Top 10 Most Infamous Undercover Operations

This is better known as the Lavon Affair, named after Israeli defense minister Pinhas Lavon. In 1954, Israel was at odds with Egypt and hoped to destabilize the government of Gamal Abdel Nasser. They hoped to induce socio-political chaos within the country and foster anti-Egyptian sentiment in the West. To carry out their plan, Israeli Military Intelligence hired a group of Egyptian Jews to bomb public places in Egypt. The hope was to place the blame on nationalists and induce an atmosphere of unrest. However, the operation did not work. The bombs that went off were weak and caused little damage. Meanwhile, an Israeli agent named Avri Elad informed the Egyptian authorities of the plan, and most of the bombers were arrested.

#9: Eli Cohen

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We return to Israel for the story of Eli Cohen. Cohen was personally recruited by the Mossad, Israel’s national intelligence agency. He was trained as a field agent and sent to infiltrate the Syrian government in the early 1960s, going by the name Kamel Amin Thaabet. Cohen posed as a successful Syrian businessman and relayed important military information back to Israel during the Six-Day War. This included taking photos of Syrian defensive positions and informing the Israeli government of strategic military plans, among other successful endeavors. Cohen was eventually captured and was publicly hanged in 1965. This came after a plea to the Israeli government that he stop working in Syria.

The story of Joseph Pistone was made popular by the 1997 film “Donnie Brasco,” which is titled after Pistone’s undercover name. Pistone was an FBI agent who infiltrated the New York Mafia, primarily the Bonanno crime family. The first Director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, forbade his agents from going undercover, as he feared that they would be corrupted by a life of crime. However, Pistone proved that it could be done, and done very successfully. Pistone was not killed, and he was not corrupted. In fact, his work led to the convictions of over 100 Mafia members and the complete downfall of the Bonanno crime family. He resigned from the FBI in 1986 and now lives under witness protection.

The 1960s was a tumultuous decade in American history, known for its vehement anti-war, gender, and race-based movements. President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered the CIA to conduct Operation CHAOS, an espionage project which hoped to uncover possible foreign influence on these domestic movements. The CIA spied on over 300,000 American citizens, including the activist group Women Strike for Peace and the Black Panther Party. On November 15, 1967, Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms told Johnson that they had found no evidence of foreign interference, but the project continued for several more years. George H.W. Bush later admitted that Operation CHAOS conducted some “improper accumulation of material.”

Launched on January 1, 1952, Operation Gladio was an extensive stay-behind operation executed by NATO and the entire Western Union during the Cold War. A stay-behind operation consists of a clandestine network of spies that “stay behind” after an invasion and conduct espionage from behind enemy lines. The aim of Operation Gladio was to root out communism in Western European countries and prevent the spread of Soviet ideology. The program has been accused of utilizing psychological warfare and endorsing right-wing terrorism, including the assassination of Eduardo Mondlane, the President of a Mozambique socialist party. However, these accusations have been vehemently denied by the US State Department.

#5: The Canadian Caper

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Made popular through Ben Affleck’s “Argo,” the Canadian Caper occurred in the midst of the Iran hostage crisis. On November 4, 1979, a large group of armed Islamists stormed the American embassy in Tehran and took 52 diplomats hostage. However, six diplomats had managed to evade capture, so the CIA and the Canadian government began a joint operation to rescue them. The diplomats were given fake Canadian passports and posed as a film crew scouting locations for a movie called “Argo.” The government even set up a production office and took out ads in trade magazines to help bolster their cover story. On January 27, 1980, the diplomats boarded a plane and flew out of Iran, and the operation remained secret for nearly 30 years.

As is shown throughout this list, the American government is not shy about spying and testing on their own citizens. Short for Counter Intelligence Program, COINTELPRO ran from the mid ‘50s to the early ‘70s and consisted of the FBI spying on American organizations. Most of these organizations were deemed “subversive” and potentially dangerous to the status quo, and the list included the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, and a number of anti-war protesters. The FBI aimed to discredit these movements and organizations in the public eye by smearing them in the media, forging fake documents, and throwing people in prison. Some were even outright assassinated, including Fred Hampton, the deputy chairman of the Black Panther Party.

One of the most infamous undercover operations in history, MKUltra was a blatant attack on American citizens conducted by the CIA. The Agency experimented on their subjects, using unsuspecting citizens to test various brainwashing techniques they hoped to use in future interrogations. The project was carried out at hospitals, prisons, and universities under the guise of academic research, with subjects being exposed to sexual assault, sensory deprivation, and any number of actions that could be deemed psychological warfare. Perhaps most infamously, some subjects were secretly dosed with LSD in the hopes of identifying the drug’s properties and its potential uses. This operation was carried out between 1953 and 1973 and revealed to the public two years later.

Let’s just say Operation Wrath of God has to be the scariest-sounding project. And with good reason. In September of 1972, a Palestinian organization called Black September infiltrated the Summer Olympics and killed eleven Israeli in what came to be called the Munich massacre. Almost immediately afterwards, the Prime Minister of Israel, Golda Meir, personally authorized Operation Wrath of God. Carried out by the country’s intelligence agency, Mossad, it targeted members of Black September and the Palestine Liberation Organization. In the next twenty or so years, Mossad assassinated a number of individuals, but the operation faced enormous criticism when they accidentally killed an innocent man in Norway. Furthermore, the primary mastermind behind the Munich massacre, Abu Daoud, was never killed.

You may ask yourself, “Why did no one attempt to assassinate Hitler?” Well, they did, but it was an enormous failure. Following the major blow that was the Battle of Stalingrad, German military officers lost morale and began plotting Hitler’s assassination as a means to end the war. The plan was to kill Hitler in a bombing, then take control of Germany by using the Wehrmacht to stage a coup. The operation was mainly headed by Claus von Stauffenberg, a German army officer who personally planted the bomb in Hitler’s conference room. Unfortunately, the bomb did not work as intended, and Hitler escaped with nothing but a burst eardrum. The subsequent coup also failed and nearly 5,000 people were executed, including Stauffenberg. Did you know about any of these operations? Let us know in the comments below!