Inside the CIA Family Jewels

The Family Jewels (University of Texas Press, 2013) documents an era of illegal domestic surveillance and programs of detention, interrogation, and political spying conducted by the CIA. In 1974, a top-secret document, named “The Family Jewels” by insiders who understood its importance to the CIA, became ground zero in a political maelstrom that became known as the Year of Intelligence. Author John Prados, a senior fellow of the National Security Archive, looks back at this time, and shows how key actors of these events continued their clandestine practices well into the 21st century. This excerpt from the introduction shows how the recent release of the CIA Family Jewels through the Freedom of Information Act spurred new insight into these remarkable documents. ++++++++++++++++

The CIA Family Jewels and a Call for Open Government
In June of 2007 the mailman brought a large package to the National Security Archive, a public interest group that works for open government by advocating freedom of information and pressing for release of the sealed records of the United States government, which are then made available in several forms to anyone who is interested in them. The package contained a newly declassified document, a copy of the notorious Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) compilation called "The Family Jewels." This material was explosive because it described abuses—illegal domestic activities carried out by the CIA over a period of decades. Agency insiders aware of its sensitivity dubbed the collection "The Family Jewels." Revelation of some of its contents in the New York Times late in 1974 had ignited a firestorm of criticism in the United States, which in turn led to a series of investigations of intelligence activities by a presidential commission plus committees of both houses of the U.S. Congress. Those investigations progressed throughout the next year—and 1975 has come down in history as the "Year of Intelligence" in the United States.

The existence of the CIA Family Jewels documents—the original is really a compilation of items—had become known at the time but had forever been shrouded in secrecy. In 1991 the Archive filed under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) for declassification of The Family Jewels. The CIA denied the request, the Archive appealed, and the agency finally relented. Thus the package that arrived at the National Security Archive's front desk. We knew the significance of the Family Jewels documents from the storm of media coverage that followed. Archive director Thomas Blanton and I—as the senior fellow most knowledgeable on intelligence matters—spent literally seventy-two hours doing back-to-back interviews with print and broadcast journalists from all over the United States and dozens of foreign outlets spanning the globe from Latin America to Europe to Asia. The CIA itself, in the person of General Michael V. Hayden, its then-director, showed up at a conference of diplomatic historians to take credit for releasing The Family Jewels—as if this had been its idea, not the result of hard-fought pursuit of an FOIA case for nearly two decades

Read more: http://www.utne.com/politics/cia-family-jewels-ze0z1312zjhar.aspx#ixzz2og6bmDQb