Even though we only learn about top-secret government and military missions after they happen, it’s often shocking to discover what our leaders and intelligence officials are really up to.
While some of these operations had sensible objectives, the methods used to attain those objectives were often so outlandish that it’s almost insane to think somebody up the chain of command thought of and ordered these missions to commence.
Other missions were so bizarre that they will be hard to believe even after reading about them…and you won’t be able to stop yourself from wondering what our covert intelligence operations are secretly up to today.
Here are the sixteen strangest top secret missions that the U.S. military or intelligence operations ever conducted:
1 – Air America (formerly the Civil Air Transport)
In 1950, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) purchased the Civil Air Transport (CAT), which was a commercial airline that had been started in China after the Second World War; many of its pilots were veterans of the Southeast Asia theater in that war. The CIA continued to operate CAT for commercial flights, but in reality, several of the passengers or crew members were intelligence operatives disguised as civilians and conducting covert operations in Asia.
CAT changed its name to Air America in 1959 and continued to operate as a front for CIA operations until the summer of 1976. During the Vietnam War, Air America flights were used to transport supplies and provide logistical support to South Vietnamese militia fighting the North Vietnamese. They were also used to discreetly supply opium and heroin to the Hmong people during the concurring civil war in Laos in exchange for their support in the war. A movie inspired by the airline, the appropriately titled Air America, was released in 1990 starring Mel Gibson and Robert Downey Jr.
2 – U-2 Spy Plane
Also known as the ‘Dragon Lady,’ the Lockheed U-2 spy plane was developed in the early 1950s as a single-engine aircraft that could fly at high altitudes (over 70,000 feet) in any weather conditions and spy on the enemy below. The U-2 was approved by President Eisenhower and began flying over eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in 1956. But even though the U-2 was designed to supposedly fly high enough to evade enemy fire, that didn’t stop these planes from ever getting shot down.
As an example, perhaps the most notable event involving a U-2 plane happened in 1960 when a U-2 piloted by Francis Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union. Powers was captured and later traded for a Soviet spy in 1972. These events were dramatized in the 2015 film Bridge of Spies, which starred Tom Hanks. In another notable event, U-2 pilots photographed Soviet nuclear missiles on Cuba, which led to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and was the closest the world has ever come to nuclear war.
3 – Operation Gold
Operation Gold was a joint operation between the CIA and British MI-6 (the same intelligence service that fictional spy James Bond works for). The objective of the operation was to build a tunnel underneath Berlin that could then be used to tap into the Soviet cable lines; at the time, western Berlin was controlled by the United States and eastern Berlin by the Soviet Union.
What the CIA and MI-6 didn’t know was that the Soviets were aware of Operation Gold almost since it began! This was because a Soviet mole in MI-6, George Blake, caught wind of the operation early on. The Soviets, however, allowed the operation to continue as if they knew nothing to protect Blake until 1956, when they ‘accidentally’ found out about the tunnel while ‘fixing’ underground cables.
4 – The CORONA Satellite
No, not the coronavirus! Decades before the pandemic ever happened, the CIA and the United States Air Force joined forces to develop the first imaging satellite. Codenamed the CORONA Project, this satellite was a top secret operation designed to collect photos over Soviet-controlled regions in Europe and Asia as a replacement for the U-2 spy planes, which were getting shot down.
The CORONA satellites were capable of taking detailed photos over a hundred miles above the Earth and ended up taking almost a million images in total during the Cold War, which proved vital for intelligence operations. The very existence of these satellites makes you wonder if the military and government are utilizing even more advanced satellites today, and if so, what they could be spying on…
5 – Project Azorian
In 1968, the Soviet ballistic missile submarine K-129 inexplicably sank in the Pacific Ocean. The Soviet Union launched a massive effort to find the sunken vessel, but to no avail. The United States military caught wind of what the Soviets were doing, and hatched an unconventional if brilliant plan to find the submarine and its missiles first.
