Published on Tuesday, June 26, 2007 by the Associated Press CIA Releases Key
1970s Files, Including Spying on Journos by Michael Sniffen
WASHINGTON The CIA released hundreds of pages of internal reports Tuesday
on agency misconduct that triggered a scandal in the mid-1970s over domestic
spying.
The documents detail assassination plots against foreign leaders like Fidel
Castro, the testing of mind- and behavior-altering drugs like LSD on unwitting
citizens, wiretapping of U.S. journalists, spying on civil rights and
anti-Vietnam war protesters, opening mail between the United States and the
Soviet Union and China, break-ins at the homes of ex-CIA employees and others.
The 693 pages, mostly drawn from the memories of active CIA officers in 1973,
were turned over at that time to three different investigative panels -
President Fords Rockefeller Commission, the Senates Church committee and the
Houses Pike committee.
The panels spent years investigating and amplifying on these documents. And
their public reports in the mid-1970s filled tens of thousands of pages. The
scandal sullied the reputation of the intelligence community and led to new
rules for the CIA, FBI and other spy agencies and new permanent committees in
Congress to oversee them.
These documents also were one of the products of the Watergate scandal.
Then-CIA Director James Schlesinger was angered to read in the newspapers that
the CIA had provided support to ex-CIA agents E. Howard Hunt and James McCord,
who were convicted in the Watergate break-in. Hunt had worked for a secret
plumbers unit in Richard Nixons White House. The unit originally was tasked
to investigate and end leaks of classified information but ultimately engaged
in a wide range of misconduct.
In May 1973, Schlesinger ordered all senior operating officials of this
agency to report to me immediately on any activities now going on, or that have
gone on the past, which might be construed to be outside the legislative
charter of this agency. The law establishing the CIA barred it from conducting
spying inside the United States.
The result was 693 pages of memos that arrived after Schlesinger had moved to
the Pentagon and been replaced as CIA chief by William Colby. Colby ultimately
reported the contents to the Justice Department.
These are the top CIA officers all going into the confessional and saying,
`Forgive me father, for I have sinned, said Thomas Blanton, director of the
private National Security Archive, which had requested release of the documents
under the Freedom of Information Act.
Inside the CIA, Colby referred to the documents as the skeletons. But
another name quickly caught on and stuck: family jewels.
They first spilled into public view on Dec. 22, 1974, with a story by Seymour
Hersh in The New York Times on the CIAs spying against antiwar and other
dissidents inside this country. The agency assembled files on some 10,000
people.
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