CIA finally releases 'Family Jewels' Documents

The CIA have released documents which give a history of misdeeds over several decades. Known as the family jewels most events had already been exposed or speculated about in the American media, however this is the first time official documents have been released.

Events covered include attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, confinement of a Russian defector, surveillance of journalists, break-ins, wire tapping and experiments on the general public.

It is these experiments on the general public that caught my attention. There is an element of trust that governments do not carry out experiments on the general public. In the UK and the US it would be a breach of fundamental rights. Of course it is only a breach if the government gets caught.

The 'family jewels' is a 702 page document which summarises "activities conduced either by or under the sponsorship of the Office of Security in the past which in my opinion conflict with the provisions of the National Security Act 1947" . The report was written in 1973 and covered the period from 1959 to 1973. It is a collection of responses from CIA employees asked to report on the above type of activities.

The uncomfortable truths mainly arise from the prohibition of the CIA to have any internal influence. This is set out by Section 102 paragraph D3 (mentioned on page 458):

"The Agency shall have no police, subpoena, law enforcement powers, or internal security functions"

The internal documents which caused the review are also included in the family jewels such as employee bulletins and responses to the press.

A lot of it is obviously still top secret and so entire pages make little sense, as an example take this paragraph from Page 72:

"2. Other activities of the Agency which could at some point raise public questions should they be exposed and on which Bill Colby is fully conversant are:

--CI acitivity of Dick Ober DD/O

-- 'blank' and 'blank' investments and accumulation of Government capital.

-- Use of CIA funds and facilities to aquire US real estate for FBI and provision of technical equipments by NSA 'blank' for use against 'long blank'"

Items 2 and three would appear to relate to some major mis-use of government funds but what for is still considered to be a National security issue over 30 years later For the nest batch of pages follows a report on funding for responding to letters generated by a speech by the president on Cambodia. Whether this is connected with the above funds is difficult to determine.

Watergate gets a mention too although again a lot of the material is still considered sensitive and I doubt anything new has been released.

Most of the stuff is incredibly dull and it often repeats itself.

On Page 235 which is a report detailing contact with other US agencies it details a request by CIA to the US Department of Agriculture and Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.

"CIA has requested the establishment of a two-acre plot of opium poppies at a USDA research site in Washington state, to be used for tests of photo-recognition of opium poppies."

The next paragraph is blanked out so no indication of what happened to the request is given.

The public testing, first mentioned on pages 238,239 seem to refer to covert intercepts of telephone conversations, tested in domestic locations.

'Laser Probe' 1967 San Francisco.

'Blank' system 1968 -

This system is designed to permit intercept of 'blank paragraph'.

You cant get much more top secret.

'Telephone intrusion study'

This seems to be monitoring of telephone systems including systems overseas. It would appear they did testing in the US for proof of concept before conducting tests overseas in unspecified locations.

Other unspecified sensors unconnected with telephones were also tested domestically for engineering test purposes.

Remote cardiograph tests were carried out on contractors that worked for the CIA (Page 240).

On page 324 there is a 'memorandum for the record' about the disposal of classified trash from the NSC.

"The material contains documents for the White House situation room, codeword and other documents from the intelligence community. This practice began in December 1971 and is still in effect. Pick up of 30 bags of trash is made every Thursday"

The memo does have a second paragraph explaining why this needed to be put on record but the paragraph give a curious look at the housekeeping of confidential material destroyed by the White house in the early 70's.

Trivia about funding for stamps and stationary seems to be an ongoing saga with little nuggets like the following on page 468.

"9. I raise these issues of funding because I remember the Agency's being severely criticized by the House Appropriations Subcommittee for having spent $3000 for stamps in connection with a program to buy tractors to secure the release of prisoners from Cuba."

Sadly the report doesn't detail exactly how they managed to spend $3000 on stamps alone.

Of course the events recounted in these pages all took place long before the use of email. Documents were sent by telegram to a signals centre and then taken by hand to the recipient. With the CIA intercepting telegrams the information could sometimes be read by the CIA before the recipient. On page 469 the following anecdote is recounted:

"12. During my stint on the 7th floor there was a special arrangement with the Office of Communications whereby the Director's office gained access to non-CIA traffic. This surfaced briefly at one point shortly after Admiral Rayborn became DCI. He had visited the Signal Center and removed a copy of a telegram from the Embassy in the Dominican republic for Under Secretary George Ball, Eyes Only. He returned to his office and proceeded to discuss this telegram with George Ball who was naturally quite curious as to how Rayborn knew about it, and also how Rayborn had it in his possession before Ball did. Ben Read in the Secretary of State's office and I spent several weeks putting this one to rest."

After that nothing interesting is worth retelling and the document ends on page 702.

Not as interesting as you might think the 'family jewels' is a collection of documents mainly centered around the CIA's domestic activities in the 60's and 70's the vast majority being involvement with law enforcement agencies.