The military worked with business magnate Howard Hughes to build a ship called the Hughes Glomar Explorer in 1972, which was officially to be used for extracting manganese nodules from the bottom of the ocean floor for Hughes’ company Global Marine Development. The story attracted significant media attention. But in reality, the military was still actively searching for K-129. When they found the wreckage in 1974, they used the Hughes Glomar to pull it up out of the ocean. Two thirds of the submarine broke off during the recovery and re-sank, but the rest was successfully recovered.
6 – A-12 Oxcart
In the early 1960s, the CIA was searching for the successor to the U-2 spy plane. They worked together with Lockheed, the same company that had built the U-2, to develop a new plane under the ‘OXCART’ program. The new plane had to travel at a speed of Mach 3.2 at an altitude of 90,000 feet, which was far faster and higher than the U-2 could fly.
The resulting Lockheed A-12 spy plane met the requirements set by the OXCART program, but it was placed back into temporary storage after only a few years of use. That’s because the technology was so advanced and top secret the military decided it would be more valuable to keep the A-12s hidden rather than to continue actively using them and risk having America’s enemies catch up with the technology.
7 – Project MKUltra
MKUltra was the project name given to a covert research operation within the Scientific Intelligence Division of the CIA. The project involved the CIA experimenting upon human subjects (many of them American citizens) to discover which drugs, psychological torture methods, and brainwashing techniques could be utilized to weaken people mentally and get them to make confessions. To that end, the participants of MKUltra administered everything from dangerous chemicals to hypnosis to sleep deprivation to electroshocks to sexual and verbal abuse to extended isolation periods to drugs like LSD on their subjects.
What made the experiments even more disturbing is how the CIA carried them out under the guise of innocent research examinations at more than eighty non-military institutions around the country, such as universities and hospitals. Several test subjects were killed while many more were physically or mentally damaged (or both) for the rest of their lives. This barbaric project was revealed to the general public in 1975 by the Rockefeller Commission.
Charles Manson has been widely speculated to have been a subject of MKULtra.
8 – Operation CHAOS
Operation CHAOS was an espionage mission the CIA conducted on the domestic front to target American citizens. The operation was started under President Lyndon Johnson and continued under President Richard Nixon. The goal of the operation was to see if there were any hostile foreign influences in the anti-war protests that had erupted across the country during the Vietnam War.
The CIA conducted domestic spying techniques like electronics eavesdropping and surveillance on specific American citizens who took part in anti-war protests, and including when these citizens traveled abroad. They accumulated active files on more than 7,000 individual Americans. Operation CHAOS was eventually revealed to the public by journalist Seymour Hersh in The New York Times in 1974, around the same time as the Watergate scandal.
9 – Project Iceworm
In the late 1950s the U.S. Army launched the Iceworm Project…which basically was to hide hundreds of nuclear missiles underneath the ice in Greenland. Greenland was a strategic location because the missiles would be in a prime location to launch strikes against the Soviet Union if need be.
The army constructed Camp Century, which was a military base under the ice that ‘officially’ was a scientific research facility. This camp consisted of more than twenty four underground tunnels carved into the ice, and was complete with living spaces, a hospital, scientific laboratories, and even a movie theater. Unfortunately, the ice caps in Greenland shifted and caused the tunnels to cave in or become unstable. By 1966 Project Iceworm was over.
10 – Project Pigeon
While the Second World War was raging, famed psychologist B.F. Skinner received military approval and funding for his ‘Bird’s Eye Bomb’…which basically was a pigeon guided missile. Skinner got the inspiration for the weapon when he watched a flock of pigeons flying and wondered if they could guide a muscle to its intended target.
Skinner trained pigeons to peck at images of enemy targets, and would then place a bird into the cockpit of a missile with a plastic screen that had an image of the missile’s flight path. When the bird pecked at the screen, it could change the coordinations of the missile and then steer it towards the target that they had been trained to peck the image of. The project was well underway in its development phase until certain higher ups in the military felt it was too outrageous and cut funding for it in late 1944.
