The CIA's Family Jewels

[Ron Ecker]

What's so interesting about 30-year old "revelations?"

I would wager that most people today have never heard of them. So they're revelations.

The CIA is recycling old news for the "American Idol" generation, which will be duly impressed, to the extent that it pays any attention. "Wow, look at the stuff they did! Oh well, it's good to know that the CIA has changed its ways."

[Tim Gratz]

According to a post on another Forum, the Church Committee was never shown the document that claims that Dulles approved the plot to kill Castro. If not, this is certainly another CIA abuse. I believe the document was written by Howard Osborn and is circa 1970 or 1972. Certainly the Church Committee should have had it when it questioned Bissell. Since Bissell testiified that it was he who had briefed Dulles, I would assume that Bissell was the support for the statement Osborn made in the document re Dulles' knowledge. I further assume that Bissell told Osborn essentially what he told Church. My logic is that if Bissell had dissembled before the Church Committee to protect Dulles, why would he not have simply denied having ever discussed it with Dulles?

It is certainly possible that Bissell used his curcuitous language with Dulles to ensure that Dulles did not fully understand him and would not veto the plot.

(I do believe by the way that Dulles was not only aware of the plot and also knew that it was part of Bissell's planning for the Bay of Pigs (per Dulles' statement on the "Meet the Press" program following the BOP.)

IMO Bissell made many grievous errors, including starting the assassination plots and plotting the Bay of Pigs. If the US was absolutely convinced that Castro had to go, it should have simply invaded Cuba with its fulll military might and replaced him with a democrat. It was Bissell's errors, IMO, that led to the placement of the Soviet missiles in Cuba and brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. And I also fault the CIA for not recognizing Castro for what he was. JFK's friend Earl E. T. Smith was correct about Castro--and JFK was correct when he criticized the Eisenhower Administration for not listening to Smith. The CIA allowed Castro to happen and then almost created a world war through its misguided efforts to get rid of him in a "deniable" manner--and of course the thought that the US could disguise its involvement in the BOP was ridiculous in the first place! It is hard to believe any intelligent person, whether JFK or the powers at the CIA, could believe they could hide US involvement in the BOP invasion.

Edited June 28, 2007 by Tim Gratz

[John Simkin]

Can members explain why the Watergate documents are heavily censored. Maybe the CIA have removed Tim Gratz's name from these documents? This sections starts here:

http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/...bsPageId=735375

The same is true of the next Watergate document.

http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/...bsPageId=735381

What is the point of releasing documents like this?

[Tim Gratz]

Obviously unlike many members John does not want me here. Perhaps I should be gratified that he thinks that I was working on a top-level CIA job when I was a senior in college! Bye bye.

[John Simkin]

Obviously unlike many members John does not want me here. Perhaps I should be gratified that he thinks that I was working on a top-level CIA job when I was a senior in college! Bye bye.

You are welcome to be a member. However, only a few weeks ago you said you were to busy to answer my questions. The arrival of the so-called “Family Jewels” brings a new active Tim. I wonder why? Is it to protect Eisenhower’s reputation? Or is it to promote documents implicating the Kennedy’s in the assassination plots against Castro? Maybe it has more to do with Watergate.

[Tim Gratz]

If you just look at one of the CIA documents with the deletions it is clear it was referring to an older man. Your post was so silly I read it as an attempt to drive me away once again. While we are on the subject of Watergate, your page on me claims I participated in a "dirty tricks" campaign with Segretti prior to the Wisconsin primary. This is jus a blatant lie. Why, I was not even IN Wisconsin in February and March of 1972. Karl Rove had helped me get a job organizing College Republicans in Rhode Island--which is, believe me, far more pleasant place to be than in Wisconsin in the dead of winter! How can you claim any ethics when you lie about me because you disagree about my politics? There is no evidence (since there cannot be) that I did anything improper or unethical in Wisconsin, or anywhere else for that matter. The only reason I'll consider staying is because of the nice welcomes from several of your members. As I said once before, some of my best friends have been--and are--of very liberal persuasions. And I like that because I think learning and knowledge advancement often comes best from people with different perspectives than your own. I think history has proven my early politcal judgments correct in many, I'd say most cases (particularly in foreign affairs), but wrong in several. I say show me someone whose views have not evolved over time and I'll show you someone with a closed mind.

[John Simkin]

I think history has proven my early politcal judgments correct in many, I'd say most cases (particularly in foreign affairs), but wrong in several. I say show me someone whose views have not evolved over time and I'll show you someone with a closed mind.

Have your views on the Iraq War evolved? Or do you stll think George Bush got it right?

