Project MINARET

Background

Project MINARET was a National Security Agency signals-intelligence collection programme operating from approximately August 1967 through October 1973 under which the international communications of named United States citizens were intercepted at the request of recipient agencies — principally the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD, the 1968–73 predecessor to the Drug Enforcement Administration), the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the United States Secret Service — and the resulting reports disseminated back to those agencies under a deliberately uncaveated marking that concealed NSA's role as the collecting service.¹

The programme operated against the existing background of Project SHAMROCK, the parallel NSA-and-predecessor cable-collection arrangement under which RCA Global, ITT World Communications, and Western Union International provided the agency with copies of all international telegrams entering and leaving the United States. SHAMROCK was a collection programme; MINARET was a targeting and dissemination programme. Where SHAMROCK gathered the underlying traffic, MINARET selected from that traffic — together with the signals-intelligence take from NSA's broader collection apparatus — the communications associated with watchlisted individuals and forwarded those communications to the requesting recipients.²

The programme had no statutory authorisation. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which would establish the first statutory framework for the targeting of US persons, was not passed until 1978 — five years after MINARET's termination. There was no judicial review of the watchlist additions, no warrant process, and no contemporaneous reporting to Congress. The programme's existence was known only to a small circle within NSA, the Justice Department, and the requesting agencies.³

The Watchlist

MINARET had two principal watchlist components, each maintained on the basis of requests from external agencies and incorporated into NSA's targeting infrastructure.

The first component, originating in August 1967, was the civil-disturbance watchlist. The Long Hot Summer riots of 1967, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968, and the mass anti-Vietnam-War mobilisations of the late 1960s produced a sequence of executive-branch demands for intelligence on the foreign connections of domestic civil-rights leaders, anti-war activists, and what were then called Black Power organisations. NSA Director Lieutenant General Marshall Carter, on the basis of a request from the FBI's Domestic Intelligence Division, established the programme to identify US-person international communications that referenced or were sent or received by named individuals in those categories.⁴

The second component, beginning in 1970, was the narcotics watchlist requested by BNDD. NSA collected the international communications of named individuals — initially approximately 450 US citizens and approximately 3,000 foreign nationals — believed by BNDD to be involved in international narcotics trafficking, and disseminated the resulting product back to BNDD for use in narcotics-enforcement work.⁵

Across the programme's seven-year lifetime, approximately 1,650 US citizens appeared on the MINARET watchlist. The 2013 NSA declassification — together with the Senate Church Committee's 1975–76 reconstruction — establishes the published identities to include:

• Civil-rights and Black political organisations: Martin Luther King Jr., the Reverend Ralph Abernathy of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Whitney Young of the National Urban League, members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, members of the Black Panther Party, Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton of the Black Panther Party leadership.
• Anti-war activists: the actress and political organiser Jane Fonda, the folk singer Joan Baez, the pediatrician and pacifist Benjamin Spock, the Students for a Democratic Society leader Tom Hayden, the Yippie organisers Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin.
• Athletes: the boxer Muhammad Ali, who had refused induction into the US Army in 1967 and was a publicly visible critic of the Vietnam War.
• Members of Congress: Senator Frank Church of Idaho, who would in 1975–76 chair the Senate Select Committee that exposed the programme; Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee, the ranking Republican on the Senate Watergate Committee.
• Journalists: Tom Wicker of The New York Times; the syndicated columnist Art Buchwald.⁶

The dissemination convention applied to the resulting reports was distinctive. Each report carried the marking "FOR BACKGROUND USE ONLY" and was handled outside NSA's normal SIGINT distribution channels. The marking served two operational purposes. First, it concealed NSA's identity as the collecting service from the recipient agency's working analysts: a recipient FBI special agent or BNDD investigator would receive a report containing the substantive intelligence but with no source attribution that would permit them to assess collection methods or to cite the report in any subsequent legal proceeding. Second, the marking was understood within the programme to indicate that the report could not be used as the basis for any legal action against the named US person — the intelligence was for "background" awareness only, not for prosecution. The combination produced a category of information that was operational in effect but invisible in the official record: the intelligence shaped FBI counter-intelligence and BNDD enforcement priorities while leaving no documentary trace that NSA had collected against US persons.⁷

Termination

The programme's termination in October 1973 was the result of a sequence of internal-legal and external-political pressures across the spring and summer of that year.

In May 1973, NSA Deputy Director Louis Tordella received from NSA General Counsel Roy Banner an internal memorandum questioning the legal basis for the watchlist activity. Banner's memorandum identified the absence of any statutory authorisation, the absence of any judicial process, and the targeting of US persons in the United States as creating an exposure for the agency that was no longer defensible against the legal standards then being articulated in the post-Watergate environment. The Tordella–Banner exchange was forwarded to incoming Director Lieutenant General Lew Allen Jr.⁸

In parallel, Attorney General Elliot Richardson — appointed in May 1973 in the post-Watergate restructuring of the Justice Department — initiated a review of NSA's domestic-collection activity through Assistant Attorney General Henry Petersen. Richardson's review produced an October 1973 directive that NSA cease the watchlist programme. Director Allen issued the formal termination order on 1 October 1973. The programme had operated for six years and approximately two months.⁹

Disclosure

Public knowledge of MINARET was the result of the 1975–76 inquiry by the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, chaired by Senator Frank Church — himself, as the subsequent declassification established, one of the watchlisted individuals.

