MH/CHAOS: The CIA’s Campaign Against the Radical New Left and the Black Panthers

* An insider’s account of the CIA’s Counterintelligence Staff’s Special Operations Group Operation MH/CHAOS was the code name for a domestic espionage project conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency in the late1960s and early 1970s, first charged by Presidents Lyndon Johnson and later by Richard Nixon to find foreign intelligence, terrorist organisations or government contacts, controlling or influencing Anti-Vietnam War activists or American black extremists protesting, bombing and carrying out other anti-government, unlawful or illegal activities in the United States. The program’s goal was to unmask possible foreign influences on the student antiwar movement. In Operation MH/CHOAS, Frank J Rafalko, who is a former CIA officer, refutes the charges made by The New York Times and the Washington Post at the time that this domestic spying program first made headlines, and takes issue with conclusions of the Rockefeller Commission and the Church Committee. He relates how the Special Operations Group began, was staffed and how it was transformed into an anti-terrorist unit before it ceased operation. Rafalko details the information that Special Operations Group collected against the New Left and Black extremists and makes the case that the MH/CHAOS program was justified, why the CIA was the logical agency to conduct the collection, and the consequences suffered later by American counterintelligence because of these investigations.