20 Declassified Government Secrets We Think You Should Know About

1.

By the time the public knew about the SR-71, it was old technology. The aircraft was so fast that the standard operating procedure for missile evasion was to accelerate. None have ever been shot down... Whatever replaced it is better... -u/RichardDunkirk

2.

The Pandora Papers. I find it kind of interesting it was the one time the Pakistan judicial system actually worked and we charged our then prime minister Nawaz Sharif of corruption and disqualified him from leading government (after panama papers exposed him). He is currently in self imposed exile in the UK and refuses to return lol. The thing is, anyone who was smart enough (or paranoid enough) knew how to properly hide their money and wealth. Both reports, although massive, still only make up a portion of illegal or unethical tax free wealth and money laundering around the world. -u/1creeperbomb

3.

The CIA’s “Heart Attack Gun” and it’s subsequent test drive on American citizens without them knowing. -u/Cheez-ly

4.

For almost 20 years Earnest Hemingway owned homes in Key West Florida and Cuba and would often travel between them, however, due to the rise of Communism in Cuba pressure was put on Hemingway to sell his home there but he adamantly refused. Then in 1954, he was returning from Cuba when his plane crashed. He suffered injuries that left him debilitated and in pain for the rest of his life.

Then in the 1960's, he began to suffer from depression, he became withdrawn from those around him and would take to his bed for days at a time. He refused to leave his home claiming to his wife that he was being watched and followed by G-men. Out of concern due to his apparent paranoia his wife took him to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota where he was subjected to Electro-Convulsive Therapy (ECT) at least 15 different times. Hemingway was submitted to a local institution for further treatment including more ECT.

Two days after returning home from the hospital he shot himself in the head with a shotgun. He blamed his weakening mental state, depression, and suicidal urges on being under constant surveillance from the FBI. He claimed he would see black cars wherever he went, that his phone had been tapped, that agents followed him everywhere, and that his mail was often redirected.

Later declassified papers from within the FBI confirmed that a file had been opened on Hemingway by the FBI as early as WW2, That J. Edgar Hoover himself had an agent following Hemingway around Havana Cuba, That his phone had indeed been tapped by the FBI, and that they were in fact so privy to his movements that they knew when he arrived at the Mayo Clinic even though he was checked in under his doctor's name and not his own. -u/ThorsHammer0999

5.

PRISM from the NSA papers is pretty f**ked up. Obviously it’s a huge invasion of privacy, but the fact that it isn’t talked about more drives me nuts. I remember mentioning it to some coworkers and they laughed at me like I was some crackpot. I had literally learned about this on national news and these people were calling me a moron. -u/LazyTitan39

6.

The government knowingly poisoned American farm families in Washington state with radioactive iodine-131 and studied the families afterward. -u/pearlysweetcake

7.

Files pertaining to Operation Northwoods, which was a proposed false flag operation that would have been used as a pretext for war with Cuba. While the operation was never greenlit, it still serves as a reminder not to take official narratives at face value. -u/Frigididator

8.

The GUNMAN Project. It's been semi-declassified now and is a fascinating examination of cold war technical espionage. In a nutshell, the US discovered the Ruskies had developed a clever way of bugging their electric typewriters in their Moscow Embassy and went about reverse-engineering the technology. -u/Sabahl

9.

Area 51, aka Homey Airport or Groom Lake, was actually a testing facility for historical, technologically advanced military planes such as the Lockheed A-12. The US government's secrecy and cover-ups over the nature of these aircraft are what gave birth to the narrative surrounding UFOs and Area 51. The whole report is 54 pages long and goes on to talk about the cover story: that if the plane were to be discovered on foreign soil, “that it was to be a weather object, etc.”

However, the report ends with the following sentence: “Even in such a case, however, the proposed policy was for the United States to stick to the weather research cover story, a course of action that would prove disastrous in May 1960.” The ‘disastrous’ incident was an embarrassing situation for the US that happened during the Cold War. In 1960 the Soviet Union shot down one of these planes, while it was spying in their territory. -u/brkh47

10.

