Documented conspiracies

The teaching

As the record each case left in courts, hearings and files teaches it.

What the law calls a conspiracy

In law a conspiracy is an agreement between two or more people to commit a crime, and the agreement is itself the offence. In England and Wales the Criminal Law Act of 1977 makes it a crime to agree on a course of conduct that would amount to an offence if carried out; the federal law of the United States adds that one of those who agreed must take some step towards it, an overt act. Courts try conspiracies all the time, to fix prices, to defraud, to smuggle or to kill, and prove them as they prove other crimes: by witnesses, documents, recordings and the money. The cases below are the ones most often cited, each with the record that proved it.

The study at Tuskegee

From 1932 the United States Public Health Service followed some six hundred Black men in Macon County, Alabama, about two thirds of them with syphilis, to watch the course of the untreated disease. The men were never told they had syphilis; they were told they had bad blood, and were given free meals, rides and burial insurance to keep them in the study. Painful spinal taps were presented as special free treatment. When penicillin became the standard cure in the 1940s it was withheld, and the service worked to keep the men from being treated elsewhere. Wives were infected and children born with the disease.

It was exposed from within. Peter Buxtun, an interviewer for the service, protested in writing from 1966, was ignored, and in 1972 gave the story to a reporter, Jean Heller of the Associated Press. Within months the study was stopped. A lawsuit brought by the lawyer Fred Gray was settled for ten million dollars, Congress passed the National Research Act in 1974, and the rules of informed consent that now govern research on human beings grew from it. In 1997 President Clinton apologised to the survivors.

Watergate and the tapes

In June 1972 five men were caught at night in the Democratic Party's offices in the Watergate building in Washington, carrying cameras and bugging equipment. Money found on them was traced to the committee working to re-elect President Nixon. The White House called it a third-rate burglary and set about paying the burglars for their silence and steering the investigation away. The cover-up came apart piece by piece: through a judge who would not accept silence, reporters at the Washington Post with a source inside the FBI, and Senate hearings, where an aide revealed that Nixon taped his own conversations.

The president refused to hand over the tapes until the Supreme Court ordered him to, unanimously, in July 1974. One, recorded six days after the break-in, caught him approving a plan to have the CIA ask the FBI to halt its inquiry. Released in August, it ended his presidency within days, and several of his closest aides went to prison.

COINTELPRO and the burglary at Media

On 8 March 1971 a small group calling itself the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into the bureau's office in Media, Pennsylvania, took its files and mailed copies to newspapers. They showed the FBI spying on students, Black activists and peace groups, and one carried the label COINTELPRO. A reporter's lawsuit forced out more, and the Senate's inquiry later laid out the whole programme: from 1956 to 1971 the FBI had worked not only to watch but to disrupt and discredit political groups, from the Communist Party and the civil rights movement to the Ku Klux Klan, with forged letters, planted informers and false rumours.

Among its acts was an anonymous letter sent to Martin Luther King in 1964 with a recording, urging him to take his own life. In 1969 an FBI informant supplied a floor plan of the flat of Fred Hampton, a Black Panther leader, who was killed in the police raid that followed; a civil suit was settled in 1982. The burglars were never caught, and most named themselves only in 2014.

MK-Ultra and the files that survived

In 1953 the CIA's director, Allen Dulles, approved MK-Ultra, a programme of research into drugs and the control of behaviour run by the chemist Sidney Gottlieb. Through universities, hospitals, prisons and front foundations it funded scores of projects, and some gave LSD to people who did not know they were taking it, among them men lured to safe houses in San Francisco and New York. One was Frank Olson, an Army scientist working with the agency, dosed without warning in November 1953; nine days later he fell to his death from a New York hotel window. His family learned the truth in 1975.

In 1973 the CIA's director, Richard Helms, ordered the programme's files destroyed, and most were. But in 1977 a request under the Freedom of Information Act turned up some twenty thousand pages that had been kept with the financial records and missed, and a Senate hearing that year put them on the record. The case shows both how far a secret agency could go and how a secret outlives its keepers: in the paperwork of those who paid for it.

The tobacco companies and the doubt they made

In December 1953, after studies linked smoking to lung cancer, the heads of the large American tobacco companies met at the Plaza Hotel in New York with a public relations firm. A few weeks later they published A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers in hundreds of newspapers, saying they believed their products were not injurious to health and that they accepted the public's health as a basic responsibility. They set up a research committee that for decades funded work to keep the question open. A memo at one company in 1969 put the strategy in a sentence: doubt was their product, since it was the best way to compete with the body of fact in the public mind.

Their own files, forced out by lawsuits and whistleblowers in the 1990s, showed that their scientists had known about the harm and about nicotine's hold for years. In 1994 seven chief executives swore before Congress that they did not believe nicotine was addictive. In 2006 a federal judge ruled, under the law against racketeering, that the companies had conspired for some fifty years to deceive the public, and ordered them to publish corrective statements, which ran from 2017.

The Dreyfus affair

In 1894 French army intelligence found in the German embassy's wastepaper a torn letter offering military secrets. Officers fixed on Captain Alfred Dreyfus, an Alsatian artillery officer whose handwriting looked similar and who was a Jew, which to them made him the likely traitor. He was convicted by a court martial on a secret file his defence never saw, stripped of his rank before a crowd crying death to the Jews, and sent to Devil's Island. When the new head of intelligence, Georges Picquart, found that the real traitor was another officer, Major Esterhazy, he was moved to Tunisia, and Major Henry forged a document to strengthen the case against Dreyfus.

The novelist Émile Zola charged the army publicly in his open letter J'accuse in 1898, and was convicted of libel for it. That summer Henry's forgery was discovered; he confessed and killed himself in his cell. Dreyfus was convicted again in 1899, pardoned, and in 1906 cleared by France's highest court and restored to the army. The affair is a true conspiracy, officers agreeing to forge and to lie, and it was driven by the antisemitic belief that a Jew must be a traitor: the mirror image of the conspiracy myths told against Jews, and their refutation.

Operation Northwoods

In March 1962 the American Joint Chiefs of Staff sent the secretary of defence a set of proposals to justify an invasion of Cuba by staging attacks and blaming them on Castro's government, among them faked incidents at the American base at Guantánamo and a faked attack on a civilian airliner. The government rejected them, and the memorandum was declassified in 1997. It shows two things at once: that officials have proposed deceptions of the worst kind, and that a proposal on paper is not an event; it was written, refused and in time released.

What the exposures left behind

Every proven case left paper, memos, budgets, tapes and files, because organisations cannot act without records, and every exposure left a mark in the law. The Church Committee led to standing intelligence committees in Congress and, in 1978, to a law requiring a special court's warrant for intelligence surveillance inside the country. Watergate brought new limits on campaign money in 1974. The tobacco papers led to the settlement of 1998, in which the companies agreed to pay the states more than two hundred billion dollars over twenty-five years and gave up kinds of advertising aimed at the young. That is the trail a real conspiracy leaves: names, documents, verdicts and laws, which anyone can look up.