries. The consent problem was addressed in 1968 when amendments to the law required tribal consent before additional states could assume jurisdiction about 15 years after the original law had already been applied without it to a large number of communities.
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The Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975 represented a genuine shift in federal policy. giving tribal nations the ability to contract with the federal government to administer their own health, education, and social service programs rather than having those programs administered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
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This was a meaningful change that grew directly from tribal advocacy and from the political energy of the American Indian movement and related organizations that had been pressing for greater tribal control throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, The occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973, when members of AIM occupied the site of the 1890 massacre for 71 days, focused national media attention on reservation conditions and treaty rights issues in ways that had direct political consequences.
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The 71-day standoff ended with a federal agreement to review treaty rights that was not ultimately honoured in the specific terms AIM demanded, but the broader policy shift towards self-determination that accelerated in its aftermath was real and substantive.
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This is worth noting because the standard history of this period sometimes presents the policy changes as having occurred entirely through legislative process, without adequate acknowledgement of the sustained pressure from native communities and organisations that made those changes politically unavoidable. What the full arc of this history reveals, from the colonial period through the late 20th century, is that the treatment of native peoples by the American government was not a series of unfortunate accidents or well-intentioned mistakes that simply did not work out as planned.
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The documentary record shows sustained, deliberate policy choices made by identifiable officials, funded through regular budget processes, implemented by professional administrators and military officers, and continued over long periods despite documented evidence of their consequences.
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The people who ran these programs were not operating outside the system. They were the system.
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And the populations that bore the consequences of those choices whose languages were suppressed, whose children were taken, whose land was transferred, whose treaty rights were violated, are not artefacts of a distant past.
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They are the living descendants of those people, dealing with the accumulated results of those choices in the present.
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The 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified in December 1865, eight months after the end of the Civil War. It abolished slavery and involuntary servitude throughout the country. It is one of the most significant constitutional amendments ever enacted, and its text is both brief and direct.
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It contains, however, a clause that is not always prominently featured in the version of this history taught in schools, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted. Eleven words. They were included largely without controversy at the time, since the idea of using prison labour had a long history that few legislators of the period found objectionable. Within a few years of ratification, those eleven words had become the legal foundation for a system that reconstructed many of the practical features of slavery under a different name, with the endorsement of the courts and the active administration of state governments throughout the South.
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The system is known as convict leasing, and it operated in the former Confederate states from roughly the late 1860s through the first decades of the 20th century, with some aspects persisting considerably longer. The mechanism was straightforward. State governments and counties arrested black men and some black women and some poor white people, though the racial targeting was extensive and documented on charges that included vagrancy, loitering, speaking loudly in the presence of a white woman failing to carry proof of employment and other offences specifically designed to produce a steady supply of convicted labourers.
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The convicted individuals were then leased to private companies, mining operations, railroad builders, turpentine producers, cotton planters, brick manufacturers who paid the state or county a fee and in return received labour under conditions they controlled almost entirely.
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The conditions in the convict lease camps were, by most documented accounts, considerably worse than the conditions that had existed on antebellum plantations, for a reason that is both simple and stomach-churning. Slaveholders had a financial interest in the long-term health and survival of enslaved people who were their property. Convict lessees had no such interest. When a leased labourer died, they simply obtained another one from the state. The state in turn simply arrested more people under the vagrancy statutes. The economic incentive structure ran in precisely the wrong direction.
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From the perspective of the labourers, the less the lessee invested in their health and safety, the more profitable the arrangement. Contemporaneous investigations documented death rates in some convict lease operations that rivaled the mortality rates of the most lethal industrial accidents of the era, sustained over years rather than in single catastrophic events.
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The journalist Douglas Blackman documented the convict lease system in extraordinary detail in his 2008 book Slavery by Another Name, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize.
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His research drew on court records, company files, government reports and the personal papers of individuals involved in administering the system. The documentation showed that thousands of black men were effectively re-enslaved through this mechanism. that the companies using their labour included some of the largest industrial enterprises of the New South, and that the system operated with the full awareness and active support of state governments, courts, and in some cases the federal government, which use least convict labour on federal projects without formal protest.
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A federal investigation in 1907, prompted by reports about conditions at a lumber and turpentine operation in Georgia and Florida, found evidence of forced labor arrangements that prosecutors described as outright peonage, the holding of people in debt bondage in violation of federal anti-peonage statutes passed after the Civil War.
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Several individuals were prosecuted in the resulting cases and the Supreme Court issued a ruling in Bailey v. Alabama in 1911 that struck down one of the Alabama statutes most directly used to create peonage arrangements.
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These were genuine legal victories. They did not end the convict lease system, which continued in various forms for decades afterward. Alabama formally abolished convict leasing in 1928, the last state to do so not through a sudden moral awakening, but largely because the labor unions representing white workers objected to the competition that leased convict labor represented in the coal and iron industries.
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nothing like a rival labour market to suddenly make exploitation seem unreasonable.
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The legal architecture that surrounded convict leasing was reinforced by a broader set of laws and practices collectively known as the Black Codes and later as the Jim Crow system that governed the daily lives of black Americans in the South from the end of Reconstruction through the 1960s. The Black Codes, enacted by southern state legislatures in 1865 and 1866, almost immediately after the 13th Amendment's ratification, restricted where black people could live, what occupations they could work in, whether they could own property, and what legal recourse they had against white employers.
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Many of these specific provisions were overturned during Reconstruction, when federal troops occupied the South, and freedmen briefly exercised political rights including voting and holding office.
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When Reconstruction ended with the withdrawal of federal troops following the political compromise of 1877, the state-level restrictions returned in elaborated form as the Jim Crow laws that defined southern life for the following century.
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What is sometimes lost in discussions of Jim Crow is the degree to which the system was enforced not just through law but through the sustained threat and frequent reality of extrajudicial violence. Lynching the killing of individuals by mobs, usually by hanging but also by burning and other methods, was the enforcement mechanism that gave the legal system its teeth.
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If the law said you could not vote, it was the threat of what would happen to you or your family if you tried that made the law effective. The documented history of lynching in the United States includes at least 4,084 racial terror lynchings in the South between 1877 and 1950, according to the research conducted by the Equal Justice Initiative and documented in their 2015 report.
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This figure covers only documented cases and only the South. The actual number, including cases in northern and western states and cases that went unrecorded, was almost certainly higher.
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The word lynching tends to evoke images of a few men acting impulsively in the dark.
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The historical record frequently describes something quite different. Many of the documented lynchings were public events, announced in advance, attended by crowds of hundreds or thousands of people, covered by local newspapers, and in some cases photographed.
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Photographic postcards of lynchings were produced and sold as souvenirs. Trains ran special excursion fairs so people from surrounding counties could attend. Children were sometimes taken by parents as educational experiences. The public and celebratory character of many of these events is important to understand because it establishes that these were not actions that communities were ashamed of or sought to conceal.
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They were community events, normalised within the social fabric of the places where they occurred, and their deterrent message was intentional and explicit. The message was not just to the person being killed, but to every black person in the region who might be considering exercising a legal right or challenging a social custom. The federal government's response to lynching is its own documented chapter. Anti-lynching legislation was introduced in Congress repeatedly between the 1900s and the 1950s. The dire anti-lynching bill passed the House in 1922 with substantial support.
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It was killed in the Senate by a filibuster led by Southern Democrats. Similar bills were introduced and filibustered in 1937 and 1940.
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The argument made by opponents that it was an unconstitutional federal intrusion into state law enforcement was the same argument used to block federal civil rights legislation of every kind for most of the first half of the 20th century.
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The federal government did not pass a formal anti-lynching law until 2022 when the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act was signed into law, approximately 120 years after the first federal anti-lynching bill had been introduced. The timing is not a quirk of legislative scheduling.
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The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 is the event in this chapter that perhaps best illustrates the combination of organized violence, institutional complicity and deliberate historical suppression that characterized the worst episodes of racial terror in 20th century America.
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On the evening of May 31st and through the day of June 1st, 1921, a white mob aided in several documented instances by members of the Tulsa Police Department and the Oklahoma National Guard attacked the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma, which was a prosperous black neighbourhood that had accumulated sufficient economic success to be called the Black Wall Street by contemporaries. By the time the violence ended somewhere between 100 and 300 people had been killed, the exact number remains uncertain because records were not systematically kept and the death toll was never officially investigated at the time.
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Approximately 35 blocks of the Greenwood district had been burned to the ground. Between 8,000 and 10,000 black residents were left homeless.
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Property losses in the district were estimated at between $1.5 and $2 million in 1921 values. Several distinctive features of the Tulsa massacre are documented in the records that survived.
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Aerial reconnaissance, possibly including aircraft dropping incendiary devices, though this remains disputed, was used during the attack, making Tulsa one of the few domestic events in American history to involve aerial involvement against an American population. The destruction was not chaotic looting but systematic demolition. Buildings were burned in sequence, working through the district methodically. National Guard units that arrived during the event were used not to protect black residents from the mob but in some documented instances to assist in rounding up black residents and placing them in internment camps at the fairgrounds, the convention hall and other locations where they were held for days without charge.
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Insurance claims filed by black residents after the massacre were systematically denied on the grounds that the losses resulted from riot, which was excluded from coverage.
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No white participant in the massacre was ever prosecuted for any crime connected to it. Efficient.
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The suppression of this history was remarkably thorough. The Tulsa massacre was not taught in Oklahoma schools for generations. It was rarely discussed in local media.
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the city's official record essentially set aside what had happened.
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A commission established by the Oklahoma State Legislature in 1997 investigated the massacre and published a report in 2001 confirming its scope and calling for reparations.
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The Oklahoma State Legislature passed a law in 2002, 81 years after the event requiring that the massacre be taught in Oklahoma schools.
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Reparations were not paid. The survivors who were still alive when the 2001 commission report was published, elderly people who had been children during the massacre died without receiving compensation.
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A second wave of attention to Tulsa came in the late 2000s and early 2020s, prompted partly by the Centennial commemoration in 2021 and partly by renewed national discussion of racial violence and its historical roots.
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Ground-penetrating radar surveys of potential mass grave sites conducted in connection with the Centennial found evidence consistent with the presence of human remains in areas where survivor accounts had suggested bodies had been buried excavations produced remains that were subsequently analysed. The process of fully documenting the human cost of the massacre is ongoing, a century after the event.
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Tulsa was not an isolated incident, though its scale made it exceptional. The Red Summer of 1919, a period of roughly eight months during which white mobs attacked black communities in at least 25 cities and towns across the United States resulted in documented deaths, injuries and property destruction. on a scale that was, at the time, reported by some newspapers as evidence of a national social crisis and then, in subsequent decades, largely removed from the standard historical narrative.
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The Chicago race riot of 1919 killed at least 38 people, injured over 500 and left more than 1,000 black families homeless.
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The Elaine massacre in Arkansas in September 1919 resulted in the killing of an estimated 100 to 200 black sharecroppers who had organized a union to negotiate cotton prices, followed by the prosecution of over 100 black men, including 12 sentenced to death for defending themselves during the attack on their union meeting.
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The Supreme Court eventually overturned those convictions in Moore v Dempsey in 1923, finding that the trials had been conducted in an atmosphere of mob domination that violated due process, which is a polite judicial way of saying the proceedings had been a complete sham from start to finish. The eugenics program that ran parallel to these events represents another form of state-administered harm against populations deemed socially undesirable, one that operated not through mobs or vagrancy arrests, but through the administrative machinery of public health departments, hospitals and courts.
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American eugenics was not a fringe movement. It was a mainstream scientific and policy program, supported by major universities, funded by prominent foundations including the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation, promoted by respected academics in biology, medicine and social science, and endorsed in its legal framework by the United States Supreme Court.
