With the announcement that the CIA is declassifying their Family Jewels, it is time to answer a few questions.
What are the CIA’s Family Jewels and how did they come into existence? What does it mean for today?
On February 2, 1973, James R. Schlesinger became the Director of Central Intelligence, replacing Richard Helms. His first words to the staff were reportedly, “I’m here to make sure you don’t screw Richard Nixon”. Nixon was just beginning his second-term in office, but the Watergate investigation was heating up.
Schlesinger was assisted in his new job by a longtime covert operator named William Colby. Together they performed a massive purge of the Agency, including the clandestine branch. That is a whole story unto itself. For the purposes of this narrative, the important thing is that Schlesinger wanted to make sure that he knew everything there was to know about the CIA’s role in Watergate. And William Colby and Deputy DCI Vernon Walters briefed him, assuring him they had provided all the information. But then something happened.
On April 15, 1973, John Dean told the federal prosecutors about the burglary of Dr. Lewis Fielding’s office in Los Angeles engineered by E. Howard Hunt, with the CIA’s assistance, and the following day Hunt confirmed the story when he testified before the Grand Jury.
Colby and Vernon Walters, the deputy DCI, had both assured Schlesinger that he knew everything there was to know about the CIA’s involvement in Watergate. Now Schlesinger discovered that Hunt had committed a burglary with material aid from the CIA. Schlesinger told Colby he was going to turn the CIA upside down and “fire everyone if necessary,” but he intended to learn everything the CIA had done that might blindside him in the future. No more surprises!
Colby had a plan ready to deal with this problem. He suggested that Schlesinger issue a directive to every CIA employee instructing him to come forward with anything the CIA might have done that exceeded the limits of the Agency’s charter. Schlesinger thought this a good idea. Colby wrote the order, Schlesinger signed it, and copies were distributed within the CIA on May 9, 1973, the same day on which Nixon moved Schlesinger to the Department of Defense, and appointed Colby as the new director of central intelligence.
[In the interest of accuracy, Schlesinger didn’t actually leave for the Pentagon until July 2nd, 1973 (it is the shortest stint as DCI in history).]
CIA officers came forward and detailed crime after crime. Assassinations, kidnapping, experimentation on unwitting citizens, infiltration of leftist groups, warrantless wiretapping and bugs, mail opening, burglary, and more. Their information was compiled into a 693-page report. This report was obviously highly sensitive.
William Colby then did something highly suspect. As the new declassifications show, DCI Colby did not brief President Ford on the Family Jewels until January 3, 1975. But he did brief someone else. This is from a deleted CIA history of the era, found in Google’s cache. Close followers of intelligence matters are familiar with the [Senate] Church Committee and the [House] Pike Committee, that investigated abuses in the 1970’s. But few remember the Nedzi Committee. That is because it was short-lived.
On 19 February 1975, the House, by a vote of 286 to 120, passed House Resolution 138 creating a House Select Committee on Intelligence, the Nedzi Committee.
[Incidentally, the reason Congress flew into this hive of activity was that on December 22, 1974, Seymour Hersh, then with the New York Times, published a front-page article entitled “Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Anti-War Forces.” The article revealed that the CIA had engaged in domestic spying activities against the anti-war movement.]
Rep. Lucien Nedzi was the Chairman of the Armed Services Subcommittee on Intelligence. That was the closest thing Congress had back then to today’s Intelligence Committees. Nedzi was a strong supporter of the CIA and he didn’t insist on much oversight at all.
CIA officials found Nedzi to be a solid choice, but other Democrats in the House and on the committee had major reservations. Harrington especially felt Nedzi had been “co-opted” by his service as chairman of the subcommittee on intelligence. He asked, “How could he investigate himself?”
That question would answer itself shortly.
Nedzi tried to set an agenda for the committee’s investigations. He believed that the committee should focus on the Agency’s “family jewels”– the list of abuses and possible illegal activities the Agency itself compiled in the early 1970s. On 5 June 1975, however, before the committee could meet to discuss its program, The New York Times published details of the “family jewels” and revealed that Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) William Colby had briefed Nedzi about them in 1973, when Nedzi was chairman of the Armed Services Subcommittee on Intelligence. 9 His fellow Democrats, led by Harrington, revolted. Nedzi resigned as chairman of the committee on 12 June 1975.
Do you see the problem? William Colby had given up the Family Jewels to a Democratic congressperson in 1973 and, yet, he only briefed President Ford about them in January 1975. The fact that the administration had lost control of the 693-page document meant they were limited in how they could respond.
