FOIAWEAR — OPERATION CHAOS / The Files on 7,200 Tee

FOIAWEAR / ARCHIVE SERIES 062

OPERATION CHAOS — in 1967 the Agency's counterintelligence staff was asked a question: was foreign money and foreign direction behind the anti-war movement? The programme that grew out of that question was called Operation Chaos, and it ran for years inside the United States. It was not run against foreign agents. It was run against Americans.

The files are still arguing about themselves. A 1975 newspaper account of the programme carried the headline “OPERATION CHAOS: FILES ON 7,200” and reported that the Agency had built a highly secret programme gathering material on thousands of people in this country. A court story the same year put the scale in a single sentence: “'Operation Chaos' files compiled by presidential order on hundreds of thousands of dissident Americans in the past 15 years cannot be destroyed at present, according to a federal court ruling.” The order, it said, came “at the request of Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, who feared extensive foreign influence on domestic unrest.”

When the programme ended, the files did not. The American Civil Liberties Union went to court to stop the Agency destroying them — “the ACLU wants those in the Chaos files to get the information the CIA collected on them” — and won a hold on their destruction while the case was heard. A 1981 headline about the files' long afterlife reads simply “SON OF OPERATION CHAOS.” A 1975 account of the Agency's own internal report noted the original objective in the report's own terms: to see if foreign counterintelligence had connection with the actual domestic operations of Chaos. It had not.

The artwork is a card index: drawer after drawer, one pulled open toward the viewer, the cards spilling out across the frame. Every card is blank. That is the point of it. Two or three carry a red tab.

The QR code on the front opens the source: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp90-01208r000100170047-4 — the released file headed “OPERATION CHAOS: FILES ON 7,200.” Every quotation above is from the released documents, which are press cuttings and reports collected in the Agency's own files.

Garment: Comfort Colors 1717, 6.1 oz garment-dyed cotton, S–4XL. Front print only; plain back. Artwork approximately 7.8 × 5.2 in, QR approximately 1.8 × 1.8 in.

Colours: offered in both dark and light garment colours — the index in manila, bone, steel teal and oxblood on Black, Graphite, Espresso, Navy and Pepper, and the same scene struck as a dark ink plate on White, Ivory, Butter, Chalky Mint, Blossom, Light Green and Chambray.

Care: machine wash cold, inside out, tumble dry low. Do not iron the print directly.

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