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The Supreme Court decision that gave the sterilization program its constitutional endorsement was Buck v Bell, decided in 1927. The plaintiff was Carrie Buck, a young woman from Virginia who had been committed to the Virginia State Colony for epileptics and feeble-minded after being raped by her foster family's nephew and becoming pregnant.
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Her daughter was taken from her. The state of Virginia moved to sterilize Carrie under Virginia's Eugenic Sterilization Act, and the case eventually reached the Supreme Court.
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Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing for an 8-1 majority, upheld the sterilization law in terms that remain remarkable for their directness. Three generations of imbeciles are enough, he wrote. The decision has never been formally overturned, It remains technically valid precedent, a fact that occasionally surprises people who encounter it for the first time and assume that something so clearly wrong must have been subsequently corrected. It has not been. The Buck v Bell decision opened the door for widespread sterilization programs in states that had been waiting for constitutional clarity before proceeding.
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By the early 1930s, over half of American states had eugenic sterilization laws on the books. Between the 1920s and the 1970s, yes, the 1970s an estimated 60,000 to 65,000 Americans were forcibly sterilized under state programs.
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The figure is approximate because record-keeping was inconsistent and because some sterilizations were performed without formal legal authorization, simply at the discretion of physicians and institution administrators who considered themselves public health benefactors.
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The Nazi connection to American eugenics is documented and direct, not a rhetorical flourish.
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German eugenicists in the 1920s and early 1930s explicitly cited American programs as models and precedents. The model eugenic sterilization law written by American eugenicist Harry Laughlin, who served as the expert eugenics agent for the House Committee on Immigration, was used as a template by German legislators drafting the law for the prevention of hereditarily diseased offspring in 1933, one of the first major pieces of Nazi social legislation.
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Leoflin received an honorary degree from the University of Heidelberg in 1936, presented as recognition of his pioneering research in racial hygiene. He accepted it.
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American eugenicists travelled to Germany in the early Nazi period and returned with favourable reports on the German programme's efficiency The American program, it was sometimes noted, was moving more slowly because of the constraints of federalism and democratic process, which German administration was not burdened by. The admiration was entirely mutual and entirely documented. The application of eugenic sterilization in America was thoroughly racialized in practice, even when the formal laws were written in race-neutral language. Studies of sterilisation records from multiple states have documented that black patients in state institutions were sterilised at disproportionate rates, that poor women of colour were pressured to consent to sterilisation as a condition of receiving welfare benefits or medical care, and that in the South, particularly, sterilisation was applied in ways that reflected and reinforced the racial hierarchy that the rest of the region's legal and social structure maintained.
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The term Mississippi appendectomy circulated, without much irony, to describe non-consensual sterilization of black women at public hospitals in the South, performed by physicians who considered the procedure unremarkable and the patient's consent optional.
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Fannie Lou Hamer, who became one of the most important figures of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, had gone to a county hospital in 1961 for the removal of a small uterine tumour. She was sterilised during the procedure without her knowledge or consent, learning what had been done to her only afterward. She subsequently became one of the most prominent voices speaking publicly about the practice of non-consensual sterilisation of black women in the South, which she described as common enough to have a casual nickname.
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Her testimony before the 1964 Democratic National Convention Credentials Committee, which was broadcast on national television, included discussion of this experience. The Johnson administration, concerned about alienating white Southern Democrats, attempted to preempt her testimony by scheduling a competing presidential press conference to draw camera crews away from the hearing room. It did not entirely work. The formal eugenics sterilisation laws in most states were repealed or fell into disuse after World War II, partly because the association with Nazi Germany made explicit eugenics programmes politically untenable, but the practice of sterilising institutionalised and marginalised women without meaningful consent continued in various forms well beyond the formal programme era.
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A 1970s investigation found that the federally funded Indian Health Service had sterilized Native American women at rates dramatically higher than the general population, with some studies suggesting that between 25 and 50 percent of Native women had been sterilized by the mid-1970s, many without adequate consent procedures. A class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of Native women led to new federal regulations requiring more rigorous consent procedures for sterilization funded by federal programs. And then, as noted above, a detailed complaint filed in 2020 alleged that gynecological procedures, including hysterectomies, had been performed on women held in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Georgia without adequate informed consent.
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A Congressional inquiry and Inspector General investigation found evidence of inadequate medical oversight and significant concerns about consent procedures. The full scope of what occurred there remains under investigation.
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The historical line from Buck v Bell to these allegations is not a straight one, but it is traceable and the populations at each point on that line share certain characteristics. limited power, limited legal access, and the presence of institutional actors who found their reproductive choices less compelling than other considerations. What the full scope of this chapter demonstrates convict leasing, Jim Crow enforcement through racial terror, the Tulsa massacre and Red Summer, forced sterilization, is that the formal abolition of slavery in 1865 did not produce a clean break in the legal and social subordination of black Americans.
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It produced a restructuring of that subordination through mechanisms that were new in their legal form but continuous in their practical purpose and effect.
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The people who designed convict leasing knew what they were doing. The legislators who blocked anti-lynching laws for decades knew what they were doing. The physicians who sterilised women without consent knew what they were doing, and the historians and school board members who kept these events out of the curriculum for generations were doing something to their action was a mission rather than commission. But the effect was the same, the maintenance of a version of American history that did not require reckoning with what was actually documented in the records.
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Before closing this chapter, there is a dimension of this history that connects directly to contemporary debates and that the historical record illuminates in ways that are often absent from those debates. The relationship between the policies described above and the current structure of racial inequality in the United States.
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This is not a political argument, but a documentary one. The wealth gap, the incarceration gap, the home ownership gap, the health outcome gap between black and white Americans are all measurable and extensively measured. They are also traceable through specific historical mechanisms to the policies documented in this chapter The wealth gap has a specific and well-documented history.
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The convict leasing system extracted labour and generated wealth for private companies and state governments from workers who were paid nothing.
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The systematic destruction of black property during events like the Tulsa massacre eliminated accumulated wealth that had been built over generations and was never compensated.
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The redlining policies administered by the Federal Homeowners Loan Corporation beginning in the 1930s designated predominantly black neighbourhoods as high risk for mortgage lending, effectively preventing black families from accessing the federally subsidised mortgage programmes that built the white middle class through home ownership.
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The gap did not emerge from differential choices or cultural factors. It emerged from documented policy decisions that allocated resources, opportunities and protections on a racially differentiated basis over a period of roughly a century. The redlining story is documented with unusual precision because the Homeowners Loan Corporation produced detailed maps of cities across the country, grading neighbourhoods by perceived lending risk using colour codes. The hazardous designation the origin of the term redlining was applied overwhelmingly to neighbourhoods with significant black populations, regardless of the actual economic characteristics of those neighbourhoods.
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The maps were used by private lenders and by the Federal Housing Administration to determine where government-backed mortgages would and would not be offered.
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The practical effect was that black families in redlined neighbourhoods could not access the federally subsidised 30-year fixed-rate mortgages that were building white suburban home ownership during the post-war period. They were pushed toward contract-buying arrangements, a predatory alternative in which buyers paid instalments to order home but did not receive the deed until the full price was paid, meaning they could be evicted for a single missed payment without recovering any equity they had built.
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The wealth transferred out of black communities through contract buying in the post-war decades has been estimated in the billions of dollars.
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The GI Bill, formerly the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, is frequently cited as one of the most successful pieces of social legislation in American history, and in terms of its effects on white beneficiaries, this is accurate. The bill provided returning veterans with access to low-cost mortgages, college tuition benefits and business loans that enabled millions of white Americans to enter the middle class.
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Black veterans were legally entitled to the same benefits. In practice, the administration of those benefits was handled through state and local institutions in the South that operated under Jim Crow rules, which meant that black veterans encountered banks that would not issue them mortgages in white neighbourhoods and universities that would not admit them. The Veterans Administration did not systematically track racial disparities in GI Bill utilization. The gap has been reconstructed by historians and economists working with available records, which show significant underutilization of benefits by black veterans relative to white veterans in the same period.
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The Fair Housing Act of 1968 formally prohibited racial discrimination in housing transactions. It came after the generation in which the wealth gap had been most decisively constructed. By 1968, the suburban home ownership expansion that had transferred enormous wealth to white families and excluded black families was largely complete. Passing a law against discrimination in housing in 1968 was a meaningful and important step. It did not undo what the preceding three decades of federally administered discrimination had built.
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The neighbourhoods that had been redlined were still under-invested, undervalued and cut off from the economic circuits that generate community wealth.
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The schools in those neighbourhoods were funded through local property taxes, which meant that the deliberate suppression of property values through redlining produced underfunded schools, which produced educational disadvantage, which compounded across generations.
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The connection between the racial terror of the early 20th century and the formal institutions of the criminal legal system is also more direct than standard accounts suggest.
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the same law enforcement agencies that participated in the tulsa massacre and that failed to prosecute lynchings throughout the jim crow period were the same agencies that administered the transition into the modern carceral state The culture of impunity for violence against black people that characterised law enforcement in the South and in many northern cities did not simply end when the formal Jim Crow laws were repealed. It transformed, in many places, into patterns of policing and prosecution that continued to produce racially differentiated outcomes under formerly race-neutral legal frameworks.
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John Ehrlichman, who served as Nixon's domestic policy chief, stated in a 1994 interview published in 2016 by journalist Dan Baum that the Nixon administration had deliberately targeted black people and anti-war protesters through the war on drugs, knowing that associating those groups with drugs would allow the administration to disrupt their communities through policing and prosecution. The quote, as published, is direct and explicit.
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This is not a second-hand account or an interpretation. It is a statement by a senior official describing his own administration's deliberate policy made in what he apparently regarded as a candid private conversation. It was not a candid private conversation. The infrastructure of racial inequality described across this chapter was not built accidentally or through the uncoordinated actions of prejudiced individuals. It was built deliberately through specific policy decisions made by identifiable people, in positions of institutional authority, funded through public budgets, and maintained through legal structures that were defended in courts and legislatures across generations.
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This distinction matters because the framing of racial inequality as the residue of individual prejudice rather than the product of specific institutional choices leads to different kinds of proposed solutions. The historical record suggests that the more useful approach focuses on reversing specific policy decisions and their consequences rather than solely on changing individual attitudes. There is also the question of what it cost the country as a whole to maintain these systems. Economists have begun to quantify this with some precision. The exclusion of black Americans from the home ownership wealth building of the post-war period, the extraction of labour through convict leasing, the destruction of black-owned businesses in events like the Tulsa massacre, The educational and employment barriers maintained through Jim Crow, these represent enormous quantities of economic value that were denied to black Americans and that, had they been allowed to accumulate and compound, would have produced a substantially different aggregate economic profile.
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The economic cost of discrimination is not borne only by the people discriminated against. It is borne by the entire economy that fails to realise the productive potential it has suppressed.
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This is a point made by economists across the political spectrum which does not make it less true or less relevant. The next chapter leaves domestic soil entirely and follows the same structural logic institutional decisions justified by high-minded language, producing documented harm on a very large scale as American foreign policy moved across continents in the second half of the 20th century.
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The domestic programs described in the preceding chapters, the medical experiments, the atmospheric testing, the convict leasing, the eugenics program all operated within the borders of the United States on American citizens and residents.
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What happened when the same institutional logic was applied beyond those borders is the subject of this chapter. and the answer involves a substantially larger geographic canvas, a considerably higher body count and a degree of operational ambition that, in retrospect, is difficult to fully absorb.
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The year 1947 is a useful starting point The National Security Act of that year created the Central Intelligence Agency, formalized the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and established the institutional framework through which American foreign policy would be conducted for the following several decades.
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The CIA's mandate was to collect and analyze foreign intelligence. Within a few years of its creation, it was also conducting covert operations, meaning actions designed to advance American foreign policy objectives in ways that could be denied or attributed to other actors.
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The legal authority for these operations was interpreted broadly by the agency's leadership and by the executive branch officials who supervised it.
