CIA admits to assassination plots, mind control experiments and spying on US citizens

Long-secret documents released on June 26 provide new details about the Central Intelligence Agency's history of illegal activities. Known inside the agency as the "family jewels," the 702 pages of documents catalog domestic wiretapping operations, failed assassination plots, kidnapping, infiltration of anti-war movements, mind-control experiments and spying on journalists. The dossier was compiled at the behest of then-agency director James Schlesinger in 1973. According to a memo written at the time, the purpose of the dossier was to identify all current and past CIA activities that "conflict with the provisions of the National Security Act of 1947" -- and were, in other words, illegal. The dossier's disclosure of the CIA's secrets from the 1950s until the early '70s shows how the agency repeatedly violated its own charter. Yet the long-awaited documents leave out a great deal. Large sections are censored, showing that the CIA still cannot bring itself to expose all the skeletons in its closet. And many activities about overseas operations disclosed years ago by journalists, Congressional investigators and a presidential commission–which led to reforms of the nation's intelligence agencies–are not detailed in the papers. Some intelligence experts suggest that the release of the documents was intended to distract from current controversies. And they and historians expressed disappointment that the documents were so heavily censored. (The agency said it had to protect its intelligence "sources and methods.") Tom Blanton of the National Security Archive, the research group that filed the Freedom of Information request in 1992 that led to the documents' becoming public, said he was initially underwhelmed by them because they contained little about the agency's foreign operations. A generation ago, congressional investigators were given the unedited catalog of abuses that CIA officers reported to Schlesinger in 1973 during the Watergate scandal. After years of work, the congressional committees produced thousands of pages of disclosures that went far beyond anything in the papers just released. Much of what the papers do reveal has been extensively documented previously and has been in the public domain, however under-reported. Disclosed in the latest documents are details about how the CIA undertook a domestic surveillance operation on the antiwar movement code-named Chaos that went on for almost seven years under Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. CIA director Richard Helms created a Special Operations Group to conduct the spying. A squad of CIA officers grew their hair long, learned the jargon of the New Left, and went off to infiltrate peace groups in the United States and Europe. The agency compiled a computer index of 300,000 names of US citizens and organizations, and extensive files on 7,200 citizens. It began working in secret with police departments all over the United States. Some anecdotes reveal just how far outside the law some CIA agents strayed. One technician was arrested in 1960 after trying to bug a Las Vegas hotel room. The operation had been requested by Sam Giancana, the Chicago mobster, who was then helping the CIA in a plot to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Giancana had been concerned that his girlfriend, the singer Phyllis McGuire, was having an affair with the comedian Dan Rowan, and surveillance was ordered to "determine the extent of his intimacy" with her. The plot to kill Castro is detailed as well. The documents describe how a CIA officer, Richard Bissell, approached the CIA's Office of Security to establish whether it had "assets that may assist in a sensitive mission requiring gangster-type action. The mission target was Fidel Castro." The minutes state that the CIA "plotted the assassination of some foreign leaders including Castro, [Patrice] Lumumba [Democratic Republic of Congo] and [Rafael] Trujillo [Dominican Republic]." Also easily lost, on page 425 is a short paragraph outlining "potentially embarrassing agency activities"–"experiments in influencing human behavior through the administration of mind- or personality-altering drugs to unwitting subjects." Of all the heinous acts committed by the CIA in the name of national security, these experiments, done on the agency's behalf by prominent psychiatrists on innocent victims -- including children as young as four -- may be the darkest. "We have no answer to the moral issue," Helms infamously said when asked about the nature of the projects. The nature of the experiments, gathered from government documents and testimony in numerous lawsuits brought against the CIA, is shocking, from testing LSD on children to implanting electrodes in victims' brains to deliberately poisoning people with uranium. "The CIA bought my services from my grandfather in 1952 starting at the tender age of four," wrote Carol Rutz of her experiences. "Over the next 12 years, I was tested, trained, and used in various ways. Electroshock, drugs, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, and other types of trauma were used to make me complain and split my personality (to create multiple personalities for specific tasks). Each alter or personality was created to respond to a post-hypnotic trigger, then perform an act and (I would) not remember it later. "This Manchurian Candidate program was just one of the operational uses of the mind-control scenario by the CIA. "Your hard-earned tax dollars supported this." The US began these experiments after World War II when it made a grab for hundreds of Nazi scientists and doctors who had been researching mind control in concentration camps, fearing they would fall into Soviet hands. US military intelligence leaders were paranoid that they were falling behind the communist bloc in the brainwashing race. Among other items, the latest documents display how the CIA spied on columnist Jack Anderson and three of his researchers, including Brit Hume, now a FOX television news anchor, in an attempt to learn their sources.