Vaults of Deceit

How this page works

Each receipt below has three parts:

The entries are in order by date. None of them rests on rumor or on a single retelling. If you find a record that says something different, the record wins and this page will be corrected.

1. Buck v. Bell: the Supreme Court approves forced sterilization (1927)

Column A: What the documents show. In Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927), the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed a Virginia law of March 20, 1924, under which the superintendent of the State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble Minded was ordered to sterilize Carrie Buck, then a young woman held at the institution. The Court upheld the order. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote for the Court that "the principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes," and added, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

Column B: Interpretation. A person was reduced to a category in a state file, and the highest court in the country ruled that the category was enough to act on her body.

Documents: Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927), full text at Cornell Legal Information Institute: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/274/200

2. The Tuskegee syphilis study (1932 to 1972)

Column A: What the documents show. The U.S. Public Health Service ran a study in Macon County, Alabama, from 1932 to 1972 to observe the natural course of syphilis in men who had largely received little or no treatment. According to the National Archives, there were over 600 participants, close to 400 with syphilis and about 200 in a control group, all African American men. On May 16, 1997, President Bill Clinton apologized at the White House to survivors and their families, saying: "what the United States government did was shameful, and I am sorry."

Column B: Interpretation. For forty years, men were treated as data points in a study of a disease instead of as patients, and it took twenty-five more years after the study ended for a formal apology.

Documents: - National Archives, Rediscovering Black History blog, "If Not for the Public Outcry: The Tuskegee Syphilis Project/Study" (May 9, 2017), citing National Archives records (NAID 564684): https://rediscovering-black-history.blogs.archives.gov/2017/05/09/if-not-for-the-public-outcry-the-tuskegee-syphilis-project-study - The White House, "Remarks by the President in Apology for Study Done in Tuskegee" (May 16, 1997), Clinton White House archive: https://clintonwhitehouse4.archives.gov/textonly/New/Remarks/Fri/19970516-898.html - Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, museum page on the study: https://cdc.gov/museum/online/story-of-cdc/tuskegee/index.html

3. Executive Order 9066 and the incarceration of Japanese Americans (1942)

Column A: What the documents show. President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942. According to the National Archives, it authorized the forced removal of persons deemed a threat to national security from the West Coast to "relocation centers" further inland, resulting in the incarceration of Japanese Americans. A congressional commission later investigated and published its findings as Personal Justice Denied (Part 1, December 1982). In 1988, Public Law 100-383 acknowledged the injustice, apologized for it, and provided a $20,000 payment to each person who had been incarcerated.

Column B: Interpretation. A whole population was handled by ancestry label rather than by individual review, and the government itself later called that an injustice.

Documents: - National Archives, Milestone Documents, "Executive Order 9066": https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/executive-order-9066 - National Archives, Personal Justice Denied, Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians: https://www.archives.gov/research/japanese-americans/justice-denied

4. Operation Paperclip: bringing German scientists to the United States (1945 onward)

Column A: What the documents show. National Archives records of the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) state that the agency ran the foreign scientist program "initially code-named Overcast and subsequently code-named Paperclip." The records include personnel dossiers on over 1,500 German and other foreign scientists, technicians, and engineers brought to the United States under Paperclip and similar programs (case files 1945 to 1958). The National Archives description names, among others, Georg Rickhey, a former official at the Nordhausen underground V-2 rocket factory who was tried and acquitted of war crimes by a U.S. military tribunal in 1947, and Walter Schreiber, who "had been instrumental in medical experiments on concentration camp inmates" and who left for Argentina in 1952 after a newspaper column about his activities. The JIOA was disbanded in 1962.

Column B: Interpretation. Scientific usefulness was allowed to outweigh a person's wartime record, and the files that show it were sealed for decades.

Documents: National Archives, Interagency Working Group, declassified records of the Office of the Secretary of Defense (Record Group 330), JIOA series: https://www.archives.gov/iwg/declassified-records/rg-330-defense-secretary

5. Human radiation experiments (1944 to 1974; reported 1995)

Column A: What the documents show. On January 15, 1994, President Clinton appointed the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments to investigate reports of possibly unethical experiments funded by the government. Its final report states that the recovered documents "enabled us to identify nearly 4,000 human radiation experiments sponsored by the federal government between 1944 and 1974." Among the experiments it was asked to investigate was "a series that included the injection of plutonium into unsuspecting hospital patients." The committee also reported that some potentially important records "were evidently lost or destroyed years ago."

