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.
These are professional liars, and I sort of doubt they’ve suddenly ‘got religion’ and changed their entire philosophical viewpoint. The fact that they’ve admitted to a criminal past does NOT mean they’ve decided to `fess up and go straight.
We shall have to see just how much is redacted, and then there’s the question of how much was never actually written down or included in the report…
And you can go to the bank with the fact that they won’t talk about what’s still going on… (and it IS still going on….)
It’s curious that they are doing this at all.
My thought exactly: Why? Why now? Are we being told this to distract us from something else? Or to get us questioning something else? To buy them cover for something else about to hit the fan? You can be sure it wasn’t done just for the sake of edifying the curiosity of history professors and the public.
I’ve missed your environmental updates.
seconded
Yeah, what boran2 and Man Eegee said!
Hi KP! Hope to see you more regularly.
Are we being told this to distract us from something else?
Exactly my thought as well.
That was my first thought too.
Is something really bad about to hit the fan in Iraq?
No kidding, why now? They certainly aren’t doing this out of the goodness of their black little hearts and some sort of conversion to open government…so what’s the real reason-this is actually kinda creeping me out-some major distraction going on here or what?
There’s little that hasn’t been seen before, but Colby makes a very interesting remark about Watergate.
I went through the Memo that lists the “skeletons” — all these items are familiar, in fact it appears to be nothing more than a CYA memo. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB222/family_jewels_wilderotter.pdf The 693 page folder, on which this memo is supposed to abstract, I’m sure, adds some blood, guts and gore that isn’t even hinted at here.
The most interesting thing by far is contained in the transcript of the Ford briefing. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB222/family_jewels_wh1.pdf In particular, at page 4 of 5, Ford briefly leaves the room and Colby talks to Ford’s aides, Marsh and Buchen (and Scowcroft), about Watergate:
What does Colby mean that “Watergate is a codeword”? Why does the transcript show Ford having left the meeting, and why is there no detail provided of the questions and answers that followed.
The explanation that makes the most sense, in the context of what ids known about the politicization of the Agency during that period, is that under Helms the CIA was used to carry out domestic political dirty tricks operations, which cummulatively were Codenamed Operation Watergate. That is in addition to the other illegal domestic political operations that are alluded to elsewhere in the “skeletons” memo and briefing, e.g., Operation Chaos, Merrimack, Artichoke, Bluebird, etc.
Perhaps, Hunt and the Plumbers weren’t a completely rogue White House operation as usually portrayed. This memo does reveal that Helms helped outplace Hunt with the Mullen Agency, which was Hunt’s base of operations after he retired from CIA and before he moved in with Colson at CREEP.
There may be something here.
This little slivver definitely raises some interesting new questions about the Agency’s role in Watergate and domestic politics.
More Juicy stuff like this, please! It’s a good read…