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The oversight mechanisms were minimal. Congress was not systematically briefed on covert operations until the Church Committee investigations in the mid-1970s forced the creation of permanent intelligence oversight committees.
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In the intervening three decades, an enormous amount happened. The first major covert operation to be confirmed through declassified documents is Operation Ajax, the 1953 coup in Iran. The democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh, had nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the British firm that had been extracting Iranian oil since 1913 under terms that gave Iran a small fraction of the revenue. This was, from the perspective of Iranians who had been watching a foreign company take the majority of profits from their country's natural resources for four decades, a reasonable policy decision.
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From the perspective of the British government and, after some persuasion, the Eisenhower administration, it was an unacceptable precedent that threatened Western access to Middle Eastern oil, and the argument went, created an opening for Soviet influence. The CIA and British intelligence worked together to organise street protests, bribe Iranian military officers, and create the conditions for a coup that removed Mossadegh and restored Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi to full power.
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The Shah subsequently ruled Iran with increasing authoritarianism, supported by American weapons and diplomatic backing, until the 1979 revolution that brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power.
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The CIA's role in the 1953 coup was officially acknowledged by the agency in a declassified document released in 2013.
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The Iranian government had been talking about it for 60 years prior to that, so the disclosure was perhaps less revelatory for some audiences than for others. Guatemala followed in 1954. President Jacobo Arbenz had implemented a land reform programme that included the expropriation of large land holdings, including uncultivated land held by the United Fruit Company. an American corporation that was one of the largest landowners in Guatemala. United Fruit had extensive political connections in Washington, including personal relationships with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA Director Alan Dulles, both of whom had professional connections to the company before entering government.
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The Eisenhower administration authorised Operation PB Success, a CIA-directed programme that combined a propaganda campaign, economic pressure and support for a military force led by Guatemalan exiles.
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Arbenz resigned under the combined pressure and fled the country in June 1954.
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The military government that replaced him suspended land reform, returned expropriated property, and established a political environment in which labour organising and left-wing political activity were suppressed through violence. The Guatemalan civil war that followed lasted 36 years, from 1960 to 1996, and produced an estimated 200,000 casualties, including genocide against Maya indigenous communities that a United Nations-backed truth commission later confirmed was carried out with counterinsurgency support from the United States.
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The Congo intervention of 1960 produced one of the Cold War's more directly documented cases of American involvement in political assassination. Patrice Lumumba, the first Prime Minister of the Independent Democratic Republic of Congo, was a nationalist leader whose willingness to seek Soviet assistance when Western powers withdrew support made him a target of intense American concern.
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CIA Director Alan Dulles sent a cable to the CIA station chief in Leopoldville in August 1960, stating that Lumumba's removal from power was an urgent and prime objective and that this should be a high priority of covert action.
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The Senate Church Committee's 1975 investigation found documentary evidence that the CIA had planned to assassinate Lumumba directly, including a discussion of using poison, and that a CIA officer had been dispatched to the Congo with assassination materials. Lumumba was not killed by the CIA directly, he was arrested by Congolese forces loyal to Mobutu Sesiseko, transferred to the secessionist province of Katanga and executed by Katangan authorities in January 1961.
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The Belgian government, which was also involved in the circumstances surrounding his death, formally apologised in 2002. The United States government has not issued a comparable apology, though the documentary record of American involvement is extensive. Mobutu, who replaced Lumumba and ruled the Congo, which he renamed Zaire until 1997, received decades of American diplomatic support and financial assistance despite running one of the most comprehensively corrupt governments in post-colonial African history. His personal fortune at the time of his departure from power was estimated at several billion dollars, much of it extracted from a country where the majority of the population lived in deep poverty.
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The strategic value of maintaining a stable, pro-Western government in the Congo which had significant mineral resources including uranium used in the Manhattan Project was judged to outweigh the inconvenience of Mobutu's governing style. This cost-benefit calculation, applied to dozens of client governments around the world throughout the Cold War period, produced a consistent pattern American support for governments that served American strategic interests regardless of how those governments treated their own populations, and American opposition to governments that challenged American interests regardless of how democratically they had been elected, Brazil 1964, Indonesia 1965, Chile 1973.
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These three cases, while distinct in their specifics, share a common structure. A leftward-leaning or democratic socialist government was removed from power through military coup, with documented American support ranging from encouragement and intelligence sharing to direct material assistance. and replaced by a military government that conducted widespread human rights abuses against political opponents, trade unionists, intellectuals and others considered threats to the new order. The Indonesian case deserves particular attention for the scale of what followed.
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In 1965, General Suharto used an alleged communist coup attempt as justification for seizing power from President Sukarno and conducting a purge of the Indonesian Communist Party and affiliated organizations. The killings that followed, over roughly six months between late 1965 and mid-1966, produced an estimated 500,000 to 1 million deaths, one of the largest mass killings of the 20th century. The CIA had been cultivating relationships with the Indonesian military for years and had provided lists of Communist Party members to Indonesian military intelligence that were used during the killings.
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American officials were aware of what was happening.
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U.S. Embassy personnel in Jakarta sent cables to Washington, describing the killings in detail and expressing satisfaction at the elimination of communist influence in a strategically important country.
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The cables, declassified in subsequent decades, show awareness of the scale of what was happening and an absence of concern about it that is striking to read in the original.
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Chile 1973 is perhaps the most thoroughly documented case of the pattern, partly because it produced a particularly vivid set of outcomes and partly because the subsequent investigations were unusually thorough.
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Salvador Allende, a democratic socialist, won the Chilean presidential election in September 1970. Before he was even inaugurated, the Nixon administration had authorised the CIA to attempt to prevent his taking office, first by encouraging the Chilean military to seize power, an effort that resulted in the assassination of General René Schneider. the Chilean army commander who refused to participate, and then, when Allende took office anyway, by implementing what Nixon described as making the economy scream through economic pressure designed to destabilise his government.
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The CIA worked to support opposition media, fund political opposition, and maintain relationships with Chilean military officers.
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On September 11, 1973, the Chilean military under General Augusto Pinochet staged a coup.
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Allende died in the presidential palace during the coup, officially by suicide, though questions about the precise circumstances have persisted.
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The Pinochet government subsequently detained, tortured, executed and disappeared thousands of political opponents.
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The National Stadium in Santiago was used as a detention and torture facility in the immediate aftermath of the coup. A truth commission established after Pinochet's rule ended confirmed 3,197 deaths and disappearances attributable to the military government, with many more cases of documented torture.
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Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who had been the primary architect of the Chile policy in the Nixon administration, was asked about it after declassified documents confirmed American involvement.
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His responses over the years varied between denial, minimisation and the argument that the Cold War context justified actions that might otherwise be viewed unfavourably. He was not prosecuted. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, the same year as the Chilean coup, which is a coincidence of timing that the Nobel Committee has had some occasion to reflect on. The Afghanistan case represents a different kind of intervention, one that was not designed to remove a government that already existed, but to support forces fighting against a government that the United States opposed.
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In 1979, the Soviet Union intervened militarily in Afghanistan to support a communist government that was losing a civil war against a variety of opposition groups collectively known as the Mujahideen.
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The Carter administration authorized, and the Reagan administration dramatically expanded, a covert program Operation Cyclone to arm, train, and fund the Mujahideen through a network that ran primarily through Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Agency.
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At its peak, Operation Cyclone was one of the largest covert programs in CIA history, with funding reaching approximately $630 million per year by the late 1980s. The Mujahideen received Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, which proved effective against Soviet helicopters and contributed significantly to the Soviet decision to withdraw from Afghanistan in 1989.
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The people who received those weapons and that training did not subsequently disappear.
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Several of the factions the CIA funded through Pakistan became, over the following decade, the Taliban and the networks that became Al-Qaeda. Osama bin Laden was in Afghanistan during the Soviet-Afghan War and moved in overlapping circles with CIA-supported networks, though the directness of American support to bin Laden specifically is debated by historians.
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What is not debated is that the infrastructure of training, weapons and organizational networks built by Operation Cyclone did not evaporate when the Soviets left and that the groups that inherited it went on to become the principal security problem that the United States spent the first decades of the 21st century attempting to address. The term blowback coined by a CIA analyst in an internal assessment of the Iran coup and subsequently popularized by scholar Chalmers Johnson describes this pattern. Covert operations that create consequences for which the American public is unprepared, because they were never told the operations were happening.
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Afghanistan is probably the most consequential single example in American history. Angola represents yet another variation, one that the American public was particularly poorly informed about because it coincided with a period when congressional restrictions on covert operations were most stringent.
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The Ford administration began providing covert support to UNITA, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola led by Jonas Savimbi, in 1975 as Angola moved toward independence from Portugal and the competing factions in the civil war sought external support. The CIA support was intended to counter Soviet and Cuban support for the MPLA, the movement that ultimately formed the Angolan government.
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Congress passed the Clark Amendment in 1976, cutting off the CIA's Angola program, partly in response to concerns about the program raised during Church Committee investigations. The Reagan administration later resumed support for UNITA AIR after the Clark Amendment was repealed in 1985. Savimbi received American diplomatic support and material assistance for years. His movement also used child soldiers, a fact documented by human rights organisations and available to American officials who continued to support him.
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The Angolan Civil War, which had multiple external sponsors beyond the United States, lasted until 2002 when Savimbi was killed. It produced approximately 500,000 deaths and displaced millions.
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Moving from the covert operations era to the more recent past requires addressing a different category of officially sanctioned deception, one that operated not through denied covert programs, but through public claims that were later established to be false or significantly misleading, made to justify military actions whose consequences are still unfolding.
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The Gulf of Tonkin incident of August 1964 is the earlier of the two cases in this category that deserve extended discussion.
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President Lyndon Johnson presented Congress with reports of two attacks by North Vietnamese torpedo boats on American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. the second of which occurred on the night of August 4, 1964.
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Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave the President authority to use military force in Southeast Asia without a formal declaration of war, with only two dissenting votes.
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The resolution became the legal basis for the massive escalation of American military involvement in Vietnam. The first attack on August 2 had involved actual firing on USS Maddox. The second attack on August 4 almost certainly did not happen. The Defence Department's own internal history, the Pentagon Papers, which were leaked in 1971, documented the doubts that existed within the government at the time about whether the second attack had occurred. Intercepted communications and the accounts of Navy personnel on the scene were ambiguous at best. The National Security Agency's own history, declassified in 2005, concluded that no North Vietnamese attack had occurred on August 4.
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The resolution passed on the basis of an event that did not happen was the legal foundation for a war that killed approximately 58,000 American service members and an estimated 2 million to 3 million Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian civilians and combatants. The secret bombing of Cambodia, which began in 1969 under the Nixon administration, represents a different kind of institutional deception, one directed not at foreign adversaries but at the American Congress and public.
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Nixon and Kissinger authorised the bombing of supply routes and base areas used by North Vietnamese forces in Cambodia, a neutral country, without informing Congress and while publicly maintaining that the United States was respecting Cambodian neutrality.
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The bombing was documented through a system of falsified records in which the actual targets were recorded in classified channels while official records showed operations in South Vietnam.
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The bombing ran from 1969 to 1973, dropping an estimated 500,000 tons of bombs on a country with which the United States was not at war, without congressional authorisation and without the knowledge of the American public until journalist Seymour Hersh reported on it in 1973. The bombing contributed to the destabilisation of the Cambodian government of Prince Sihanouk. who was overthrown by a military coup in 1970, and the power vacuum that followed provided conditions that facilitated the rise of the Khmer Rouge, who seized control of the country in 1975 and carried out one of the most devastating genocides of the 20th century.
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The causal relationship between the bombing and the Khmer Rouge's rise is contested among historians, but the connection is documented in the historical record and was widely discussed by specialists at the time.
