5 times the U.S. government revealed secrets it tried to keep hidden
Some believe the U.S. government is behind the drones in New Jersey. There's no evidence of that—but the government does have a long history of covert programs.
Dozens of witnesses over the last several weeks have seen drones flying around New Jersey, and growing anxiety about who’s operating them and why they’ve appeared doesn’t seem to have wielded much explanation from authorities. Officials have only said they don’t pose a security threat.
Silence about the drones has only created space for conspiracy theories to take root, and some speculate that the government knows more than it’s letting on. There’s no evidence this is happening here. But it is true the federal government has a long history of covert programs.
“It is government obstruction, dissembling, and outright dishonesty that––more than any other factor––has engendered suspicion and encouraged conspiracy theorizing,” historian Matthew Connelly wrote in The Declassification Engine: What History Reveals About America’s Top Secrets.
Here are five instances when the U.S. government eventually owned up to programs and incidents that it initially kept secret.
Human experiments: Scientists exposed vulnerable Americans to radiation
In 1945, the same year it dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, the U.S. government began experiments investigating the effects of radiation on the human body. Scientists administered doses of plutonium, a radioactive chemical, to 18 people over the course of two years. Their subjects included Americans living with terminal illness, children, and unhoused people.
Ebb Cade, a construction worker from Tennessee, was one of the subjects. After he broke his arm and leg in a car accident in March 1945, doctors delayed treating his fractures for weeks until they could inject him with plutonium and see how it impacted his bones. He died eight years later.
In the subsequent years, more experiments got off the ground, expanding to incarcerated people, seniors, and servicemen––and they were all exposed to radiation without their consent.
In response to unethical Nazi experiments on subjects in concentration camps during World War II, a framework outlining humane principles for medical research was laid out in April 1947. Understanding that “they might have to answer for their actions” someday, as Connelly put it, American officials involved with the radiation experiments made moves to classify them.
Details about the human experiments remained hidden for decades. It wasn’t until 1994, when the Department of Energy launched an investigation into experiments conducted between 1944 and 1974, that they became widely known.
The Roswell incident: “flying disc,” weather balloon, or something else?
In the summer of 1947, the nation’s attention turned to Roswell, New Mexico, after a local rancher found unexplained debris on his property, including bits of tinfoil and rubber.
The debris ended up in the hands of the nearby Roswell Army Air Field, which sent officers to investigate. On July 8, they released a statement announcing that they were in possession of a “flying disc.” But they quickly backtracked. It was actually a weather balloon, they said, not a flying disc.
The about-face and the mysterious nature of the debris fanned rumors that it was actually the remains of an extraterrestrial aircraft.
In 1994, the United States Air Force made a report that seems to have corrected the record. The debris was actually radar reflectors developed for Project Mogul, a research spy program targeting the Soviet Union.
MKUltra: The CIA destroyed documents associated with an experimental drug program
During the Cold War, the U.S. explored increasingly unconventional ways of trying to stay one step ahead of the Soviet Union. Between 1953 and 1973, MKUltra, a secret CIA program, explored one method: mind-control drugs that the U.S. could use as weapons.
By drugging civilians and government workers (without consent), the program’s researchers wanted to observe the effects of the drugs like LSD, ultimately hoping to make people biddable to carry out tasks like secret assassinations.
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This project carried significant risks and serious ethical concerns. In one experiment, Gottlieb’s team drugged a patient with such a high dose that he died.
Details of MKUltra began to emerge in 1974, when a New York Times story exposed the CIA’s unethical and illegal practices, leading to a senate investigation and public revelations. The full extent of MKUltra’s activities will likely remain a mystery, since CIA director Richard Helms ordered all of the program’s records to be destroyed the year before.
COINTELPRO: The FBI’s surveillance of Americans only came to light because of a theft
J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI launched the Counterintelligence Program, or COINTELPRO, in the thick of the Cold War. Its objective: mitigate the Communist Party of the United States’s influence in the country.
COINTELPRO used a range of tactics to surveil and sabotage its targets, such as undermining them in the public eye or sowing conflict to weaken them.
The program gradually broadened its scope to include organizations and individuals it saw as disruptive to the social and political order, including the Ku Klux Klan, Black Panthers, and leading activists in the civil rights movement––including Martin Luther King, Jr.
The FBI surveilled King through wiretapping and bugging and paid special attention to his extramarital affairs. In 1964, the FBI even intimidated King by sending him an anonymous letter which called him a “filthy, abnormal animal.”
COINTELPRO’s activities first came to light in 1971 when members of the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, an activist group, pocketed classified documents about the program’s work during a break-in at a local FBI office and released them to the press.
One of many “broken arrow” incidents: How the U.S. lost a nuclear weapon in the sea
As the U.S. built a stockpile of nuclear arms during the Cold War, a new risk emerged: broken arrow incidents in which nuclear weapons are stolen, lost, or mishandled. America has officially owned up to 32 broken arrow incidents.
One of them occurred on December 5, 1965, when the U.S.S. Ticonderoga, an aircraft carrier, was in the Philippine Sea. A Skyhawk warplane, loaded with a pilot and nuclear bomb, rolled off the ship and slipped into the ocean.
Recovery efforts immediately focused on the pilot. But after hours of searching via helicopter and boat, crew members never found him. The pilot, aircraft, and nuclear weapon remained lost under 16,000 feet of water.
In the wake of the disaster, officials directed the men on board the Ticonderoga to keep their lips sealed, since they didn’t want the presence of nuclear weapons on board a navy ship to become common knowledge.
Though the Navy acknowledged the incident in 1981, details of what exactly happened remained elusive. Eight years later, scholars William Arkin and Joshua Handler released documents from the National Archives, drawing even more attention to the disaster.
Programs like MKUltra and COINTELPRO may be consigned to history, but many Americans wonder what clandestine activities are being carried out today––and when details will come to light.
As Connelly wrote, the issue of declassification and transparency isn’t about “vanquish[ing] government secrecy.” Instead, the goal should be “to distinguish the kind of information that really does require safeguarding from the information that citizens urgently need in order to hold their leaders to account. This is the only way to uphold both national security and democratic accountability.”
