Partly True: Conspiracy Stories With a Documented Core
Partly True Part of the story is documented, but other parts of the popular version are not supported by the cited sources, or key details rest on a single account that has not been independently confirmed.
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- Gulf War Illness and the Khamisiyah Cover-Up Claims
Many veterans of the 1990-91 Gulf War came home with chronic, unexplained symptoms. The Pentagon and CIA long said no U.S. troops had been exposed to chemical weapons; in June 1996 the Defense Department acknowledged that U.S. troops had destroyed Iraqi chemical munitions at Khamisiyah. Later estimates put about 100,000 troops in the potential exposure zone, though the GAO said those estimates could not be adequately supported.
- Operation Bloodstone: Recruiting Nazi Collaborators for the Cold War
According to historian Christopher Simpson's 1988 book Blowback, a 1948 State Department program code-named Bloodstone brought anti-Soviet émigrés, including some former Nazi collaborators, to the United States for intelligence and political warfare work. Much of what is publicly known about Bloodstone comes from Simpson's research in declassified records.
- Operation Gladio: NATO's Secret 'Stay-Behind' Armies
In 1990 Italy's prime minister disclosed that a secret, armed 'stay-behind' network code-named Gladio had existed for decades to resist a possible Soviet invasion, and other Western European governments acknowledged similar networks. The European Parliament condemned them. Claims that the networks were behind terrorist attacks remain unproven in the official record cited here.
- Operation Mockingbird
The theory says the CIA ran a vast secret program, called Operation Mockingbird, to control the American news media. The official record shows something narrower but still real: the CIA kept covert relationships with about 50 U.S. journalists or media employees until 1976. In the CIA's own 'Family Jewels' file, the name belongs to a 1963 wiretap on two Washington newsmen.
- The Business Plot: A General's Testimony About a Fascist Coup
In 1934, retired Marine Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler testified under oath that a bond salesman had sounded him out about leading a veterans' movement. A House committee reported in 1935 that it had verified most of his statements and that such attempts 'were discussed, were planned.' No coup was ever attempted, and the committee said it had no evidence that several famous men named in press reports were involved.
- The Church Committee and the CIA's Poison Dart Gun
In September 1975, the Senate's Church Committee opened its first public hearings with a case of CIA employees keeping a deadly shellfish toxin after the president had ordered it destroyed. CIA Director William Colby brought along an electric pistol built to fire tiny poison darts. The weapon is now popularly called the 'heart attack gun,' though that name does not appear in the hearings.
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