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The Iraq War of 2003 is the most extensively documented case of a major military action initiated on the basis of false or seriously misleading intelligence. The Bush administration's case for invading Iraq rested primarily on two claims, that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction in violation of United Nations resolutions and that there were meaningful connections between Saddam Hussein's government and al-Qaeda.
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The first claim was based on intelligence assessments that the CIA and other agencies presented with a degree of certainty that the underlying evidence did not support, and in some cases on intelligence that had been reported by a single source whose reliability had been questioned by the agencies themselves.
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The second claim was asserted repeatedly by senior administration officials despite the absence of substantive supporting evidence and over the objections of intelligence analysts who had reviewed the relevant material.
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The Senate Intelligence Committee's Phase II report, published in 2008, concluded that the administration's public statements about the Iraq threat had gone beyond what the intelligence assessments actually supported.
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The British inquiry led by Sir John Chilcott, whose final report was published in 2016 after seven years of investigation, concluded that the UK, which participated in the invasion as the primary coalition partner, had committed to military action before the peaceful options had been exhausted and that the intelligence assessments had been presented with more certainty than the underlying evidence warranted.
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The weapons of mass destruction that were the primary public justification for the invasion were not found.
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The Iraqi civilian death toll from the invasion and the subsequent conflict that followed the collapse of the Saddam Hussein government is estimated, depending on methodology, at between 150,000 and 600,000 or more. The Islamic State, which emerged from the post-invasion power vacuum in Iraq and Syria and which at its peak controlled territory the size of the United Kingdom, is a direct consequence of the invasion and its aftermath.
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Nobody who made the decision to invade was prosecuted for anything related to that decision. The enhanced interrogation program that the CIA ran after September 11 operated on a different institutional model from the deception surrounding the war itself, but it belongs in the same chapter because it represents the same pattern of senior officials authorizing actions that violated established law and documented human rights standards. within a framework of legal opinions that were crafted to provide after-the-fact authorisation for decisions that had already been made, the programme, details of which emerged through a combination of media reporting, FOIA litigation and the Senate Intelligence Committee investigation.
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involved the detention of individuals at black sites secret facilities operated in cooperation with foreign intelligence services outside the legal framework of either american law or the geneva conventions and the use of techniques that included waterboarding which involves controlled drowning to the point of the subject believing they are dying confinement in small boxes sleep deprivation for periods documented at up to 180 hours physical strikes nudity dietary manipulation and exposure to extreme temperatures.
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The Senate Intelligence Committee's study of the program, the result of five years of investigation and review of six million pages of CIA documents, was completed in 2012. The full report ran to approximately 6,700 pages.
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The Executive Summary 525 pages was released to the public in December 2014 after a protracted negotiation between the Committee and the CIA over redactions. The full report has not been released and remains classified.
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The Executive Summary's key findings included that the enhanced interrogation techniques had not produced unique intelligence that could not have been obtained through other means, contrary to the CIA's public claims about the programme's effectiveness, and that the CIA had misled Congress, the White House and the Justice Department about what the programme involved and what it had produced. The legal opinions that authorised the programme were written by John Yoo and Jay Bybee in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel in 2002.
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The opinions argued, through a chain of reasoning that most legal scholars who subsequently reviewed them, described as seriously flawed, that the techniques authorised did not constitute torture under the legal definition and that the President had authority to order them as commander-in-chief regardless of statutory prohibitions.
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Bybee, who signed the opinions as the head of the Office of Legal Counsel, was subsequently appointed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, where he has served as a federal judge since 2003. You returned to academic life at the University of California Berkeley School of Law. The CIA officers who carried out the program and the senior officials who authorized it were not prosecuted. The Obama administration, citing a need to look forward rather than backward, declined to initiate any criminal proceedings.
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The phrase look forward rather than backward is, from the perspective of establishing accountability for documented abuses, essentially a policy decision to treat impunity as the default outcome, which is what happened.
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The Senate report documented that at least 26 of the individuals detained in the program were later determined to have been wrongly held, meaning they were not the people the CIA thought they were or had no meaningful connection to terrorism. Some of them were detained and subjected to the program's techniques for extended periods before this determination was made. The CIA's response to this finding in the documents that are available was essentially administrative. The wrongful detentions were the result of process failures rather than systemic problems.
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The people who had been detained, in some cases for months or years, and subjected to techniques that the Senate report described in clinical detail were not compensated or publicly acknowledged. Several of them attempted to seek legal remedies in American courts and were prevented from doing so on state secrets grounds, the government's position being that allowing litigation about the program would require disclosing classified information that would damage national security, which is a legal doctrine that has the practical effect of making the very existence of accountability contingent on governmental discretion.
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What connects the programmes in this chapter? The coups in Iran and Guatemala and Chile, the bombing campaigns in Cambodia, the weapons supplied to forces that became Taliban and Al-Qaeda, the invasion of Iraq on false intelligence, the black-site detention programme is not just the specific harms they produced. though those harms were documented and substantial. What connects them is the consistent pattern of decisions made with inadequate accountability to the institutions that were supposed to oversee them, justified through legal and national security frameworks that were interpreted to authorise almost anything and followed by consequences that were either unanticipated or anticipated and accepted as acceptable costs.
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The individuals who made these decisions were, in most cases, educated, credentialed professionals who believed they were serving the national interest. Some of them received awards and honours for their service. None of them went to prison.
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The accumulation of this record is what makes the next chapter's subject the domestic surveillance apparatus that monitored American citizens feel less like an aberration and more like the extension of a consistent institutional logic from foreign to domestic application. The pattern of American intervention in foreign countries during the Cold War was not limited to the high-profile cases already discussed. Political scientists William Bloom and Lindsay O'Rourke, working independently from different methodological perspectives, have documented American attempts to influence or overthrow foreign governments in a range that runs from several dozen to well over 50 cases between 1945 and the end of the Cold War.
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The variation in the count depends partly on how intervention is defined, whether it includes covert electoral interference as well as coups, whether attempted operations that did not succeed are counted alongside successful ones, but even the most conservative accounting produces a number that is difficult to reconcile with the self-image of a country that defines itself as a defender of democratic self-determination. Haiti is a case that receives less attention than Iran or Chile, but that illustrates the pattern with particular clarity over an extended time horizon.
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American military forces occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934, administering the country's finances and training a national police force. The occupation was prompted in part by concerns about German influence in the Caribbean and in part by the more straightforwardly economic interest of American financial institutions that held Haitian debt.
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The American-trained Haitian military subsequently formed the institutional backbone of the dictatorship of François Duvalier, known as Papa Doc, whose government ran from 1957 to 1971 and combined extreme personal corruption with systematic political violence against opponents. His son, Jean-Claude Duvalier, known as Baby Doc, continued the family enterprise until 1986.
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The United States maintained relations with both Duvalier throughout their rules, providing varying levels of assistance based on geopolitical calculations that consistently placed anti-communism above concern for Haitian governance.
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When Baby Doc was finally pressured to leave in 1986, he was airlifted out of the country on a United States Air Force plane, which is a level of exit assistance that most departing dictators would probably appreciate.
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Nicaragua represents another extended case study in the costs of Cold War intervention.
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The Somoza family, which had been installed in power partly through American support and had ruled Nicaragua with American backing since the 1930s, was overthrown by the Sandinista Revolution in 1979.
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The Reagan administration, viewing the Sandinistas as an unacceptable communist presence in Central America, authorized the CIA to organize, train and fund a counter-revolutionary force known as the Contras. The Contra program ran into a legal problem in 1982 when Congress passed the Boland Amendment, which prohibited the use of federal funds to overthrow the Nicaraguan government.
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The Reagan administration's response to this legal prohibition was to find alternative funding for the Contras outside congressional appropriations, an effort that eventually produced the Iran-Contra affair, in which funds from secret arms sales to Iran were diverted to the Contras in a scheme run out of the National Security Council by Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North. The scheme was exposed in 1986. Congressional hearings followed. Several officials were convicted of crimes related to the affair, Most of those convictions were overturned on appeal or the individuals involved were pardoned by President George H.W.
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Bush in 1992.
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North subsequently became a political commentator and the president of the National Rifle Association. The human cost of the Contra programme was documented by human rights organisations that investigated the conflict during the 1980s.
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Reports by America's Watch and Amnesty International documented deliberate attacks on civilian populations, including the killing of health workers, educators and agricultural cooperative members.
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The International Court of Justice, in a 1986 case brought by Nicaragua, ruled that the United States had violated international law by supporting the Contras and by mining Nicaraguan harbours and ordered the United States to pay reparations. The United States responded by withdrawing its acceptance of the court's compulsory jurisdiction and declining to recognise the ruling, which is a legal mechanism equivalent to saying that a court has no authority over you precisely because you expect it to rule against you.
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The broader pattern of Cold War intervention produced consequences that went beyond the specific countries where operations took place. The consistent American willingness to support authoritarian governments and oppose democratic ones that move too far left created a global template for what a pro-American government looked like, and it was frequently a government that maintained stability through repression rather than consent.
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The military and police forces that American advisors trained in counterinsurgency techniques at facilities like the School of the Americas, a U.S. Army training school based in Panama and later Georgia that trained military officers from across Latin America, provided graduates who subsequently participated in some of the most serious human rights abuses of the post-war period in their home countries. The School of the Americas, which was renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in 2001, following sustained public pressure, trained officers who were later identified in truth commission reports from Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras as having participated in torture, disappearances and extrajudicial killings.
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The curriculum materials used at the school, which were declassified in 1996, included manuals that addressed techniques for extracting information through coercive means.
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The Pentagon acknowledged the manuals and stated that they had been withdrawn from use and that their content violated American policy, which raised the question of how exactly they had come to be in use in the first place.
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The post-Cold War period produced its own variations on these themes. The 1990s saw American intervention in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo and Sudan, each with its own specific context and rationale.
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The 2000s brought Afghanistan and Iraq in the wake of September 11.
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The 2010s brought Libya where American air power contributed to the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi and Syria where a complex civil war involved American support for various opposition factions alongside simultaneous concerns about other American armed groups in the region.
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The specific details of each intervention differ substantially. The structural feature they share is that the decisions were made within institutional frameworks that had limited external accountability, justified through legal interpretations that authorised broad executive discretion and that produced consequences some intended, some not, that the populations of the countries involved bore more directly than the policymakers who made the decisions.
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One more episode deserves inclusion before this chapter closes because it connects the foreign intervention history to the domestic surveillance history that follows. The rendition program that operated alongside the black site detention system after September 11th involved the transfer of individuals detained by American forces or their allies to countries where they would be held and interrogated outside American legal jurisdiction.
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Some of those individuals were transferred to countries Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Syria, whose security services were known to use torture. The CIA's own Inspector General, in an internal report completed in 2004, documented that the agency had insufficient information about what was happening to rendered individuals after their transfer, which is a carefully worded way of saying that the agency knew it was delivering people to torture chambers and had decided not to look too closely at what happened next. The programme was authorised at the highest levels of the executive branch.
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Its existence was confirmed through a combination of court cases, media reporting and eventually official acknowledgement. Its architects were not prosecuted. Some of them subsequently published memoirs. The torture program described in the Senate Intelligence Committee summary produced testimony some of it, critics have argued, unreliable precisely because it was produced under extreme coercive pressure that was used in legal proceedings, briefed to congressional leaders in sessions that some of those leaders later said they had been prevented from fully discussing with colleagues or acting on, and used to build what intelligence officials described as a comprehensive picture of terrorist networks.
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The committee's finding that the enhanced techniques had not in fact produced unique intelligence beyond what was available through other means was disputed by the CIA.
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This dispute about whether torture worked became a public debate that somewhat displaced the prior question of whether it was legal or ethical, which is a reframing that those who designed the programme presumably found more comfortable. The accumulated record of foreign intervention documented in this chapter cannot be squared with the America of official self-presentation, the country that stands for freedom, democratic self-determination, and the rule of law in international affairs. It can, however, be squared with a different but equally real America.