Column B: Interpretation. Thousands of people were exposed in government-sponsored research, and for many of them the record that would tell their story no longer exists.

Documents: Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, Final Report (1995), U.S. Department of Energy: https://ehss.energy.gov/ohre/roadmap/achre/report.html (Executive Summary: https://ehss.energy.gov/ohre/roadmap/achre/summary.html)

6. MKULTRA: the CIA's behavior-modification program (1950s to 1973; hearing 1977)

Column A: What the documents show. On August 3, 1977, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research held a joint hearing titled "Project MKULTRA, the CIA's Program of Research in Behavioral Modification." The hearing record states that recovered documents covered 149 MKULTRA subprojects, many connected to behavioral modification, drug testing, or "administering drugs surreptitiously," and that "cut-out" funding arrangements were used "to conceal CIA's sponsorship." The record states that over 30 universities and institutions were involved, that the program included "covert drug tests on unwitting citizens," that LSD was given to "unwitting subjects in social situations," and that at least one death resulted. It also states that the records "were destroyed in January 1973, at the instruction of then CIA Director Richard Helms," and that additional records surfaced only after a Freedom of Information request.

Column B: Interpretation. Ordinary people were tested on without knowing it, and the main record was deliberately destroyed. What survived came out because one citizen asked.

Documents: - U.S. Senate, Joint Hearing, "Project MKULTRA, the CIA's Program of Research in Behavioral Modification" (August 3, 1977): https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/hearings/95mkultra.pdf - CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room, MKULTRA collection: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/collection/mkultra

7. COINTELPRO: the FBI's covert action programs (1956 to 1971)

Column A: What the documents show. The Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (the Church Committee) was established on January 27, 1975, and issued its final report on April 29, 1976. Its Book III states: "COINTELPRO is the FBI acronym for a series of covert action programs directed against domestic groups. In these programs, the Bureau went beyond the collection of intelligence to secret action designed to 'disrupt' and 'neutralize' target groups and individuals." The report describes techniques ranging from "the trivial" to "the degrading (sending anonymous poison-pen letters intended to break up marriages) and the dangerous." It was based on a staff study of more than 20,000 pages of FBI documents and includes a case study on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Column B: Interpretation. Citizens were sorted into "target" files by a federal agency, and the file, not the law, decided what was done to them.

Documents: - U.S. Senate, Church Committee Final Report, Book III, "Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans" (1976): https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/94755_III.pdf - U.S. Senate Historical Office, "The Church Committee": https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/investigations/church-committee.htm

8. CIA assassination plots against foreign leaders (1960s; reported 1975)

Column A: What the documents show. On November 20, 1975, the Church Committee issued an interim report, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders (Senate Report No. 94-465). The committee wrote: "We have found concrete evidence of at least eight plots involving the CIA to assassinate Fidel Castro from 1960 to 1965." It also wrote: "The evidence establishes that the United States was implicated in several assassination plots," and that "short of war, assassination is incompatible with American principles, international order, and morality." The report also examines CIA cables concerning Patrice Lumumba of the Congo in 1960.

Column B: Interpretation. Plans that were officially unthinkable were written down in government cables, and Congress confirmed it from the government's own files.

Documents: U.S. Senate, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, Interim Report (November 20, 1975): https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/94465.pdf

9. Operation Northwoods: proposed pretexts for invading Cuba (1962)

Column A: What the documents show. On March 13, 1962, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff sent Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara a Top Secret memorandum titled "Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba." According to the National Security Archive, the memo described plans to covertly engineer pretexts for an invasion, including "a fake Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington," sinking "a boatload of Cuban refugees (real or simulated)," faking a Cuban air force attack on a civilian jetliner, and a "Remember the Maine" incident in which a U.S. ship would be blown up and the blame placed on Cuba. The proposals were part of the anti-Castro program known as Operation Mongoose. The document records proposals; it does not show them being carried out.

