CIA to reveal 'skeletons'/Agency to declassify records of abuses, from domestic spying to assassination attempts

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Friday, June 22, 2007 (SF Chronicle)

CIA to reveal 'skeletons'/Agency to declassify records of abuses, from domestic
spying to assassination attempts

Karen DeYoung, Walter Pincus, Washington Post


(06-22) 04:00 PDT Washington -- 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 Hayden said Thursday.
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.
In anticipation of the CIA's release, the National Security Archive at
George Washington University on Thursday published a separate set of
documents from January 1975 detailing internal government deliberations of
the abuses. Those documents 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 in news
accounts.
An article about the CIA's infiltration of anti-war groups, published by
New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh in December 1974, was "just the tip
of the iceberg," then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger warned Ford,
according to a Jan. 3, 1975, memorandum of their conversation.
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 trove of CIA documents, generated as the Vietnam War
wound down and agency involvement in President Richard 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 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 back 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 story that Colby took the file to the White
House. The National Security Archive release included a six-page summary
of a Jan. 3, 1975, conversation 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.
Among several new details, the summary document reveals a 1969 program
about CIA efforts against "the international activities of radicals and
black militants." Undercover CIA agents were placed inside U.S. peace
groups and sent abroad as credentialed members to identify any foreign
contacts. This came at a time when the Soviet Union was suspected of
financing and influencing U.S. domestic organizations.
The program included "information on the domestic activities" of the
organizations and led to the accumulation of 10,000 American names.
Other "skeletons" listed in the summary included the "very productive"
1963 wiretapping of two columnists -- Robert Allen and Paul Scott -- whose
conversations included talks with 12 Senators and six congressmen; and the
"personal surveillances" for two months in 1972 of muckraking columnist
Jack Anderson and staff members, including Les Whitten and Brit Hume, and
of Washington Post reporter Mike Getler between October 1971 and April
1972.
The CIA documents scheduled for release next week, Hayden said Thursday,
"provide a glimpse of a very different time and a very different agency."
Barred by secrecy restrictions from correcting "misinformation," he said,
the CIA is at the mercy of the press. "Unfortunately, there seems to be an
instinct among some in the media today to take a few pieces of
information, which may or may not be accurate, and run with them to the
darkest corner of the room," Hayden said.
Hayden's speech and some of the questions that followed evoked more recent
criticism of the intelligence community, which has been accused of illegal
wiretapping, infiltration of anti-war groups and the kidnapping and
torturing of terrorism suspects.
"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 ancient CIA operations, Blanton said, "are pretty
resonant today."

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