CIA to Air Decades of Its Dirty Laundry
22 June Washington Post - CIA to Air Decades of Its Dirty Laundry by Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus.
Quote:
The CIA will declassify hundreds of pages of long-secret records detailing some of the intelligence agency's worst illegal abuses -- the so-called "family jewels" documenting a quarter-century of overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying, kidnapping and infiltration of leftist groups from the 1950s to the 1970s, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said yesterday.
The documents, to be publicly released next week, also include accounts of break-ins and theft, the agency's opening of private mail to and from China and the Soviet Union, wiretaps and surveillance of journalists, and a series of "unwitting" tests on U.S. civilians, including the use of drugs.
"Most of it is unflattering, but it is CIA's history," Hayden said in a speech to a conference of foreign policy historians. The documents have been sought for decades by historians, journalists and conspiracy theorists and have been the subject of many fruitless Freedom of Information Act requests.
In anticipation of the CIA's release, the
National Security Archive at George Washington University yesterday
published a separate set of documents from January 1975 detailing internal government discussions of the abuses...
CIA Reveals Cold War Secrets
CIA FOIA - "Family Jewels" - CIA webpage.
27 June LA Times - CIA Reveals Cold War Secrets by Greg Miller.
Quote:
After fighting to keep them secret for more than three decades, the CIA released hundreds of documents Tuesday that catalog some of the most egregious intelligence abuses of the Cold War, including assassination plots against foreign leaders and illegal efforts to spy on Americans.
The records are part of a trove of jealously guarded documents long known within the agency as "the family jewels." Assembled in the early 1970s as part of an internal inquiry of potentially embarrassing or illegal activities, the records were subsequently turned over to Congress, prompting investigations and sweeping intelligence reforms.
The records were ordered released by CIA Director Michael V. Hayden as part of what he characterized as an effort to close an embarrassing chapter in the agency's history.
The documents serve as "reminders of some things the CIA should not have done," Hayden said Tuesday in remarks to the agency's workforce. "The documents truly do provide a glimpse of a very different era and a very different agency."
Indeed, many of the episodes detailed in the 693 pages of newly declassified text read like relics from another time, including elaborate attempts to enlist Mafia operatives to poison Cuban President Fidel Castro...
27 June Washington Post - CIA Releases Files On Past Misdeeds by Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus.
Quote:
Hundreds of pages of decades-old documents declassified and released by the CIA yesterday revealed a 1970s-era agency in the throes of unaccustomed self-examination, caught between its traditional secrecy and demands that it come clean on a history of unsavory activities.
Prompted by the then-unraveling Watergate affair, and by fears that CIA involvement in that scandal would be exposed along with other illegal operations, the agency combed its files for what it called "delicate" information with "flap potential." The result was a collection of documents the CIA called the "family jewels."
Partly disclosed yesterday, the documents chronicle activities including assassination plans, illegal wiretaps and hunts for spies at political conventions. One document spoke of a plan to poison an African leader. Another revealed that the CIA had offered a Mafia boss $150,000 to kill Cuba's Fidel Castro...
27 June NY Times - Files on Illegal Spying Show C.I.A. Skeletons From Cold War by Mark Mazzetti and Tim Weiner.
Quote:
Long-secret documents released Tuesday provide new details about how the Central Intelligence Agency illegally spied on Americans decades ago, including trying to bug a Las Vegas hotel room for evidence of infidelity and tracking down an expert lock-picker for a Watergate conspirator.
Known inside the agency as the “family jewels,” the 702 pages of documents catalog domestic wiretapping operations, failed assassination plots, mind-control experiments and spying on journalists from the early years of the C.I.A.
The papers provide evidence of paranoia and occasional incompetence as the agency began a string of illegal spying operations in the 1960s and 1970s, often to hunt links between Communist governments and the domestic protests that roiled the nation in that period...
