Titan6
member
Not sure if this should be under L&P or here. Certainly is gun and civil rights related.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19438161/page/2/
Link to the papers:
http://www.foia.cia.gov/browse_docs...ase_dec=RIPPUB&classification=U&showPage=0001
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19438161/page/2/
CIA opens the book on a shady past
Declassified ‘family jewels’ detail assassination plots, break-ins, wiretaps
MSNBC video
RFK Jr. rebuts CIA report
June 22: The CIA released papers that suggest Robert Kennedy directed efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro. Chris Matthews talks with Robert Kennedy Jr., who strongly denies the report.
By Alex Johnson
Reporter
MSNBC
Updated: 44 minutes ago
The CIA declassified nearly 700 pages of secret records Tuesday recording its illegal activities during the first decades of the Cold War, publishing a catalog of adventures that run the gamut of spy movie clichés from attempts to kill foreign leaders and intercept domestic mail to garden-variety break-ins and burglaries.
“Most of it is unflattering, but it is CIA’s history,” the CIA’s director, Gen. Michael Hayden, said last week in announcing plans to release the documents, which had been considered so sensitive that they were known internally as the agency’s “family jewels.”
Much of the material had previously entered the public record through nearly 30 years of requests by academics, authors and journalists under the Freedom of Information Act. But publication of the materials Tuesday by the CIA itself marked a major step in the agency’s public acknowledgement of its sometimes sordid history.
The documents were compiled beginning in 1973 at the order of then-CIA Director James Schlesinger, who wanted to be prepared for congressional investigations he expected in the wake of disclosures that arose during the Watergate scandal. Schlesinger’s successor, William Colby, was outraged at much of the material, which he collected in a report to President Gerald Ford in 1975.
Assassination plots, break-ins and a possible kidnapping
Among the disclosures, gleaned from a six-page summary prepared in January 1975 by Associate Deputy Attorney General James Wilderotter and an initial review of documents by NBC News and MSNBC.com, are that the CIA confined a Soviet defector, Yuri Nosenko, in a safe house from April 1964 to September 1967, fearing he might be a plant.
Nosenko, deputy chief of the Seventh Department of the KGB, was responsible for recruiting foreign spies. He claimed to have been the KGB handler of the case of Lee Harvey Oswald, who he said was rejected as not intelligent enough to work as a KGB agent.
Nosenko was eventually released and was given a false identity. He became an adviser to the CIA and the FBI for $35,000 a year and a lump sum $150,000 payment for his ordeal.
The papers indicate that the CIA regularly confined defectors for interrogation, but only outside the United States, and the agency was concerned that the detention of the Soviet defector might violate kidnapping laws. “The possibility exists that the press could cause undesirable publicity if it were to uncover the story,” David H. Blee, chief of the Soviet Bloc Division, wrote in a memo.
The papers reveal some new details about the CIA’s plots to assassinate foreign leaders. Among them were Cuban President Fidel Castro; Patrice Lumumba, the democratically elected president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo; and Rafael Trujillo, the Dominican dictator.
The papers report that Robert F. Kennedy, attorney general for his brother, President John Kennedy, was involved in planning the operation against Castro, an allegation that his son, Robert Kennedy Jr., denied strongly this week in an interview on MSNBC’s “Hardball.”
Americans’ communications intercepted
The CIA also routinely intercepted international mail and telephone calls of U.S. citizens.
For 20 years beginning in 1953, the CIA screened and opened mail to and from the Soviet Union that passed through John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. The operation was approved by three successive postmasters general, the documents indicate.
Likewise, for three years beginning in 1969, the CIA similarly opened mail to and from China that passed through San Francisco.
And the agency intercepted radio telephone calls involving U.S. citizens and foreign nationals to and from South America “for drug-related matters” involving the federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.
General Counsel Lawrence R. Houston, asked for his ruling on the legality of the operation, replied on Jan. 29, 1973, that since the reports were going to the BNDD, they were for law enforcement purposes, which the CIA was barred from. Accordingly, the intercepts were illegal, he concluded.
CIA opens the book on a shady past
Other disclosures:
The CIA conducted surveillance on numerous journalists, including Brit Hume, now an anchor for Fox News. Hume was working for investigative columnist Jack Anderson when he, Anderson and other Anderson associates were put under surveillance in 1972 after Anderson published a column, considered inside the agency as highly damaging, reporting that the CIA was “tilting” toward Pakistan in its Middle East operations.
Another journalist who was placed under surveillance was Michael Getler, then the intelligence reporter for The Washington Post. There was no indication that the CIA conducted any illegal wiretaps or other unlawful operations against Getler.
From 1963 to 1973, the CIA authorized and funded “behavioral modification” research on Americans without their consent. The research primarily involved observation of their reactions in public, but some of it involved reactions to undisclosed drugs, the documents report.
In fiscal 1971 and 1972, “Agency funds were made available to the FBI.” No further details are given on what this account was for.
Mob boss worries over girlfriend
The papers also include some disclosures that can only be described as odd, NBC’s Robert Windrem reported.
The Mafia was also involved in the plot to assassinate Castro, the papers reveal, and Sam Giancana, boss of the Chicago mob, once used that connection to seek a personal favor.
According to the documents, Giancana asked Robert Maheu, his contact with the CIA, for help in bugging his girlfriend, Phyllis McGuire, a member of the McGuire Sisters, a popular singing group.
Giancana wanted to know whether McGuire was having an affair with Dan Rowan, half of the Rowan & Martin comedy team. But the CIA technician was caught, and the Justice Department had to get involved at the highest levels — Kennedy, the attorney general — to block prosecution.
Some in the agency were also exasperated by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who made frequent demands on the CIA, the papers reveal. One memo, dated May 7, 1973, complains about the “inordinate amount of time” and “fairly sizeable amount of money that has been expended in support of these measures.”
The 693 pages of CIA disclosures were turned over in 1975 to three investigative panels — special House and Senate committees and a commission headed by then-Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. Much of the material has since seen the light of day, but Tuesday marked the first time the CIA had publicized and taken formal public responsibility for activities.
In his address last week, to a conference of historians, Hayden acknowledged that the papers “provide a glimpse of a very different time and a very different agency.”
Link to the papers:
http://www.foia.cia.gov/browse_docs...ase_dec=RIPPUB&classification=U&showPage=0001
Last edited:
