The Family Jewels is the informal name used to refer to a set of reports that detail activities conducted by the United States Central Intelligence Agency. Considered illegal or inappropriate, these actions were conducted over the span of decades, from the 1950s to the mid-1970s.

William Colby, who was the CIA director in the mid-1970s and helped in the compilation of the reports, dubbed them the "skeletons" in the CIA's closet. Most of the documents were publicly released on June 25, 2007, after more than three decades of secrecy. The non-governmental National Security Archive had filed a FOIA request fifteen years earlier.

Background

The reports that constitute the CIA's "Family Jewels" were commissioned in 1973 by then CIA director James R. Schlesinger, in response to press accounts of CIA involvement in the Watergate scandal — in particular, support to the burglars, E. Howard Hunt and James McCord, both CIA veterans. On May 9, 1973, Schlesinger signed a directive commanding senior officers to compile a report of current or past CIA actions that may have fallen outside the agency's charter. The resulting report, which was in the form of a 693-page loose-leaf book of memos, was passed on to William Colby when he succeeded Schlesinger as Director of Central Intelligence in late 1973.

Leaks and official release

    The Central Intelligence Agency, directly violating its charter, conducted a massive, illegal domestic intelligence operation during the Nixon Administration against the antiwar movement and other dissident groups in the United States according to well-placed Government sources.

Additional details of the contents trickled out over the years, but requests by journalists and historians for access to the documents under the Freedom of Information Act were long denied. Finally, in June 2007, CIA Director Michael Hayden announced that the documents would be released to the public. A six-page summary of the reports was made available at the National Security Archive (based at George Washington University), with the following introduction:

    The Central Intelligence Agency violated its charter for 25 years until revelations of illegal wiretapping, domestic surveillance, assassination plots, and human experimentation led to official investigations and reforms in the 1970s.

The complete set of documents, with some redactions (including a number of pages in their entirety), was released on the CIA website on June 25, 2007.

Content

The reports describe numerous activities conducted by the CIA during the 1950s to 1970s that violated its charter. According to a briefing provided by CIA Director William Colby to the Justice Department on December 31, 1974, these included 18 issues which were of legal concern:

   1. Confinement of a Russian defector, Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko, that "might be regarded as a violation of the kidnapping laws."
   2. Wiretapping of two syndicated columnists, Robert Allen and Paul Scott, approved by US Attorney General Robert Kennedy and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (see also Project Mockingbird)[8]
   3. Physical surveillance of investigative journalist and muckraker Jack Anderson and his associates, including Les Whitten of the Washington Post and future Fox News Channel anchor and managing editor Brit Hume. Jack Anderson had written two articles on CIA-backed assassination attempts on Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
   4. Physical surveillance of then-Washington Post reporter Michael Getler, who later was an ombudsman for the Washington Post and PBS.
   5. Break-in at the home of a former CIA employee.
   6. Break-in at the office of a former defector.
   7. Warrantless entry into the apartment of a former CIA employee.
   8. Opening of mail to and from the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1973 (including letters associated with actress Jane Fonda) (project SRPOINTER/HTLINGUAL at JFK airport)
   9. Opening of mail to and from the People's Republic of China from 1969 to 1972 (project SRPOINTER/HTLINGUAL at JFK airport - see also Project SHAMROCK by the NSA)
  10. Funding of behavior modification research on unwitting U.S. citizens, including unscientific, non-consensual human experiments.[9] (see also Project MKULTRA concerning LSD experiments)
  11. Assassination plots against Cuban President Fidel Castro (authorized by Robert Kennedy)[10]; Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba; President Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic; and René Schneider, Commander-in-chief of the Chilean Army. All of these plots were said to be unsuccessful ones.[11]
  12. Surveillance of dissident groups between 1967 and 1971 (see Project RESISTANCE, Project MERRIMAC and Operation CHAOS)
  13. Surveillance of a particular Latin American female, and of U.S. citizens in Detroit.
  14. Surveillance of former CIA officer and Agency critic, Victor Marchetti, author of the book, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, published in 1974.
  15. Amassing of files on 9,900-plus Americans related to the antiwar movement (see Project RESISTANCE, Project MERRIMAC and Operation CHAOS).
  16. Polygraph experiments with the sheriff of San Mateo County, California.
  17. Fake CIA identification documents that might violate state laws.
  18. Testing of electronic equipment on U.S. telephone circuits.

(From wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Visit The CIA's Family Jewels NSA Website

The CIA's Family Jewels
Agency Violated Charter for 25 Years, Wiretapped Journalists and Dissidents

CIA Announces Declassification of 1970s "Skeletons" File, Archive Posts Justice Department Summary from 1975, With White House Memcons on Damage Control

The full "family jewels" report, released today by the Central Intelligence Agency and detailing 25 years of Agency misdeeds, is now available on the Archive's Web site. The 702-page collection was delivered by CIA officers to the Archive at approximately 11:30 this morning -- 15 years after the Archive filed a Freedom of Information request for the documents.

Download The CIA's Family Jewels: Agency Violated Charter for 25 Years

PDF format, 24.2MB, 703Pages.

Washington D.C., June 21, 2007 - The Central Intelligence Agency violated its charter for 25 years until revelations of illegal wiretapping, domestic surveillance, assassination plots, and human experimentation led to official investigations and reforms in the 1970s, according to declassified documents posted today on the Web by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden announced today that the Agency is declassifying the full 693-page file amassed on CIA's illegal activities by order of then-CIA director James Schlesinger in 1973--the so-called "family jewels." Only a few dozen heavily-censored pages of this file have previously been declassified, although multiple Freedom of Information Act requests have been filed over the years for the documents. Gen. Hayden called the file "a glimpse of a very different time and a very different Agency." The papers are scheduled for public release on Monday, June 25.

"This is the first voluntary CIA declassification of controversial material since George Tenet in 1998 reneged on the 1990s promises of greater openness at the Agency," commented Thomas Blanton, the Archive's director.

Hayden also announced the declassification of some 11,000 pages of the so-called CAESAR, POLO and ESAU papers--hard-target analyses of Soviet and Chinese leadership internal politics and Sino-Soviet relations from 1953-1973, a collection of intelligence on Warsaw Pact military programs, and hundreds of pages on the A-12 spy plane.

The National Security Archive separately obtained (and posted today) a six-page summary of the illegal CIA activities, prepared by Justice Department lawyers after a CIA briefing in December 1974, and the memorandum of conversation when the CIA first briefed President Gerald Ford on the scandal on January 3, 1975.

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