Censored CIA documents detail internal misdeeds

WASHINGTON — The CIA released hundreds of heavily censored documents Tuesday about its spying on Americans, foreign assassination plots and other misdeeds that triggered a scandal in the mid-1970s.

Known inside the CIA as the "family jewels," the documents were released with vast sections blocked out by agency censors. As a result, they were far less revealing than the reports issued in the mid-1970s by the three investigations that obtained unedited versions of these internal CIA documents a generation ago.

The ensuing scandal sullied the reputation of the intelligence community and led to new rules for the CIA, FBI and other spy agencies and new permanent committees in Congress to oversee them.

The 693 pages, mostly drawn from the memories of active CIA officers in 1973, were turned over at that time to three different investigative panels — President Ford's Rockefeller Commission, the Senate's Church committee and the House's Pike committee.

The panels spent years investigating and amplifying on these documents. And their public reports in the mid-1970s filled tens of thousands of pages.

In early 1975, CIA Director William Colby told the Justice Department that these documents detailed assassination plots against foreign leaders such as Fidel Castro, the testing of behavior-altering drugs on unwitting citizens, wiretapping of U.S. journalists, spying on civil rights and anti-Vietnam war protesters, opening of mail between the United States and the Soviet Union and China and break-ins at the homes of ex-CIA employees and others.

But as censored by the CIA, many of the most sensational events were mentioned in little more than one sketchy paragraph apiece.

The new documents devoted two paragraphs to the programs that opened mail between U.S. citizens and the Soviet Union and China.

One paragraph said "Project WESTPOINTER," from the fall of 1969 through October 1971, was based in the San Francisco area and the "target was mail to the United States from Mainland China."

The other paragraph said a program, begun in 1953 but dormant by 1973, intercepted incoming and outgoing Russian mail, and occasionally other types of mail, at New York's Kennedy Airport.