- 4/13/2025
From manipulating foreign elections to conducting illegal mind control experiments, the CIA's dark history is filled with shocking operations. Join us as we explore the most disturbing actions carried out by America's intelligence agency. Our countdown includes covert coups, torture programs, drug trafficking allegations, and more! Which CIA operation do you find most disturbing? Let us know in the comments below!
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00:00So many patients were left with some amnesia after de-patterning, that the Allens stopped the treatment when you and Cameron left.
00:07Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're looking at the worst known atrocities committed by the CIA in the name of defending freedom.
00:14You had a million dollars in cash to run the coup, right?
00:18That's right, and we used about $60,000 or something.
00:24A Stolen Italian Election
00:27In 1948, as Italy stood at a political crossroads, the CIA stepped in to tip the scales.
00:34Fearing a communist victory in the Italian general elections, the agency flooded the country with cash.
00:40They led the US effort to funnel the modern equivalent of $130 to $260 million into the campaign of centrist parties.
00:49They hoped to sway public opinion against the leftist, popular democratic front.
00:54Beyond just financial support, the CIA orchestrated a massive propaganda campaign.
01:00Millions of letters suddenly appeared in mailboxes.
01:03Anti-leftist radio programs flooded the airwaves.
01:06Anti-communist publications pushed dire warnings.
01:10Their efforts paid off, with their coalition winning by millions of votes.
01:15A CIA-backed civil war.
01:18There were not enough CIA advisors to make a great deal of difference, however, and we hired European mercenaries, and we tried to hire white Angolan refugees to go back in as mercenaries fighting on our side.
01:32In the mid-1970s, Angola's quest for independence erupted into a fierce civil war.
01:38The CIA gleefully seized the opportunity and launched a covert operation, Operation IA Feature.
01:44Fearing the spread of communism, the US shunted tons of cash and guns to anti-communist factions.
01:50This clandestine support aimed to counteract Soviet involvement on the other side.
01:55Unhappy with this unsanctioned intervention, Congress stepped in.
02:00It passed the Clark Amendment in 1976, which barred further US military assistance in Angola.
02:06Of course, it seems it didn't take long for the CIA to find an end around.
02:10It's been reported that Israel had acted as a middleman to get around the law.
02:15It secretly provided money for Roberto and Savimbi to recruit mercenaries from Africa, America, and Europe.
02:22Decades of failed coup attempts in Cuba.
02:25Castro has come to be seen as this nettlesome figure that we simply can't deal with, who has defied us and jeered at us for almost 50 years and got away with it.
02:41Nothing can drive a superpower up the wall faster than that.
02:45The CIA's obsession with toppling Fidel Castro led to a series of audacious and often absurd schemes.
02:51Wile E. Coyote couldn't have done worse.
02:54The most infamous, the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, saw a CIA-trained brigade of Cuban exiles attempt to invade.
03:02The operation was a catastrophic failure.
03:05Without air cover, the anti-Castro forces ships are attacked and the men are cut off from their supplies.
03:12The situation looks dire.
03:14A stain on the Kennedy administration that strengthened Castro's position.
03:19Undeterred, the CIA spent decades embroiled in multiple assassination plots.
03:24Cuban officials have claimed that, before his death, Castro survived 634 attempts.
03:30These ranged from poisoned cigars to exploding seashells, coming across like a bad James Bond ripoff.
03:37These relentless efforts not only failed, but also strained US-Cuba relations for the rest of the century.
03:43Stung by failure, the CIA gambled on an astonishing new partner in crime, the Mafia.
03:50The CIA torture memo.
03:53Two men wrote the memos.
03:55One, Stephen Bradbury, was the senior attorney in the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility from 2005 until Bush left office in January.
04:04In August 2002, the US Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel issued memos, normally not newsworthy.
04:11These, however, have since become known as the torture memos.
04:15They provided legal justifications for the CIA's use of quote-unquote enhanced interrogation techniques on detainees during the War on Terror.