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the America of institutional interests, strategic calculations, and the consistent prioritization of perceived national advantage over the rights and welfare of people in other countries. Both Americas exist in the documentary record. The question of which one is more representative is not a question history can answer. It is a question that requires judgment.
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But that judgment should be informed by the full record, not just the founding documents and the speeches, but the cables and the operational plans and the Senate committee findings and the truth commission reports. All of it is part of the picture, and ignoring the less flattering parts does not make them less real. It just makes the picture less accurate.
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The previous chapter closed with a note about the extension of institutional logic from foreign to domestic application.
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That extension has a very specific history and a very specific starting point, and that starting point is a man named John Edgar Hoover, who ran the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 1924 until his death in 1972-48 years and who built over that span what was arguably the most comprehensive domestic surveillance apparatus in the democratic world, operating largely without statutory authority, with minimal congressional oversight and with a personal philosophy about the relationship between power and information that would have made the architects of any authoritarian system nod in recognition.
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Hoover was appointed acting director of the Bureau of Investigation in 1924, at the age of 29, following a scandal in which his predecessor's bureau had been caught, conducting politically motivated investigations and compiling dossiers on political opponents of the Harding administration.
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The irony of this origin story is considerable. Hoover was brought in to clean up a bureau that had been abusing its power for political purposes. He proceeded to build something substantially more capable of doing exactly that. He served under eight presidents. None of them could fire him, because all of them were afraid of what he might release from the files he had been building on them. That is not a metaphor or an inference. It is documented. Hoover's practice of collecting personal information affairs, financial irregularities, sexual behavior, personal indiscretions on politicians, judges, military officers, and members of the executive branch was known to Washington insiders throughout his tenure.
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The information was never released. It did not need to be. The knowledge that Hoover had it was sufficient.
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Multiple accounts from presidents and senior officials of the period describe conversations in which the implicit threat of Hoover's files was understood to be present without being articulated.
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This is how blackmail works at its most efficient. The threat of release is more valuable than actual release because release ends the leverage while the threat sustains it indefinitely.
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Hoover sustained it for nearly five decades. The formal surveillance programmes that Hoover ran included the Security Index, a list of individuals to be detained in the event of a national emergency that at its peak contained tens of thousands of names. He ran the Responsibilities programme through which derogatory information about teachers, professors and civil servants was passed anonymously to employers and government agencies to facilitate their dismissal without legal process.
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He ran a programme targeting civil rights organisations as far back as the 1940s on the theory that communist influence was present in the civil rights movement and that monitoring the movement was therefore a matter of national security, a rationale that proved elastic enough to justify surveilling anyone who questioned the racial status quo. The program that most directly illustrates the character of what Hoover built is COINTELPRO, the counterintelligence program, which ran officially from 1956 to 1971 and which was exposed in March 1971 when a group of activists who called themselves the Citizens Commission to investigate the FBI broke into the FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, removed several hundred documents and mailed them to journalists.
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The New York Times and The Washington Post initially declined to publish the documents. The Los Angeles Times and several smaller publications did. What the documents revealed was a program that went far beyond surveillance into active disruption, the deliberate use of FBI resources to destroy organizations and individuals that Hoover had decided were threats to what he described as the American way of life. COINTELPRO's targets included the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers' Party, white supremacist groups, the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, the New Left broadly defined, and virtually every significant civil rights organization of the 1950s and 1960s.
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The techniques used included anonymous letters designed to create suspicion and conflict within target organisations, forged correspondence attributed to movement leaders, the planting of informants who sometimes became active provocateurs encouraging illegal activity, the use of FBI contacts in the news media to plant negative stories, the notification of employers and landlords about the political activities of targets to encourage job loss and eviction, and in several documented cases, actions that contributed to violence between rival groups.
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The most thoroughly documented COINTELPRO operation against an individual was the campaign against Martin Luther King Jr.
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Hoover had been suspicious of King for years, partly because of King's associations with individuals who had Communist Party connections, and partly because King represented a form of mass political mobilisation that Hoover found intrinsically threatening.
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After King delivered his speech at the March on Washington in August 1963, Hoover reportedly described him as the most dangerous Negro in America, a phrase documented in FBI memoranda, and authorised an escalating programme of surveillance and harassment. King's hotel rooms were bugged, his phone was tapped, his personal life was monitored with particular attention to evidence of extramarital affairs, which the FBI documented extensively and used as the basis for a particularly remarkable piece of correspondence sent to King in November 1964, shortly after he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
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The letter, which was sent anonymously along with recordings that the FBI had made of King's private conversations, described King in extremely hostile terms and suggested that he had only one option available to prevent public exposure of the recordings.
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The option suggested was suicide. The letter gave King a deadline of 34 days. The letter was written by FBI agent William Sullivan under the direction of Hoover's deputy and its origin in the FBI was later confirmed through congressional investigation and declassified documents.
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Coretta Scott King, who survived her husband, described learning about the letter as one of the most disturbing revelations of the post-assassination period.
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The letter is reproduced in the historical record and has been the subject of extensive scholarly and journalistic analysis. It is a government document proposing that a Nobel Peace Prize laureate kill himself. That sentence should not require additional commentary, though it consistently seems to when people encounter it for the first time.
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The Church Committee investigation in 1975 examined COINTELPRO in detail and produced findings that described the program as a sophisticated vigilante operation directed at American citizens for their political beliefs, speech and associations.
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The committee documented that COINTELPRO operations had contributed to the murder of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, who was killed in a Chicago police raid in December 1969 in circumstances that investigation showed had been facilitated by an FBI informant who had provided the police with a floor plan of Hampton's apartment. Hampton was 21 years old. He was shot while asleep. A civil lawsuit filed by his family was settled in 1982, with the federal government, the city of Chicago and Cook County paying a combined $1.85 million without admitting liability.
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No criminal charges were ever brought in connection with his death.
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The Church Committee's investigation produced substantial reforms in theory, including the creation of Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committees and the prohibition of certain activities by executive order.
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In practice, the institutional culture that had produced COINTELPRO did not simply evaporate. the FBI continued to monitor political organisations through the following decades, with the targets shifting from civil rights and anti-war groups to environmental activists, animal rights organisations and anti-globalisation movements in the 1990s and 2000s. Documents obtained through FOIA requests by journalists and advocacy groups documented that the FBI had classified the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front as the top domestic terrorist threats in the United States in the early 2000s organisations that had damaged property but had not killed anyone, while simultaneously paying less systematic attention to right-wing extremist networks that had produced actual mass casualties.
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This prioritisation was the subject of congressional criticism and subsequent revision, though the revision came after events that its critics argued the earlier prioritisation had contributed to.
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The domestic surveillance history took a qualitative leap in scope after September 11, 2001.
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The legal and institutional changes made in the immediate aftermath of the attacks the USA Patriot Act, expanded FISA court authority, new rules governing information sharing between intelligence and law enforcement agencies, created a framework within which the National Security Agency, which had previously been limited by law to foreign intelligence collection, expanded its collection activities to encompass domestic communications on a scale that was not publicly known until June 2013.
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edward snowden was a contractor working for the nsa who after years of watching what he described as an increasingly expansive surveillance architecture being built in secret made copies of a substantial volume of classified documents and provided them to journalists glenn greenwald and laura poitress The documents were published beginning in June 2013, first in The Guardian and then in The Washington Post and subsequently in other publications. What the documents revealed was a surveillance infrastructure of genuinely remarkable scope. The NSA was collecting the metadata of essentially all telephone calls made in the United States, not the content of the calls, but the records of who called whom, when, for how long, and from what location.
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The programme, operating under a classified interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, had been authorised by the FISA Court in a series of secret orders. The existence of the programme had not been disclosed to the American public. Several members of Congress, including Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, had been briefed on it in classified settings and had attempted to warn the public that a secret surveillance programme existed that they would be troubled by if they knew about it without being legally able to say what it was. The NSA's PRISM program, also documented by the Snowden Files, involved the collection of internet communications data emails, video, photos, stored data, voice chats, file transfers, social networking data from major American technology companies, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and others, under legal authorities that the companies had been compelled by court order to comply with and had been prohibited from disclosing.
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The degree of voluntary versus compelled cooperation by the companies was disputed, but the existence of the data collection and its scope were confirmed. Senator Wyden asked Director of National Intelligence James Clapper in a public Senate hearing in March 2013 whether the NSA collected any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans. Clapper answered, not wittingly.
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The Snowden documents revealed that this answer was false. The metadata collection programme was exactly the kind of data collection Whedon had been asking about. Clapper subsequently said he had given the least untruthful answer he could think of, which is a phrase that has entered a certain kind of public record as a memorable formulation for deliberate deception.
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He was not prosecuted for lying to Congress. He continued to serve as Director of National Intelligence until 2017. The legal and policy debate that followed the Snowden disclosures produced some genuine changes.
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A federal appeals court ruled in 2015 that the bulk telephone metadata collection programme had not been authorised by the Patriot Act's Section 215, despite the secret FISA court interpretation that had been used to justify it.
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The USA Freedom Act, passed in 2015, imposed some restrictions on the bulk collection programme. The fundamental architecture of post-September 11th surveillance, the legal authorities, the technical capabilities, the cooperative relationships with technology companies was modified at the edges but not dismantled. Snowden, who had fled to Hong Kong when the documents were published and subsequently travelled to Russia when his passport was revoked, remained in Russia, living in conditions that he is described as not ideal but survivable, which is the kind of understatement that comes naturally to someone weighing the alternative.
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The surveillance architecture built in the post-September 11th period rested on a classified legal framework that American citizens were not permitted to know about.
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The FISA Court, which operates in secret and hears only the government's arguments, issued opinions interpreting the surveillance statutes in ways that the statute's authors did not intend and that legal scholars uniformly described as unmoored from the statutory text.
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The court, which almost never denies government requests, functioned less as a meaningful check on executive authority and more as an institutional legitimising mechanism, a way of saying that a court had reviewed the programme and found it acceptable, without disclosing that the court operated in secret, had no adversarial process and had developed an interpretation of the law that would be unrecognisable to the legislators who had passed it.
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The FBI's post-September 11 domestic surveillance expansion included the substantial use of national security letters, administrative subpoenas that the FBI could issue without court approval to obtain records from businesses, and that came with permanent gag orders prohibiting the recipients from disclosing that they had received them. The Patriot Act dramatically expanded the FBI's authority to issue NSLs, and the Inspector General of the Justice Department found in 2007 that the Bureau had issued approximately 47,000 NSLs in 2005 alone, in many cases with inadequate internal oversight and in some cases for information that was not related to terrorism investigations.
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Recipients of NSLs had very limited ability to challenge them legally because the gag order prevented them from consulting with anyone who might advise them of their legal options.
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John Denver appears in the FBI's records as mentioned in the setup for this chapter because Hoover's FBI maintained files on entertainers, writers, musicians and public figures who expressed political views the Bureau found objectionable. Denver had made public statements supportive of clean energy and environmentalism that apparently warranted documentation. He was in good company. The FBI maintained files on Albert Einstein, who was monitored for years as a suspected communist sympathiser. John Lennon was surveilled extensively during the Nixon period, with the Nixon administration reportedly exploring whether Lennon could be deported on the basis of a marijuana conviction to prevent him from participating in anti-Vietnam War activities.
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A federal judge eventually found in 1975 that the deportation proceedings had been politically motivated.
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Ernest Hemingway, toward the end of his life, told friends and his physician that he was being followed and that his phone was tapped. His physician attributed this to paranoid delusion brought on by depression and the electroconvulsive therapy he had received.
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After Hoover's death and the subsequent declassification of FBI records, Hemingway's file was found. He had been under surveillance. His physician later expressed regret for having dismissed his concerns. The scale of COINTELPRO's domestic reach and the scale of the post-September 11th surveillance architecture share a feature that distinguishes them from most of the programs discussed in previous chapters.
