CIA goes public with scores of Cold War files

By Greg Miller

June 27, 2007 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON —

After fighting to keep them secret for more than three decades, the CIA released hundreds of documents Tuesday that catalog some of the most egregious intelligence abuses of the Cold War, including assassination plots against foreign leaders and illegal efforts to spy on Americans.

The records are part of a trove of jealously guarded documents long known within the agency as “the family jewels.” Assembled in the early 1970s as part of an internal inquiry of potentially embarrassing or illegal activities, the records were subsequently turned over to Congress, prompting investigations and sweeping intelligence reforms.

The records were ordered released by CIA Director Michael V. Hayden as part of what he characterized as an effort to close an embarrassing chapter in the agency’s history.

The documents serve as “reminders of some things the CIA should not have done,” Hayden said Tuesday in remarks to the agency’s workforce. “The documents truly do provide a glimpse of a very different era and a very different agency.”

Indeed, many of the episodes detailed in the 693 pages of newly declassified text read like relics from another time, including elaborate attempts to enlist Mafia operatives to poison Cuban President Fidel Castro.

But other documents seem remarkably relevant today, as the nation grapples anew with questions of how much latitude U.S. intelligence agencies should be given, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The documents describe secret CIA holding cells and the possibly illegal detention of a suspected Soviet spy who was held without trial for years at a CIA lockup facility in Maryland before it was determined he was a legitimate defector. They also detail plans to eavesdrop on international phone calls of U.S. residents, and aggressive efforts to root out leaks of classified information to reporters.

Watchdog groups praised the release of the records, and said it was a remarkable step for a secretive organization under no legal obligation to declassify the documents.

“It allows the agency to simultaneously distance itself from its questionable past and portray itself as open and forthcoming,” said Steven Aftergood, director of the project on government secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists.

Even so, the released records are incomplete, with dozens of pages blacked out by CIA censors. One memo that lists the most damaging secrets contained in “the family jewels” is missing its first paragraph. A separate memo that is supposed to summarize the “unusual activities” of the CIA’s domestic branch includes just three paragraphs followed by 17 blacked-out pages.

The records that are complete do not appear to contain major revelations of CIA misdeeds, but provide extensive new detail from internal CIA accounts on episodes that have fascinated Cold War historians for decades. Most of the records are memos written by agency officials in response to a 1973 order from then-CIA Director James R. Schlesinger for employees to report activities they thought might violate the agency’s charter.

Arguably the most exceptional operation detailed is a plot to enlist organized crime figures to assassinate Castro shortly after he came to power. Although the machinations were uncovered more than 35 years ago, the newly released reports show that the CIA director at the time, Allen W. Dulles, “was briefed and gave his approval” to the operation.

According to a five-page memo, a private investigator contracted by the CIA worked directly with Chicago crime boss Sam Giancana to come up with the assassination plan. In an almost comical aside, the CIA only realized it was dealing with Giancana after subsequently seeing his photo in a most-wanted list in Parade magazine.

“Sam suggested that they not resort to firearms but, if he could be furnished some type of potent pill, that could be placed in Castro’s food or drink, it would be a much more effective operation,” the memo said.

But after several failed attempts, the Cuban operative selected by the Mafia “got cold feet and asked out of the assignment.” The Mafia suggested another candidate, but the operation was canceled when the botched 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion exposed the Kennedy administration to criticism for its anti-Castro policies.

The CIA’s first Mafia contact in the plot was Johnny Roselli, a Las Vegas mobster later convicted of cheating Friars Club members out of $400,000 in a “rigged gin rummy game.” Years later, he threatened to expose the Castro plot if the agency didn’t halt his deportation proceedings. Then-Director Richard Helms refused, and the episode was splashed across news pages by columnist Jack Anderson.

The records also shed extensive light on the CIA’s involvement in efforts to spy on Americans, including student antiwar activists, Black Power group leaders, pro-Castro sympathizers and Soviet dissidents.

CIA operatives worked closely with local police to gather intelligence against groups planning protests at the 1972 national political conventions. The agency also worked with the U.S. Secret Service at those events.

Antiwar activists were followed, some all the way to Paris, where they attended meetings with Viet Cong representatives. The surveillance turned up financial connections between Beatle John Lennon, described only as “a British subject,” and a project linked to antiwar activist Rennie Davis, one of the defendants in the Chicago Seven trial.

