I’m very, very excited to learn that the CIA is declassifying their family jewels. They’re being hosted at the National Security Archives.
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.
Long time readers of this site know that I often write about the Church Committee and its relevance to today. The Church Committee reports were the most extensive source for knowledge about illegal CIA, FBI, NSA, and IRS activity previously available to historians. But the new declassifications will dwarf that.
CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden announced today that the Agency is declassifying the full 693-page file amassed on CIA’s illegal activities by order of then-CIA director James Schlesinger in 1973–the so-called “family jewels.” Only a few dozen heavily-censored pages of this file have previously been declassified…
Hayden also announced the declassification of some 11,000 pages of the so-called CAESAR, POLO and ESAU papers–hard-target analyses of Soviet and Chinese leadership internal politics and Sino-Soviet relations from 1953-1973, a collection of intelligence on Warsaw Pact military programs, and hundreds of pages on the A-12 spy plane.
The National Security Archive separately obtained (and posted today) a six-page
summary of the illegal CIA activities, prepared by Justice Department lawyers after a CIA briefing in December 1974, and the memorandum of conversation when the CIA first briefed President Gerald Ford on the scandal on January 3, 1975.
I’ll have a lot more to say about these disclosures after I have time to wade into them. If I had the money, I’d spend the next year researching this and write a book about it.
The creation of the Family Jewels documents is one of the most fascinating stories in recent American history and it intimately involves Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George H.W. Bush, and Henry Kissinger, who all worked feverishly to try to put the genie back in the bottle. They failed…until they came to power again…in 2000. Now they have failed again.
