Privacy Digest

Files on Illegal Spying Show C.I.A. Skeletons From Cold War: WASHINGTON, June 26 -- Long-secret documents released Tuesday provide new details about how the Central Intelligence Agency illegally spied on Americans decades ago, including trying to bug a Las Vegas hotel room for evidence of infidelity and tracking down an expert lock-picker for a Watergate conspirator.

Known inside the agency as the "family jewels," the 702 pages of documents catalog domestic wiretapping operations, failed assassination plots, mind-control experiments and spying on journalists from the early years of the C.I.A.

The papers provide evidence of paranoia and occasional incompetence as the agency began a string of illegal spying operations in the 1960s and 1970s, often to hunt links between Communist governments and the domestic protests that roiled the nation in that period.

Yet the long-awaited documents leave out a great deal. Large sections are censored, showing that the C.I.A. 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.

In a note to agency employees, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the C.I.A. director, said that Tuesday's release of documents was part of the agency's "social contract" with the American public, "to give those we serve a window into the complexities of intelligence."

General Hayden drew a contrast between the illegal activities of the past and current C.I.A. practices, which he insists are lawful.

The 60-year-old agency has been under fire, though, by critics who object to the secret prisons and harsh interrogation practices it has adopted since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Some intelligence experts suggested on Tuesday that the release of the documents was intended to distract from the 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.")
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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.

But Mr. Blanton said what was striking was the scope of the C.I.A's domestic spying efforts -- what he called the "C.I.A. doing its Stasi imitation" -- and the "confessional" nature of so many of the documents.

(Read Original Article - Via NYT > Home Page.)