Vietnam-War Era Documents Prove the NSA Spied on Senators, Martin Luther King and Others

The National Security Agency has been spying on Americans for a longer time than one may think. according to new reports.

The NSA recently declassified Vietnam War-era documents that revealed the names of Vietnam War dissenters and civil rights leaders who were monitored by the governmental agency. A recently declassified NSA history called the tapping "disreputable if not outright illegal," according to Foreign Policy. 

The names of the surveillance targets were kept secret for decades. The documents were declassified in light of a decision by the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel, in response to an appeal by the National Security Archive at George Washington University. The names on the watch list include civil rights vanguards Martin Luther King Jr. and Whitney Young, the boxer Muhammad Ali, New York Times journalist Tom Wicker, and, shockingly, two current sitting members of Congress: Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) and Sen. Howard Baker (R-Tenn.). The NSA monitored the senators' overseas telephone calls and cable traffic. 

As the Vietnam War escalated in the latter half of the 1960s, anti-Vietnam protests grew, as well as intense criticism of the Lyndon Johnson administration. The dissent made Johnson fearful and angered Johnson's successor, Richard Nixon. As the politicians in power were paranoid anti-communists, they worried that domestic protesters were tied to hostile communist regimes in foreign countries. Therefore, the CIA instituted Operation Chaos to investigate such individuals, and the NSA worked with other intelligence programs to gather "watch lists" of anti-war advocates and monitor their communication to foreign countries. The program became officially known as "Minaret" under Nixon in 1969. 

The program was carried out from 1967 to 1973. The idea of the watch list was developed pre-Vietnam War to monitor narcotics traffickers and potential threats to the president. The NSA list began in the summer of 1967, known as the "summer of love"-- a time when anti-war fervor was reaching a boiling point. The surveillance began due to President Johnson's assertion that anti-war protests and race riots were being secretly begun and sustained by the Soviet Union and its allies. Most of the names on the list came from the CIA and FBI, and included both anti-war and civil rights activists. 

At the time, even with anti-communist paranoia rampant, no federal judge would approve White House wiretapping. Therefore, the White House got around this by asking the NSA to tap overseas phone calls and intercept telegrams of those on the watch list, which the NSA did unquestioningly. 

During Minaret's run, the NSA eavesdropped on phone calls and intercepted overseas communications of 1,650 U.S. citizens, the majority of whom were anti-war activists, civil rights leaders and those involved in what the White House considered "extremist" organizations. A declassified document found at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan confirms that the program monitored anti-war dissidents David Dellinger, Rennie David, Jane Fonda, Bernardine Dohrn, Kathy Boudin and Robert Franklin Williams, as well as African-American militants, or "Black Panthers" Stokely Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver. 

The 1975 disclosure of the program's existence by the Church Committee, chaired by Minaret target Sen. Frank Church, led to Congress passing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978.

Minaret and its companion program, Operation Shamrock, were predecessors of the monitoring that George W. Bush's administration carried out from 2001 to 2004. Moreover, evidence of NSA eavesdropping, such as the monitoring of calls of Verizon Business Network Services customers, is happening currently, which was disclosed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Despite the recent evidence of such NSA spying, there has not been evidence that the NSA is currently monitoring the White House's political dissidents. But the disclosure of operation Minaret and the revelations unveiled by Snowden proves that the agency has long abused its power, and continues to do so under the instruction of the White House.