[Tim Gratz]

I tend to agree more with the position of Senator McCain. Obviously we made a lot of mistakes in Iraq. It is clear that most politicians of both parties believed based on intelligence reports that Hussein had WMD. I think that may have been in part because that is what Hussein WANTED the world to believe, to protect his own empire. I think that perhaps one reason why our intelligence WAS so faulty was because of restrictions placed on intelligence agencies due to the exposure of the CIA abuses of the fifties and sixties. To a certain extent I think that as wrong as assassination is as an instrument of foreign policy, what shocked the country even more than the assassination plots was that the CIA had actually entered a partnership with the mafia to effect political murder--almost literally a deal with the devil! And I am extremely critical of any politician or bureacrat who approved such an unholy alliance regardless of his or her political party. As I said in a previous post, clear the assassination plots started when Eisenhower was in office.

By the way, do forum members know that the first public exposure of the assassination plots came because Johhny Rosselli participated in a Gin Rummy scam at the Beverly Hills Friars Club, a scam whose victims included Phil Silvers and Zeppo Marx? It is an interesting story.

[Charles Drago]

Iraq is the latest in a long line of so-called perfect failures.

Mistakes? Don't fool yourselves.

All is proceeding according to plan, with self-correcting mechanisms functioning as designed in response to unanticipated events.

The Cold War has been replaced. The money flows, the power accrues.

Who could ask for anything more?

Charles

[John Simkin]

Iraq is the latest in a long line of so-called perfect failures.

Mistakes? Don't fool yourselves.

All is proceeding according to plan, with self-correcting mechanisms functioning as designed in response to unanticipated events.

The Cold War has been replaced. The money flows, the power accrues.

Who could ask for anything more?

Charles

Exactly right? Who made the most money out of the Vietnam War? Corporations that donated large sums of money to LBJ. Who is making the most money out of the Iraq War? Corporations that made donations to George Bush and the Republican Party.

[Guest David Guyatt]

I wonder if the newspaper article about this story came with an inside joke... a sort of April Fool's day angle or a pinch-and-a-punch-for-the-first-of-the-month thingy?

Quote:

By Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus

Washington Post Staff Writers

Friday, June 22, 2007; Page A01

The CIA will declassify hundreds of pages of long-secret records detailing some of the intelligence agency's worst illegal abuses -- the so-called "family jewels" documenting a quarter-century of overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying, kidnapping and infiltration of leftist groups from the 1950s to the 1970s, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said yesterday.

Unquote

It may only be me that has noticed, over the years, the frequent appearance of the number "22" and considered whether it was symbolic of something more deeply hidden?

22 June is, according to some experts, the day that Freemasonry was founded exactly 290 years ago (to the day), when the first organised Grand lodge was formed in the Goose and Gridiron Ale-House in St. Paul’s Church-yard inside the Square Mile of the City of London. Other experts argue that it was 24th June 1717, the feast day of St, John the Baptist. But you never can be sure with masons can you…

David

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

I enjoyed this post sent in by a reader of the NYT's blog about the CIA "Jewels" The writer is alluding to Hayden's efforts to block the release of documents that stongly support the view that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was a manufactured incident. I think that the efforts to block the documents occured in 2004. There were two unusually good articles in the Times about this, I believe in 2005. Teachers of history should try to get ahold of these articles, as they offer the most prescient example of history as an indispensible tool for understanding current events.

---------------------

I found it. It MUST have been Halloween on 42nd street!

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/31/politics...ssnyt&emc=r

16.

June 26th,

2007

2:52 pm

CIA director Michael Hayden’s newfound enthusiasm for historical glasnost is, of course, laughable.

At NSA it was “history buff” Hayden who kept historian Robert Hanyok’s Vietnam revelations classified TOP SECRET while George Bush was running for reelection, evidently in the belief that - forty years after the fact - the voters didn’t have a timely need to know Iraq wouldn’t be the first war a president launched on false pretenses.

It’s entirely possible that had we known in November 2004 the profoundly relevant history Hayden and his NSA successor saw fit to withhold from us for another year, namely, that the Vietnam War had been unwittingly authorized by a deliberately misled congress, George Bush might very well have failed to win a second term.

What could be more political than classifying purely historical knowledge - thereby transforming it into a form of de facto intelligence - for the sole purpose of protecting an incumbent’s re-electability?

This isn’t about the CIA and its dirty laundry.

It’s about Michael Hayden.

The man has repeatedly proven himself incapable of distinguishing between political intelligence and any other kind.