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they were directed not primarily at marginalised populations with limited political power, but at the political process itself.
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When the FBI surveils and disrupts labour unions, civil rights organisations, anti-war movements and environmental groups, it is not simply monitoring individual people, it is intervening in the political ecosystem, tilting the playing field of democratic participation in favour of established power and against organised challenges to it. When the NSA collects the communications metadata of the entire population, it creates a database that could, in the hands of a sufficiently motivated and sufficiently unscrupulous government, be used to identify every person who had ever associated with a political organization.
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attended a protest, communicated with a journalist, or contacted an advocacy group, the architecture exists. What prevents its use for those purposes is not a technical constraint but a political one, the continued functioning of the democratic norms and legal structures that limit what the government can do with information it collects. Those norms and structures are not self-enforcing. They require ongoing maintenance. And the history documented in this chapter suggests that when institutional interests conflict with those norms, the norms do not always win.
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The surveillance state that Snowden documented in 2013 was not a surprise to everyone.
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Civil liberties organisations, cryptographers, some technologists and members of Congress who had been briefed in classified settings had been raising concerns for years about what was being built in the post-September 11th environment. What Snowden provided was documentation-specific programmes, specific capabilities, specific legal interpretations that made it impossible for the government to maintain the public position that the concerns were hypothetical or exaggerated. The documentation did not, on its own, change policy in fundamental ways.
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It changed the public conversation, which changed the political constraints on policy, which produced some modifications. Whether those modifications were proportionate to what the documentation revealed depends on your assessment of what it revealed, and people have continued to disagree about that.
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the United States incarcerates more people than any other country in the world. This is not a contested claim. It is a documented fact. The United States has approximately 5% of the world's population and approximately 20 to 25% of its incarcerated population, depending on which measure is used and when it is taken.
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The peak incarceration rate, reached around 2008, was approximately 760 people per 100,000 a figure that exceeded every country in the world, and that was, at its peak, higher than the incarceration rates of the Soviet Union at the height of the Gulag system. That comparison requires some methodological care, the Gulag and the American prison system are very different institutions with very different histories, but as a raw number of incarcerated people per capita in a supposedly free society, it is a figure that invites serious examination of how it came to exist.
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The modern mass incarceration system was built primarily between 1970 and 2000 through a specific set of policy decisions at the federal and state levels. The population of people incarcerated in American prisons and jails in 1970 was approximately 200,000. By 2008, it was approximately 2.3 million.
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This is not a natural demographic phenomenon. It is the direct product of legislative choices about what behaviours to criminalise, how severely to punish them and how much discretion to give judges in sentencing.
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The war on drugs, declared by the Nixon administration in 1971 and escalated dramatically under the Reagan administration in the 1980s, was the single most significant driver of incarceration growth.
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Federal and state mandatory minimum sentences for drug offences created a system in which judges had no discretion to consider individual circumstances Possession of a specified quantity of a controlled substance triggered an automatic minimum sentence regardless of the defendant's history, role in a larger organisation or any other mitigating factor. The 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act established sentencing disparities between crack cocaine and powder cocaine offences that had dramatic racial effects.
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5 grams of crack cocaine triggered the same mandatory minimum sentence as 500 grams of powder cocaine, a 100 to 1 disparity. Crack cocaine was used predominantly in black communities. Powder cocaine was used more commonly in white communities.
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The demographic effect of this sentencing disparity was immediate and large, and it was not invisible to the legislators who passed it.
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The disparity was reduced but not eliminated by the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, which changed the ratio to 18 to 1.
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The First Step Act of 2018 applied the new ratio retroactively, resulting in the release of some individuals who had been serving sentences based on the original disparity. The disparity is still not zero. Mandatory minimum sentencing – truth in sentencing laws that required offenders to serve a minimum percentage of their sentence before parole eligibility. Three strikes laws that imposed life sentences for a third felony conviction, regardless of its severity, and the elimination of parole in the federal system, and many states collectively created a sentencing structure that pushed incarcerated populations steadily upward, even as crime rates, which had peaked in the early 1990s, began a long decline.
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The incarcerated population continued to grow for a decade after crime rates started falling. The system, once built, had its own institutional momentum. The private prison industry, which began to grow in the 1980s as states and counties looked for ways to manage rapidly expanding incarcerated populations without building new public facilities, created an economic interest in maintaining or expanding incarceration.
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Companies like Corrections Corporation of America and the GEO Group entered into contracts with state and federal governments to house inmates, generating profits from the per diem payments received for each incarcerated person.
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These companies lobbied for policies' mandatory minimums, longer sentences, stricter immigration enforcement that increased the population of potential customers. They contributed to political campaigns of legislators who supported tough-on-crime policies. They employed lobbyists at the state and federal level. The conflict of interest between an industry that profits from incarceration and the democratic process that determines incarceration policy is documented in lobbying records, campaign finance disclosures and investigative journalism.
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It was not a secret. It was simply a normal feature of the political landscape for several decades. The racial distribution of the incarcerated population is one of the most extensively documented features of American criminal justice.
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Black Americans are incarcerated at approximately five times the rate of white Americans. This disparity exists at every level of the criminal justice system, in stops and searches by police, in arrests, in charging decisions by prosecutors, in bail decisions, in conviction rates, in sentencing, and in parole and probation revocation.
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At each step, discretionary decisions by individual actors in the system produce outcomes that are racially differentiated in ways that cannot be explained by differential rates of actual criminal behaviour which, when measured through methods that do not rely on arrests and convictions, show substantially smaller racial differences than the incarceration statistics suggest. Michelle Alexander's 2010 book The New Jim Crow made the argument that mass incarceration functioned as a system of racialized social control that performed many of the same functions in the post-civil rights era that Jim Crow laws had performed in the preceding century.
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The argument was not that the systems were legally identical, but that they produced comparable outcomes. The permanent marginalization of black men from civic and economic life through the mechanisms of the criminal legal system rather than through explicit racial statutes. Conviction of a felony in the United States results in collateral consequences, loss of voting rights in many states, permanent exclusion from public housing, ineligibility for food stamps, barriers to employment and professional licensing that function as a kind of secondary punishment extending well beyond the period of incarceration.
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These collateral consequences apply regardless of whether the individual committed a violent offence or a non-violent drug possession offence. and they fall with particular weight on the communities already most affected by the racial disparities in the system.
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The school-to-prison pipeline is a term used by researchers and advocates to describe the set of policies and practices zero-tolerance disciplinary rules, police officers stationed in schools, criminalization of behaviors previously handled through school disciplinary processes that have produced a pattern of disproportionate suspension, expulsion, and arrest of black and Latino students in comparison to white students for comparable behavior.
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The statistical documentation of this pattern is extensive. The American Civil Liberties Union, the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, and multiple academic research centres have produced consistent findings showing that black students are three times more likely to be suspended or expelled than white students for the same behaviours, and that once a student has been suspended or expelled their probability of subsequent contact with the criminal justice system increases significantly.
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The school-to-prison pipeline is not a metaphor. It is a documented set of institutional practices with measurable outcomes. The incarceration of women, which receives less public attention than the incarceration of men, has grown even faster in percentage terms since the 1970s. The female incarcerated population in the United States grew by approximately 700% between 1980 and 2019.
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the majority of incarcerated women are serving sentences for non-violent offences, many of them drug-related.
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A disproportionate share of incarcerated women are mothers of minor children, and the separation of children from incarcerated parents produces documented effects on child development, educational outcomes, and subsequent involvement in the criminal justice system creating a generational transmission of incarceration's consequences that the system's design does not account for. The private prison contracts that several states and the federal government operate contain provisions that have attracted particular attention from critics – minimum occupancy guarantees, sometimes called lock-up quotas, that require the contracting government to keep the private facility at a minimum percentage of capacity, typically between 80% and 90%, or pay the private operator for the unused beds.
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These provisions create a financial incentive for the government to maintain or increase incarcerated populations, and they transfer financial risk from the private operator to the public in a way that aligns the economic interests of the contract with maximum incarceration.
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The existence of such provisions in contracts between governments and private prison operators has been documented by a series of investigative reports, including a 2013 study by In the Public Interest that analysed contracts from 62 facilities and found that approximately two-thirds contained some form of occupancy guarantee.
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The bail system, which operates as the primary mechanism for determining whether a person accused of a crime will be held in custody or released while their case proceeds through the courts, produces outcomes that are heavily correlated with wealth rather than public safety. A person who can afford bail is released while their case is pending. A person who cannot afford bail remains in jail, sometimes for months or years before their case is resolved.
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Incarceration pending trial creates powerful incentives to accept a plea deal regardless of guilt, because a plea deal typically means release, while going to trial means remaining incarcerated for the duration, which can be far longer than the sentence that would result from a guilty plea.
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Studies of the pretrial detention system have documented that a substantial percentage of people who are ultimately not convicted of any crime spend time in jail awaiting the resolution of their cases.
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The racial and economic disparities in the bail system mirror and amplify the disparities in the broader incarceration system. The political economy of mass incarceration, the way in which the system sustains itself through the interests of the various actors who benefit from its continuation, is one of the more analytically interesting aspects of this history, because it explains why the system has been difficult to reform despite broad public awareness of its costs and dysfunctions.
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prison guards, unions, private prison corporations, rural communities whose local economies depend on prison employment, prosecutors whose professional advancement is measured in convictions and sentences, politicians who have built careers on tough-on-crime credentials. All of these actors have interests that are served by the continued functioning of the system as currently designed. The interests of the people who are most harmed by the system, the incarcerated, their families and their communities, are the interests that are most poorly represented in the political process that governs the system's design.
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This is not an accident. It is a structural feature of a system that strips political rights, including voting rights in many states, from exactly the population most affected by its operation.
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The most consequential reform efforts of recent years have focused on mandatory minimums, bail reform, drug policy and the restoration of voting rights to formerly incarcerated people. Progress has been uneven and frequently contested. Several states have enacted significant reforms. The Federal First Step Act of 2018 produced genuine, if modest, changes at the federal level. The long-term trend toward declining incarceration that began around 2008 continued through 2019 then was disrupted by the dynamics of the pandemic year and has resumed in subsequent years.
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Whether the current trajectory represents a fundamental rethinking of the mass incarceration experiment of the late 20th century or a modest correction within a largely unchanged system is a question that the next decade's policy choices will answer.
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What is already answered by the historical and empirical record is how the system was built and who bears its costs. Those questions have documentary answers. The next chapter turns to the people who found those answers and tried to tell the public about them and to what the system did to them for their trouble. The previous chapter ended with a question about who bears the costs of mass incarceration and who bears the costs of the surveillance state. This chapter is about a different category of person, one who, having seen the gap between what the system claimed to be doing and what it was actually doing, made the decision to tell someone outside the system about it.
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These people are called whistleblowers, which is a neutral enough term that somewhat obscures what the experience actually involves. A more accurate term might be people who accepted catastrophic personal consequences in exchange for the possibility that the public would learn something it had a right to know. The ratio of personal cost to public benefit in most of these cases is, when you look at it directly, uncomfortable to contemplate.
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There is a structural reason why whistleblowers tend to be treated the way the American legal and institutional system treats them, and it is worth stating clearly before getting into the individual cases. Secrecy, as discussed in earlier chapters, is not just a mechanism for keeping information from foreign adversaries. It is also a mechanism for keeping information from the public and from the oversight institution's Congress, the courts, that are supposed to constrain what the executive branch does. When someone inside the system decides to take information out of that classified envelope and put it into public view, they are not just violating an administrative rule about document handling, they are disrupting a power arrangement.