04:24The Justice Department went to great lengths to justify what were clearly illegal acts of interrogation.
04:31The DOG argued that practices such as waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and stress positions could be legally permissible under an expansive interpretation of presidential authority.
04:42In real life, these techniques were literally torture.
04:45From threats of sexual assault to confinement in coffin-sized boxes, the abuse was severe.
04:51The CIA inflicted profound physical and psychological harm on its detainees, sparking global outrage.
04:57They believe the Water Board is working here to create compliance.
05:00Well, of course they do.
05:01They're the ones who get to decide when it's used.
05:03They're also the ones who get to decide if it's working.
05:06How is that even ethical?
05:07Australia's Forgotten Coup.
05:10Once again, there will be a Labour government chosen by the people of Australia.
05:18In 1975, Australia faced an unprecedented political upheaval.
05:23The leftist Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, found himself on the business end of a coup.
05:28Whitlam's government had pursued policies asserting Australia's autonomy.
05:32He bristled at US presence on Australian soil, including challenging US military interests like the secret CIA base in Pine Gap.
05:41The Governor General takes the advice from his Prime Minister and from no one else.
05:46And must act on that advice?
05:48Unquestionably.
05:49The CIA and MI6 each bristled at Whitlam's interference.
05:53The US and UK each saw Australia as a subordinate nation.
05:57Evidence suggests that both agencies played roles in Whitlam's ousting.
06:01While concrete evidence of direct CIA involvement remains unsubstantiated, the event sent long-lasting shockwaves through the political system of a close ally.
06:11By 2pm, word of the dismissal has spread among members of the press gallery.
06:16The Senate is in session.
06:17And to Labour's Senate leader Ken Reitz's surprise, the coalition senators agree to pass the budget.
06:23He doesn't know what they know.
06:25A CIA coup leads to slaughter in Indonesia.
06:28I don't believe that number of people get killed back to 1965.
06:33Some people say 400,000 or so.
06:35In 1965, Indonesia was plunged into turmoil following an alleged failed coup attempt.
06:41The Indonesian military, under Major General Suharto, took aim at members and sympathizers of the Communist Party of Indonesia.
06:49The resultant anti-communist purge was a bloodbath.
06:52Estimates suggest that between 500,000 and 1 million people were killed.
06:57Oh, that's crazy.
06:58It's because there are a lot of people working on it.
07:00It's crazy.
07:01It's because there are a lot of people working on it.
07:02It's because there are a lot of people working on it.
07:07It's because there are a lot of people working on it.
07:11Declassified documents reveal that the U.S. government provided key support to Suharto.
07:16The CIA gave the aspiring dictator a vetted hit list of dissidents.
07:20This assistance not only facilitated the mass killings, but also paved the way for Suharto's rise to power.
07:26He controlled Indonesia in an iron grip for the next 31 years.
07:36Support of the Nicaraguan Contras.
07:39After Vietnam, the American public has no stomach for direct U.S. intervention,
07:43where American boys will do the dime.
07:46So this army will be manned with foreign youth.
07:49They are known as the counter-revolutionaries, or Contras.
07:53Without the help and initiative of the CIA, the Nicaraguan Contras might never have existed.
07:58The U.S. government saw the leftist Sandinista government as a threat to private American interests.
08:04In a now familiar story, the CIA found a way around congressional attempts to prevent their aid.
08:10The Iran-Contra affair was a scheme to launder financial support to Nicaragua.
08:15Contra field commanders complained that their troops are being underfed and poorly led.
08:20Forty-one of them will mutiny against their leader, Enrique Bermudez, charging corruption and mismanagement, and demanding his removal.
08:29Profits from illegal arms sales to Iran were diverted to support the Contras, circumventing congressional restrictions.
08:36Even worse rumors soon bubbled to the surface.
08:39Some claimed that the CIA was complicit in drug trafficking operations to finance the Contras.
08:45There were also claims that the Contras were secretly involved in cocaine distribution in U.S. cities.
