The family jewels exposed

The Central Intelligence Agency violated its charter for 25 years until revelations of illegal wiretapping, domestic surveillance, assassination plots, and human experimentation led to official investigations and reforms in the 1970s, according to declassified documents posted today on the Web by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.



It's all there at the National Archives for you to read online or download.
The highlights (if you want to call them that) are:

• Top Ten Most Interesting "Family Jewels"
• Released by the CIA to the National Security Archive, June 26, 2007
• 1) Journalist surveillance - operation CELOTEX I-II (pp. 26-30)
• 2) Covert mail opening, codenamed SRPOINTER / HTLINGUAL at JFK airport (pp. 28, 644-45)
• 3) Watergate burglar and former CIA operative E. Howard Hunt requests a lock picker (p. 107)
• 4) CIA Science and Technology Directorate Chief Carl Duckett "thinks the Director would be ill-advised to say he is acquainted with this program" (Sidney Gottlieb's drug experiments) (p. 213)
• 5) MHCHAOS documents (investigating foreign support for domestic U.S. dissent) reflecting Agency employee resentment against participation (p. 326)
• 6) Plan to poison Congo leader Patrice Lumumba (p. 464)
• 7) Report of detention of Soviet defector Yuriy Nosenko (p. 522)
• 8) Document describing John Lennon funding anti-war activists (p. 552)
• 9) MHCHAOS documents (investigating foreign support for domestic U.S. dissent) (pp. 591-93)
• 10) CIA counter-intelligence official James J. Angleton and issue of training foreign police in bomb-making, sabotage, etc. (pp. 599-603)
• Plus a bonus "Jewel":
• Warrantless wiretapping by CIA's Division D (pp. 533-539)

There is also information about:

• Behavior modification experiments on "unwitting" U.S. citizens.
• Assassination plots against Castro, Lumumba, and Trujillo (on the latter, "no active part" but a "faint connection" to the killers).
• Surveillance of dissident groups between 1967 and 1971.
• Polygraph experiments with the San Mateo, California, sheriff.
• Fake CIA identification documents that might violate state laws.
• Testing of electronic equipment on US telephone circuits.

None of this surprises me. I just have to make a few phone calls to apologize to people I accused of being paranoid conspiracy theorists way back when.