LAUSR

important inflection point in CIA history. On the one hand, the agents of America’s secret government worked even harder to watch and control the young people who protested against their bipolar view of the world. President Lyndon Johnson pressured the CIA to widen existing programs and investigate the possible foreign links of many different antiwar groups and individuals. Helms responded by creating a program known as Operation CHAOS, a counterintelligence program run by the Agency and directed at American dissidents, even though these domestic actions directly violated the CIA’s charter. Soon, President Richard Nixon demanded that the CIA and other secret agencies expand these programs against the Americans he considered the nation’s enemies. Johnson’s paranoia about domestic dissidents and his illegal programs to combat them – as extensive as they were – soon came to seem mild compared to his successor’s obsessive concern with dissenters and his endorsement of systematic law-breaking to investigate and punish them. While government officials worked in secret to intimidate the administration’s young opponents, members of the press grew more determined to unearth proof of what they believed were real government conspiracies against democracy. The chain of events that began with the Ramparts exposé – the Operation CHAOS programs against domestic dissidents, the Nixon administration’s anti-subversive program known as the Huston Plan, and the police discovery of the CIA-affiliated burglars at the Watergate office building – culminated in the extensive congressional and journalistic investigations of the intelligence community in 1975. The investigators on Frank Church’s Senate committee exposed many CIA abuses: assassination plots, the covert use of reporters and religious groups for espionage purposes, and Operation CHAOS, among others. But they produced relatively little new information about the CIA’s infiltration of the NSA. Paget’s book helps to fill this gap, and to remind us of the consequences when we fail to keep watch over our secret agencies.