CIA veröffentlicht ihre "Familienjuwelen"

--- Die CIA gibt mit der Veröffentlichung von zwei umfangreichen Dossiers Einblicke in das Treiben des US-Auslandsgeheimdienstes. : The first collection, which some call the “Family Jewels,” consists of almost 700 pages and was compiled in 1973 under Director of Central Intelligence James Schlesinger, who asked CIA employees to report activities they thought might be inconsistent with the Agency’s charter. ... The release of this collection answers a Freedom of Information Act request from 1992. ... The second collection, the CAESAR-POLO-ESAU papers, consists of 147 documents and 11,000 pages of analysis from 1953 to 1973. The CAESAR and POLO papers studied Soviet and Chinese leadership hierarchies, respectively, and the ESAU papers were developed by analysts to inform CIA assessments on Sino-Soviet relations.

Einen Bericht dazu gibts unter anderem in der New York Times:

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. ... 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. ... 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. ... 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. ... Some of the documents provide insight into the mundane workings of a bureaucracy — tedious correspondence about reimbursement for stationery, references to insurance benefits for E. Howard Hunt, the Watergate conspirator, and a document noting “the high degree of resentment” among C.I.A. officers who had to grow long hair to pose as hippie radicals to infiltrate the peace movement at home and overseas. And some of the language in the papers reflects the sanitized jargon of officialdom: “gangster-type action” refers to an assassination plot against Fidel Castro, for example. ... Historians have generally concluded that far from being a rogue agency, the C.I.A. was following orders from the White House or top officials. In 1967, for instance, President Lyndon B. Johnson became convinced that the American antiwar movement was controlled and financed by Communist governments, and he ordered the C.I.A. to produce evidence. His director of central intelligence, Richard Helms, reminded him that the C.I.A. was barred from spying on Americans. In his posthumous memoir, Mr. Helms said Johnson told him: “I’m quite aware of that. What I want for you is to pursue this matter, and to do what is necessary to track down the foreign Communists who are behind this intolerable interference in our domestic affairs.” Though it was a violation of the C.I.A.’s charter, Mr. Helms obeyed the president’s orders.