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16 Conspiracy Theories That Were Real After All
By Michael Rodio
Not long ago, seriously believing in conspiracy theories was the exclusive hobby of hardcore tinfoil-hatters who saw secret plots in every newspaper headline or TV special. It once took an overactive imagination to believe in CIA-sponsored mind-control research or elaborate government plots to overthrow world leaders.
But then a scary thing happened: The conspiracy theories turned out to be true. And in some cases, they're worse than anyone imagined.
1 / 17
The CIA’s Secret Mind Control Experiments
What if someone told you that the Central Intelligence Agency tested various methods of “mind control”—including LSD—on U.S. and Canadian citizens for two decades? And what if we told you that the research took place at major American universities, hospitals, prisons, and pharmaceutical labs?
Sounds unbelievable, right? But through Project MKUltra, operational from 1953 to 1973, the CIA’s Scientific Intelligence Division used unwitting U.S. and Canadian citizens to test methods of behavioral controls ranging from sensory deprivation to the newly-created drug LSD.
2 / 17
Yes, The CIA Tested LSD
The huge program first came to light in the 1975 Church Committee Hearings prompted by New York Times allegations that the CIA operated without Congressional oversight. Even though CIA director Richard Helms ordered the MKUltra files destroyed in 1973, a remaining cache of 20,000 documents surfaced in 1977 Senate hearings. The Senate report on MKUltra revealed that over 30 universities and institutions were involved in the project, and that the experiments made little scientific sense. Oops.
3 / 17
The Second Tonkin Gulf Attacks Never Happened
On August 4, 1964, a group of North Vietnamese boats attacked American destroyer U.S.S. Maddox in the Tonkin Gulf off Vietnam. At the time, President Lyndon B. Johnson used this “second attack”—there had been one confirmed previously—as justification to escalate the war in Vietnam.
The only problem: The second attack never actually happened.
4 / 17
Apocalypse Now
According to a series of documents declassified by the National Security Agency in November 2005, NSA historian Robert Hanyok confirmed that reports from the Tonkin Gulf had been made to “fit the claim” of an attack. The reason it took so long to declassify the docs? NSA officials feared comparisons to the “manipulated intelligence used to justify the Iraq War."
5 / 17
The U.S. Tried To Provoke A War With Cuba
In the early 1960s, with the Cold War nearing a hot flash and the Bay of Pigs disaster still stinging, U.S. leaders searched for a way to justify aggression against Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Their solution? Operation Northwoods, a top-secret plan to carry out “justifiable grievances” against the U.S. under the guise of Cuban terrorist efforts.
6 / 17
Nixing Operation Northwoods
According to James Bamford, who wrote several books about the efforts, top military leaders under President John F. Kennedy discussed hijacking planes, assassinating Cuban émigrés, sinking boats ferrying Cuban refugees to the U.S., and even destroying a U.S. military ship with its crew aboard. Operation Northwoods never came to fruition—it got nixed by civilian leadership—but it was a dark moment in U.S. military history that could have been much, much darker.
7 / 17
The Scientology Shadow War
One of the weirder eras in U.S. tax history: a thirty-year shadow war between the Internal Revenue Service and the Church of Scientology. The “war” began in 1967, when the IRS stripped the Church of its tax-exempt status. L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, retaliated in 1973 by launching “Operation Snow White.”
Under the direction of Hubbard’s third wife Mary Sue, Scientologists launched a campaign to attack and discredit IRS officials through covert espionage.
8 / 17
The IRS Throws In The Towel
When the conspiracy was discovered in 1977, Scientologists turned to clandestine legal pressure, ultimately achieving their tax-exempt status (and saving millions in taxes) in 1993. Operation Snow White was so secretive that Scientologist leaders still refuse to acknowledge the “closing agreement” between the IRS and the Church of Scientology, even though the Wall Street Journal published it.
9 / 17
Orchestrating The Overthrow In Iran
In 1951, the democratically-elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddeq, decided to nationalize the nation’s vast oil reserves. But British interests—particularly those of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, now BP—sought to maintain control of the oil output, while Americans wanted corporate access to oil riches.
The successful plan—nicknamed Operation AJAX by the CIA and Operation Boot by Britain’s MI6—resulted in a military coup (pictured) that overthrew Mosaddeq in 1953 and replaced him with a pro-Western leader who would keep oil in Western hands.
