Conspiracy theory

:For the fictional film, see Conspiracy Theory (movie).

Real life imitates conspiracy theory

Sometimes real life does imitate conspiracy theory. It is part of the job of intelligence agencies such as the CIA and MI5 to create conspiracy theories while attempting to analyse their information. However, these are referred to as 'scenarios', or 'working theories.'

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A number of actual government organizations or plans have been described as resembling particularly poor conspiracy theories. Nonetheless, these are fully acknowledged by their respective governments, or by a broad consensus of mainstream experts, as being, or having been, real:

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• The United States Department of Defense Information Awareness Office (IAO) has many similarities to conspiracy theory. First, its avowed purpose is to gather and correlate information on ordinary citizens for the purpose of predicting terrorism and other crime. Second, its logo depicted the eye in the pyramid, a symbol associated with Illuminati and Masonic representations of power or divinity, casting a beam over the globe of the Earth. This logo has since been changed. The original logo is still widely available on the Internet. Lastly, the name "Iao" is a Gnostic word for God, used in the Golden Dawn and Thelema among others.
• The inner workings of the Mafia were unknown to most outsiders until defecting Genovese mob family soldier Joe Valachi revealed them in Congressional testimony in October 1963.
• Retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, an outspoken isolationist and anti-war activist, testified to the U.S. Congress in 1934 that a group of the wealthiest American industrialists had approached him to organize a coup d'état to overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt and establish a fascist government, but this alleged Business Plot was not verified beyond Butler's congressional testimony.
• The CIA has been involved in foreign coups d'état, according to declassified papers and legal inquiries. These interventions include the 1954 overthrow of Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, the deposing in 1953 of Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh and the 1970 attempted overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile, among others.
• From the 1949 to 1973, the CIA and the U.S. Army operated a joint research program into mind control, codenamed MKULTRA. In this program, CIA agents gave LSD and other powerful hallucinogenic drugs to unwitting and unconsenting victims, in an effort to devise a working "Truth serum" and/or mind-control drug. MKULTRA was publicly exposed by Presidential and Congressional research committees in 1975, but the CIA claimed it had discontinued the program two years before. Prominent writers and drug figures first exposed to LSD under this program include novelist Ken Kesey of the Merry Pranksters, psychologists Timothy Leary and Baba Ram Dass (Richard Alpert), and poet Allen Ginsberg. A source on this is the book Acid Dreams by Bruce Shalin and Martin A. Lee. Future 'Unabomber' Theodore Kaczynski clamied to have undergone a "stress" experiment while a Harvard University undergraduate in the early 1960s, according to Alston Chase. Henry Murray who had during World War II served in the OSS, precursor to the CIA, was at Harvard during the same time period as the Leary experiments, but there is no evidence Kaczynski was given LSD.
• ECHELON is a communications interception network operated by the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. It is designed to capture telephone calls, fax and e-mail messages for purposes similar to the IAO (see above). New Zealand has openly admitted the existence of Echelon, and the European Union commissioned a report on the system.
• Investigative journalist Gary Webb published a 1998 series in the San Jose Mercury News on connections between the Nicaraguan Contras and crack-cocaine traffickers. The story generated enormous interest and debate in the U.S. due to the Contras' ties with the CIA.
• In the 2003 Iraq War, Iraqi resistance was strong at first and then collapsed suddenly. A conspiracy theory emerged in Iraq and elsewhere that there had been a safqah—Arabic for "secret deal"—between the U.S. and the Iraqi military elite, wherein the elite were bribed to stand down. This conspiracy theory was generally ignored in the U.S. media. In late May 2003, General Tommy Franks, who had been the head of the U.S. forces in the conflict, confirmed in an interview with Defense News that the U.S. government had paid off high-level Iraqi military officials and that they had stated that "I am working for you now." How important this was to the course of the conflict was not entirely clear at the time of this writing (May 24, 2003).
• Operation Northwoods, a 1962 United States Department of Defense plan to commit acts of terrorism (real and/or simulated) on American tourists in Cuba and blame them on the Castro government to encourage support for an invasion of the country to depose Castro, was long considered to be a groundless conspiracy theory until the project's documents were declassified and published. The operation was approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but was rejected by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. General Lyman Lemnitzer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was fired shortly after.
• The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male. For a period of 50 years, the U.S. Government used some members of the black population of a town in Alabama to observe the effects of untreated syphilis. The participants were not asked to participate and were not told they were not being treated for their syphilis.
• In 1949, General Motors was convicted of violating anti-trust laws in its purchase and maintenance of streetcar systems in cities throughout the US, most notably Los Angeles. The General Motors streetcar conspiracy was intended to promote the use of buses and automobiles.