The shadowy and sometimes bizarre operations of the CIA are kept top secret for many years, deemed necessary to protect national security.
It’s only decades later American citizens learn of alleged Russian alien encounters or mind control experiments recorded by the agency.
But, as the full release of files on the assassination of John F. Kennedy – running into the tens of thousands of pages – shows, the CIA meticulously documents what it investigates.
Over the years declassified files have revealed the agency had a hand in creating fake porn tapes of world leaders, ‘demon dolls’ of Osama Bin Laden, recruited former Nazis to work on the space program and attempted to develop remote control dogs.
Here, The Post looks back at some of the CIA’s most audacious missions from their archives which have eventually been revealed to the public:
Cold war condoms: weapon of mass humiliation
In the 1950s, the CIA co-funded an operation to drop millions of anti-Communist pamphlets from weather balloons flying over Soviet-controlled Europe.
But one CIA agent took things a step further, drawing up a plan to also have packets of extra-large condoms, labelled only “small” or “medium”, dropped on Communist nations.
The strategy was to lower the morale of male citizens by suggesting they were physically inferior to their well-endowed Western counterparts.
The plan never came to fruition.
CIA’s Bin Laden ‘demon toy’
The CIA once hatched a plan to make a Osama Bin Laden figurine with a face that peeled off in the sun to reveal a devil.
The aim was to distribute the demonic toys to children in the Middle East and counter the al Qaeda leader’s influence by spooking them.
Donald Levine, the creator of G.I. Joe, was commissioned to design three prototypes in 2005 as part of the spy agency’s plan to smoke out the terrorist behind the 9/11 attacks.
After being left in the sun, the face of one of the prototypes would peel off to reveal a “demon-like visage with red skin, green eyes, and black markings,” (who bore an uncanny resemblance to Star Wars character Darth Maul).
“The action figure idea was proposed and rejected by the CIA before it got past the prototype stage.
“To our knowledge, there were only three individual action figures ever created and these were merely to show what a final product might look like,” a CIA spokesperson said in a statement when the plan was revealed in 2014 in declassified documents.
Blackmailing a world leader with a fake sex tape
From 1945 till approximately 1970s, the CIA ran covert operations targeting foreign leaders deemed a threat to the US.
Among the targets were Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo and President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam. Lethal viruses, explosive cigars and other spy-thriller type tactics were all used.
President Achmed Sukarno of Indonesia accused the US of trying to destroy him for his sympathy towards communism.
That effort included a CIA-produced pornographic film called “Happy Days” which purported to show Sukarno, in “ecstatic sexual congress with a woman”, according to reports, although the person involved was actually an American ‘performer’ in a mask.
The CIA’s’ crafty plan was to circulate this film, pretending that it had been secretly made by the KGB in the course of a visit by Sukarno to the Soviet Union.
The plan was to throw Sukarno into a rage at his intimate moments being exposed, for him to be humiliated and change Indonesia’s course.
However, the plan backfired.
Sukarno was actually impressed with how he was depicted in the film because it showed “him leaving his Russian partner aglow with fulfilment” and he reportedly ordered its distribution throughout Indonesia.
Remote-controlled dogs
The CIA created remote-controlled dogs by operating on their brains during a bizarre 1963 mind-control experiment, according to declassified documents.
Researchers implanted a device inside six canines’ skulls and used a remote control to guide them through an open field, according to documents posted on The Black Vault, a website specializing in declassified government records.
The pooches could be made to run, turn and stop as scientists zapped the reward center of their brains with electrical currents, according to the CIA papers, which were published in 1965.
“The specific aim of the research program was to examine the feasibility of controlling the behavior of a dog, in an open field, by means of remotely stimulated electrical stimulation of the brain,” the documents state.
The experiments were eventually abandoned.
MKUltra and mind control
The CIA experimented extensively with brainwashing during the 1950s and 1960s, experimenting with techniques designed to make a person kill someone, then have no recollection afterward.
Code-named MKUltra, the program involved some 149 separate experiments — many on unwitting Americans who had not consented to being guinea pigs, including a Kentucky mental patient who was dosed with LSD for 179 days straight.
MKUltra was officially launched in 1953 to develop better interrogation techniques, as well as to explore the possibility of creating a ‘programmable assassin’.
