Ten Conspiracy Theories That Turned Out to Be True

In 1953, CIA Director Allen Dulles approved a secret research program on drugs and behavior control, driven partly by fear that Communist interrogators had learned to brainwash American prisoners in Korea. The chemist Sidney Gottlieb ran much of the work. Its code name was MKUltra.

The program funded experiments with LSD and other substances, sometimes on people who never agreed to take part. In one strand, later nicknamed Operation Midnight Climax, men were dosed without their knowledge at CIA safe houses and watched through two-way mirrors. Frank Olson, a civilian scientist working for the Army at Fort Detrick, was secretly given LSD at a 1953 meeting and died days later after a fall from a New York hotel window. His family eventually received a $750,000 settlement and an apology from President Ford.

In January 1973, most MKUltra files were destroyed, on the instruction of then CIA Director Richard Helms according to Senate testimony. The story leaked out through reporting and the investigations of the mid-1970s. Then, in 1977, the CIA found seven boxes of surviving financial records. At an August 1977 Senate hearing, officials said the papers covered 149 subprojects and named about 80 institutions, including 44 colleges and universities, many of which did not know the CIA was paying.

During Prohibition, bootleggers kept the country drinking partly by stealing industrial alcohol and trying to make it drinkable. The government's answer was chemistry. Industrial alcohol was already "denatured" with toxic additives so no one would drink it. In 1926, under President Coolidge, federal officials decided to make those formulas deadlier, with the Treasury requiring methyl alcohol at up to 10 percent of the product.

The results showed up fast. Around Christmas 1926, dozens of people in New York City were rushed to Bellevue Hospital after drinking tainted liquor, and more than 20 died within days. Charles Norris, the city's first chief medical examiner, publicly blamed Washington and called the policy an experiment in extermination. A New Jersey senator called it legalized murder. Defenders of Prohibition replied that anyone who drank illegal liquor had chosen the risk.

Nobody can give a precise death toll, because poisoning from government denaturants is hard to separate from bootleggers' own toxic batches. Estimates commonly cited by historians run to at least 10,000 deaths from tainted alcohol by the time Prohibition ended in December 1933. What is not in doubt is that the poisoning was deliberate federal policy, announced in the newspapers of the day.

The idea that companies secretly build products to fail sounds like a gripe from a frustrated shopper. In the case of the incandescent light bulb, it was a signed agreement. On December 23, 1924, the world's major bulb makers met in Geneva and formed what became known as the Phoebus cartel. Members included Osram, Philips and Tokyo Electric, with General Electric represented through its international arm.

The cartel divided up world markets and set a standard life of 1,000 hours for an ordinary household bulb, down from the 1,500 to 2,000 hours that had been common. Factories sent sample bulbs to a central testing lab in Switzerland, and a maker whose bulbs lasted too long, or too short, could be fined. According to research by media historian Markus Krajewski, the average life of a reference bulb fell from about 1,800 hours in 1926 to roughly 1,200 hours by fiscal 1933–34, while sales rose and prices held steady.

The agreement was supposed to run until 1955. Patent expirations, internal squabbling, legal pressure in the United States and finally World War II broke it apart, and it was nullified in 1940. Planned obsolescence still gets debated, but this early case is on paper.

On the night of March 8, 1971, while much of the country was watching the Ali-Frazier fight, eight activists broke into a small FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, and carried off more than 1,000 files. They mailed copies to newspapers. The Washington Post ran the story on March 24, and one odd word in the papers, COINTELPRO, opened a much bigger door.

COINTELPRO, short for Counterintelligence Program, began in 1956 as an effort to disrupt the Communist Party USA. Over the 1960s it expanded to the Socialist Workers Party, the Ku Klux Klan and other white hate groups, the Black Panther Party, Puerto Rican independence groups, the antiwar New Left and civil rights organizations. Tactics included infiltration, anonymous letters, planted stories and efforts to turn groups against each other. The most notorious example is an anonymous 1964 letter and tape sent to Martin Luther King Jr.; a copy surfaced in the files of senior FBI official William Sullivan during the 1975 investigations.

The FBI says all COINTELPRO operations ended in 1971. The Senate's Church Committee examined the program in 1975 and 1976 and sharply criticized it as an attack on lawful political activity. The burglars were never caught; several revealed themselves in a 2014 book.

For decades, Americans were told that dietary fat was the main villain behind heart disease, while sugar got a lighter touch. In 2016, researchers led by Cristin Kearns of the University of California, San Francisco, published internal industry documents in JAMA Internal Medicine showing that part of that story had been bought.

In 1965, a trade group called the Sugar Research Foundation paid Harvard nutrition researchers to write a review of the science on diet and heart disease. The scientists involved included Fredrick Stare, Mark Hegsted and Robert McGandy, with Hegsted and McGandy receiving about $6,500, roughly $48,000 in 2016 dollars. The foundation's research director set the review's focus and saw drafts. The two-part review appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1967, played down evidence linking sugar to heart disease, emphasized fat, and did not disclose the industry funding.