11 – Edgewood Arsenal Human Experiments
In the 1950s, the U.S. Army began conducting research on psychoactive drugs at the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. The goal was to identify non-lethal drugs that could be used for interrogations or on the battlefield. The army used over 5,000 unsuspecting soldiers as the subjects for their experiments by giving them everything from BZ to VX to LSD to PSP to marijuana to sarin.
Several of the soldiers involved in the testing ended up dying due to lethal doses of the drugs that were sometimes given, while others were left with severe health problems and mental trauma that they carried with them for the rest of their lives. The experiments were halted in 1975 following a Congressional hearing that created public outrage.
12 – Peacekeeper Rail Garrison
Towards the end of the Cold War, the U.S. military decided to make some of their nuclear missile silos mobile so they would be less likely to be hit in the event of a Soviet attack. This is why the military developed Air Force train cars that would be kept in reinforced buildings but the could be moved across the country quickly if needed. There were a total of 25 trains, each of which carried two rail cars that contained nuclear missiles, and that could be used on over 120,000 miles of existing railroad track.
What was even neater was how the missiles could be fired from the trains while on the go. This system became known as the Peacekeeper Rail Garrison and was approved by President Ronald Reagan in 1986. It was expensive to operate, however, and was deemed no longer necessary and scrapped five years later after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
13 – Acoustic Kitty
Did you know that the CIA tried to use cats on spy missions during the Cold War? The CIA literally launched a project called ‘Acoustic Kitty’ in the 1960s to use cats to spy on Soviet embassies around the world and even on the Kremlin itself. Scientists from the CIA’s Directorate of Science & Technology implanted a battery and microphone into the ears of cats and antennas into their tails. This allowed the cats to then record their surroundings and transmit everything back to base.
However, the idea quickly proved to be much less effective in practice than in theory. The first cat that was used to spy on the Soviet embassy in Washington D.C. was hit and killed by a taxi. Other cats were very difficult to train, and most would try to satisfy their hunger or curiosity of their surroundings rather than go to the specific places that the CIA wanted to spy on. The project was stopped in 1967 and then disclosed to the public in 2001.
14 – Project MKNaomi
Project MKNAOMI was a joint research program between the CIA and the U.S. Department of Defense that focused on research into biological warfare agents. As with the MKUltra and the Edgewood Arsenal experiments, MKNAOMI focused on conducting tests on living people. The goal of the project was to determine which substances were lethal so they could be used with the Technical Services Division of the CIA, which could then supply the substances to intelligence and military units as needed.
MKNAOMI came to an end in 1969 when President Richard Nixon decided to ban the use of biological weapons by the military and outlawed the possession of stockpiles of biological weapons the following year. Nonetheless, certain toxins were still being stored in CIA laboratories until they were uncovered years later.
15 – Stargate Project
The Stargate Project refers to a number of projects that the U.S. government conducted to research psychic phenomena, out-of-body experiences, and the ability to see events (including future events) via remote viewing and clairvoyant abilities. The project was overall very small scale with no more than 20 to 25 personnel working on it at any one time, and the military would only turn to the project to find intelligence after all other options had been exhausted.
The Stargate Project was eventually terminated in the early 1990s and declassified a few years later. A CIA report was released that stated the project never discovered any information that ended up being useful to intelligence operations. Nonetheless, the project has spawned a countless number of conspiracy theories, including some theories that similar psychic projects are still going on in the military to this day.
16 – Operation Mockingbird
Operation Mockingbird was a CIA program that began during the Cold War as an attempt to take control of or at least manipulate America media organizations for propaganda purposes. Supposedly, several American journalists were recruited into the CIA and then told what to say on TV programs or what to write in newspaper articles. One of the main objectives at the time was to spread positive news stories about programs the government was conducting during the Cold War and to influence public opinion.
The same went for Hollywood where directors, producers, and screenwriters who were powerful players in the industry were likewise recruited to insert information into movies and shows to try and sway public opinion on certain matters. So be careful about what you’re watching…
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