CIA opens the book on a shady past

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 Americans’ 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.”

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.

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 many new details emerge in a review of the documents by MSNBC.com, including the never-before-disclosed news that CIA Director Allen Dulles personally approved the agency’s plot to assassinate Cuban President Fidel Castro in 1960 and 1961.

Operation CHAOS — still sensitive
Even after more than 30 years, the CIA chose to keep scores of pages partly or totally blacked out. Much of the redacted material appears in sections relating to Richard Ober, head of the Special Operations Group and deputy to James Jesus Angleton, the agency’s legendary chief of counterintelligence.

Ober directed Operation CHAOS, a highly secretive covert operation to spy on racial, anti-war and other protest groups inside the United States.

The CIA’s charter bans domestic spying, but in 1976, the final report of the special Senate subcommittee headed by Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, to investigate CIA abuses concluded that the CHAOS project had amassed files on more than 7,000 American citizens and 1,000 domestic organizations. That information was disseminated in thousands of reports to the FBI and other agencies.

Americans’ communications intercepted
It has also long been known that the CIA routinely intercepted international mail and telephone calls of U.S. citizens, but the scope of that espionage becomes clearer in the new documents.

For 20 years beginning in 1953, the CIA opened and copied all mail to and from the Soviet Union that passed through John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. The operation, which used the information to compile a watch list of suspicious people, 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.

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