Column B: Interpretation. Staged events to justify a war were put in writing at the top of the military chain, which is why "could they?" questions deserve documents, not dismissal.

Documents: - National Security Archive, "Pentagon Proposed Pretexts for Cuba Invasion in 1962" (April 30, 2001): https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/news/20010430/ - The memorandum itself (PDF scan, 15 pp.): https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/news/20010430/northwoods.pdf

10. The KUBARK interrogation manual (1963)

Column A: What the documents show. "KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation," dated July 1963, is a CIA manual that, according to the National Security Archive, "includes a detailed section on 'The Coercive Counterintelligence Interrogation.'" It was first obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the Baltimore Sun in 1997, and the CIA released a less censored version in February 2014. The Archive posted it on May 12, 2004, alongside the CIA's 1983 "Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual."

Column B: Interpretation. Coercion was not an accident of a few bad actors; it was written into a training text.

Documents: National Security Archive, Electronic Briefing Book No. 122, "Prisoner Abuse: Patterns from the Past" (CIA interrogation manuals): https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB122/

11. The Gulf of Tonkin: the attack that did not happen (1964; declassified 2005)

Column A: What the documents show. On December 1, 2005, the National Security Agency declassified documents on the Gulf of Tonkin incidents, including an internal history by NSA historian Robert Hanyok. According to the National Security Archive's summary, Hanyok concluded that no second attack on U.S. ships occurred on the night of August 4, 1964, contrary to the administration's claims. He wrote that agency officials "mishandled" signals intelligence and that "the overwhelming body of reports, if used, would have told the story that no attack occurred." He did not find a "smoking gun" proving a cover-up, but described "an active effort to make SIGINT fit the claim of what happened during the evening of 4 August."

Column B: Interpretation. A reported event that helped widen a war is, by the government's own later history, an event that did not occur.

Documents: - National Security Archive, "Tonkin Gulf Intelligence 'Skewed' According to Official History and Intercepts" (December 1, 2005): https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB132/press20051201.htm - National Security Agency, Robert J. Hanyok, "Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish: The Gulf of Tonkin Mystery, 2-4 August 1964": https://www.nsa.gov/portals/75/documents/news-features/declassified-documents/gulf-of-tonkin/articles/release-1/rel1_skunks_bogies.pdf

12. Project Popeye: secret weather modification in war (1966 to 1967)

Column A: What the documents show. A State Department memorandum dated January 13, 1967, "Weather Modification in North Vietnam and Laos (Project Popeye)," records that the Department of Defense sought approval for an operational phase of cloud seeding along infiltration routes. The stated objective was "to produce sufficient rainfall along these lines of communication to interdict or at least interfere with truck traffic," using cloud seeding "in a non-publicized effort." The memo states that a test phase was conducted in October 1966 in the Lao Panhandle "without consultation with Lao authorities." A footnote records that Secretary of State Dean Rusk approved the next phase on an experimental basis.

Column B: Interpretation. Changing the weather as a weapon is not only a theory; at least once it was a documented, approved, and quiet government program.

Documents: U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964 to 1968, Volume XXVIII, Laos, Document 274: https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v28/d274

13. The Pentagon Papers (commissioned 1967; leaked 1971; released in full 2011)

Column A: What the documents show. The Pentagon Papers, officially the "Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force," were commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in 1967. Portions were leaked to the press in June 1971. On the 40th anniversary of the leak, the National Archives, with the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon Presidential Libraries, released the complete report: 48 boxes and approximately 7,000 declassified pages, about 34 percent of it available for the first time.

Column B: Interpretation. The government's own internal history of a war was kept from the public who paid for and fought it, and the full text took forty years to come out.

Documents: National Archives, "Pentagon Papers": https://www.archives.gov/research/pentagon-papers

14. Watergate (1972 to 1974)

Column A: What the documents show. Early on June 17, 1972, five men broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. The Senate created a select committee on February 7, 1973, which reported on June 27, 1974. On July 24, 1974, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in United States v. Nixon that the President must surrender recordings to the special prosecutor. According to the Senate Historical Office, the recordings revealed that President Nixon "had participated in devising a plan to cover up the White House connection to the Watergate burglary." The House Judiciary Committee adopted three articles of impeachment, and Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974.

