CIA gives up the 'Family Jewels'

John Crewdson and Stephen J. Hedges

The Central Intelligence Agency Tuesday released an unprecedented collection of previously classified documents that detail some of the agency's worst spying abuses, from failed assassination plots and domestic spying to clumsy links with key players in the Watergate scandal -- during the 1960s and 1970s.

Known as the "family jewels" or the "Jewel File" on CIA routing slips, the 702-page collection of memos, investigative reports and handwritten jottings confirm many details of the CIA's troubled past, and attempts by low and high-level policy makers to use the agency's assurances of secrecy for their own benefit.

Virtually everything in the document made public Tuesday has been reported before, and in far more detail than the CIA report provides.

They include the agency's steaming open 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.

Some disclosures, such as the CIA's ill-fated attempts to enlist Chicago Mafia boss Sam Giancana to arrange the assassination of Cuban leader Fidel Castro, by hiring someone to slip CIA-manufactured poison pills in Castro's "food or drink," have become the stuff of popular legend and even the subject of movies.

An aside to the plot against Castro was Giancana's concern that his then-companion, singer Phyllis McGuire of the McGuire Systers, was seeing comedian Dan Rowan on the side while both were appearing at the same Las Vegas hotel. Giancana persuaded the CIA to send one of its technicians to bug Rowan's hotel room, but the technician was surprised in the act and arrested.

The U.S. Justice Department signalled its intention to prosecute the technician and also Robert Maheu, the Las Vegas public relations executive who had served as liaison between the CIA and the Mafia, the CIA intervened and "at our request, the prosecution was dropped.

The information in the CIA report, compiled in 1973 and leaked to The New York Times in December of 1974, is relatively sparse. Though now officially declassified, the CIA document contains numerous deletions. Many entire pages have been whited-out.

Still, interest in the darker side of the CIA's history was such that, within minutes of the document's posting on the agency's web site its servers had virtually frozen.

The leak of the agency's "Family Jewels" prompted Congress to launch two long-running investigations that unearthed volumes of information about the CIA's illicit history, ranging from the unsuccessful attempt to cause Castro's beard to fall out, thus presumably reducing his popular appeaal, to failed attempts to assassinate other heads of state, such as Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba.

It was Idaho Senator Frank Church, who presided over one of the investigations, who famously termed the CIA a "rogue elephant on a rampage."

The CIA's director, Gen. Michael Hayden, explained that the release of the previously secret report was part of the agency's "social contract with the American people," which included 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."

In the wake of the furor caused by the disclosures, Attorney General Edward H. Levi declared that it was beyond the Constitutional powers of the president to order an assassination--an issue that has been revived since Sept. 11, 2001 in connection with the U.S. military's efforts to capture or kill Osama bin Laden.

Among the most disturbing disclosures is the extent of the CIA's efforts, in some cases clearly illegal, to identify the sources of news articles based on classified information.

The first incident mentioned occurred in 1963, when the CIA placed taps on the home and office telephones of two unidentified Washington newsmen who had published several articles based on information from within the CIA and other agencies. The surveillance was described as "particularly productive,", identifying among their sources 12 other newsmen, 12 Senators, six congressmen, 11 congressional staff members, and 16 government employees, including a White House staff member, members of Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson's office, an assistant attorney general, "and other well-placed individuals."

Although the two newsmen are not named, they were identified by the Washington post as Robert Allen and Paul Scott, who published a popular syndicated newspaper column.

Another target was Michael Getler, former Pentagon corespondent for the Washington Post and now the ombudsman for the Public Broadcasting Service. In late 1971 and early 1972, the CIA followed Getler around Washington and set up an observation post in the Capitol Hilton Hotel from which Getler's office in the Post's headquarters building could be observed--all in an effort, the CIA report said, to determine who was leaking Getler classified information

Getler said in a telephone interview that he first learned of the surveillance in 1975 when CIA Director Colby testified about it before one of the congressional investigating committees. At the time the surveillance was underway, Getler said, "I was unaware of it completely."

He said he assumed the surveillance was triggered by his article on the movement of Soviet submarines to Cuba, which appeared in the Post in October 1971, shortly before the surveillance began.