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They are transferring information from an environment in which a small number of people control it to an environment in which many people can act on it. That transfer threatens institutional interests. And institutions, when their interests are threatened, tend to respond with whatever tools they have available. The tools available to the United States government include the Espionage Act of 1917, which was written to prosecute spies passing secrets to foreign enemies and which has been used, with increasing frequency since 2009, to prosecute people who gave information to journalists and the American public.
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Daniel Ellsberg had worked as a military analyst at the RAND Corporation and had served in Vietnam. He had seen, from inside the system, the gap between what the government was telling the public about the war and what the classified record actually showed. The classified record he had access to was a study commissioned by Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara, 47 volumes of internal government history documenting American policy in Vietnam from the Truman administration through 1967.
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The study showed, among many other things, that multiple administrations had systematically misled Congress and the public about the war's progress, that the likelihood of military success had been assessed internally as low while the public was being told the opposite, and that decisions to escalate had been made with full knowledge that they were unlikely to achieve their stated objectives.
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Ellsberg made copies of the study and, after years of attempting to get members of Congress to act on the information, provided it to New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan, who began publishing it in June 1971. The Nixon administration obtained a prior restraint order and injunction preventing the Times from publishing further, which the Supreme Court overturned in a landmark press freedom decision 15 days after publication began.
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The Washington Post had by then also obtained the documents and began publishing as well. Nixon's Justice Department charged Ellsberg with espionage, theft and conspiracy, seeking a sentence of 115 years. The case against Ellsberg collapsed in 1973 when it emerged that the Nixon administration had sent a team of operatives, the same group, that would later break into the Watergate Hotel to burglarize the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist, seeking personal information that could be used to discredit him. The judge dismissed the charges on grounds of government misconduct.
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Ellsberg was never convicted.
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He lived until 2023 and in the final year of his life, after being diagnosed with terminal cancer, he publicly released additional classified documents and said he had no regrets about what he had done in 1971. He was 92. He had spent more than 50 years being willing to answer questions about a decision he made before most of the people asking those questions were born.
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The Pentagon Papers case established the principle, at least in theory, that the government could not use prior restraint to prevent the press from publishing classified information, and that the public interest in knowing the documented truth about government conduct could outweigh the classification system. What it did not establish, because Ellsberg was not convicted, was any clear legal protection for the people who provided that information to the press.
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That legal gap remained, and the government's use of the Espionage Act against whistleblowers in subsequent decades demonstrated how significant that gap was. Gary Webb was not a government insider. He was a staff reporter at the San Jose Mercury News who, in 1996, published a three-part investigative series called Dark Alliance that documented connections between the CIA-supported contra networks in Nicaragua and crack cocaine distribution networks in Los Angeles during the 1980s.
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The series argued, based on court records, DEA files and interviews with participants, that CIA-connected figures had facilitated the import of cocaine into the United States and that the proceeds had funded contra operations and that the epidemic of crack cocaine that had devastated black urban communities in the 1980s had been connected to these networks.
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The Mercury News published the series with an interactive website, one of the earliest uses of the internet, by a major newspaper for investigative journalism, and it reached an enormous audience. The response from the major American newspapers was not to investigate Webb's claims and determine whether they were accurate. It was to investigate Webb and determine whether his work was flawed. The New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times each published lengthy pieces questioning Webb's methodology, his sourcing and his conclusions.
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The CIA released its own review, which acknowledged that agency-connected individuals had in fact been involved in drug trafficking but maintained that the CIA had not been operationally responsible and had not looked the other way systematically.
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The Mercury News, under pressure from its parent company, published a partial retraction of some of Webb's framing and effectively distanced itself from the work.
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Webb left the paper. A subsequent investigation by the CIA's own Inspector General, whose report was released in 1998, found that the CIA had in fact been aware of cocaine trafficking by contra-connected individuals and had failed to report it to the Justice Department as required by law and that this had occurred with knowledge at senior levels of the agency.
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The report confirmed many of the core elements of what Webb had reported. It received considerably less coverage than the original campaign to discredit Webb's work, in part because the major newspapers that had led that campaign were not particularly eager to revisit the question of whether they had been right.
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Webb, who had been essentially driven from his career in mainstream journalism, worked at a small alternative newspaper in Sacramento.
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In December 2004, he died from two gunshot wounds to the head. The coroner ruled it a suicide. His death was widely reported as a suicide. The specific mechanics of a self-inflicted death by two gunshot wounds to the head have been noted by various commentators as unusual, though the coroner's determination has not been formally challenged.
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his family accepted the ruling. His story was made into a 2014 film called Kill the Messenger, starring Jeremy Renner, which is probably the most appropriate memorial available to a journalist who was destroyed for being approximately right about something important. Chelsea Manning was an army intelligence analyst who had access to a wide range of classified military and diplomatic materials.
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In 2010, Manning provided a substantial volume of these materials to WikiLeaks, the disclosure organisation founded by Julian Assange.
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The release materials included the collateral murder video footage from an Apache helicopter gunship showing the killing of a group of people in Baghdad in 2007, including two Reuters journalists and a subsequent attack on a van that came to assist the wounded, killing two men and wounding two children. The video had been sought by Reuters through Freedom of Information Act requests for three years. The Army had denied the requests. The Army's original report on the incident had described the people killed as insurgents. The other materials released by Manning included hundreds of thousands of State Department diplomatic cables, Iraq war logs and Afghanistan war logs that provided detailed ground-level accounts of the conflicts, including documentation of civilian casualties that had not been reported publicly.
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evidence of a directive from the State Department to collect biometric and personal data on United Nations officials, and numerous accounts of interactions with foreign governments that were, as one diplomat elegantly described them after the release, somewhat awkward to have in the public domain.
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Manning was arrested in May 2010, held in military detention at Quantico, Virginia, where the conditions of her confinement, which included extended periods of solitary isolation, mandatory nudity at certain times, and sleep disruption, were described by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture as cruel, inhuman, and degrading. The State Department's own spokesman, Philip Crowley, described Manning's treatment as ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid in a public forum. He resigned three days later.
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Manning was convicted of espionage and other charges in 2013 and sentenced to 35 years in a military prison.
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President Obama commuted her sentence in January 2017 and she was released after serving approximately seven years.
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The sentence she received 35 years was the longest ever imposed in an American leak case at the time. The material she leaked included documentation of events that the government had been actively concealing from the public and from international bodies.
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Edward Snowden's story has been discussed in the preceding chapter in the context of what his disclosures revealed about NSA surveillance programs. What deserves attention here is the personal dimension what happened to him as a result of what he did and what his situation represents as a case study in the government's treatment of people who reveal classified programs to the public. Snowden was a contractor with top-secret clearance who had worked for both the CIA and NSA.
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He made copies of documents describing surveillance programs that he believed violated the constitutional rights of American citizens.
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He provided those documents to journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras in Hong Kong in June 2013.
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He was charged under the Espionage Act with theft of government property, unauthorised communication of national defence information, and willful communication of classified intelligence information. These charges carry potential sentences in the multiple decades. He was in Hong Kong when the charges were filed. His passport was revoked while he was in transit to Ecuador. He has lived in Russia since 2013. The legal framework under which Snowden was charged does not permit a public interest defence. The Espionage Act, as currently interpreted, does not allow a defendant to argue that the information they disclosed served the public interest, that it revealed illegal government conduct, or that the harm from disclosure was outweighed by the benefit of public knowledge.
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The only question the law asks is whether you had authorisation to disclose the information. If you did not, the legal consequence is the same regardless of what the information showed, who knew about it, or what happened after it was made public. This is a feature of the law that legal scholars have criticized extensively on First Amendment grounds and that the government has defended on the grounds that allowing a public interest defense would create an unworkable system in which any leaker could argue that their particular disclosure was justified. Both positions have merit.
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The practical consequence in Snowden's case is that he cannot return to the United States without facing decades in federal prison for revealing that the government was conducting mass surveillance of its own citizens in a program that a federal court later found was illegal. Julian Assange is a figure adjacent to the whistleblower story whose case has elements that are both more and less straightforward than the others in this chapter. Assange is Australian, not American. He did not leak the documents himself, he published documents provided by others. WikiLeaks, the organisation he founded, operated on the editorial principle that the public had a right to information about the activities of powerful institutions and that the classification system was primarily a tool of power.
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rather than a genuine protection of national security. Whether Assange is a journalist, a publisher or a different kind of actor is a question that the American and British legal systems have been addressing for years. He spent seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, having been granted asylum there after British courts authorised his extradition to Sweden on separate allegations. He spent five further years in Belmarsh Prison in the United Kingdom, while the United States sought his extradition on espionage charges related to the WikiLeaks publications. He reached a plea agreement with the United States government in 2024 and was released, returning to Australia.
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The plea agreement represented a resolution that satisfied almost nobody who had followed the case, which is perhaps the most accurate possible description of what legal resolutions to cases of this complexity tend to look like. Thomas Drake had worked as a senior executive at the NSA and had attempted to raise concerns about NSA surveillance programs through official channels through his chain of command, through the NSA Inspector General and through Congressional Oversight Committees. He found that these channels did not produce results. He subsequently provided unclassified information to a journalist at the Baltimore Sun.
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He was charged under the Espionage Act in 2010, facing potential decades in prison.
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The government's case collapsed when a judge ruled that key evidence could not be used, and Drake pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor charge of exceeding his authorised use of a government computer. He received a sentence of community service and probation. He had spent four years under indictment, had lost his career and most of his financial resources defending himself, and had watched his house be searched by FBI agents who took computers and documents. He now works at an Apple store in Washington, D.C. This is not a footnote added for ironic effect.
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It is what happened to him.
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Jeffrey Sterling was a former CIA officer who provided information to journalist James Risen about a classified operation codenamed Operation Merlin in which the CIA had given a Russian defector flawed nuclear weapon design documents to pass to Iran, apparently in an attempt to slow Iran's nuclear program.
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The operation, as Risen described it in his 2006 book State of War, had gone wrong in ways that might have actually helped Iran's nuclear programme rather than impeding it, which is not the kind of operational outcome that intelligence agencies typically advertise. Stirling was convicted of espionage in 2015 and sentenced to three and a half years in prison.
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Risen was subpoenaed to testify about his sources and refused for years, facing contempt charges. The Justice Department ultimately declined to pursue the subpoena. Sterling, who is black, became the subject of commentary about the racial dimensions of leak prosecutions, the observation being that the government's record of prosecuting leakers was not distributed uniformly across the population of people who had provided information to journalists. and that black and non-white employees of intelligence agencies appeared in the prosecution's statistics at higher rates than their representation in the workforce would predict.
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Reality Winner was a 25-year-old Air Force veteran working as a contractor for the NSA when she printed a classified report documenting Russian interference in the 2016 American elections and mailed it to The Intercept, a news organization founded in part by Glenn Greenwald.
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The report provided evidence that Russian military intelligence had targeted American voting infrastructure before the 2016 election, which was information the American public clearly had an interest in knowing.
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Winner was identified through forensic analysis of the document the NSA uses in visible microdots embedded in printed documents that encode the printer's serial number and the date and time of printing, which allowed investigators to identify the specific printer that had produced the document and narrow the list of people who had access to it.
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Winner was charged under the Espionage Act and sentenced in 2018 to five years and three months in federal prison at the time, the longest sentence ever imposed in a federal case involving unauthorised disclosure of government information to the media. She served the full term. The Russian interference program she had documented was subsequently discussed in multiple congressional reports, special counsel investigations and news articles, all of which drew on various sources to establish something that Winner had already known and had decided people should be told.
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What connects all of these cases is not simply that the individuals were punished. it is the specific character of the punishment and what it was designed to accomplish the espionage act charges the lengthy sentences the pre-trial detention conditions the professional destruction these consequences were not calibrated to the actual damage caused by the disclosures which in most cases has proven difficult to specify in concrete terms despite government claims that damage was severe they were calibrated to deter The message the system sends to anyone inside a classified programme who is considering disclosure is not subtle.
