PROJECT MINARET

1. Public Record

MINARET. NSA watch-list work beside Shamrock, 1960s into 1973. Names of Americans and others submitted by FBI, CIA, Secret Service, BNDD, Defense. The Agency matches those names against the take it already has, including the Shamrock firehose, and passes hits back. No warrant. No notice to the person on the list. Anti-war names, civil-rights names, narcotics names, the same White House hunger that feeds CHAOS and, later, Huston's menu.

Church puts Minaret on the table with Shamrock in autumn 1975. The shock is not that foreign cables were read. It is that an American could be placed on a list by another agency and then found in a stream that was never supposed to be a domestic search tool. Numbers vary by memo. The structure does not: list in, traffic against the list, report out. Nixon-era pressure fattens the list. The program is reined in as the investigations start, before FISA gives the later court a job.

Minaret is the index. Shamrock is the pipe. They only make sense as a pair.

2. Date of Incident

1960s origin as a formal watch-list use of NSA take. Peak late 1960s-early 1970s. Curtailed 1973-75. Public with Church.

3. Location

Fort Meade, fed by other agencies' names. Approximate 39°06 N 076°46 W.

4. Official Narrative

A watch-list use of signals take that reached Americans without a court. Official narrative after Church is that this was a misuse of a foreign tool. FISA is the later fence.

5. Witness Layer

NSA officers. Submitting agencies. Church staff. Americans who never knew they were a query.

6. Recovery Logistics

Church volumes. Internal lists not released in full. No public name-by-name dump.

7. Assessment

A list file. Keep it welded to Shamrock so nobody files them as two mysteries. Keep the submitting agencies. A watch list is how a foreign intercept becomes a domestic answer without anyone writing "domestic intercept" on the folder. Do not write every modern query as Minaret. Do not write Minaret as only Nixon. The pipe was older than he was.

8. Materials & Remains

Church. Later NSA historical notes. Redacted list fragments.

9. Key Personnel

NSA watch officers : The match.

Submitting agencies : The names.

Church Committee : The public caption.

10. Aftermath

FISA and the later arguments about queries. Minaret becomes the short word for watch-list abuse of a foreign take.

11. Current Archive Status

Status: NSA watch list, 1960s-73. Hits from Shamrock take. Church 1975.

Confidence: High that Minaret matched agency names against NSA traffic including Americans. High that it sat beside Shamrock. Low that the full name list is public. Low that every hit path is mapped.

Filing note

A foreign pipe, a domestic list, agencies feeding names into a building that was not supposed to search the country, hits going back in envelopes, a committee that had to explain why the two captions were one machine.

List in, traffic against the list, report out. Three steps. No warrant between them.