In May 1958, the CIA’s Far East Division hatched a plan: recruit an attractive white woman to extract information from the president of Indonesia by engaging in an “intimate relationship” with him. The operation was dubbed Project Harpstar.
The plan ultimately fell through but it, alongside the tens of thousands of pages of other previously classified information released by the Trump administration on Tuesday, sheds light on how the CIA worked in the shadows to fight global Marxism during the Cold War. Infiltrating civilian activist groups, working with the Catholic Church to combat communism, pouring cash into pro-Western media operations, disguising intelligence assets as students, and selling arms through civilian proxies are just a few of the strategies employed by American intelligence officers in their crusade against the Soviet Union and its allies.
The ill-fated Project Harpstar was conceived when CIA operatives noticed that the Russians had successfully used women posing as romantic prospects in their covert operations.
“Basically, [the] Project capitalized on President Sukarno’s weakness for women, especially Caucasian,” a newly released 1966 CIA dispatch reads. “Because of our inability to get controlled assets close to him to determine his thinking and plans, and the recent apparent success of Soviet’s use of a woman, [we] believed he may let down [his] guard and become expansive in [the] discussion of plans with a female and accept advice that he would not ordinarily accept from a man.”
Agents selected a wealthy 35-year-old widow whom they described as “highly intelligent and extremely attractive” to seduce the Indonesian president. Her cover story was that of a film industry scout visiting the country to scope out locations to film an adaptation of Journey to the Center of the Earth. The CIA even arranged to pay the Indonesian branch of 20th Century Fox to make the whole affair appear as legitimate as possible.
Due to “unfortunate timing,” the female asset had little time to cultivate a relationship with the Indonesian president as he had to leave the country on official business shortly after her arrival, rendering the operation a failure. A similar program detailed in the dispatch, Project Norfolk, saw the CIA attempt to secure “female companionship” for the king of Jordan.
Despite President Donald Trump’s promise that there would be no redactions in the newly released records, the documents detailing Project Harpstar and Project Norfolk, alongside a handful of others, include blotted-out information. Nothing has emerged in the roughly 64,000 pages of unsealed documents that challenge the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted as a lone gunman in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, according to the New York Times. While the files lack revelatory information about the Kennedy assassination, they do include ample documentation of how the CIA was interacting with Cuba, a country long suspected of involvement in the killing.
One file detailed the CIA’s operations in Cuba in September 1961, shortly after American-backed anti-communist Cuban commandos launched their failed Bay of Pigs invasion in April of that year. The CIA reported having roughly 24 agents in Cuba at the time. One of these operatives managed to convince a Uruguayan diplomat to act as a courier, sending him on an amphibious delivery mission on behalf of the CIA. Another traveled to Geneva in an attempt to recruit the head of the Cuban National Bank while he was attending a sugar conference.
These agents were often regular people who had become disillusioned with the leadership of communist leader Fidel Castro. One described in the 1961 document, for instance, was an airline pilot.
Cuban exiles, those who fled the communist island for the United States, were seen as prime recruits by the CIA. In one instance, the CIA mulled recruiting over 100 of these exiles to return to Cuba “under the guise of students” to act as intelligence assets for the United States. An earlier document shows that the agency employed the same strategy by planting Cuban dissidents at universities across the Western Hemisphere.
“CIA has on hand both propaganda and political action assets in the Caribbean area and elsewhere in Latin America,” a 1962 CIA report on Operation Mongoose, a secret program intended to topple the Castro regime, reads. “It is planned to use those assets both to support the Project inside Cuba and to generate and mobilize public and official opinion against Castro outside Cuba.”
The documents corroborate past revelations that the United States was extensively involved in funding anti-communist radio broadcasters and newspapers. Many of the CIA’s assets, among them diplomats and media workers, received stipends directly from the agency.
The CIA often flexed its media network to combat what it perceived as the spread of communism, per the documents.
During the winter of 1963, the agency identified a large labor union meeting in Brazil that it believed was to serve as a means for communist operatives to politically organize and align themselves with union officials. To derail this conference, the CIA discussed using its agents to pressure union representatives into boycotting the meeting, using state-run broadcasters to discredit communist nations by arguing that they provide poor working conditions, and spreading counterfeit union literature intended to make the conference’s organizers look bad.
The CIA clearly valued its global media network, with one document showing the agency eager to step into negotiations with Turkey that would allow Voice of America and Radio Free Europe to operate out of the country.
Russian propaganda efforts were similarly robust to those employed by the CIA, according to the documents. As of 1953, the CIA and its Western allies were responsible for roughly 1,015 hours per week of broadcasts, compared to the 1,395 hours produced by the communist bloc, according to a newly released document. The CIA’s target audience at the time were the Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe.
A CIA report from the early 1950s identified financially supporting “nonpolitical, but anti-communist, religious broadcasts” as one of its primary strategies for combatting communism.
Indeed, the CIA forged alliances with religious organizations based on their shared opposition to the rise of Marxism. A report dated January 1962 stated that the CIA often utilized its connections with members of the Catholic Church to subvert Cuba’s communist government.
CIA operatives in 1961 worked with members of the church to sow dissent in Cuba over the Castro regime’s repression of religious rights, using the feast day of the country’s patron saint as a flashpoint. The operation resulted in 65,000 pieces of anti-Castro literature being distributed across Latin America, and within the United States, the CIA collaborated with Catholics to hold a Mass at a Miami stadium that was attended by 25,000 people.
The scheme was dubbed Operation Virgen del Cobre, referring to an image of the Virgin Mary associated with Cuban independence.
JFK FILES RELEASED: TRUMP ADMINISTRATION MAKES THOUSANDS OF CLASSIFIED RECORDS PUBLIC
Tension did exist between Catholics and American intelligence operatives, however.
Washington’s top CIA officer sent a dispatch in October 1967 revealing that one of his operatives had infiltrated the Catholic Association for International Peace to gather information on its anti-Vietnam War demonstrations and its promotion of “selective conscientious objection” as a means to avoid conscription. The agency also infiltrated secular anti-war groups, according to other newly released documents.
Other interesting details contained in the trove of declassified documents include the revelation that the CIA owned the International Armament Corporation, a gun distributor that imported foreign surplus firearms and distributed weapons produced by ArmaLite, the manufacturer responsible for designing the AR-15 and AR-10. Per one document, the CIA used the firearm distributor as a front to sell off inventory. Additionally, the documents revealed the CIA to have been actively spying on the New York Times journalist who was going to break the news about the Bay of Pigs invasion before it occurred.
Striking a darker tone, documents show that the CIA considered engaging in “agricultural sabotage,” even going so far as to draw up plans to ruin rice crops in Cuba by using its controlled assets. A general working with the CIA suggested using “biological agents which would appear to be of natural origin” to obscure American involvement, highlighting the damage such a plot being uncovered could do to America’s global image.