-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: "Mario Profaca" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: June 28, 2007 8:08:23 AM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [SPY NEWS] CIA Paid for Nixon Thank-You Notes, Documents Show
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://news.yahoo.com/s/bloomberg/20070627/pl_bloomberg/atwazidek0i_1
CIA Paid for Nixon Thank-You Notes, Documents Show
Ken Fireman and Jeff Bliss Wed Jun 27, 10:45 AM ET
June 27 (Bloomberg) -- The Central Intelligence Agency secretly
paid more than $33,000 in 1970 to cover the cost of White House
thank-you notes to supporters of President Richard Nixon's decision
to invade Cambodia, newly released agency documents show.
ADVERTISEMENT
The financing of the notes, done at White House request, was one
part of a complex relationship between the Nixon White House and
the CIA that eventually drew the agency into the Watergate scandal.
CIA officials were aware that paying for the thank-you notes could
be controversial and took steps to conceal the true purpose of the
expenditure from government auditors outside the agency, the
records show.
``Think we can go ahead and do this. Have to be careful as to way
this is documented -- that's the only thing,'' said Warren
Magnusson, the CIA's deputy director for liaison and planning, in a
telephone conversation with White House Staff Secretary John Brown
on May 26, 1970, according to a transcript of the call.
The transcript was part of more than 700 pages of previously
classified material that was released by the CIA yesterday in
response to a 1992 Freedom of Information Act request from the
National Security Archive, a Washington-based group. The released
documents were heavily redacted.
The documents, known within the CIA as the ``family jewels,'' were
compiled in 1973 on the order of then-director James Schlesinger.
They detailed a long history of CIA activities that, in the words
of one agency official, then- Director of Security Howard Osborn,
``conflict with the provisions of the National Security Act of 1947.''
Surveillance of Activists
Those activities include CIA surveillance of antiwar activists and
other domestic political dissidents and agency involvement in
assassination plots against foreign leaders such as Cuba's Fidel
Castro. Those activities were extensively aired by congressional
investigating committees in the 1970s.
The CIA's current director, Michael Hayden, said yesterday in a
note to agency employees that the documents are ``reminders of some
things the CIA should not have done.'' He added that they ``provide
a glimpse of a very different era and a very different agency.''
Arthur Hulnick, a 30-year CIA veteran and professor of
international relations at Boston University, said the release of
the ``family jewels'' fulfills a promise by the agency to
periodically declassify documents in the public interest.
``The agency was supposed to do this,'' he said.
Watergate Affair
Schlesinger ordered the documents compiled as news was breaking of
the agency's involvement in the Watergate affair. The CIA had
provided help to former agents Howard Hunt and James McCord, who
were convicted for their roles in the 1972 break-in at the
Democratic National Headquarters in Washington.
The agency later told the FBI, at Nixon's request, to curtail its
investigation of Watergate on the grounds that it would damage
national security.
According to the documents, the White House request for CIA funding
for the thank-you notes surfaced in a telephone conversation
between Brown and Magnusson four weeks after Nixon announced in a
nationally televised speech that he was sending U.S. troops into
Cambodia.
Supply Routes
Nixon's action was aimed at disrupting the supply routes of North
Vietnamese troops who were fighting U.S. forces in neighboring
Vietnam. His decision triggered a nationwide wave of protests on
college campuses.
Magnusson, 85, said today in an interview from his home in
Springfield, Virginia, that he didn't recall the incident. He said
he retired from the CIA in 1979.
The documents also showed how the Nixon administration and its
political embarrassments became intertwined with the CIA.
In October 1972, CIA Director Richard Helms asked the agency to
prepare a report on fugitive financier Robert Vesco, who was
accused by federal authorities of making $200,000 in illegal
contributions to Nixon's re-election campaign of that year.
A short time later, after some agency employees came across
evidence of ``high-level American intercession on behalf of Mr.
Vesco,'' Helms abruptly canceled the project, the documents showed.
Vesco fled to Costa Rica after federal authorities accused him of
stealing $224 million from a mutual fund. He spent the next two
decades in various Central American and Caribbean nations in order
to avoid extradition to the U.S. He ended up in Cuba, where he was
sentenced in 1996 to 13 years in prison for marketing an unproven
cancer medication, according to Time magazine.
To contact the reporter on this story: Ken Fireman in Washington at
[EMAIL PROTECTED] ; Jeff Bliss in Washington at
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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