Family Jewels (Central Intelligence Agency)

"Family Jewels" is the name of a set of reports that detail sensitive activities conducted by the United States Central Intelligence Agency. Considered illegal or inappropriate, these actions were conducted from 1959 to 1973. William Colby, who was the CIA director who received 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 7, 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.
Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh revealed some of the contents of the "Family Jewels" in a front-page "New York Times" article in December 1974, in which he reported that:
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 at an announcement made to the annual meeting of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. 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.
Congressional investigators had access to the "Family Jewels" in the 1970s, and its existence was known for years before its declassification.
Content.
The reports describe numerous activities conducted by the CIA during the 1950s to 1970s that may have 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:
Reactions to release.
Then-President of Cuba, Fidel Castro, who was the target of multiple CIA assassination attempts reported in these documents, responded to their release on July 1, 2007, saying that the United States was still a "killing machine" and that the revealing of the documents was an attempt at diversion. David Corn of the liberal / progressive magazine "The Nation" wrote that one key 'jewel' had been redacted and remained classified. Writing for "The New York Times", Amy Zegart wrote: "Given all the illegal activities actually listed in this document, the hidden sections are all the more disturbing."
In 2009, Daniel L. Pines, the Assistant General Counsel of the Office of General Counsel within the CIA, wrote a law review published in the "Indiana Law Journal" challenging the assertion that most of the activities described within the Family Jewels were illegal during the time they were conducted. In his conclusion, Pines wrote: "Admittedly, several of the operations mounted during that period failed to comply fully with the laws then in place. Yet, the vast majority of those operations did. Further, except for unconsenting human experimentation, each of the main types of activities depicted in the Family Jewels - targeted killings of foreign leaders, electronic surveillance of Americans, examination of U.S. mail, and collecting information on American dissident movements - was legal in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s."
Mafia involvement in assassination attempts on Fidel Castro.
According to the Family Jewels documents released, members of the American mafia were involved in CIA attempts to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro. The documents showed that the CIA recruited Robert Maheu, an ex-FBI agent and aide to Howard Hughes in Las Vegas, to approach Johnny Roselli under the pretense of representing international corporations that wanted Castro dead due to lost gambling interests. Roselli introduced Maheu to mobster leaders Sam Giancana and Santo Trafficante, Jr. Supplied with six poison pills from the CIA, Giancana and Trafficante tried unsuccessfully to have people place the poison in Castro's food.