08:51Although U.S. Congress restricted avert assistance to the Contra,
08:55Reagan funded support through secret arms sales to Iran.
08:58The installation of Mobutu Sekou.
09:08The CIA bears some responsibility for the Democratic Republic of Congo being one of the most dangerous places on Earth.
09:14After the country's independence in 1960, Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba veered towards the Soviet Union, which the U.S. couldn't tolerate.
09:23So, of course, the CIA supported Colonel Joseph Mobutu in a coup.
09:28Mobutu, later known as Mobutu Sese Sekou, maintained a pro-Western stance, aligning with U.S. interests during the Cold War.
09:36His loyalty earned a blind eye to his atrocities.
09:40In 1966, he publicly executed four political rivals before a crowd of 50,000.
09:47Two years later, Pierre Moulele, a former minister and rebel leader, was lured back from exile under false promises of amnesty.
09:54They cut him to pieces, slowly, a CIA killer in Uruguay.
10:07The end of the 60s was a globally turbulent time.
10:19Uruguay, for example, grappled with escalating social unrest and the rise of the leftist guerrilla group, the Tupamaros.
10:26Amid this turmoil, the CIA dispatched Dan Mitrione, an operative renowned for his expertise in counterinsurgency and interrogation techniques.
10:36In truth, Mitrione was essentially a CIA-sanctioned serial killer.
10:40Operating under the guise of a public safety advisor, Mitrione allegedly conducted torture training sessions for Uruguayan police.
10:48He is reported to have killed homeless individuals as subjects in his demonstrations.
10:54In 1970, the Tupamaros kidnapped Mitrione, demanding the release of political prisoners.
11:00When their demands were not met, they executed him, apparently more humanely than he killed many others.
11:06The body of Dan Mitrione was found today in Montevideo, Uruguay.
11:11He was the American aid official who was murdered by Uruguayan terrorists who had kidnapped him.
11:16Project Mockingbird
11:29Project Mockingbird may seem like an innocuous codename, but in truth, it was a gross, widespread violation of privacy.
11:37The CIA launched a witch hunt trying to discover and plug leaks to the press.
11:42They illegally wiretapped journalists receiving classified intel, without judicial warrants.
11:47The agency monitored the journalists' communications, raising significant concerns about press freedom and governmental overreach.
11:55I'm going to take this ordinary loudspeaker and simply hook a pair of wires to it.
12:00It's plugged into a tape recorder, and I'm going to record a brief segment using this as the microphone itself.
12:06The existence of Project Mockingbird came to light in 1975, during the Rockefeller Commission's investigations into CIA activities.
12:14They discovered the agency's illegal intrusion into domestic affairs and its attempts to control media narratives.
12:22Extraordinary Rendition
12:24We had initially designed a program that would only go after the top echelon of leaders.
12:29But under Mr. Bush, they also began to pick up the mid-level leaders.
12:33One thing about CIA abuse, it's bipartisan.
12:37President Bill Clinton expanded the CIA's counter-terrorism efforts by allowing extraordinary rendition.
12:43This official process involves capturing suspected terrorists abroad and transferring them to third countries for interrogation in a black site.
12:52America's tacit agreements with these countries allow them to avoid the law.
12:57What we're talking about here is it was a secret program that began about 1995, and that was about sending people not to justice, but to another country.
13:05It was about outsourcing the detention and also sometimes interrogation of the prisoners.
13:10One of the most infamous black sites was Cobalt, a secret CIA detention facility in Afghanistan.
13:16Also known as the Salt Pit, prisoners there were subjected to extreme abuse.
13:21The facility had no proper oversight, and detainees were often shackled in total darkness for days or even weeks.
13:29Some even died in custody.
13:31The abuses at Cobalt were so severe that some CIA officials referred to it as a dungeon.
13:37By the time that Brennan made that statement, Mahir Arar had been rendered to Syria and locked up in a tiny grave-like cell for days and beaten with cables.
13:48CIA as a drug cartel.
13:51But in 1982, Democrats in Congress passed laws to cut off support for the Nicaraguan rebels.