The Sugar Association, the foundation's successor, responded that it should have been more transparent but criticized the coverage of the 2016 paper. Funding disclosure rules in medical journals were looser in the 1960s, which explains how it happened but does not change what the documents show.

For years, the claim that cigarette companies knew their products were addictive and deadly, and hid it, was treated by the industry as slander. In 1999, the U.S. Department of Justice sued the major manufacturers, including Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds, under the civil racketeering law usually aimed at organized crime.

On August 17, 2006, federal judge Gladys Kessler ruled against them in an opinion running to 1,682 pages. She found the companies had lied to and deceived the public for decades. According to her findings, they concealed their own research showing that nicotine is addictive, promoted "light" and low-tar cigarettes as safer while knowing smokers used them as an excuse not to quit, publicly denied the dangers of secondhand smoke despite internal acknowledgment of them, and marketed to young people to recruit replacement smokers.

The companies fought the remedies for years. Court-ordered corrective statements finally began running in newspapers and on television in November 2017, followed by required messages on company websites, cigarette packs and signs in retail stores. The case is one of the clearest examples of a corporate conspiracy established not by leaks or rumor but by a full federal trial.

On August 2, 1964, North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked the destroyer USS Maddox, which was gathering electronic intelligence in support of covert South Vietnamese raids, a role the public was not told about. Two nights later, the Maddox and a second destroyer reported another attack. President Johnson ordered retaliatory air strikes and asked Congress for broad authority to act in Vietnam.

Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution on August 7, unanimously in the House and 88 to 2 in the Senate, with only Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening voting no. It became the legal foundation for a vast escalation of the Vietnam War. Doubts about the second attack surfaced almost immediately, even from the commander aboard the Maddox, who suggested that freak weather on radar and overeager sonar operators may explain many of the reports.

Skeptics argued for decades that the August 4 attack never happened. In 2005 the National Security Agency declassified an internal history by its own historian, Robert Hanyok, which concluded that no attack took place that night and that signals intelligence had been mishandled and presented in a skewed way to support the claim that it had. Congress repealed the resolution in January 1971.

In November 1986, a Lebanese magazine reported that the United States had been secretly selling weapons to Iran, a country Washington publicly treated as hostile. Days later, President Reagan told the nation on television that the U.S. had not traded arms for hostages, a reference to Americans held in Lebanon by Iran-linked militants.

The story got worse. On November 25, Attorney General Edwin Meese announced that profits from the arms sales had been made available to the Contras, rebels fighting Nicaragua's leftist government, at a time when Congress had restricted that aid through the Boland Amendments. National Security Adviser John Poindexter resigned, and his aide Oliver North was fired after shredding and hiding documents.

On March 4, 1987, Reagan went back on television and admitted that, whatever his intentions, the deals had come down to trading arms for hostages, and he took responsibility. Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh eventually charged 14 people, and 11 were convicted. Appeals courts overturned the convictions of North and Poindexter, and on December 24, 1992, President George H.W. Bush pardoned six others, including former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger before he could stand trial.

On March 12, 2013, at an open Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Senator Ron Wyden asked Director of National Intelligence James Clapper whether the NSA collected any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans. Clapper answered no, then added that it did not do so wittingly.

Three months later, in June 2013, The Guardian published a secret order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court requiring Verizon to hand the NSA records of its customers' calls on an ongoing daily basis. The document came from Edward Snowden, an NSA contractor. It showed the agency was collecting metadata, such as which numbers called which and for how long, on a massive scale, and similar orders had gone to other major carriers. Clapper later apologized, saying he had misunderstood the question.

Civil liberties groups had warned about this kind of dragnet for years, and were often dismissed as paranoid. In May 2015, a federal appeals court ruled in ACLU v. Clapper that the Patriot Act provision the government relied on, Section 215, did not authorize the program. Congress passed the USA FREEDOM Act that June, and bulk collection of Americans' call records ended on November 29, 2015.

Of all the claims in this file, this is the one that sounds most like fiction. On March 13, 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff sent Defense Secretary Robert McNamara a top secret memo titled "Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba." It was signed by the chairman, General Lyman Lemnitzer.

The memo laid out ways to manufacture a pretext for invading Cuba by staging incidents and blaming Fidel Castro's government. Ideas included a fake Communist Cuban terror campaign in Miami, other Florida cities and Washington; sinking a boat of Cuban refugees, real or simulated; staging attacks at Guantanamo Bay; blowing up a U.S. ship and blaming Cuba, an echo of the USS Maine; and faking the shootdown of a civilian airliner using a drone disguised as the real plane.

None of it happened. President Kennedy rejected the proposals, and Lemnitzer was replaced as chairman later that year, going on to become NATO's top commander in early 1963. The memo stayed secret until November 1997, when the Assassination Records Review Board, set up to release records connected to Kennedy's assassination, made it public. The National Security Archive posted it online in 2001. Northwoods proves that a false-flag plan was written down and sent up the chain of command. It does not prove any later event was staged.