In a program code-named MHCHAOS, the CIA recruited, tested and dispatched Americans with “existing extremist credentials” abroad to gather intelligence on efforts by Cuba, China, North Vietnam, the Soviet Union, North Korea and “the Arab fedayeen” to foment domestic extremism in the U.S.

Between 1967 and 1971, the CIA had agents monitor dissident groups in the nation’s capital, almost boasting about how one group was “successfully penetrated.”As part of an effort to combat drug trafficking, the CIA asked the Department of Agriculture to plant a field of opium poppies in Washington state to be used to test “photo-recognition systems” designed to detect illicit crops from overhead.

CIA spy planes were used to observe an oil spill off Santa Barbara and hurricane and earthquake damage. But the agency refused a request from federal “Alcohol & Tobacco” authorities to use infrared scanners to locate moonshine stills.

The CIA’s relationship with the Nixon administration was varied and complex. In one series of documents, the agency said it had reimbursed the White House more than $33,600 for the “postage, stationery and addressing” of thank-you notes to letter writers who praised President Nixon’s 1970 speech on his decision to invade Cambodia.

The documents also describe a panicked internal investigation to find out whether the CIA might be implicated in the Watergate scandal that led to Nixon’s resignation. E. Howard Hunt, who organized the break-in at the Watergate Hotel, was a former CIA agent, as was James M. McCord Jr., one of the “plumbers” arrested during the attempted bugging of the Democratic Party headquarters.

Director Helms ordered agency officials to report all contacts with Hunt and McCord. The inquiry didn’t turn up any evidence that implicated CIA officials. But one official reported getting a call from Hunt in the spring of 1972, just months before the break-in, asking for a referral of “a retiree or resignee who was accomplished at picking locks.”

The documents also contain an undated summary of Hunt’s CIA retirement status, noting that he made $28,226 per year in his last year at the agency, which entitled him to a monthly pension of about $1,200.

The documents released Tuesday portray a CIA obsessed with news coverage that is too negative, or too accurate. In one case, the agency conducted physical surveillance of Anderson, the muckraking columnist, and his associates, including Brit Hume, now a Fox News anchor.

In Project Mockingbird, the agency in 1963 wiretapped the office and homes of Washington-based syndicated news columnists Paul Scott and Robert Allen, who had published articles that cited “top secret” classified information, according to an undated, unsigned memo.

The memo said John A. McCone, then agency director, authorized the telephone interceptions in coordination with Robert F. Kennedy, the attorney general; Robert S. McNamara, the secretary of Defense; and other senior U.S. officials.

The wiretaps were “particularly productive in identifying contacts of the newsmen,” the memo said, including 18 members of Congress and 16 staff members from the White House and other government offices. Indeed, the inquiry concluded that the columnists “received more classified and official data than they could use.”

greg.miller@latimes.com

Times staff writers Peter Spiegel, Josh Meyer and Bob Drogin contributed to this report.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Gems from ‘The family jewels’

The CIA on Tuesday released a 693-page history of questionable operations that took place between 1959 and 1973, a record known within the agency as “The family jewels.”

Other activities

Without warrants, the agency bugged the office and home telephones of Washington reporters Robert Allen and Paul Scott from 1963 to 1965. The CIA learned that they spoke with 13 other reporters, 12 senators, six House members, 21 congressional staffers, a White House aide and an assistant attorney general, but didn’t find a source of classified information.

Operatives planned to attempt to assassinate Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Republic of Congo -- later known as Zaire and today as the Democratic Republic of Congo -- using poison. The plot was dropped when Lumumba was slain in January 1961, apparently by others.

The agency coddled, then imprisoned and finally freed Soviet KGB agent Yuri Nosenko, who defected to the West in 1964 and provided information about presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald’s ties to the Soviet Union. Nosenko was kept in a “specially constructed ‘jail’” for more than two years, where he was harshly interrogated, possibly foreshadowing U.S. responses to terrorism decades later.

On a “surreptitious” basis, the agency monitored incoming and outgoing Soviet mail. In 1970, the it also broke into a Silver Spring, Md., office occupied by a defector.

Domestic political groups were monitored, including student antiwar activists, Black Power groups, pro-Castro sympathizers and Soviet dissidents. The agency also helped local authorities police Democratic and Republican political conventions.

The agency spied on columnist Jack Anderson and his staff members and on Washington Post reporter Michael Getler.