Following the riots and racial unrest that shook the country in 1967, President Lyndon Johnson directed federal agencies to investigate the causes of the social explosion. His directive led to the analysis and recommendations of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (known as the Kerner Commission after its chair, Ohio Governor Otto Kerner Jr.). Among the commission’s lesser-known recommendations was a call for the government to integrate its surveillance systems. In response, then–CIA Director Richard Helms ordered the agency to start collecting information on what one FBI memo described as “racial agitators who might travel abroad,” persons who were also investigated for “having any significant bearing on possible racial disturbances in the U.S.”
In launching Operation Chaos, Johnson created the cultural hack used to legitimate the CIA’s illegal activities targeting US citizens in both the analog and digital eras of surveillance: stigmatizing Latino, Black and other racialized groups as threats to national security and then surveilling, harassing, and even killing them, as happened in the better-known case of US surveillance of the Black Panthers.
Johnson’s successor, Richard Nixon, expanded the program in response to what he called the “wild orgasm of anarchists sweeping across the country like a prairie fire.” As a result, Operation Chaos infiltrated and surveilled groups like the Brown Berets, La Raza Unida Party, the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, and others opposed to the war in Vietnam.
Representative Castro, who sits on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Foreign Affairs Committees, requested release of the documents, in part, to right past wrongs against these and other Latino groups, many of whom suffered harassment, losses of funding, and ruined reputations.
“Organizations operating lawfully and in the spirit of democracy were surveilled and often discredited, ” said Castro in a statement to The Nation. “Today, greater transparency about those activities can help us correct the record and clear the names of those who were unfairly targeted,” he added.
The broad Latino net cast by Operation Chaos extended far beyond the more radical Latino groups. Also swept up in the program were local religious, nonprofit, education, media, and other groups organizing around housing, education, and other local and domestic concerns. United Bronx Parents and the Chelsea Coalition on Housing were targeted, as were Latinos and non-Latinos in the SEIU, the American Federation of Teachers, and other labor unions.
Among the many Latino leaders profiled and targeted by the CIA’s unwarranted domestic operations were “Corky” Gonzalez, one of the leaders of the Crusade for Justice in Denver, legendary LA-based educator Sal Castro, and members of the Young Lords and Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization, among others.