If, as TIME’s Robert Baer says, Hayden’s publication of the CIA’s “family jewels” is intended to signal that anyone who politicizes intelligence will find their face on the front page, Hayden’s own image ought to be the first to appear, above the fold, front and center.

— Posted by Robert ("Bob") Smith

Edited June 29, 2007 by Nathaniel Heidenheimer

[William Kelly]

I see on page 5 and 21 that the telephone taps on newsmen were part of "Project Mockingbird".

Rather than recruiting willing newsmen to serve as assets as we have known Mockingbird, these apparently independent newsmen were bugged and observed by CIA spooks from a Hinkley Hilton observation post across the street.

This seems like small stuff, and doesn't sound like Frank Wisner's "Worldwitzer" organ that they bragged about.

BK

Sure does. It just seems a coincidence that they used the title Mockingbird. As far as I am aware the CIA have never used this term before (although E. Howard Hunt did just before he died). Deborah Davis was the first person to reveal the name "Operation Mockingbird". She told me she got it from a senior CIA official. The same one who named Richard Ober as being Deep Throat.

Well, if Mockingbird wasn't the name for the CIA's multitude of media assets, then it had another name.

Hunt, in his book, said that the media operation he was affiliated with was not called Mockingbird, but he doesn't say what they did call it.

Among these "So-called Family Jewels," the Costum Jewels recently released, the Mockingbird incidnet is also blamed on RFK, according to Walter N. Elder, McCone's assistant. WNE also [see: David Corn report on Costum Jewels] makes note of the previously unknown fact that McCone's phones and offices were wired and there are possibly additional outstanding inter-office tapes and transcripts.

While the entire memo is worth reading, here's where RFK is blamed for the Mockingbird bugs, which brings up the question of why the FBI or military DIA counter-intel unit was not requested to do this investigation in the first place?

In another, similar investigation of a classified miliary report broadcast by Dan Rather, they determined the leak was from Kissinger's office. I'm sure he blamed Bobby too.

Even though most of these costum jewels are plastic and pretty, there's a few good gems if you dig a little.

After leaving McCone's side, Elder became chief of the CIA history staff, which also included, according to these reports, Bernard Drell, Clinton Conger, and archivest Leone Sullivan.

1 June 1973

MEMO : Mr. William E. Colby

SUBJECT : Special Activities.

• Following our recent conversation, I have searched my memory and Mr. McCone’s files for examples of activities which to hostile observers or to someone without complete knowledge and with a special kind of motivation could be interpreted as examples of activities exceeding CIA’s charter.
  
• First, as we discussed, on 7 March 1962, DCI McCone, under pressure from Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, agreed to tap the telephone of columnists Robert S. Allen and Paul Scott in an effort to identify their sources for classified information which was appearing in their columns. Because the primary source appeared to be in the Department of Defense, McCone ordered me personally to brief General Joe Carroll, Director of DIA orally, which I did. I understand more complete information on this operation is available from the Director of Security. I, personally, managed to avoid gaining any knowledge of what precise actions were taken, what information was gained, what was done with it, and when the operation was terminated.
  
• TOTALLY REDACTED – ..............
  

[Paul Rigby]

Redactions and all, and there are many, the CIA family jewels documents are now available in the MFF document archive:

http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/....do?docId=60409

We added a hotlinked table of contents to make browsing and navigation a little easier.

Enjoy, if that is the right word here....

Rex

Rex,

Do you know if there's a decent index to them yet? And, if so, how to gain access to it?

Paul

[Tim Gratz]

David wrote:

"It may only be me that has noticed, over the years, the frequent appearance of the number "22" and considered whether it was symbolic of something more deeply hidden?"

By golly, I think you may be on to something.

The significant date here is not the date the CIA released the documents but rather the date the news report appeared in the Washington Post!

And of course we have the strange death of Phillip Graham of the Post.

Tie that into the influence of the Post in the downfall of Richard Nixon.

So you have stumbled across a theory that links the Masons, through their control of the Washington Post, to both the assassination of JFK and the downfall of Richard Nixon.

Moreover, since the CIA documents had to be released shortly after June 22nd to allow the story to appear on June 22nd ("the inside joke") this also confirms the CIA's involvement!

Note also that unlike many stories, this story was by-lined to two ("to two" = "22"!!) reporters, just as the Post's coverage of Watergate was! Once more, two plus two, or 22! Astounding!

Eureka! I think you have it! Proving, of course, that two plus two equals four! And that the JFK assassination and the Watergate affair was a grand alliance between the Masons and the CIA, with the help of their friends at the Washington Post!

Edited June 29, 2007 by Tim Gratz