CIA to reveal some of it's Misdeeds.

[sabang]

Last Updated: Friday, 22 June 2007, 12:50 GMT 13:50 UK

CIA to reveal decades of misdeeds

Gen Hayden: Documents give a glimpse of a very different time

The US Central Intelligence Agency is to declassify hundreds of documents detailing some of the agency's worst illegal abuses from the 1950s to 1970s.
The papers, to be released next week, will detail assassination plots, domestic spying and wiretapping, kidnapping and human experiments.
Many of the incidents are already known, but the documents are expected to give more comprehensive accounts.
It is "unflattering" but part of agency history, CIA chief Michael Hayden said.
"This is about telling the American people what we have done in their name," Gen Hayden told a conference of foreign policy historians.
The documents, dubbed the "Family Jewels", offer a "glimpse of a very different time and a very different agency".
The full 693-page file detailing CIA illegal activities was compiled on the orders of the then CIA director James Schlesinger in 1973.
He had been alarmed by accounts of CIA involvement in the Watergate scandal under his predecessor and asked CIA officials to inform him of all activities that fell outside the agency's legal charter.
'Skeletons'
Ahead of the documents' release by the CIA, the National Security Archive, an independent research body, on Thursday published related papers it had obtained.
These detail government discussions in 1975 of the CIA abuses and briefings by Mr Schlesinger's successor at the CIA, William Colby, who said the CIA had "done some things it shouldn't have".
Among the incidents that were said to "present legal questions" were:

• the confinement of a Soviet defector in the mid-1960s
• assassination plots of foreign leaders, including Cuba's Fidel Castro
• wiretapping and surveillance of journalists
• behaviour modification experiments on "unwitting" US citizens
• surveillance of dissident groups between 1967 and 1971
• opening from 1953 to 1973 of letters to and from the Soviet Union; from 1969 to 1972 of mail to and from China

The papers also convey mounting concern in President Gerald Ford's administration that what were dubbed the CIA's "skeletons" were surfacing in the media. Henry Kissinger, then both secretary of state and national security adviser, was against Mr Colby's moves to investigate the CIA's past abuses and the fact that agency secrets were being divulged. Accusations appearing in the media about the CIA were "worse than in the days of McCarthy", Mr Kissinger said.


BBC NEWS | Americas | CIA to reveal decades of misdeeds

[sabang]

Some excerpts from The Guardian
CIA reveals decades of plots, kidnaps and wiretaps | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited

In the minutes, Colby says some US citizens had been subjected to "unwitting" CIA drug experiments to induce "behaviour modification". The CIA also illegally amassed 9,900 files on Americans involved in anti-war activities.


In an official record of a White House meeting with President Ford the next day, on January 4 1975, a rattled Henry Kissinger, the secretary of state and national security adviser, argues that the existence of the "family jewels" dossier, and its partial leaking, may turn into a major scandal - with the FBI investigating the CIA. "What is happening is worse than in the days of McCarthy. You will end up with a CIA that does only reporting, not operations ... What Colby has done is a disgrace," Mr Kissinger tells Ford. "All these stories are just the tip of the iceberg. If they come out, blood will flow. For example, Robert Kennedy [the former attorney-general] personally managed the operation on the assassination of Castro."

I wonder if the Dossier will list All of the CIA's misdeeds...

[raycarey]

I wonder if the Dossier will list All of the CIA's misdeeds

not likely.

[barbaro]

Secrecy, domestic spying (and media).

It was important back then (in the OP) as it is, now:

[Norton]

I wonder if the Dossier will list All of the CIA's misdeeds...

Silly boy. No need to wonder. A full disclosure will be forth coming it's the law.

[Butterfly]

so I guess the US back then was no better than the Soviet Union,

[Jet Gorgon]

^ How about Mossad or even MI5? CIA doing its job is all.

[Travelmate]

Come now Gorgon, don't paint the MI5 with the same brush. We have 007. What u got? Tom Cruise?? wet blanket....

[raycarey]

Come now Gorgon, don't paint the MI5 with the same brush. We have 007. What u got? Tom Cruise??

tom cruise is canadian?

[Boon Mee]

I wonder if the Dossier will list All of the CIA's misdeeds

not likely.

Oh well. Blame Bush. It's always been an easy thing for the flaccid mind.

[Norton]

Oh well. Blame Bush. It's always been an easy thing for the flaccid mind.

Not this time Booners. As with most Presidents, GWB has no idea what the CIA is up to half the time.

[Panda]

Land of the free.
Truth, justice and the American way, --as Superman used to say.
But then he was just a comic book character. Oh well, back to reality.

[sabang]

I knew some fairly high up Brits in the ICAC & Police force in HK, before the handover. As well as Police work, they were also involved in surveillance & counter surveillance, that sort of sneaky beaky stuff- so they regularly liased with the CIA & FBI, no doubt other US security agencies.

Interestingly, they all seemed to respect the FBI & it's people. None of them had a good word to say about the CIA.