CIA's Order to 'Have Fun' with SPT Targets
By Eleanor Voss ·
Kept secret until 2000, a tasking memo authorizes an operator to choose their own style and timing for sessions where the target could be anyone.
The cost of being a target in a government sandbox is the total loss of agency, reduced to a data point in a session where the operator is encouraged to experiment. For the individuals caught in the gears of the SPT project, the price was a psychological vulnerability that the record suggests was exploited not for intelligence, but for the sake of the exercise itself.
This is not a standard intelligence collection directive. The text, an OCR-extracted page from the CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room identified as CIA-RDP96-00789R003300470006-9, reads like a set of guidelines for a rehearsal. It is an instruction to an unnamed operator on how to conduct "sessions" against a target. The document is stripped of the traditional constraints of a covert operation—there are no legal boundaries, no specified targets, and no prohibited techniques. Instead, it offers a terrifying degree of autonomy.
A Playground for the Operator
In section 5, the record grants the operator total discretion: "Select own style, technique, timing." The operator is told to prepare summaries and record data, but the constraints end there. The most jarring instruction appears in section 6, a reminder that strips the operation of any professional modesty: "Target can be anything; have fun."
This "have fun" directive transforms the task from a mission into a game. The record establishes that the operator must coordinate with the Branch Chief—the agency supervisor charged with ensuring task objectives are understood—to confirm that "no misunderstandings exist." But the only objective explicitly stated is the recording of data. The operator is not tasked with recovering a secret or flipping an asset; they are tasked with the act of targeting itself.
The SPT Coincidence
The target of this activity is identified only as "SPT." In the context of the record, SPT is the entity associated with the project's tracking and analysis. In the public record, the term appears in a different light: Blue Comet SPT Layzner, a science fiction series produced between 1985 and 1986 by Nippon Sunrise, a Japanese animation studio that specialized in the mecha genre.
While the coincidence of the name may seem trivial, the timing is not. The project records in the CIA file date back to the mid-1990s, yet the record's obsession with "target control type" and "targeting technique" mirrors the thematic preoccupations of the very media the name evokes—the interface between human operators and specialized, controlled machinery. The connection here is the language of control. The CIA is not merely watching a target; it is applying a "control type" to them.
The Monitor and the Method
The record requires a specific set of metadata for every encounter. The operator must record the "PROJECT NO," the "SOURCE NO," and the "SESSION NO" in the upper right of the summary. Crucially, the record demands the name of a "MONITOR."
In any standard intelligence operation, a monitor is a safety check or a quality control officer. Here, the presence of a monitor alongside the operator's total freedom of "style" and "technique" suggests a different relationship. The operator is the subject of the study, and the monitor is the one recording the operator's intuition. The "target" is simply the material used to test the operator's efficacy.
This procedural rigidity regarding the metadata contrasts sharply with the fluidity of the operation. The record notes that "target control type, targeting technique, target source, who has target knowledgeability" are recorded in separate project records for each specific SPT target. This separation of data suggests a library of techniques. The agency was not building a file on a person; it was building a manual on how to break or move a person.
The Shape of the Sandbox
There is a gap in this record where the law should be. There is no mention of the Attorney General, no citation of executive orders, and no reference to the operational limits that typically govern the treatment of targets. The absence of these guardrails is a fact of the record. When an operator is told the target "can be anything" and to "have fun," the agency has effectively suspended the target's humanity.
The desk's reading is that the SPT project was never about the targets themselves. If the target can be "anything," then the target is irrelevant. The project's primary objective was the refinement of a behavioral methodology. The sessions were not intelligence-gathering missions; they were laboratory experiments conducted in the field. The "target control type" mentioned in the record is the actual product of the project—a categorized list of ways to manipulate a subject's environment or psychology to achieve a desired result.
This pattern suggests the operation functioned as a "sandbox" for high-level behavioral experimentation. By allowing the operator to select their own style and timing, the CIA was testing which intuitive approaches yielded the most consistent "control." The monitor was not there to ensure the target's safety, but to ensure the data on the operator's technique was captured accurately.
If this file is shaped the way it looks, the withheld pages—the ones detailing the "targeting techniques" and "control types"—contain a blueprint for psychological coercion. The redacted portions are not protecting the identities of the targets, because the targets were interchangeable. They are protecting the methodology. The agency is hiding the how, not the who.
The desk's reading is that the SPT project represents a pivot from traditional espionage to a form of operational psychology where the human target is treated as a piece of hardware to be calibrated. The people who served as the "anything" in these sessions paid for the agency's curiosity with their own autonomy. A full release of the project records would show a systematic effort to standardize human manipulation, turning the "fun" of the operator into a permanent scar for the target.