There isn't the volume of discussion I had anticipated regarding this. For the unaware, the CIA declassified some 700-pages of the most unlawful activities committed by the Central Intelligence Agency outside the boundaries of their charter from it's inception through the early 1970s. The impetus for the collecting of this data was the CIA's involvement in the Watergate scandal, coupled with the very real possibility that the Agency's involvement would garner press coverage. As a result, the director of the CIA asked for a laundry list of all the CIA's sins. This, in turn, is the list. Cryptome also links to a single ZIP with all of the scanned pages (it's easier to browse them in the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer, scanning through them forward and back).
So far, aside from the usual CIA plot to kill Castro by the Mafia type news, I came across the following:
- Press payola, from pages 81-104, whereas members of the press and others wrote puff-pieces supporting Nixon-authorized bombings in Laos and Cambodia.
- Page 135 mentions HYDRA, a computer system that supported CHAOS, which indexed media sourced from several Federal (and state?) agencies covered the monitoring of domestic antiwar activists (link).
- Page 163 mentions domestic surveillance project involving US and foreign physicians, as well as another program which monitored suspected "militants, subversives, or terrorists".
They seem to have spent an inordinate amount of time worrying about drugs and militant blacks in the Caribbean?!?
Tags: Cambodia, Caribbean, Central Intelligence Agency, Laos, United States
