Project SHAMROCK and MINARET: How the NSA Read Americans' Telegrams for 30 Years

For three decades the NSA received copies of Americans' international telegrams, and kept a watch list of citizens including MLK and two senators. What the record shows.

Short answer: yes, it happened, and the government admitted it. From August 1945 until May 1975, under a program code-named SHAMROCK, the National Security Agency and its military predecessors received copies of millions of international telegrams sent to, from or through the United States. In parallel, under watch-list programs that became Project MINARET, the NSA searched intercepted communications for the names of American citizens supplied by the FBI, CIA and other agencies. Those names, declassified in 2013, included Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammad Ali and two sitting U.S. senators.

This is not a theory pieced together from rumours. It is in the 1976 final report of the Senate's Church Committee, in court records, and in the NSA's own internal history. Here is what each source says, and where to read it.

How SHAMROCK started

According to the Church Committee's Book III, SHAMROCK began in August 1945, when representatives of the U.S. Army's signals intelligence service approached the three main U.S. international telegraph companies, RCA Global, ITT World Communications and Western Union International, seeking access to foreign government traffic carried on their lines. The report records that the companies were advised such peacetime interception could be illegal, and agreed to cooperate after receiving assurances of protection.

What began as wartime-style codebreaking settled into a routine that outlived the war by three decades. The committee found that RCA Global and ITT World Communications provided virtually all of their international message traffic, while Western Union International provided only certain foreign traffic.

How big it was

The Church Committee called SHAMROCK "the largest governmental interception program affecting Americans," and said it dwarfed the CIA's mail-opening program by comparison. The NSA estimated that in the program's later years, its analysts reviewed about 150,000 telegrams per month. The committee stressed that while the stated purpose was foreign enciphered traffic, the NSA "had access to virtually all the international telegrams of Americans" carried by RCA Global and ITT.

Once the telegrams were in the NSA's hands, the committee wrote, they were available for analysis and dissemination using the agency's selection criteria, including the watch lists. That is where SHAMROCK and MINARET meet.

The watch lists, and MINARET

The NSA had kept "watch lists" of names and terms since the early 1960s, at first to track travel to Cuba and to protect the President and other officials. The Church Committee found that the routine inclusion of U.S. citizens' names began in 1967, as the FBI, CIA, Secret Service, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs and military intelligence asked the NSA to look for Americans in its intercepts, particularly people connected to civil disturbances and the anti-war movement.

In July 1969 the NSA issued a charter formally establishing Project MINARET. The committee describes how MINARET tightened security around the program: reports on Americans were classified Top Secret, marked "For Background Use Only," and were not serialized or identified as NSA products. In other words, recipients were not supposed to be able to tell where the information had come from.

The numbers differ slightly by source. A 1978 appeals court decision in Halkin v. Helms described about 1,200 Americans on the watch lists at one time or another, and about 2,000 reports disseminated. The NSA's own internal history, declassified in 2013, says the watch list "eventually contained over 1,600 names."

Who was on the list

For decades the names stayed secret. In September 2013, after an appeal by the National Security Archive at George Washington University to the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel, the NSA released portions of its internal history naming some targets. They included:

Martin Luther King Jr. and Whitney Young, civil rights leaders
Muhammad Ali, the boxer
Tom Wicker of The New York Times and humour columnist Art Buchwald
Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho), who later chaired the committee that exposed the programs, and Senator Howard Baker (R-Tennessee)

The NSA history says virtually all the names were provided by other government organizations. It does not say who decided to add each person, or what the agency learned about them. Those gaps are exactly why the release mattered: it confirmed that an intelligence agency built to watch foreign governments had been pointed at domestic critics, journalists and members of Congress.

How it ended

The watch-list program for Americans ended in 1973. SHAMROCK lasted until May 15, 1975, when Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger ordered it ended as the Church Committee's investigation closed in. The committee's hearings made both programs public in late 1975, and its report followed in 1976.

The fallout shaped the rules that still govern U.S. surveillance. The Church Committee's findings fed directly into the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA), which created the secret FISA court and required warrants for certain foreign intelligence surveillance inside the United States. Nobody was prosecuted. When anti-war activists sued over the interceptions, the D.C. Circuit in Halkin v. Helms (1978) upheld the government's use of the state secrets privilege, which blocked much of the case.

Why it still matters

SHAMROCK is the clearest documented precedent for a pattern that has come up again and again: private communications companies quietly handing bulk data to an intelligence agency, with legal cover arranged privately rather than by statute. The same questions surfaced in the 2000s over warrantless wiretapping and telecom immunity, and they surface now in fights over FISA Section 702. Our report on Section 702 and what the record shows picks up that thread, and our file on the FBI's Carnivore email system covers the internet-era version.

The record also shows the limits of what is known. Fifty years later, there is still no public accounting of everything collected, who asked for each name, or what was done with the reports. Anyone claiming to know more than the documents show is guessing.

Read the documents yourself

Church Committee Final Report, Book III, "National Security Agency Surveillance Affecting Americans" (1976), available through the Senate's website and archives such as the Mary Ferrell Foundation and AARC.
National Security Archive, Electronic Briefing Book No. 441 (2013), with the declassified NSA history pages on MINARET.
Halkin v. Helms, 598 F.2d 1 (D.C. Cir. 1978).

If you want this kind of file in one place, the Declassified Dossier 5-in-1 collects five more programs, from the CIA's Family Jewels to Project Blue Book, in plain English with the sources listed. You can also request your own records: see how to request your own FBI file.

Frequently asked questions

What was Project SHAMROCK?

SHAMROCK was the code name for an arrangement from August 1945 to May 1975 under which the major international telegraph companies gave the NSA and its predecessors copies of international telegrams sent to, from or through the United States.

What was Project MINARET?

MINARET was the NSA's 1967-1973 program for watch-listing U.S. citizens and organizations and reporting on their international communications to other agencies, formalized by a charter in July 1969.

Who was on the NSA watch list?

Names declassified in 2013 include Martin Luther King Jr., Whitney Young, Muhammad Ali, journalists Tom Wicker and Art Buchwald, and Senators Frank Church and Howard Baker.

Did anyone go to prison for SHAMROCK or MINARET?

No prosecutions resulted. The programs ended in the 1970s, and the Church Committee's findings fed into the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978.