Name: 30 Declassified Secrets That Will SHOCK You
Uploaded: 2025-05-23T04:54:12.000Z
Duration: 12 min 21 s
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Declassified documents showed the US government was not just aware of what was happening, it helped.

Relative clauses (Restrictive vs. nonrestrictive)

Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we'll be looking at deep, dark government secrets that were declassified or leaked to the public.

Fearing for his campaign, Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon sabotaged peace talks between North and South Vietnam in 1968, promising South Vietnam a better deal once he was president.

President Johnson's declassified tapes reveal that he knew and considered Nixon's actions treason, but he kept quiet rather than revealing FBI and NSA wiretaps.

The American public was never told that the regime for which 35,000 Americans had died had been willing to boycott peace talks to help elect Richard Nixon.

The US Army maintained a base in Thule, Greenland, for much of the Cold War.

One of their B-52s, armed with nuclear weapons, went down near the base in 1968.

It was later revealed that the Army lied about its payload recovery.

In 1968, American soldiers murdered hundreds of unarmed civilians, including children, in a small Vietnamese village of My Lai.

A year later, photojournalist Ron Haberle published photos of the event in a Cleveland newspaper, leading to global shock and outrage.

Gruver estimated that the population of the village had been 300 to 400 people, and that very few, if any, escaped.

A test rocket fired by the US military in Utah, bound for New Mexico, went horribly off course in 1970.

The rocket, containing radioactive isotopes that effectively made it a salted bomb, landed in Mexico's Mapimi Desert.

Ayatollah Khomeini overthrew the US-backed Shah of Iran in 1979.

Declassified documents revealed he'd secretly tried to negotiate the transition with both the Kennedy and Carter administrations.

At a stroke, two and a half thousand years of Persian monarchy came to an end.

CIA agents compiled jokes overheard in the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

They were part of an assessment of Soviet morale.

A Soviet lieutenant named Stanislav Petrov saved the world from nuclear holocaust in 1983.

When a nuclear early warning system reported incoming American missiles, he decided not to tell his superiors, believing, correctly as it turned out, that it was a false alarm.

His superiors would likely have launched a retaliatory nuclear strike.

I knew perfectly well that nobody would be able to correct my mistake if I had made one.

An expedition finally located the wreck of the Titanic in September 1985.

But the expedition's primary purpose was actually a secret mission to map out the wreckage of two American nuclear-powered submarines that sank in the 1960s.

Lunik and Sputnik were the crown jewels of the early Soviet satellite program.

Unbeknownst to the Soviet Union, the CIA managed to steal, study, and return the Lunik from an exhibition in 1959.

In 1959, Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro overthrew US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista and assumed power.

The CIA tried to assassinate the communist leader hundreds of times.

Many of the failures were so public that the Church Committee acknowledged eight that occurred between 1960 and 1965.

The chief of Cuba's counterintelligence, Fabian Escalante, estimated the number of assassination attempts at a staggering 638.

The CIA took the term surveillance bug literally in the early 1970s.

They created a robotic dragonfly, or insectothopter, for eavesdropping.

However, crosswinds rendered the device impractical.

But it was the first of a very successful generation of micro drones that have continued to be developed.

Available within the FBI's archive of Freedom of Information Act materials, you can find the FBI file on Bigfoot from the late 1970s.

They analyzed a hair sample and concluded it came from a deer.

In 2000, the Iranian military purchased a team of dolphins trained to attack boats from the Russians.

From 2005 to 2010, the US and Israeli cyber intelligence services joined forces with Stuxnet, a virus sent to Iran to disrupt their nuclear program. 2010 was a bad year for Iran, largely because of Stuxnet.

There were other things going on too, but Stuxnet, I think, hurt them for maybe up to a year.

The CIA looked into a scientist's method for guiding lightning onto targets using artificial leaders in 1967.

But the program was scrapped as less practical than conventional weapons.

In the mid-1960s, Indonesian General Soeharto oversaw the mass murder of between 500,000 to 1.2 million people.

The US was complicit in the killings, framed as an anti-communist purge, even providing names to Soeharto's death squads.

With Western backing, Soeharto became president.

The victims are still often buried on the sand underneath the very hotels where Australian surfers or American ecotourists are staying and sipping on coconut.

Project Gladio, which ran from 1956 to 1990, involved NATO creating secret, stay-behind paramilitary organizations in case of Soviet invasion.

Started in 1992, the NSA program Rampart-A sucks communication data right out of the fiber-optic cables that form the backbone of the Internet.

It was revealed in 2013 when former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked information about the mass surveillance programs of the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance, comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the US.

I could be, you know, rendered by the CIA.

I could have people come after me or any of their third-party partners.

You know, they work closely with a number of other nations.

Robert Hansen was a high-level agent within the FBI with a long and storied career that spanned the 1980s and 90s.

He was also one of the highest-placed Soviet and Russian spies in American history.

He pleaded guilty to passing thousands of classified documents to his Russian handlers.

He also, as you mentioned, resulted his work in the execution of numerous Russians who were spying for the United States.

In 1957, the Soviets had deployed new effective surface-to-air missiles, known as S-75s.

The CIA disguised SAM sniffer drones as U-2 planes to collect data on the missiles as they were shot down.

This strategy finally succeeded in 1966 over Vietnam.

The data collected led to the development of a warning system.

In Project Constant Peg, a special squadron of US fighter pilots trained on Soviet MIGs from 1977 to 1988 in order to understand and develop combat tactics against them.

In 1936, Imperial Japan created a secret unit, Manchu Detachment 731, to research biological and chemical weapons.

They conducted deadly human experiments and horrific war crimes in China, killing an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 people.

At the end of World War II, the US gave captured researchers immunity in exchange for data.

Under the Bush administration, the CIA established torture sites around the world in the wake of 9-11, where detainees, some innocent, were beaten, waterboarded, and sexually assaulted.

In 2002, memoranda known as the Torture Memos advised the CIA on techniques that could be considered legal.

The leadership of the House and the Senate were always kept informed as to the interrogation techniques that are now under attack.

Operation Northwoods was a scraps Department of Defense plan in 1962 for the CIA to conduct false flag attacks against American military and civilian targets in order to justify an invasion of Cuba.

The Pentagon would foster a homegrown terror campaign in Florida, Washington, and possibly other cities, all perpetuated by fake Cuban operatives.

Forty years after the fact, the NSA declassified documents concerning Project Minaret, a secret surveillance program in the 1960s and 70s.

During the Vietnam War, the NSA had wiretapped anti-war activists, civil rights leaders, journalists, and two US senators.

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In Operation Paperclip, which lasted from 1945 to 1959, the U.S. recruited over 1,600 German scientists and engineers, many of whom had been members of the Nazi Party.

They played a major role in the U.S. space program. and brought 114 fellow V-2 rocket makers with him.

The mid-20th century saw the CIA facilitating the replacement of democratically elected leaders in foreign countries with right-wing dictators.

In 1954's Operation PB Success, they organized a coup against Guatemalan President Arbenz to aid the United Fruit Company, resulting in decades of atrocities.

Edward Snowden also revealed a program called Dishfire, run by the NSA and the UK's GCHQ, that collects about 200 million text messages every day around the world.

Another NSA program, Mystic, can record the metadata and content of phone calls from entire countries.

Initiated in 2007, PRISM was another NSA program revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

It allows the NSA to collect communications matching court-approved search terms from companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Apple.

Cyber Command launched Operation Glowing Symphony against ISIS in 2016.

It was one of the largest cyberattacks in history, and it caused major disruption to the terrorist group.