CIA to Air Decades of Its Dirty Laundry

[cal04]

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.

(snip)
A New York Times article by reporter Seymour Hersh about the CIA's infiltration of antiwar groups, published in December 1974, was "just the tip of the iceberg," then-Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger warned Ford, according to a Jan. 3 memorandum of their conversation.



http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/21/AR2007062102434.html?hpid=topnews

[Eagle_Eye]

1. Nixon knew about it. Ford knew about it, and they chose to do nothing.

Repugs can sure keep a secret when it comes to the government going against the will of the people.

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

5. Repugs are still running the show ..

so I won't be surprised if most of the "dirty deeds" exposed were things that happened during the administration of prez's Kennedy, Johnson, Carter.

[papau]

9. Brothers by David Talbot just out on why people thought CIA killed Kennedy

BROTHERS

The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years


By David Talbot

[soothsayer]

2. Can't wait until they release the stuff they're up to now (in 30 years)

[TomClash]

3. How do we know these records are authentic? nt

[cassiepriam]

4. bingo. something is fishy.

[jamesinca]

6. You beat me to the post.

I put this in LBN, and I just now saw it here. I think it will make for some interesting reading, unless they edit it a lot.

[groovedaddy]

7. It's all about the damage control

I get really suspicious when the CIA wants to tell on itself.

[Demeter]

8. Kissinger Implicates Himself in the Article

Kissinger warned that if other operations were divulged, "blood will flow," saying, "For example, Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation on the assassination of Castro." Kennedy was the attorney general from 1961 to 1964...Worried that the disclosures could lead to criminal prosecutions, Kissinger added that "when the FBI has a hunting license into the CIA, this could end up worse for the country than Watergate," the scandal that led to the fall of the Nixon administration the previous year.

In a meeting at which Colby detailed the worst abuses -- after telling the president "we have a 25-year old institution which has done some things it shouldn't have" -- Ford said he would appoint a presidential commission to look into the matter. "We don't want to destroy but to preserve the CIA. But we want to make sure that illegal operations and those outside the charter don't happen," Ford said.

Most of the major incidents and operations in the reports to be released next week were revealed in varying detail during congressional investigations that led to widespread intelligence reforms and increased oversight. But the treasure-trove of CIA documents, generated as the Vietnam War wound down and agency involvement in Nixon's "dirty tricks" political campaign began to be revealed, is expected to provide far more comprehensive accounts, written by the agency itself...The reports, known collectively by historians and CIA officials as the "family jewels," were initially produced in response to a 1973 request by then-CIA Director James R. Schlesinger. Alarmed by press accounts of CIA involvement in Watergate under his predecessor, Schlesinger asked the agency's employees to inform him of all operations that were "outside" the agency's legal charter.

This process was unprecedented at the agency, where only a few officials had previously been privy to the scope of its illegal activities. Schlesinger collected the reports, some of which dated to the 1950s, in a folder that was inherited by his successor, Colby, in September of that year.
But it was not until Hersh's article that Colby took the file to the White House. The National Security Archive release included a six-page summary of a conversation on Jan. 3, 1975, in which Colby briefed the Justice Department for the first time on the extent of the "skeletons."
Operations listed in the report began in 1953, when the CIA's counterintelligence staff started a 20-year program to screen and in some cases open mail between the United States and the Soviet Union passing through a New York airport. A similar program in San Francisco intercepted mail to and from China from 1969 to 1972. Under its charter, the CIA is prohibited from domestic operations.