10 / 17
The Revolution Was Televised
That leader was Mohammad-Rezā Shāh Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, who ruled Iran as an absolute monarchy until his own overthrow in 1979 (pictured here in the film "Argo").
On the 60th anniversary of the coup, the CIA released a trove of documents detailing the agency’s role in planning and executing the overthrow. American involvement had been public knowledge for some time, but the CIA’s declassification of the documents marked the agency’s first public acknowledgement of its involvement.
11 / 17
False Testimony Triggers Persian Gulf War
On the eve of the Persian Gulf War in 1990, a Kuwaiti nurse named Nayirah issued a stirring testimony before the Congressional Human Rights Congress: She said she had witnessed invading Iraqi soldiers removing Kuwaiti babies from their hospital incubators. The story was moving and widely-shared—several senators, as well as President George H. W. Bush, repeated the story in the days leading up to the launch of Operation Desert Shield. The story was also false.
12 / 17
Lies Exposed
In a January 1992 op-ed in The New York Times, Harper’s editor John MacArthur wrote that “Nurse” Nayirah was the daughter of Saud al-Ṣabaḥ, Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. California Representative Tom Lantos, the head of the CHRC, knew about Nayirah’s identity before her testimony.
It also turned out that Nayirah’s testimony had been masterminded by Hill & Knowlton, a huge public relations firm, to sway public opinion on behalf of their Kuwaiti-backed client, Citizens for a Free Kuwait.
13 / 17
The CIA Infiltrated Major American News Media
Because the CIA wasn’t already busy enough in the 1950s and 1960s, Agency leaders Cord Meyer and Alan W. Dulles (pictured) launched a secret campaign to place propaganda through media influence. Nicknamed Operation Mockingbird, the operation succeeded in recruiting American journalists as covert CIA operatives or placing CIA spies in news organizations.
According to testimonies gathered by the 1975 Church Committee, the CIA maintained a network of covert operatives—many masquerading as everyday journalists in American and foreign media outlets—who could influence or otherwise fabricate propaganda outright.
Operation Mockingbird finally came to light in the book "Invisible Government" by David Wise and Thomas Ross, first published in 1964.
14 / 17
Guns For Hostages: Iran-Contra
One of the Cold War’s most persistent conspiracy theories was that the U.S. government financed the anti-communist Contra rebels of Nicaragua. The reality was much worse: President Ronald Reagan’s administration was not only funding the Contras, but also doing so by illegally selling weapons to Iran (via Israeli proxies) in exchange for American hostages held in Lebanon.
Even after the weapons-trading came to light in November 1986, Reagan admitted to the trades but denied that they were in exchange for hostages. After further investigation, however, Reagan ultimately admitted in March 1987 that the exchange had “deteriorated, in its implementation, into trading arms for hostages.”
15 / 17
Drug Money And The “Dark Alliance”
The U.S. government's covert, corrupt attempts at funding the Contra rebels didn't stop with selling arms to Iran, however.
It’s a distant memory now, but the crack cocaine epidemic—and all its racial, social, and political overtones—was one of America’s biggest scourges in the 1980s and 1990s. So when the San Jose Mercury News broke the story in 1996 that the CIA facilitated cocaine smuggling into Los Angeles to fund Contra rebels in Nicaragua, the bombshell hit with full force.
16 / 17
Drugs For The Contras
In a three-part story and ensuing nonfiction book, Pulitzer-winning journalist Gary Webb wrote that the CIA's dealings first “opened the first pipeline from Colombia’s cocaine cartels” to the urban street gangs of L.A. while “funding a Latin American guerilla army.” But the paper soon backed away from the story—editor Scott Herhold later called it "an institutional failure by a newspaper eager for its own prizes”—even though an Esquire feature ultimately vindicated Webb’s journalism.
17 / 17
'1984' Comes To Life
It's nothing new to theorize that the government is using expansive surveillance systems to watch its citizens. George Orwell's "1984"had suggested as much since 1949. But then, former defense contractor Edward Snowden revealed in The Guardian and The New York Times in June 2013 that the National Security Agency had been doing exactly that: tracking and recording personal communications of American citizens and foreigners—including world leaders—in a massive program of covert and illegal surveillance.
From new headquarters like the Utah Data Center (shown here in 2013), the NSA overwhelmingly targets innocent U.S. citizens. For a comprehensive look at the story since then, view “The NSA Files: Decoded,” created by The Guardian.