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What happened to Chelsea Manning can happen to you. What happened to Reality Winner can happen to you. What happened to Gary Webb, though it happened to him through institutional rather than legal mechanisms, can happen to you. The sentence is not primarily about the individual. It is about the population of people who have not yet decided whether to disclose what they know.
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The irony that runs through this chapter, and it is an irony the historical record makes difficult to avoid, is that most of the information in this entire video ultimately became available because someone violated a law or a rule to make it public. The Tuskegee study was exposed because a Public Health Service employee named Peter Buxton leaked it to a journalist after years of being ignored through official channels.
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MKUltra became partially known because a filing error left documents in a records facility that was not purged and because a Senate investigation followed the initial media reports. The Pentagon Papers were published because Daniel Ellsberg made copies and gave them to the press.
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COINTELPRO became known because a group of activists broke into an FBI office. The NSA's bulk collection programs became known because Edward Snowden copied files and gave them to journalists. The pattern is consistent and it is not coincidental.
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It is the structural consequence of a classification system that has no reliable internal mechanism for distinguishing secrets that protect national security from secrets that protect institutional interests combined with oversight mechanisms that are either inadequate or themselves classified and accountability mechanisms that are routinely waived when the people who would be held accountable are sufficiently powerful.
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This is the architecture of official secrecy, and it has a predictable outcome. The most important information about what the government is doing tends to become public not through the official channels designed for oversight and accountability, but through people who accept personal ruin in exchange for public knowledge. The official channels exist, they are simply not reliable enough to be the only mechanism and the history of the programmes in this video is largely the history of what happens when those channels fail and someone decides to use an unofficial one instead.
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There is one final case worth mentioning before this chapter closes because it illuminates a particular dimension of how the system treats disclosure that the other cases do not cover as directly.
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John Kiriakou was a CIA officer who publicly confirmed in 2007 that the CIA had used waterboarding as an interrogation technique. He was the first current or former CIA employee to confirm this publicly.
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The Bush administration had been maintaining careful ambiguity about what enhanced interrogation techniques had actually been used. Kiriakou's confirmation was the first official acknowledgement that waterboarding had occurred He was later charged under the Espionage Act not primarily for confirming the existence of waterboarding, but for disclosing the name of a covert officer in a separate communication. He pleaded guilty and served approximately two and a half years in federal prison. The people who had authorised and conducted the waterboarding programme were not charged with anything.
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The person who told the public that waterboarding had happened went to prison. This is the kind of disparity that requires no editorial commentary. The facts speak with considerable clarity on their own.
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Now we arrive at the final chapter, the one that is less a chapter than a reckoning. Everything covered in this video happened. It is documented. It was funded with public money, carried out by professionals, justified through legal and security frameworks, and in most cases followed by some combination of congressional investigation, court settlement, and presidential apology that acknowledge the facts without fully resolving their consequences. And the question the historical record leaves us with is not primarily a question about the past, it is a question about the present.
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Consider the timeline. The Tuskegee study ran for 40 years before it was exposed. COINTELPRO ran for 15 years before the media office break-in brought it to public attention. The NSA metadata collection program ran for years before Snowden's disclosures. The CIA's black sites operated for years before the Senate report confirmed their existence. In each case, the programs were running while the public did not know about them, and the exposure came not through the designed oversight mechanisms, but through unauthorized disclosure or accidental discovery.
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the designed mechanisms either did not work or were themselves classified. This pattern produces a specific and uncomfortable inference. There are almost certainly programs operating right now that the public does not know about. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a straightforward extrapolation from the documented pattern of how classified programs in the United States have historically operated.
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Some of those programs are almost certainly entirely appropriate foreign intelligence collection, genuinely sensitive national security operations, things that need to be secret because making them public would genuinely compromise their effectiveness. Some of them, if the pattern holds, are not entirely appropriate and the people running them have decided that the oversight mechanisms available are inadequate or have circumvented them and the public does not know they exist.
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The question of what from the current era will become the reclassified footnote of 2075 is genuinely impossible to answer, because the answer depends on which programmes are currently running and which of them someone will eventually decide the public has a right to know about. But the historical record suggests some categories worth thinking about. Surveillance technology has expanded dramatically in capability since the Snowden disclosures, and the legal framework governing its use has not kept pace. Artificial intelligence applications within intelligence and military contexts are being developed faster than the oversight frameworks that govern them are being designed.
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Partnerships between private technology companies and government agencies involve data flows that are not fully visible to either the public or the congressional oversight committees that are supposed to monitor them.
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International detention and rendition arrangements have been modified but not eliminated.
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Algorithmic systems used in criminal justice, immigration enforcement and social services make consequential decisions about people's lives with limited transparency or accountability.
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None of this is to say that any specific current programme is equivalent to Tuskegee, or COINTELPRO, or the Black Sites. It is to say that the institutional conditions that produce those programmes – secrecy, limited oversight, the consistent prioritisation of institutional interests over the rights of the people affected – have not been eliminated. They have been modified at the edges. The fundamental architecture remains.
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And the history documented in this video suggests, with considerable repetitive force, that when those institutional conditions exist, the programs they can produce are not limited by the intentions of the people running them in any given year.
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They are limited by the accountability mechanisms that exist to constrain them. Those mechanisms are imperfect. The record of what happens when they fail is the record this video has been telling.
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Before the final remarks close this account entirely, it is worth dwelling on a feature of the whistleblower cases that tends to get lost in the narrative of individual heroism and individual punishment. the role of journalism and what happens to journalism when the legal framework treats the disclosure of government wrongdoing as a criminal act regardless of what the wrongdoing was.
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The Espionage Act, as applied to leak prosecutions, does not only threaten the people who provide information, it threatens the journalists who receive it. A reporter who obtains classified documents from a source has, in a strict legal reading, potentially received stolen property. The Justice Department has subpoenaed journalists to identify their sources under threat of contempt charges in cases involving national security leaks.
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James Risen of The New York Times resisted a subpoena to identify his source in the Sterling case for years under sustained legal pressure.
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In the Manning case, the government attempted to use communications between Manning and Assange as evidence that Assange had been more than a passive recipient of documents that he had actively solicited and directed the disclosure, which would make him a co-conspirator rather than a journalist. The distinction matters legally because if the government can successfully characterize the relationship between a source and a publisher as a criminal conspiracy, it can reach the journalist as well as the leaker. That possibility, and the demonstrated willingness of multiple administrations to explore its limits, has a chilling effect on national security journalism that operates quietly in the background of every decision an editor makes about whether to pursue a sensitive story.
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The media outlets that published the Snowden documents The Guardian, The Washington Post and others consulted extensively with government officials before publication and withheld some information at the government's request on the grounds that publishing it would create identifiable risks to specific individuals or ongoing operations.
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This process of negotiated publication, in which journalists decide, with input from the government, what to publish and what to hold is standard practice for national security journalism at major outlets. It is a practice that reasonable people can defend as responsible, and that other reasonable people can criticise as a form of self-censorship that serves institutional interests at the expense of public information.
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The fact that this negotiation happens at all illustrates the degree to which the classified information landscape creates a specific relationship between powerful institutions and the press that does not exist in most other areas of journalism.
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The international dimension of the whistleblower problem is significant and underappreciated.
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Several of the most important disclosures in recent American history have depended on foreign platforms, foreign publications, or the physical presence of the disclosing individual outside American jurisdiction.
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Snowden spoke to journalists in Hong Kong. WikiLeaks operated from servers in multiple countries. The Intercept, which published Reality Winner's document and which was founded by journalists who had worked with Snowden's disclosures, was explicitly designed to be a platform for sensitive national security reporting with legal infrastructure better suited to defending against government pressure.
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The globalization of media infrastructure has made it somewhat harder for the American government to suppress disclosures by threatening American outlets. But it has also made the jurisdictional situation more complex for everyone involved, including the disclosers, who may find themselves in international legal limbo in ways that Ellsberg, who remained on American soil and faced American courts, did not.
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There is also the question of what the whistleblowers themselves say about why they did what they did, because the official characterisation that they were criminals, or at best misguided idealists who did not understand the consequences of their actions, is not the only available description of their motivations. Ellsberg described his decision as stemming from his realisation that he could not in good conscience continue to have access to information that showed the war was being continued on false pretenses while American soldiers and Vietnamese civilians died.
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Manning described her decision in terms of believing that the public had a right to see what was being done in their name with their money and by their military. Snowden described his as the product of a specific moment of clarity about what the surveillance architecture he was helping to build would mean for future generations if it became normalized. Drake described using official channels first, exhausting them, and concluding that the official channels were not going to produce results. These are not the descriptions of people who acted randomly or recklessly. They are the descriptions of people who made deliberate calculations and accepted the consequences.
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Whether those calculations were correct is a question that history tends to answer differently over time than it answers in the immediate moment of disclosure. In the immediate moment, the government's characterisation tends to dominate. The person is a traitor. The disclosure is damaging. The information is being weaponised by adversaries. The proper channels exist and should have been used. Over time, as the information becomes integrated into the public record and the specific harms predicted by the government frequently fail to materialise at the scale claimed, the assessment tends to shift.
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Ellsberg is now widely regarded as a hero of the First Amendment. His case is taught in journalism schools and law schools as a landmark for press freedom.
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At the time of the Pentagon Papers publication, Nixon's Attorney General described what the Times was doing as a treasonous act.
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The gap between those two assessments is not filled by new information about what Ellsberg did. It is filled by a changing understanding of what the information meant and what it cost to suppress it.
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The question of whether future generations will view Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden and Reality Winner the way the current generation views Daniel Ellsberg is one that history will answer in its own time. What can be said now is that the information they provided is in the historical record, that it has changed what is publicly known about how the American government conducted itself in specific periods, and that the consequences they faced were imposed by a legal system that treated the disclosure of government wrongdoing as equivalent to the disclosure of military secrets to foreign enemies without distinction, because the law that governed their prosecution does not make that distinction.
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The final accounting of what the programmes in this video cost in human terms, in economic terms, in terms of the trust between citizens and institutions that democratic governance depends on, is not a calculation that can be made with precision. The Tuskegee study's effects on medical trust in black communities have been studied and continue to be studied. but the full downstream impact of reduced healthcare utilisation, reduced clinical trial participation and the generational transmission of institutional distrust cannot be fully quantified. The human cost of the open-air testing programme cannot be calculated because the causal chains are too diffuse and the records too incomplete.
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The cost of the coup in lives, in democratic institutions destroyed, in civil wars facilitated can be partially estimated from the historical record of each country. But the counterfactual what would have happened without American intervention is unknowable. The cost of mass incarceration can be measured in incarcerated people and disrupted families and communities hollowed out by the removal of their most economically active members. But the human meaning of those numbers exceeds any aggregate statistic.
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What can be said is that the programmes documented in this video were not aberrations in the history of a country that otherwise functioned as its stated values suggested it should.
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They were the product of the same institutions, funded by the same budgets, staffed by the same professionals, overseen by the same structures or lack of structures that produced everything else the American government did during the same periods.
226:17
The question of how a country that produced the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights also produced Tuskegee and Cointelpro, and the black sites, is not a question with a simple answer. It is a question that the historical record forces us to hold, with some discomfort. The discomfort of recognising that institutional capacity for both remarkable achievement and serious harm can co-exist in the same system. and that the difference between which tendency prevails in any given moment is not fixed by founding documents or national mythology.
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It is determined by the ongoing work of people who know what has happened before and who decide on the basis of that knowledge what they are willing to accept and what they are not.
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That work requires knowing the history. Which is why, regardless of how uncomfortable some of what you heard tonight may have been, it matters that you know it. Not to despair about it, but to see the full picture, the brilliant and the brutal, the proud and the shameful, and to be a more complete and informed participant in the ongoing project of making something better out of the raw material of what exists. Sleep well. Sweet dreams.
