50 Interesting Facts about CIA

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1William Kampiles

William Kampiles

In 1977, William Kampiles stole a top-secret KH-11 spy satellite manual from the CIA which he sold to the Russians for $3000. He then told the CIA for who he worked for and what he had done in the hopes that they would hire him as a double agent. They didn't and he was sentenced to 40 years in prison.


2. In 1962, the CIA tipped off South Africa's intelligence service about the location of Nelson Mandela, leading to his arrest that put him in jail for 27 years.


3. The CIA's concern over soccer fields along the coast of Cuba led to the Cuban Missile Crisis. In September 1962, a CIA analyst noticed the fields and became concerned because, as he put it, "Cubans play baseball, Russians play soccer."


4. In 1954, the CIA deposed a democratically elected Guatemalan president (Jacobo Árbenz) and replaced him with a dictator (Carlos Castillo Armas) to save investments in a banana company.


5. The Starbucks at the CIA headquarters is not allowed to take names for orders.


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6Freedom of Information Act

Freedom of Information Act

Thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, the CIA released nearly 12 million documents. One set of documents revealed research on the possibility that "insane" people may be experiencing multiple "levels of reality" and their brains can't process this information, leading to mental instability.


7. In 1961 Belgians, with CIA involvement, ordered the murder of a democratically elected Prime Minister of Congo (Patrice Lumumba) who just wanted for the Congolese to regain the natural resources that were still under foreign control since the colonial times.


8. The CIA secretly pumped funds into abstract-expressionists, such as Jackson Pollack and Mark Rothko, in an attempt to make American freedom and expression art popular in contrast to rigid Soviet art.


9. A CIA handbook taught torture methods and stressed the importance of psychological over physical torture. The threat of inflicting pain triggered fears more damaging than the pain itself because people often underestimated their capacity to withstand pain.


10. Freeway Rick Ross was a cocaine kingpin in 1980's Los Angeles, at one point making 2-3 million dollars a week. The kicker? He was illiterate and his cocaine supplier was the CIA, who sold cocaine to illegally finance the Nicaraguan Contras.


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11CIA

CIA

In a CIA program called "Operation Midnight Climax", prostitutes were enlisted by the CIA to lure men to 'safe houses' in San Francisco where they were administered LSD without their consent. CIA Agents would then watch them have sex with the prostitutes through 1-way mirrors.


12. The CIA hired a magician (John Mulholland) to train agents in sleight of hand techniques for use in their mickey-slipping LSD experiments.


13. In order to obtain the vast amounts of titanium needed for the construction of the SR-71, the CIA created fake companies throughout the world to purchase the metal from the biggest supplier, the USSR.


14. There has been an encrypted sculpture called "Kryptos" that is located on the grounds of the CIA headquarters since 1990 and has yet to be fully decrypted.


15. Economists have discovered that insider knowledge of top-secret CIA coups have been used to make huge financial profits.


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16Fidel Castro

Fidel Castro

Operation Northwoods is a plan that called for CIA to commit genuine acts of terrorism in U.S. cities and elsewhere. These acts of terrorism were to be blamed on Cuba in order to create public support for a war against that nation, which had recently become communist under Fidel Castro.


17. Danny Casolaro was an investigative journalist who was working to uncover a secret group controlling the CIA, White House, etc. Despite telling friends and family that if he is found dead, it wouldn't be a suicide, he was found dead after meeting with an unknown source.


18. After George Orwell's death, the CIA secretly bought the rights to 1984 and Animal Farm and clandestinely produced the first film version of 1984 and the critically acclaimed animated film version of Animal Farm.


19. Project Coldfeet is a 1962 operation where two CIA operatives were airdropped onto an abandoned Soviet research station on an ice floe, retrieved information on advanced submarine detection systems, and were extracted via the Fulton Skyhook recovery system to a modified B-17.


20. Several days before the invasion of Afghanistan, a CIA agent made an agreement with the military commander of the Taliban, to kill Osama Bin Laden and capture his top lieutenants. Before the plan could be carried out, the United States began its invasion.


21CIA Memorial Wall

CIA Memorial Wall

The Central Intelligence Agency has a memorial wall at headquarters for employees who are killed while working for the US spy agency. Each year the CIA adds stars for deaths; some with names, some without. There are 125 stars as of 2017, eight more than in 2016 and 46 more than in 2002.


22. The CIA, in South Vietnam, in a program called "Operation Phoenix," secretly, without trial, executed at least 20,000 civilians who were suspected of being members of the Communist Party.


23. CIA agents in Milan botched an operation in 2003 because they gave hotels frequent flier numbers so they could earn miles during their stay in Milan.


24. The CIA once owned dummy corporation, "Air America," that operated as a civilian airline but was used to conduct military operations.


25. In 2013, the CIA publicly acknowledged the existence of Area 51 for the first time.

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2 COMMENTS

  1. The CIA opened an import export business in the Middle East as a cover for spying activities, the business became so successful that the CIA operative quit the CIA in order to concentrate on the business

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  2. Their motto makes me laugh – most CIA operatives wouldn’t know the truth if it came up and bit them on the arse.

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