By Michael Rodio
Not long ago, seriously believing in conspiracy theories was the exclusive hobby of hardcore tinfoil-hatters who saw secret plots in every newspaper headline or TV special. It once took an overactive imagination to believe in CIA-sponsored mind-control research or elaborate government plots to overthrow world leaders.
But then a scary thing happened: The conspiracy theories turned out to be true. And in some cases, they're worse than anyone imagined.
1 / 17
The CIA’s Secret Mind Control Experiments
What if someone told you that the Central Intelligence Agency tested various methods of “mind control”—including LSD—on U.S. and Canadian citizens for two decades? And what if we told you that the research took place at major American universities, hospitals, prisons, and pharmaceutical labs?
Sounds unbelievable, right? But through Project MKUltra, operational from 1953 to 1973, the CIA’s Scientific Intelligence Division used unwitting U.S. and Canadian citizens to test methods of behavioral controls ranging from sensory deprivation to the newly-created drug LSD.
2 / 17
Yes, The CIA Tested LSD
The huge program first came to light in the 1975 Church Committee Hearings prompted by New York Times allegations that the CIA operated without Congressional oversight. Even though CIA director Richard Helms ordered the MKUltra files destroyed in 1973, a remaining cache of 20,000 documents surfaced in 1977 Senate hearings. The Senate report on MKUltra revealed that over 30 universities and institutions were involved in the project, and that the experiments made little scientific sense. Oops.
3 / 17
The Second Tonkin Gulf Attacks Never Happened
On August 4, 1964, a group of North Vietnamese boats attacked American destroyer U.S.S. Maddox in the Tonkin Gulf off Vietnam. At the time, President Lyndon B. Johnson used this “second attack”—there had been one confirmed previously—as justification to escalate the war in Vietnam.
The only problem: The second attack never actually happened.
4 / 17
Apocalypse Now
According to a series of documents declassified by the National Security Agency in November 2005, NSA historian Robert Hanyok confirmed that reports from the Tonkin Gulf had been made to “fit the claim” of an attack. The reason it took so long to declassify the docs? NSA officials feared comparisons to the “manipulated intelligence used to justify the Iraq War."
5 / 17
The U.S. Tried To Provoke A War With Cuba
In the early 1960s, with the Cold War nearing a hot flash and the Bay of Pigs disaster still stinging, U.S. leaders searched for a way to justify aggression against Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Their solution? Operation Northwoods, a top-secret plan to carry out “justifiable grievances” against the U.S. under the guise of Cuban terrorist efforts.
6 / 17
Nixing Operation Northwoods
According to James Bamford, who wrote several books about the efforts, top military leaders under President John F. Kennedy discussed hijacking planes, assassinating Cuban émigrés, sinking boats ferrying Cuban refugees to the U.S., and even destroying a U.S. military ship with its crew aboard. Operation Northwoods never came to fruition—it got nixed by civilian leadership—but it was a dark moment in U.S. military history that could have been much, much darker.
7 / 17
The Scientology Shadow War
One of the weirder eras in U.S. tax history: a thirty-year shadow war between the Internal Revenue Service and the Church of Scientology. The “war” began in 1967, when the IRS stripped the Church of its tax-exempt status. L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, retaliated in 1973 by launching “Operation Snow White.”
Under the direction of Hubbard’s third wife Mary Sue, Scientologists launched a campaign to attack and discredit IRS officials through covert espionage.
8 / 17
The IRS Throws In The Towel
When the conspiracy was discovered in 1977, Scientologists turned to clandestine legal pressure, ultimately achieving their tax-exempt status (and saving millions in taxes) in 1993. Operation Snow White was so secretive that Scientologist leaders still refuse to acknowledge the “closing agreement” between the IRS and the Church of Scientology, even though the Wall Street Journal published it.
9 / 17
Orchestrating The Overthrow In Iran
In 1951, the democratically-elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddeq, decided to nationalize the nation’s vast oil reserves. But British interests—particularly those of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, now BP—sought to maintain control of the oil output, while Americans wanted corporate access to oil riches.
The successful plan—nicknamed Operation AJAX by the CIA and Operation Boot by Britain’s MI6—resulted in a military coup (pictured) that overthrew Mosaddeq in 1953 and replaced him with a pro-Western leader who would keep oil in Western hands.