13:56So the Contras and their CIA backers had to find new ways of funding their struggle.
14:01Allegations of the CIA's involvement in drug trafficking have surfaced multiple times over the decades.
14:07In the 1980s, during the Nicaraguan Revolution, reports suggested that the CIA was involved in cocaine smuggling.
14:13The illegal funds were then used to fund the Contras off the books.
14:17These people were willing to take up arms.
14:20We needed to stop the red threat.
14:22And people believed that in that vein you made certain compromises or certain trade-offs for a larger good.
14:28Investigations, including those by the US Department of Justice, acknowledged that individuals associated with the Contras engaged in drug trafficking.
14:37No evidence was ever made public to acknowledge CIA involvement.
14:41Similarly, during the Vietnam War, the agency was accused of complicity in heroin production in Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle.
14:49The CIA has consistently denied all accusations.
14:52What began as a proxy war fought in a foreign land will come home as an epic scandal in American politics.
15:00Operation Condor
15:02Three Days of the Condor was a 1970s Robert Redford spy thriller about corrupt CIA operations.
15:13The real Operation Condor was even more insidious.
15:28Over the 1970s and 80s, the CIA participated in a multinational covert campaign of political repression and state terror.
15:37They helped install or supported right-wing dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil.
15:46These regimes worked together in CIA-orchestrated cross-border operations.
15:51Dissidents and rivals were abducted, tortured, or assassinated all over South America.
15:57The United States provided key organizational, financial, and technical assistance to Operation Condor.
16:03The military provided training and weapons, while the CIA provided intel, cash, and technology.
16:09The overall death and suffering that resulted from these regimes is hard to quantify.
16:26Iran and Operation Ajax
16:28The CIA sent one million dollars to their station in Tehran for use in any way that would bring about the fall of Mossadegh.
16:36Ajax wasn't just an ancient Greek hero or a household cleaner.
16:40Operation Ajax is one of the most infamous missions in CIA history.
16:44Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosadegh ruffled Western feathers by nationalizing Iran's oil industry.
16:52British hegemony would disappear almost overnight.
16:55Fearing a domino effect of nationalism and potential Soviet influence, the CIA, with British collaboration, initiated a plan to remove Mossadegh.
17:04The operation involved propaganda campaigns, using fake protesters and bribing officials.
17:10The chaos collapsed Mossadegh's government from within.
17:13My uncle was very frail, very dejected.
17:17He was sure they were going to kill him.
17:19The turmoil culminated on August 19, 1953, when Mossadegh was arrested.
17:25The pro-Western shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was reinstated with increased powers.
17:30This intervention ceded the generations of distrust to follow in the wake of the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
17:37The legacy of the 1953 coup in Iran is shaping politics to this day.
17:44We have a government in Iran and a political system in Iran that probably never would have emerged.
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18:05The CIA once dosed unsuspecting Americans with LSD just to see what would happen.
18:22MKUltra, the agency's mind control experiment, was a two decades long nightmare.
18:27Beginning in the 1950s, the CIA ran illegal drug tests on unwilling US and Canadian citizens.
18:34LSD, electroshock therapy, and sensory deprivation were employed to break and reprogram their minds.
18:49In Operation Midnight Climax, they even set up CIA-run brothels in San Francisco.
18:55Sex workers drugged clients while agents watched from behind one-way mirrors.
19:01Meanwhile, their Montreal experiments left psychiatric patients with shattered identities.
19:07They erased memories through massive electroshock sessions and forced drug comas.
19:13Most of the CIA's records on the subject were intentionally destroyed before they could be made public.
19:19Unlawful wiretaps, the opening of private mail, even a drug testing program involving the use of LSD against unsuspecting persons.
19:28We'll talk with a reporter who first broke the story of domestic misdeeds.
19:33Were other CIA atrocities renditioned from our list?
19:36Let us know in the comments below.
19:38Check out these other clips from WatchMojo, and be sure to subscribe and ring the bell to be notified about our latest videos.
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