The CIA's Hilton observation post was also used to monitor syndicated columnist Jack Anderson and his assistants, including Brit Hume, now an anchor with Fox News, who had their offices nearby.

Hume said in a telephone interview that he believed the CIA's interest in Anderson's sources had been occasioned by the leak of "this enormous stack" of classifed documents showing that the U.S., although publicly neutral during the 1971 India-Pakistan war, was privately "tilting toward Pakistan," then a military dictatorship, at the expense of India, "the world's largest democracy." Anderson's columns caused a furor and later won him the Pulitzer Prize.

But Hume said he had known for years that the CIA had photographed him and Anderson entering and leaving their office, and also the outside of Hume's residence, "watching my wife take the kids to school. I've never been a very interesting target for this sort of thing," said Hume

Anderson was a Mormon who neither drank nor smoked, and Hume said the CIA, perhaps in jest, had "given all of us codenames after liqueurs. I was eggnog."

In 1971, William Beecher, the Pentagon correspondent of the New York Times, published what a CIA memo termed a "devastatingly accurate" article on arms-limitation talks with the former Soviet Union. President Richard Nixon was described as "furious."

Four government officials suspected as Beecher's sources were given lie-detector tests by a CIA polygraph expert. All were cleared. Beecher's telephone was also tapped, not by the CIA but the FBI, on orders from Nixon's then-national security advisor, Henry Kissinger.

Other CIA surveillance targets included Victor Marchetti, a disgruntled CIA analyst who quit the agency and published a book with John Marks, "The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence," the first in what has become a long series of tell-all books by retired CIA officers.

Another episode about which the CIA worried was its confinement, for more than two years, of Yuiry Nosenko, a Soviet defector whom legendary CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton believed to be a double agent. Nosenko was held in a cell equipped only with a cot inside the CIA training facility at Camp Peary in Virginia.

When CIA officials concluded that Nosenko's confinement was probably illegal they moved him to a "comfortable safehouse" where he was interviewed "under friendly, sympathetic conditions," according to the report. "It soon became apparent," the report said, "that Nosekno was bona fide...he has proven to be the most valuable and economical defector this agency has ever had..."

Ironically, it was Angleton's conviction that proved the CIA harbored a Soviet "mole," and his subsequent unfounded accusations against several senior CIA employees that nonetheless damaged their careers, which led CIA Director Colby to arrange for the "Family Jewels" to find their way to The New York Times in December 1974

Several of the most serious infractions were attributed to Angleton's Counter-Intelligence Staff, and he retired a few days after news reports that the CIA had illegally collected intelligence on anti-Vietnam War groups and had "penetrated" some groups with its own agents.

One disclosure concerns the former Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, predecessor of the Drug Enforcement Adminstration, which worried that it had been infiltrated by "dishonest and corrupt elements" with ties to the drug-smuggling industry.

The BNDD asked the CIA to supply some of its trusted agents who could infiltrate BNDD offices around the country to look for corrupt behavior. While a seemingly worthwhile endeavor, the fact that CIA agents were effectively working as federal law-enforcement officers was deemed a potential violation of law, since the CIA has no police powers.

Tuesday's disclosures also dredge up the CIA's extensive efforts to avoid involvement in the Watergate scandal, which engulfed Washington in the early 1970s.

In a stream of memos, James Schlesinger, who became director of central intelligence in 1973, implored CIA employees to notify his office of any evidence that the agency was involved in the scandal. Schlesinger even went the extent of listing his office extension, 6363, so employees could call him; they were instructed to tell his secretary that they wanted to discuss, "activities outside CIA's Charter."

At the same, he and other top CIA officials were wrestling with the agency's known links to Watergate - the involvement of two former CIA officers in the scandal. Howard Hunt and Jim McCord had each worked at the CIA before becoming White House employees. Hunt was hired as a White House security consultant in 1971, and he asked for and got CIA technical assistant - including an alias, a camera that looked like tobacco pouch and a disguise -- for help with his new job.

Some of the documents reflect a surprisingly press-shy spy agency, one that followed closely what reporters wrote about it.