Director Allen's testimony to the Church Committee on 6 August 1975 was the first public acknowledgement by NSA of any watchlist programme. Allen described the programme's mechanics, identified the requesting agencies, and acknowledged the absence of statutory authorisation. The committee's reconstructed account was published in 1976 as Book III of the committee's Final Report — Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans — under the chapter heading "National Security Agency Surveillance Affecting Americans."¹⁰

The Church Committee's reconstruction included substantive description of the programme's operating mechanics, the watchlist categories, and the dissemination conventions, but withheld the published identities of the watchlisted individuals. The names remained classified until 2013, when NSA — in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by researchers Matthew Aid and William Burr — declassified the substantive identification of the principal watchlisted figures including King, Ali, Senator Church, Senator Baker, Tom Wicker, and Art Buchwald. The September 2013 release was reported by Charlie Savage and Laura Poitras in The New York Times, by Adam Goldman at The Washington Post, and by the National Security Archive at George Washington University in the briefing book that accompanied the lawsuit's release.¹¹

Legacy

MINARET's principal institutional legacy is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, enacted directly in response to the Church Committee's findings on NSA, FBI, and CIA domestic-collection programmes. FISA established the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the warrant-based statutory framework for foreign-intelligence surveillance involving US persons, and the prohibition on the kind of unsupervised executive-branch watchlisting that MINARET had embodied. The post-FISA framework was substantially rewritten in 2008 by the FISA Amendments Act and again in 2015 by the USA FREEDOM Act, but the underlying premise — that targeting of US persons requires statutory authority and judicial process — traces directly to the MINARET reckoning.¹²

The programme's secondary legacy is internal to NSA: USSID 18 — United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18 — was promulgated as the agency's standing internal regulation on the collection, processing, retention, and dissemination of communications involving US persons. USSID 18 has been revised multiple times in the post-1978 period; the current public version was last substantially declassified in 2011. The directive's existence and persistence reflect the institutional understanding within NSA that the MINARET pattern — unsupervised watchlisting of US persons on the request of any executive-branch agency — must not recur.¹³

The MINARET case has functioned in the broader public-record discussion of US intelligence as a recurring reference point on three connected questions: the absence-of-authority problem (intelligence collection conducted without statutory basis); the dissemination-secrecy problem (reports marked to conceal their collection origin and to insulate them from legal challenge); and the targeting-of-political-figures problem (the inclusion on a national-security watchlist of two sitting US Senators, civil-rights leaders, and journalists). Each of these patterns has reappeared in subsequent disclosures — the post-September 2001 STELLAR WIND programme on the absence-of-authority problem, the Snowden disclosures on the scale-and-secrecy problem, the COINTELPRO record on the targeting-of-political-figures problem — and the MINARET case is typically invoked as the historical template against which the contemporary case is read.¹⁴

Related agencies

This dossier relates principally to the National Security Agency as collecting service, and to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Defense Intelligence Agency as recipient agencies. The country-level context is on the page for the United States. See also the related dossier on Project SHAMROCK, the parallel NSA cable-collection programme of the same period, and on COINTELPRO, the FBI domestic-counterintelligence programme that received MINARET reporting on civil-rights and anti-war targets.

1. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Final Report, Book III: Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, 23 April 1976 (the Church Committee Final Report, Book III), chapter on the National Security Agency.
2. Church Committee Final Report, Book III, op. cit., on the relationship between SHAMROCK and MINARET; James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace: A Report on America's Most Secret Agency (Houghton Mifflin, 1982); James Bamford, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (Doubleday, 2001).
3. Church Committee Final Report, Book III, op. cit., on the legal basis (or absence thereof) of the watchlist programme; Frederick A. O. Schwarz Jr. (chief counsel to the Church Committee), Democracy in the Dark: The Seduction of Government Secrecy (The New Press, 2015).
4. Church Committee Final Report, Book III, op. cit., on the August 1967 origin of the civil-disturbance watchlist and the role of NSA Director Marshall Carter.
5. Church Committee Final Report, Book III, op. cit., on the 1970 BNDD narcotics watchlist; Drug Enforcement Administration historical record on the BNDD–DEA transition (1973).
6. Matthew M. Aid and William Burr, "Secret Cold War Documents Reveal NSA Spied on Senators," National Security Archive Briefing Book No. 441, 25 September 2013 (the FOIA-prompted 2013 NSA declassification with the substantive identification of watchlisted individuals); Charlie Savage and Laura Poitras, "How a Court Secretly Evolved, Extending U.S. Spies' Reach," The New York Times, 26 September 2013.
7. Church Committee Final Report, Book III, op. cit., on the "FOR BACKGROUND USE ONLY" dissemination convention; Director Lew Allen Jr. testimony to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, 6 August 1975.
8. Church Committee Final Report, Book III, op. cit., on the May 1973 Tordella–Banner internal-counsel exchange; Bamford, The Puzzle Palace, op. cit.
9. Church Committee Final Report, Book III, op. cit., on the role of Attorney General Elliot Richardson and the October 1973 termination order; Richardson's contemporaneous correspondence in the Department of Justice records.
10. Lieutenant General Lew Allen Jr., testimony before the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, 6 August 1975, Hearings, Volume 5: The National Security Agency and Fourth Amendment Rights; Church Committee Final Report, Book III, op. cit.
11. Aid and Burr, National Security Archive Briefing Book No. 441, op. cit.; Matthew M. Aid, The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency (Bloomsbury, 2009); subsequent Charlie Savage and Adam Goldman reporting on the September 2013 release.
12. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, Public Law 95-511, 25 October 1978; FISA Amendments Act of 2008, Public Law 110-261; USA FREEDOM Act of 2015, Public Law 114-23.
13. United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18 (USSID 18), most recent publicly declassified version on file at the National Security Archive; NSA Office of General Counsel internal-policy record on US-person collection.
14. Subsequent reference to MINARET as historical template in: ACLU litigation filings on STELLAR WIND (post-2005); Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board reports (2014) on Section 215 and Section 702; the Schwarz, Democracy in the Dark, op. cit., chapter on intelligence-community oversight history.