Michael DeM
06/24/07, 11:04 am
CIA Shines Light on Dark Past
By Karen Deyoung and Walter Pincus
Washington Post
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 oversees assassination attempts, domestic spying, kidnapping and infiltration of leftist groups from the 1950s to the 1970s, CIA director Michael Hayden said Thursday.
The documents, to be publicly released next week, also included 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 published a separate set of documents from January 1975 detailing internal government deliberations of the abuses. Those documents, published Thursday, portray a rising sense of panic within the administration of President Ford that what then-CIA Director William Colby called "skeletons" in the CIA's closet had begun to be revealed.
An article about the CIA's infiltration of antiwar groups, published by New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh in December was "just the tip of the iceberg," then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger warned Ford, according to a Jan. 3 memorandum of their conversation.
Kissinger warned that if other operations were divulged, "blood will flow. For example, Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation on the assassination of (Cuban President Fidel) 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.
Most of the major events and operations in the reports were revealed in varying detail during congressional investigations that led to widespread intelligence reforms and increased oversight. But the 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 by historians and CIA officials as "the family jewels," were initially produced in response to a 1973 request by then-CIA Director James 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.
The CIA documents scheduled for release next week, Hayden said Thursday, "provide a glimpse of a very different time and a very different agency."
Hayden's speech and some of the questions that followed evoked more recent criticism of the intelligence community.
"It's surely part of (Hayden's) program now to draw a bright line with the past," said National Security Archive Director Thomas Blanton. "But it's uncanny how the government keeps dipping into the black bag."
Newly revealed details of old CIA operations, Blanton said, "are pretty resonant today."
By Karen Deyoung and Walter Pincus
Washington Post
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 oversees assassination attempts, domestic spying, kidnapping and infiltration of leftist groups from the 1950s to the 1970s, CIA director Michael Hayden said Thursday.
The documents, to be publicly released next week, also included 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 published a separate set of documents from January 1975 detailing internal government deliberations of the abuses. Those documents, published Thursday, portray a rising sense of panic within the administration of President Ford that what then-CIA Director William Colby called "skeletons" in the CIA's closet had begun to be revealed.
An article about the CIA's infiltration of antiwar groups, published by New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh in December was "just the tip of the iceberg," then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger warned Ford, according to a Jan. 3 memorandum of their conversation.
Kissinger warned that if other operations were divulged, "blood will flow. For example, Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation on the assassination of (Cuban President Fidel) 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.
Most of the major events and operations in the reports were revealed in varying detail during congressional investigations that led to widespread intelligence reforms and increased oversight. But the 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 by historians and CIA officials as "the family jewels," were initially produced in response to a 1973 request by then-CIA Director James 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.
The CIA documents scheduled for release next week, Hayden said Thursday, "provide a glimpse of a very different time and a very different agency."
Hayden's speech and some of the questions that followed evoked more recent criticism of the intelligence community.
"It's surely part of (Hayden's) program now to draw a bright line with the past," said National Security Archive Director Thomas Blanton. "But it's uncanny how the government keeps dipping into the black bag."
Newly revealed details of old CIA operations, Blanton said, "are pretty resonant today."