(Credits: Far Out / Boris Carmi / CIA)
Sat 27 December 2025 22:00, UK
From pumping unsuspecting prisoners full of LSD as a means of torture to seemingly endless meddling in South American politics, the CIA has an extensive and incredibly distressing history of controversy and covert dealings, but perhaps its most bizarre operations have involved amassing extensive files on pop culture figures like Eartha Kitt.
On the face of it, Kitt was among the most iconic figures to ever grace Broadway stages, with her distinctive vocal prowess and affable, flirtatious public persona. In the eyes of the Central Intelligence Agency, though, the South Carolina-born performer was a dangerous would-be communist beset on the total destruction of the American way of life.
This was, after all, the peak of Cold War paranoia during which anybody – particularly prominent Black celebrities – who did not bend over backwards to support the state in every way possible could be accused of being a covert communist at the drop of a hat. Kitt certainly wasn’t the only performer that the Agency had on its watchlist, having compiled files of pseudo-evidence against everybody from Jean Seberg to Aretha Franklin.
Seemingly, the root cause of the investigation into the Catwoman actress arrived in 1968, when she was invited to a White House luncheon with then-president Lyndon B Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird. At one point, the First Lady asked Kitt her view on the Vietnam War, to which the vocalist responded, “You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed.”
“They rebel in the street. They will take pot, and they will get high,” she continued. “They don’t want to go to school because they’re going to be snatched off from their mothers to be shot in Vietnam.”
Kitt was often noted for her support of social causes and was an outspoken critic of the war in Vietnam, so it is not clear what Lady Bird Johnson expected her to say, but her utterly undeniable comments caused the First Lady to burst into tears.
In the wake of that highly publicised incident, Kitt was more or less blacklisted from the US entertainment industry, and the CIA wasted no time in opening up a dossier on her life and activity. Years later, in 1975, those files were uncovered by The New York Times, who discovered that the agency had no evidence of Kitt being a covert Soviet spy, or of any concrete countercultural activities, aside from a few shreds of Hollywood gossip.
Still, that didn’t stop the organisation from branding Kitt a “spoiled child” with a “very nasty disposition” as well as being a “sadistic nymphomaniac” – to which Kitt later responded, “What has that got to do with the CIA if I was?”
During those years in political exile, Kitt performed various residencies in the United Kingdom, including a week in Caerphilly, Wales, which only seemed to increase her streak of activism. According to the performer, her global travels opened her eyes to the sorry state of affairs in the United States, where racism was far more ingrained in everyday society, and segregation was still in recent memory.
Ultimately, the CIA’s measly files on Eartha Kitt didn’t amount to anything substantial, no Broadway spy rings were uncovered, and Catwoman was never deemed a communist agitator, the very fact that an investigation occurred in telling of just how bizarre the CIA’s operations were during the age of Cold War counterculture.
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