CRAZIEST Declassified CIA Projects

"From bizarre spy games, to unbelievable illegal activities, these are the CRAZIEST declassified CIA Projects.

HEY YOU ! There are more awesome videos being made every week, like and subscribe to World Unearthed so you don't miss a beat !

CRAZIEST Declassified CIA Projects

8. HTLINGUAL | who's reading your mail?

HTLINGUAL was the title of a secret illegal project conducted by the CIA from 1952 to 1973. The main goal of this project was to intercept mail from the Soviet Union and China. All the CIA wanted was to gain foreign intelligence. Basically, the needed to know what Russia and China's plans were. Along the way, however, the CIA had a growing interest in peace advocates and activists in the civil rights movement.

So, here’s how it would work. Both incoming and outgoing mail between the United States and the Soviet Union would be put in separate bags and sent to a team of CIA agents. These agents had a workspace set up somewhere in JFK airport in New York. The agency staff would then open the letters, photograph them, and make a list of all the names and addresses. The collected information was then sent to numerous offices around the United States. Agents would add and delete names from their “hit list”, if you will, depending on how suspicious their letters were. Over HTLINGUAL's operation, 28 million letters were intercepted and 215,000 of them were opened for investigation.

The CIA admitted that they weren’t just concerned with foreign intelligence. They had suspicions of U.S. citizens being traitors and communicating with the Soviets and Chinese. This makes sense because when this operation began in 1952, America and the Soviet Union were in the heat of the Cold War. The Soviet’s fearless leader, Joseph Stalin, died in 1953. This was a possible catalyst in the nation's hunger for power. Also, the Korean War ended in 1953 without an actual winner, making tensions between the U.S. and Asia even thicker. Oh, and the Soviets supplied China with their weapons. Tensions were high. The CIA’s suspicion is understandable.

In 1973, the new Director of Operations suggested that HTLINGUAL be terminated. Some leaders of the operation wanted it to stay active, and some felt that the CIA should stop doing illegal activity… considering that they were, you know, a part of the federal government who makes our laws. Eventually, the split in opinion forced the operation to be suspended, and it died from neglect.

6. PROJECT COLDFEET | intelligence on ice

Project Coldfeet, contrary to popular belief, did not have to do with nervous grooms on their wedding day. The CIA’s main purpose with this project was to extract Soviet information from one of their research stations in the Arctic. This particular station they targeted was abandoned. The station was literally, in the words of the CIA, “a floating ice island”. Although the arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States was at an all-time high in 1962, the U.S. government must have still felt a need to break the ice. Not literally, of course.

Project Coldfeet was a group effort from three U.S. government organizations: The Office of Naval Research, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the CIA. The team assigned to go couldn’t get there by land or by boat. They couldn’t even reach it through landing from the air, as the impact from an aircraft would have probably broken the ice. Two agents parachuted down from a bomber aircraft and stayed at the station for six days. They retrieved a lot of information about how the Soviets detect U.S. submarines under the ice. From this, the U.S. was able to develop more advanced submarine warfare tactics in an Arctic climate."