US President Lyndon B. Johnson reacts to word of new problems in Vietnam while hosting Defense Secretary Robert McNamara at the LBJ Ranch in 1964.
Declassified documents have revealed that the US National Security Agency spied on Vietnam War critics including civil rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King, heavyweight boxer Muhammad Ali, and a pair of US senators.
The six-year secret program called œMinaret” was exposed in the 1970s but the targets of the surveillance had not been known until Wednesday. The documents, declassified in response to an appeal by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, call the spying effort œdisreputable if not outright illegal,” according to Foreign Policy.
Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) and Sen. Howard Baker (R-Tenn.) were among the most important victims of the NSA™s spying. The documents showed the US spy agency was tasked with monitoring the overseas telephone calls of these two members of Congress.
Other prominent victims included civil rights leader Whitney Young and New York Times journalist Tom Wicker.
Between 1697 and 1973, some 1,650 US citizens were monitored by the NSA under the Minaret program.
At the height of the Vietnam War, anti-war criticism, public protests and movements were a thorn in the side of President Lyndon B. Johnson, and later Richard Nixon. So they started to develop conspiracy theories, trying to link civil rights leaders to foreign powers as they tasked intelligence agencies to provide fodder for their theories.
CIA responded with Operation Chaos while the NSA started to compile watch lists of anti-war critics to spy on foreign communications. The NSA secretly intercepted the telephone calls and telegrams of these prominent Americans.
Documents found at Michigan Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library prove the US monitored foreign travel and overseas communications of anti-war activists such as David Dellinger, Rennie Davis, Jane Fonda, Tom Hayden, Bernardine Dohrn, Kathy Boudin, and Robert Franklin Williams, as well as a number of prominent African-Americans, such as Eldridge Cleaver and Stokely Carmichael.
The documents suggest Dr. Martin Luther King, an outspoken opponent of the US war in Vietnam, was apparently monitored up until his assassination in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968.
The NSA has kept eavesdropping on US citizens™ domestic and foreign communications, the latest series of which was revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden in June. But as the spy agency continues its operation outside of law, the identities of those who have been targets of its wiretapping remain to be announced, at least for decades.
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