Column B: Interpretation. A cover-up at the highest level came apart because a record existed and a court ordered it produced.

Documents: - U.S. Senate Historical Office, "Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities (The Watergate Committee)": https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/investigations/watergate.htm - National Archives, Watergate research resources: https://www.archives.gov/research/investigations/watergate

15. The CIA "Family Jewels" (compiled 1973; released 2007)

Column A: What the documents show. On May 9, 1973, CIA Director James Schlesinger directed employees to report any activities "which might be construed to be outside the legislative charter of this Agency." The resulting compilation, known inside the agency as the "family jewels," was released by the CIA in full on June 26, 2007, as a 702-page collection delivered to the National Security Archive 15 years after the Archive's Freedom of Information request. Items the Archive lists from the file include surveillance of journalists (operation CELOTEX) and covert mail opening (HTLINGUAL).

Column B: Interpretation. The agency's own staff wrote down what crossed the line, and the public waited more than three decades to read it.

Documents: National Security Archive, Electronic Briefing Book No. 222, "The CIA's Family Jewels" (full report and parts 1 to 5): https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB222/index.htm

16. Iran-Contra (1984 to 1986; investigated 1986 to 1993)

Column A: What the documents show. According to the National Archives description of Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh's records, two secret operations were exposed in October and November 1986: assistance to the military activities of Nicaraguan contra rebels "during an October 1984 to October 1986 prohibition on such aid," and "the sale of U.S. arms to Iran in contravention of stated U.S. policy and in possible violation of arms-export controls." In late November 1986, administration officials announced that some proceeds from the arms sales had been diverted to the contras. Walsh was appointed Independent Counsel on December 19, 1986. His records span 1986 to 1993.

Column B: Interpretation. A ban passed by Congress was routed around through a second secret deal, and the money trail is what exposed it.

Documents: - National Archives, "Records of Lawrence Walsh relating to Iran/Contra": https://www.archives.gov/research/investigations/walsh.html - Final Report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters (1993), mirror hosted by the Federation of American Scientists: https://irp.fas.org/offdocs/walsh/

17. Star Gate: government remote viewing (1970s to 1995)

Column A: What the documents show. CIA funding for psychic "remote viewing" research began in 1970, and research started at the Stanford Research Institute in 1972. The effort later continued as the program known as Star Gate. In 1995 the CIA contracted the American Institutes for Research to evaluate the program. The final evaluation, dated September 29, 1995, was released on November 28, 1995, and recommended ending the effort. The CIA concluded that there was no case in which the technique had provided data used to guide intelligence operations. Program records are in the CIA's FOIA reading room.

Column B: Interpretation. Unusual government programs do exist on paper, and so do the official evaluations of whether they worked. Read both.

Documents: - CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room, "STAR GATE: Program Status and Proposed New Direction": https://cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp96-00791r000100160001-0 - Federation of American Scientists, "STAR GATE [Controlled Remote Viewing]" (summary with links to the 1995 evaluation): https://irp.fas.org/program/collect/stargate.htm

18. The Pennsylvania grand jury report on six Catholic dioceses (2018)

Column A: What the documents show. Report I of Pennsylvania's 40th Statewide Investigating Grand Jury, released August 14, 2018, covers six dioceses and contains profiles of more than 300 clergy members. The grand jury reported that FBI behavioral analysts identified a recurring "playbook for concealing the truth," including using euphemisms such as "inappropriate contact" in place of "rape," telling parishioners a removed priest was on "sick leave," and transferring accused priests "to a new location." The report also notes that documents were kept in a "secret archive," which it says the church's Code of Canon Law requires.

Column B: Interpretation. Changing the words in a file changed what the institution had to answer for. That is the Zero Switch at work.

Documents: Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Report I of the 40th Statewide Investigating Grand Jury (interim redacted report, August 14, 2018), archived copy hosted by BishopAccountability.org: https://www.bishop-accountability.org/PA_40th_GJ/2018_08_14_Interim_Redacted_PA_GJ_Report.pdf

What these receipts have in common

Every one of these events was, at some point, denied, hidden, or unknown to the public. Every one of them is now in an official record. That is the point of this page: not to ask you to believe more, but to show you where to look.

Sources