By this time [June 1975] the Ford administration had some familiar characters. Donald Rumsfeld was still Ford’s chief of staff but would replace Schlesinger as Secretary of Defense on November 20th. Dick Cheney was Assistant to the President and would replace Rumsfeld as chief of staff when he moved to the Pentagon. George Herbert Walker Bush was ambassador to China, but would replace Colby as DCI on January 30, 1976. Henry Kissinger was the Secretary of State.
More from the CIA history:
The circus-like atmosphere continued on 16 June, when the House rejected Nedzi’s resignation by a vote of 290 to 64. But Nedzi refused to continue as chairman. On 17 July, the House abolished Nedzi’s Select Committee and voted to establish a new Select Committee with Representative [Otis] Pike as chairman.
The Pike Committee was combative and aggressive. While the Church Committee in the Senate sought compromise and cooperation with the administration and the CIA, Rep. Pike’s committee was much more distrustful and assertive of congressional prerogatives.
Confrontation would be the key to CIA and White House relationships with the Pike Committee and its staff. Early on, Republican Representative James Johnson set the tone for the relationship when he told Seymour Bolten, chief of the CIA Review Staff, “You, the CIA, are the enemy.” Colby came to consider Pike a “jackass” and his staff “a ragtag, immature and publicity-seeking group.” 17 Even Colby’s rather reserved counsel, Mitch Rogovin, saw Pike as “a real prickly guy…to deal with.” Rogovin believed Pike was not really wrong in his position. “He just made it so goddamn difficult. You also had to deal with Pike’s political ambitions.” 18
The CIA Review Staff, which worked closely with both the Church Committee and Pike Committee staffs, never developed the same cooperative relationship with the Pike Committee staffers that it did with the Church Committee. The Review Staff pictured the Pike staffers as “flower children, very young and irresponsible and naïve.”
According to CIA officer Richard Lehman, the Pike Committee staffers were “absolutely convinced that they were dealing with the devil incarnate.” For Lehman, the Pike staff “came in loaded for bear.” Donald Gregg, the CIA officer responsible for coordinating Agency responses to the Pike Committee, remembered, “The months I spent with the Pike Committee made my tour in Vietnam seem like a picnic. I would vastly prefer to fight the Viet Cong than deal with a polemical investigation by a Congressional committee, which is what the Pike Committee [investigation] was.”
You might recognize Donald Gregg as the National Security Advisor to Vice-President George H. W. Bush. In that role he would be intimately involved in the Iran-Contra fiasco.
Again, from the official CIA history.
Henry Kissinger, while appearing to cooperate with the committee, worked hard to undermine its investigations and to stonewall the release of documents to it.
In the end, the Pike Committee report was never officially released. Portions of it were leaked to the New York Times which published excerpts. The entire report was leaked and published by the Village Voice. And it was also published in England.
The Church Committee report, however, was released. And it led to public outrage and a string of reforms. Those reforms were resisted at every step by familiar faces.
Another major issue for Rumsfeld was the effort by members of the Church Committee in the Senate and the Pike Committee in the House to curtail the power of U.S. intelligence agencies: “They were very specific about their effort to destroy American intelligence [capabilities],” remembers Robert Ellsworth. “It was Senator Church who said our intelligence agencies were ‘rogue elephants.’ They were supposedly out there assassinating people and playing dirty tricks and so forth…. Well, that just wasn’t true.”
And:
In December 1974, The New York Times reported that the CIA had engaged in an illegal domestic spying program for two decades, tapping phones, opening mail, and breaking into homes of antiwar protesters. The article, by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, prompted a congressional uproar.
In a memo to Ford, obtained at the Ford Presidential Library in Ann Arbor, Mich., [Dick] Cheney urged the swift creation of a presidential commission to investigate the CIA. Cheney wrote that doing so was “the best prospect for heading off congressional efforts to further encroach on the executive branch.”
Ford did create a commission [Rockefeller Commission] but it did not prevent Congress from doing their own investigations.
The consequence of all these investigations was a series of reforms. The Freedom of Information Act was strengthened, the FISA law was passed, the permanent select committees on intelligence were created. The Presidential Records Act was enacted. [See Bush’s Executive Order 13233].
None of these laws were seen as legitimate by the people in the Ford Administration. Their contempt for these reforms were only strengthened by Jimmy Carter’s efforts to clean-up the CIA and emphasize human rights in American foreign policy.
The result was, when Cheney and Rumsfeld came back to power in 2001, they swiftly moved to undermine or ignore these reforms…one by one.
Cheney ignored the FISA laws, Bush eviscerated the Presidential Records Act, Cheney asserts the act does not cover the OVP, torture was reinstituted, the congressional intelligence committees were denied information, and so on.
With the full release of the Family Jewels we have an timely opportunity to revisit all these debates and to insist on the reforms that were made in the 1970’s.