10 / 17
The Revolution Was Televised
That leader was Mohammad-Rezā Shāh Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, who ruled Iran as an absolute monarchy until his own overthrow in 1979 (pictured here in the film "Argo").
On the 60th anniversary of the coup, the CIA released a trove of documents detailing the agency’s role in planning and executing the overthrow. American involvement had been public knowledge for some time, but the CIA’s declassification of the documents marked the agency’s first public acknowledgement of its involvement.
11 / 17
False Testimony Triggers Persian Gulf War
On the eve of the Persian Gulf War in 1990, a Kuwaiti nurse named Nayirah issued a stirring testimony before the Congressional Human Rights Congress: She said she had witnessed invading Iraqi soldiers removing Kuwaiti babies from their hospital incubators. The story was moving and widely-shared—several senators, as well as President George H. W. Bush, repeated the story in the days leading up to the launch of Operation Desert Shield. The story was also false.
12 / 17
Lies Exposed
In a January 1992 op-ed in The New York Times, Harper’s editor John MacArthur wrote that “Nurse” Nayirah was the daughter of Saud al-Ṣabaḥ, Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. California Representative Tom Lantos, the head of the CHRC, knew about Nayirah’s identity before her testimony.
It also turned out that Nayirah’s testimony had been masterminded by Hill & Knowlton, a huge public relations firm, to sway public opinion on behalf of their Kuwaiti-backed client, Citizens for a Free Kuwait.
13 / 17
The CIA Infiltrated Major American News Media
Because the CIA wasn’t already busy enough in the 1950s and 1960s, Agency leaders Cord Meyer and Alan W. Dulles (pictured) launched a secret campaign to place propaganda through media influence. Nicknamed Operation Mockingbird, the operation succeeded in recruiting American journalists as covert CIA operatives or placing CIA spies in news organizations.
According to testimonies gathered by the 1975 Church Committee, the CIA maintained a network of covert operatives—many masquerading as everyday journalists in American and foreign media outlets—who could influence or otherwise fabricate propaganda outright.
Operation Mockingbird finally came to light in the book "Invisible Government" by David Wise and Thomas Ross, first published in 1964.
14 / 17
Guns For Hostages: Iran-Contra
One of the Cold War’s most persistent conspiracy theories was that the U.S. government financed the anti-communist Contra rebels of Nicaragua. The reality was much worse: President Ronald Reagan’s administration was not only funding the Contras, but also doing so by illegally selling weapons to Iran (via Israeli proxies) in exchange for American hostages held in Lebanon.
Even after the weapons-trading came to light in November 1986, Reagan admitted to the trades but denied that they were in exchange for hostages. After further investigation, however, Reagan ultimately admitted in March 1987 that the exchange had “deteriorated, in its implementation, into trading arms for hostages.”
15 / 17
Drug Money And The “Dark Alliance”
The U.S. government's covert, corrupt attempts at funding the Contra rebels didn't stop with selling arms to Iran, however.
It’s a distant memory now, but the crack cocaine epidemic—and all its racial, social, and political overtones—was one of America’s biggest scourges in the 1980s and 1990s. So when the San Jose Mercury News broke the story in 1996 that the CIA facilitated cocaine smuggling into Los Angeles to fund Contra rebels in Nicaragua, the bombshell hit with full force.
16 / 17
Drugs For The Contras
In a three-part story and ensuing nonfiction book, Pulitzer-winning journalist Gary Webb wrote that the CIA's dealings first “opened the first pipeline from Colombia’s cocaine cartels” to the urban street gangs of L.A. while “funding a Latin American guerilla army.” But the paper soon backed away from the story—editor Scott Herhold later called it "an institutional failure by a newspaper eager for its own prizes”—even though an Esquire feature ultimately vindicated Webb’s journalism.
17 / 17
'1984' Comes To Life
It's nothing new to theorize that the government is using expansive surveillance systems to watch its citizens. George Orwell's "1984"had suggested as much since 1949. But then, former defense contractor Edward Snowden revealed in The Guardian and The New York Times in June 2013 that the National Security Agency had been doing exactly that: tracking and recording personal communications of American citizens and foreigners—including world leaders—in a massive program of covert and illegal surveillance.
From new headquarters like the Utah Data Center (shown here in 2013), the NSA overwhelmingly targets innocent U.S. citizens. For a comprehensive look at the story since then, view “The NSA Files: Decoded,” created by The Guardian.