MK Ultra. The united states government did super unethical mind control experiments with enormous doses of LSD. Homeless people and children were among those experimented on. The unabomber was one of their victims. -u/Admirabletooshie

11.

PROJECT AJAX "...UK prime minister Winston Churchill and the Eisenhower administration decided in early 1953 to overthrow Iran's government..." "Following the coup in 1953, a government under General Fazlollah Zahedi was formed which allowed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran (Persian for an Iranian king), to rule more firmly as monarch. He relied heavily on United States support to hold on to power." "After the coup, the Shah continued his rule as monarch for the next 26 years until he was overthrown in the Iranian Revolution in 1979." -u/wayler72

12.

That the CIA or FBI (or both) tried to train cats to become spies, basically spy cats. -u/RobtheGreat100

13.

Three Identical Strangers is a 2018 documentary film directed by Tim Wardle, about the lives of Edward Galland, David Kellman, and Robert Shafran, a set of identical triplet brothers adopted as infants by separate families. Combining archival footage, re-enacted scenes, and present-day interviews, it recounts how the triplets discovered one another by chance in New York in 1980 at age 19, their public and private lives in the years that followed, and their eventual discovery that their adoption had been part of an undisclosed scientific "nature vs. nurture" study of the development of genetically identical siblings raised in differing socioeconomic circumstances. -u/Large-Travel-3352

14.

the Tuskegee Experiment, or officially the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, was pretty horrific. -u/BlackLetterLies

15.

Nazino island. the mass deportation of about 6,700 people[1] to Nazino Island in the Soviet Union in May 1933. The deportees were forcibly sent to the small, isolated island in Western Siberia, located 540 kilometers (340 mi) northwest of Tomsk, Russian SFSR, to construct a "special settlement". They were abandoned with having only flour as food, little to no tools, and virtually without any clothing, or shelter necessary for harsh siberian climate. Those who attempted to leave were killed by armed guards. The conditions of the island deteriorated quickly and resulted in widespread disease, abuse of power, violence, and cannibalism. Within thirteen weeks, over 4,000 of the deportees sent to Nazino Island had died or disappeared, and majority of the survivors were in ill health.

16.

The CIA Gateway Experience is something that I will always find fascinating. An experiment uncovered by Tiktok users. ‘A training system designed to bring enhanced strength, focus and coherence to the amplitude and frequency of brainwave output between left and right hemispheres so as to alter consciousness, moving it outside the physical sphere so as to ultimately escape even the restrictions of time and space’ Wayne McDonnell -u/SolipsismSchism

17.

Operation Paperclip was a secret United States intelligence program in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians were taken from former Nazi Germany to the U.S. for government employment after the end of World War II in Europe, between 1945 and 1959. -u/AlwaysInTheFlowers

18.

The CIA files on their assistance to Indonesian President Suharto in 1965. Elected President Sukarno faced a military coup by junior officers upset by the corruption of the generals. This coup was put down by General Suharto, and was quickly blamed on the PKI who had a slight involvement. Then followed a violent suppression of the PKI -- the largest communist party outside of the USSR and PRC. Suharto's genocide of the PKI was one of the worst mass murders of the century. The CIA was closely involved in the genocide, to the point of drawing up death lists and funding the death squads of the TNI army. Many people who were prominent in US government endorsed the killings, reasoning that a dead communist was a good communist. -u/kombiwombi

19.

Operation Mincemeat is always a good one! A successful British deception operation during WWII. British intelligence recovered the body of Glyndwr Michael, who died from rat poison, and dressed him up as Captain William Martin. Winston Churchill and Eisenhower approved the transport of the body to southern Spain where it would wash up on shore with information about Allied armies advancing across the Mediterranean. This was all a rouse to get Hitler to transfer troops from France to Greece allowing the Allied army to successfully invade Sicily on July 10, 1943. -u/Hanathepanda

20.

All of the COINTELPRO documents from the mid 20th century. The FBI was basically tracking, infiltrating, and influencing every major social movement and organization at the time, and assassinated the leaders and helped dissolve the organizations that didn't lineup with their goals. -u/MaizeNBlueWaffle