Many of the documents pertaining to MKUltra were destroyed in 1973 on the CIA’s orders, but some survived and were revealed later that decade.
A disturbing 1954 document details an experiment during which two women were hypnotized and one was made to try to wake the other. When the first woman didn’t stir, the other woman was ordered to “fly into a rage and shoot her.”
The entranced woman picked up an [purposefully unloaded] pistol, pointed it at the other woman and pulled the trigger before falling into a “deep sleep.” Upon waking, neither woman remembered anything about the sequence.
Another time, a hypnotized woman was told to wait by a phone to receive a call. The person on the other end would mention a code word in the course of a normal conversation, causing the woman to pass into an undetectable trance state.
The woman would then proceed to a location and plant an incendiary device hidden in a briefcase. The mind control experiments had huge potential for abuses of power.
One hypnotist told the CIA in 1951 he had used his powers to induce “young girls to engage in sexual intercourse with him.” In 1952, another specialist said that, with the correct conditioning, “Individuals could be taught to do anything, including murder.”
The program was cancelled in 1973.
The original Project Stargate
In the 1970s, the CIA tested the abilities of self-proclaimed psychic Uri Geller – famed for claiming to bend spoons with his mind – as part of its Stargate program, which investigated psychic powers
The project was a top secret operation run by the CIA and US military, launched because CIA operatives believed their Soviet counterparts were engaging in paranormal investigation and wanted to level the playing field.
Beginning in 1972, Congress allocated millions of dollars to fund the experiments in psychic techniques.
Geller and others were tasked with proving their powers by being placed in a sealed and monitored room where he was asked to draw words and objects selected by scientists using his psychic powers.
One test included randomly selecting a word from a dictionary. The first word selected was “fuse”. One psychic drew a firecracker.
“[Geller’s] almost immediate response was that he saw a ‘cylinder with noise coming out of it’,” CIA records show.
He also guessed other objects, including guessing purple circles for a bunch of grapes.
The CIA’s conclusion was that Uri “demonstrated his paranormal perceptual ability in a convincing and unambiguous manner”.
According to the records, the CIA also got their test subjects to attempt a number of other odd experiments – such as making psychic contact with aliens.
However, the CIA ultimately concluded the scheme did not add value to the intelligence services – despite spending millions over two decades.
The title of the program has recently been recycled as the name of a new AI project. Geller has continued to be a celebrity and now runs a museum showcasing his life and memorabilia in Jaffa, Israel.
Operation Paperclip
A secret program known as Paperclip, which saw the US enlist German scientists, some who had been members of the Nazi party, remains one of the most controversial epochs in post-war history.
The top-secret intelligence program brought scientists to America who had until recently been developing weapons against the allies to harness their brain power for Cold War initiatives against Russia.
The argument was that the West wanted to “secure as much of the dark magic of the Nazi [war] rocket program as they could.”
It resulted in the postwar employment of more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians in the US.
By January 1946, two months after the Nuremberg trials had begun, there were more than 160 Nazis — most alongside their families — relocated to the US.
The US military scientists working alongside one crew at the Hilltop facility in Dayton, Ohio, were disgusted by their new colleagues, expressing “emotions . . . ranging from vehemence to frustration.”
Another team of rocket scientists were held at Fort Bliss in Texas. Their leader was Wernher von Braun, the Nazi scientist crucial to the development of the V-2 rocket — which held a payload of 2,000 pounds and flew five times beyond the speed of sound.
Others included Kurt Debus, a former SS officer and the future first director of launch operations at the Kennedy Space Center, who “traded his death’s-head insignia for a fridge full of Bud and a pair of bowling shoes,” according to “Star Bound: A Beginner’s Guide to the American Space Program” by Emily Carney and Bruce McCandless III.
There was also Arthur Rudolph, who helmed the Saturn V development project at Marshall Space Center before being investigated for war crimes And Dr. Hubertus Strughold, the “father of space medicine” who helped design the first pressure suits for astronauts but was alleged to have participated in human experiments at the Dachau concentration camp.
The CIA missions and experiments which have been revealed are enough to make anyone’s jaw drop. But much more is still kept under lock and key.
If these are the things the agency has revealed, we are left to imagine what else has been suppressed from the public and what else lurks in the archive waiting to be declassified.