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06/26/07
The CIA releases censored internal
misconduct reports that set off a domestic spying scandal
By MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The CIA released hundreds of heavily censored
documents Tuesday about its spying on Americans, foreign assassination
plots and other misdeeds that triggered a scandal in the mid-1970s.
Known inside the CIA as the "family jewels," the
documents were released with vast sections blocked out by
agency censors. As a result, they were far less revealing
than the reports issued in the mid-1970s by the three investigations
which obtained unedited versions of these internal CIA documents
a generation ago.
The ensuing 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.
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 Ford's Rockefeller Commission,
the Senate's Church committee and the House's 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.
In early 1975, CIA Director William Colby told the Justice
Department that these documents detailed assassination plots
against foreign leaders such as Fidel Castro, the testing
of behavior-altering drugs on unwitting citizens, wiretapping
of U.S. journalists, spying on civil rights and anti-Vietnam
war protesters, opening of mail between the United States
and the Soviet Union and China and break-ins at the homes
of ex-CIA employees and others.
But as censored by the CIA, many of the most sensational events
were mentioned in little more than one, sketchy paragraph
apiece.
The new documents devoted two paragraphs to the programs that
opened mail between U.S. citizens and the Soviet Union and
China.
One paragraph said "Project WESTPOINTER," from the
fall of 1969 through October 1971, was based in the San Francisco
area and the "target was mail to the United States from
Mainland China."
The other paragraph said a program, begun in 1953 but dormant
by 1973, intercepted incoming and outgoing Russian mail, and
occasionally other types of mail, at New York's Kennedy Airport.
By contrast, the Senate committee headed by Frank Church,
D-Idaho, which spent two years investigating these documents,
produced a book-length study of 12 CIA and FBI mail opening
programs from 1940 to 1973. It found that the CIA alone had
opened and photographed almost 250,000 first class letters
in the United States and produced a computerized CIA index
of nearly 1.5 million names.
The agency's new documents contained an unsigned three-page
memo that described CIA's program code named Operation CHAOS
as a worldwide effort to collect information "on foreign
efforts to manipulate U.S. extremism." It said some American
extremists had been recruited by the CIA and sent abroad as
contract agents, but asserts that CHAOS "has not and
is not conducting efforts domestically for internal domestic
collection purposes."
Another 1973 memo to Colby from the CIA inspector general
expressed concern over CHAOS "because of the high degree
of resentment we found among many agency employees at their
being expected to participate in it."
But the Church committee reported in 1976 that CHAOS compiled
a computerized index of 300,000 individuals, including 7,200
Americans and more than 100 domestic groups between 1967-1973
as it examined civil rights and anti-Vietnam war protesters.
One of the most detailed descriptions in the newly released
documents concerned one of the plots to kill the Cuban dictator
Castro.
A memo by CIA security chief Howard Osborn said in August
1960 the CIA recruited ex-FBI agent Robert Maheu, who was
a top aide to Howard Hughes in Las Vegas, to approach mobster
Johnny Roselli and pass himself off as the representative
of international corporations who wanted Castro killed.
Roselli introduced Maheu to "Sam Gold" and "Joe,"
who were actually 10-most wanted mobsters Sam "Momo"
Giancana, Al Capone's successor in Chicago, and Santos Trafficante.
The mobsters worked for free, turning down a $150,000 offer.
The CIA gave them six poison pills, and they tried unsuccessfully
for several months to have several people put them in the
Cuban leader's food.
This particular plot was dropped after the failed CIA-sponsored
Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Other plots continued against
Castro though they are not detailed in the newly released
documents. Details of this plot first appeared in Jack Anderson's
newspaper column in 1971.
The new releases devote one bare-bones paragraph to CIA involvement
in a plot that resulted in Congolese Premier Patrice Lumumba's
assassination in 1961.
The Church committee produced a 364-page report on assassination
plots that described at least eight plots involving the CIA
to assassinate Castro between 1960 and 1965 and detailed how
the CIA encouraged Congolese dissidents to kill Lumumba.
In a message to CIA employees Tuesday, Director Michael Hayden
said: "It's important to remember that the CIA itself
launched this process of recollection and self-examination.
And it was the Agency itself that shared the resulting documents
in full with Congress.
"The collection as a whole was exhaustively reviewed
in the 1970s by three outside investigative panels,"
Hayden said. The documents provide "reminders of some
things the CIA should not have done" and "a glimpse
of a very different era and a very different agency,"
he said.
The documents 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 Nixon's 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 whose contents Schlesinger's
successor, Colby, reported 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.
Some contents of these documents first spilled into public
view Dec. 22, 1974, with a story by Seymour Hersh in The New
York Times on the CIA's spying against anti-war and other
dissidents inside this country.
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Associated Press writers Pete Yost and Jennifer Kerr contributed
to this report.
___
On the Net:
CIA documents: http://www.foia.cia.gov
Church report: http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/contents.htm
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