CIA airs its dirty laundry, releasing records of abuses

WASHINGTON - The CIA shined an unaccustomed light on its dark side Tuesday, making public a 693-page report that documents some of its worst historical abuses. They include failed assassination plots against world leaders and illegal spying on Americans, as well as the agency’s links with the hapless Watergate burglars whose arrests eventually toppled the presidency of Richard Nixon.

Known inside the agency as the “family jewels,” the collection of memos, investigative reports and handwritten jottings confirm many details of the CIA’s troubled past from the ’50s through the early ’70s. It reveals the determined work of the American espionage bureaucracy to conceal some of its worst deeds behind its sizable cloak of government secrecy.

Many of the allegations addressed by the documents have been reported before. Tuesday’s disclosure, however, was the first widespread release of the original records.

Some episodes, such as the CIA’s enlisting of Chicago mob boss Sam “Momo” Giancana to arrange an ill-fated assassination attempt against Cuban leader Fidel Castro using CIAmanufactured poison pills, have become the stuff of popular legend.

Failed attempts to assassinate other heads of state, such as Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, are also discussed.

The CIA’s peripheral involvement in Watergate led then-CIA Director James Schlesinger to compile the “family jewels” file in 1973, asking each CIA component to send him a summary of activities it thought might have violated the law. Schlesinger’s goal was to learn for himself of activities that had the greatest potential for embarrassing the agency.

Much of the “family jewels” file was leaked to The New York Times in December 1974. Though now officially declassified, the document contains numerous deletions and many pages that are entirely whitedout.

The 1974 leak prompted Congress to launch two longrunning investigations that unearthed volumes of information about the intelligence agency’s illicit history, including the surreptitious opening of letters mailed from the U.S. to the former Soviet Union and China and break-ins by CIA operatives at the homes of past and present employees suspected of disloyalty.

The late Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, who presided over one of the investigations, famously termed the CIA a “rogue elephant on a rampage.”

The CIA’s current director, Gen. Michael Hayden, explained that the release of the previously secret report is part of the agency’s “social contract with the American people,” which includes an obligation to “share with the public the information we can.”

“The improved system of intelligence oversight that came out of the 1970s,” Hayden said, “gives the CIA a far stronger place in our democratic system.”