New details of unsavory secrets: CIA opens files

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."

The records do not appear to contain major revelations of CIA misdeeds but instead provide extensive new detail from internal CIA accounts on episodes that have occupied 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 Schlesinger for employees to report activities they thought might violate the CIA's charter. The agency had been stung by news reports of CIA connections to the Watergate scandal, which led to President Nixon's resignation in 1974.

E. Howard Hunt, who organized the Watergate break-in, was a former CIA agent, as was James McCord, one of the White House "plumbers" arrested during the attempted bugging of the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate building in Washington, D.C.

The records were subsequently turned over to Congress, prompting multiple investigations and sweeping intelligence reforms. The late Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, who presided over one of the investigations, famously termed the CIA a "rogue elephant on a rampage."

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

Many of the episodes detailed in the 693 pages of newly declassified text read like relics from another era, including the elaborate attempts by the CIA to enlist mafia operatives to poison Cuban leader 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, Yuriy Ivonovich Nosenko, who was held without trial at a CIA facility in Maryland for years before it was determined he was a legitimate defector.

They also document plans to eavesdrop on international phone calls of U.S. residents, and aggressive efforts to root out leaks of classified information to reporters.

The records that were released are incomplete, with dozens of pages blacked out by CIA censors. Arguably the most exceptional operation detailed was a plot to enlist known organized-crime figures to assassinate Castro in the early 1960s.

Although the machinations were uncovered more than 35 years ago, the newly released reports show that the CIA director at the time, Allen 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 realized it was dealing with Giancana after subsequently seeing his photo in a most-wanted listing 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.

The plot was almost exposed over Giancana's concern that his then-companion, singer Phyllis McGuire of the McGuire sisters, was seeing "Laugh-In" comedian Dan Rowan on the side while both were appearing at the same Las Vegas hotel.

Giancana persuaded the CIA to send one of its technicians to bug Rowan's hotel room, but the technician was surprised in the act and arrested. The U.S. Justice Department signaled its intention to prosecute the technician.

The CIA intervened, the documents show, and "at our request, the prosecution was dropped."

The mafia suggested another candidate, but the operation was canceled when the botched Bay of Pigs invasion exposed the Kennedy administration to criticism for its anti-Castro policies.

Other documents revealed plans to assassinate Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba and Rafael Trujillo, leader of the Dominican Republic. Both men were killed in 1961.

The records also shed extensive light on the CIA's involvement in efforts to spy on Americans, including student anti-war 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 presidential conventions in 1972. The agency also worked with the Secret Service at the conventions that year.

Anti-war activists were followed — some all the way to Paris, where they attended summit meetings with Viet Cong representatives. The surveillance turned up financial connections between John Lennon of The Beatles, described only as "a British subject," and a project linked to anti-war activist Rennie Davis, one of the Chicago Seven.

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

As part of an effort to combat drug trafficking, the CIA asked the U.S. 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.

But the agency refused a request from federal "Alcohol & Tobacco" authorities to use infrared scanners to locate moonshine stills.

The CIA was eager to examine the use of dangerous pharmaceutical drugs to modify the behavior of targeted individuals.

One document, dated May 8, 1973, mentions the existence of a 1963 account of agency scientists administering mind- or personality-altering drugs on "unwitting subjects" — that is, testing hallucinogens such as LSD on people without their knowledge. The document doesn't provide details.

One of the most notorious such cases involved the death of Frank Olson, a CIA germ-warfare expert who died in a fall from a hotel window in 1953, nine days after a CIA doctor spiked Olson's after-dinner drink with LSD.

In 1975, President Gerald Ford invited Olson's family to the White House to apologize; the government also paid the family $750,000.

The documents released Tuesday portray a CIA obsessed with news coverage that was either too negative or simply too accurate.

In one case, the agency conducted physical surveillance of muckraker Jack Anderson and his associates, including Brit Hume, now a Fox News anchor.

In Project Mockingbird, the agency in 1963 wiretapped the office and homes of two 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 new documents devoted two paragraphs to the programs that opened mail between U.S. citizens and the Soviet Union and China.

One paragraph said "Project WESTPOINTER," from the fall of 1969 through October 1971, was based in the San Francisco area and the "target was mail to the United States from Mainland China."

The other paragraph said a program, begun in 1953 but dormant by 1973, intercepted incoming and outgoing Russian mail, and occasionally other types of mail, at New York's Kennedy Airport.

Compiled from Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, USA Today and McClatchy Newspapers.