PROJECT MINARET

Opening

MINARET was the National Security Agency's watch-list program against Americans. From 1967 to 1973 other agencies, the FBI above all, gave the NSA names of US citizens and groups, and the NSA pulled their international calls and cables out of its foreign intercepts and passed on what it found. The names included Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali, the columnists Art Buchwald and Tom Wicker, and two sitting senators, Frank Church and Howard Baker.

The NSA had kept watch lists since the early 1960s for things like travel to Cuba and threats to the President. The domestic expansion began in October 1967 and got its codename in July 1969. The NSA's new director suspended it in August 1973, and the Attorney General called it of "questionable legality" that autumn. The Church Committee made it public in 1975.

Timeline

Early 1960sThe NSA begins watch lists for Americans travelling to Cuba and for presidential protection.

20 October 1967Major General William Yarborough, the Army's intelligence chief, cables NSA Director General Marshall Carter for help monitoring communications for foreign links to civil disturbances. The domestic list grows from there.

1 July 1969The NSA issues the MINARET charter. Staff are told to "restrict the knowledge" that the NSA is collecting such material and to keep its name off the reports.

Early 1973The lists peak at 600 American and 6,000 foreign names.

August 1973General Lew Allen, NSA Director for under two weeks, learns of MINARET from his chief lawyer and suspends dissemination. In September he asks the requesting agencies to recertify their needs.

1 October 1973Attorney General Elliot Richardson writes to Allen that the watch list activity is of questionable legality in light of the Supreme Court's 1972 Keith decision on domestic wiretaps, and tells the FBI and Secret Service to stop asking for NSA material obtained by electronic surveillance.

29 October 1975Allen testifies about the watch lists in open session of the Church Committee.

1978Congress passes the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

September 2013After a National Security Archive appeal, the NSA releases the passage of its internal history naming King, Ali, Buchwald, Wicker, Whitney Young, Church and Baker.

Key figures

William Yarborough and Marshall Carter, whose October 1967 cables started the domestic expansion.

Lew Allen Jr., NSA Director from August 1973, who halted dissemination.

Roy Banner, the NSA lawyer who briefed him.

Henry Petersen and Elliot Richardson, the Justice Department officials who found the program of questionable legality.

Frank Church and Howard Baker, senators who were on the list.

Physical and documentary trail

The Church Committee's NSA report in Book III (1976) gives the numbers. About 1,200 Americans appeared on the civil disturbance list between 1967 and 1973. The FBI supplied about 950 of them, the Secret Service about 180, the Defense Intelligence Agency 20 people who had travelled to North Vietnam, and the CIA about 30. The Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs separately submitted 450 Americans. The lists produced about 2,000 reports, roughly 10 percent of them from communications between two Americans. Material from 1967 to autumn 1969 was destroyed under a five-year retention rule. The source traffic included cables obtained under SHAMROCK, covered in that report, and the wider investigation is in the Church Committee report.

The second source is the NSA's own history, "American Cryptology during the Cold War, 1945-1989", Book III (1998), which says the list "eventually contained over 1,600 names." It does not say how many were American.

Years later the NSA lawyer who first looked at the procedural aspects stated that the people involved seemed to understand that the operation was disreputable if not outright illegal.

Corrections to the earlier version of this report. The phrase "disreputable if not outright illegal" is the NSA history's report of what an NSA lawyer said, not the history's own verdict. The figure of about 1,600 comes from the NSA history and covers the whole list; the Church Committee counted about 1,200 Americans. Jane Fonda does not appear in the NSA history; her name comes from a separate 1975 White House memo on monitoring of activists. Richardson did not end the program on his own: Allen had already suspended it.

Things you might not know

• The reports were disguised. MINARET reports went out without the usual serial numbers and were made to look like human-source reports, so readers could not tell which agency had produced them.
• The NSA added a few names itself. Its history says it contributed thirteen, all but two of them NSA employees who were known spies, such as the 1960 defectors Bernon Mitchell and William Martin. It also names Perry Fellwock, a former analyst who had gone public about the agency in 1972. The Church Committee put the NSA's contribution at 50 to 75.
• A Weathermen case set off the alarm. Banner warned Allen that a federal judge had ordered agencies to disclose any illegal wiretaps of leading Weathermen defendants, and that a court case would soon expose the list.
• Nobody can say why Baker was on it. Church was a war critic. Baker supported the war and Nixon's policy, and the National Security Archive called his inclusion "the real mystery."
• The intelligence board never approved it. The requesting agencies all sat on the US Intelligence Board, but the board never approved a civil disturbance watch list or discussed monitoring citizens.

Competing explanations

Foreign intelligence that overreached. The NSA's position in 1973 was that Americans' messages had been collected "as an incidental and unintended act in the conduct of the interception of foreign communications," and that it relied on requesting agencies to judge legality.

Political surveillance on demand. The names were chosen by the FBI and others under pressure from two White Houses to find foreign backing for dissent. A senator, a humorist and a world champion boxer had no plausible foreign intelligence value.

A system nobody owned. The NSA trusted the requesters, the requesters trusted the NSA, and the board above both never discussed it. Concealment in the 1969 charter suggests the people running it knew how it would look.

Later life of the case

MINARET and SHAMROCK were the central NSA cases behind FISA in 1978, which put foreign intelligence surveillance involving Americans under a court. The 2013 release of names came months after the Snowden disclosures, and MINARET was often cited in the argument over NSA powers that followed.

Finding

MINARET is documented and admitted. For six years the NSA searched its foreign intercepts for the communications of about 1,200 Americans named by other agencies, including two senators, without warrants, and disguised the reports it sent out.

What still will not resolve: the full list, and what the reports from before autumn 1969 contained. Those were destroyed, and the NSA has never released the names beyond the handful in its history.