Covert Action

Washington, D.C., March 19, 2026 - On August 10, 1973, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger placed a call to Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird to complain about U.S. officials who were participating in congressional hearings to investigate the secret bombing of Cambodia. As the Nixon administration’s cover up was unraveling, Kissinger was angry that “these @*%&* over there are acting as if it happened on the moon”; he demanded that Secretary Laird defend the original Nixon/Kissinger decision to launch clandestine attacks on Cambodia.

Washington D.C. December 4, 2025 -  Fifty years ago today, Senator Frank Church convened the first public congressional hearing ever held on CIA covert operations to overthrow a foreign government, focusing on the case of Chile. His Senate Select Committee was taking this “unusual step,” Church explained, “because the committee believes the American people must know and be able to judge what was undertaken by their government in Chile.

Washington D.C., November 20, 2025 - Fifty years ago today, a special Senate Committee led by Idaho Senator Frank Church lifted the veil of secrecy on the clandestine efforts of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to target specific foreign leaders for assassination.

Washington, D.C., October 30, 2025 – The CIA experienced “as many failures as successes” in exploring the intelligence applications of LSD and other drugs, according to the October 1975 U.S. Senate testimony of the Agency’s former top chemist, Sidney Gottlieb, the man most closely associated with the notorious MKULTRA behavior control research projects. “[T]he results of everything told us that the money expended, the effort expended, the security risk involved, when you add everything up … it was probably not a high pay-off program.”

Washington, D.C., October 27, 2025 - Tonight, PBS stations across the country will begin airing a two-part biographic documentary on Henry Alfred Kissinger, depicting his life and the controversial legacy of his foreign policies. “According to the featured experts,” concludes a review of the film published in Foreignpolicy.com, “Kissinger learned the wrong lessons from his experiences with Nazi Germany.

Washington, D.C., September 3, 2025 - Covert CIA surveillance of a Soviet agent under diplomatic cover in Mexico City in 1968 led to the acquisition of intelligence on the “entire clandestine leadership” of the Colombian Communist Party and the nascent FARC insurgent group, according to declassified records from the John F. Kennedy assassination papers released earlier this year.

Washington, D.C., April 7, 2025 - Just six months before the 1964 military coup that overthrew the government of João Goulart in Brazil, Deputy Director of Central Intelligence for Plans Richard Helms briefed the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) on CIA clandestine operations in South America’s largest country.

Washington, D.C., December 23, 2024 – Today, the National Security Archive and ProQuest (part of Clarivate) celebrate the publication of a new scholarly document collection many years in the making on the shocking secret history of the CIA’s mind control research programs. The new collection, CIA and the Behavioral Sciences: Mind Control, Drug Experiments and MKULTRA, brings together more than 1,200 essential records on one of the most infamous and abusive programs in CIA history.

Washington, D.C., October 1, 2024 - On the 50th anniversary of the Pinochet regime’s first act of international terrorism, the National Security Archive is posting a compilation of documents, including CIA intelligence reports and a judicial confession of the Chilean secret police operative, Michael Townley, who constructed, placed, and detonated the car bomb that killed Chilean General Carlos Prats and his wife Sofía Cuthbert in Buenos Aires on September 30, 1974.

Washington, D.C., September 9, 2024 – Fifty years ago, as the New York Times prepared to break a major exposé on CIA covert operations in Chile, the architect of those operations, Henry Kissinger, misled President Gerald Ford about clandestine U.S. efforts to undermine the elected government of Socialist Party leader Salvador Allende, documents posted today by the National Security Archive show.