The Family Jewels

Mark Crispin Miller, Series Editor

This series begins with a startling premise—that even now, more than two hundred years since its founding, America remains a largely undiscovered country with much of its amazing story yet to be told. In these books, some of America's foremost historians and cultural critics bring to light episodes in our nation's history that have never been explored. They offer fresh takes on events and people we thought we knew well and draw unexpected connections that deepen our understanding of our national character.

John Prados

THE FAMILY JEWELS

THE CIA, SECRECY, AND PRESIDENTIAL POWER

University of Texas Press
AUSTIN

Copyright © 2013 by John Prados

All rights reserved

First edition, 2013

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Prados, John.

The family jewels : the CIA, secrecy, and presidential power / by John Prados. — First edition.

pages      cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-292-73762-4 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Intelligence service—United States.   2. United States. Central Intelligence Agency.   3. Presidents—United States.   4. Executive power—United States.   I. Title.

JK468.I6P696   2013

327.1273—dc23

2013004240

doi:10.7560/737624

ISBN 978-0-292-75292-4 (library e-book)
ISBN 978-0-292-75293-1 (individual e-book)

J. HIGGINS:
You were with Mr. Donovan's OSS, weren't you, sir?

MR. WABASH:
I sailed the Adriatic with a movie star at the helm! . . . It doesn't seem like much of a war now, but it was. I go back even further: to ten years after the Great War, as we called it. Before we knew enough to number them
.

J. HIGGINS:
You miss that kind of action, sir?

MR. WABASH:
No—that kind of clarity
.

—LORENZO SEMPLE, Jr., AND DAVID RAYFIEL,
THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR
SCREENPLAY, FEBRUARY 3, 1975, FROM THE NOVEL
SIX DAYS OF THE CONDOR
BY JAMES O'GRADY

CONTENTS

LIST OF ACRONYMS

INTRODUCTION

PROLOGUE

1

Where Did the Family Jewels Come From?

2

The Family Jewels:
The White House Reacts

3

Domestic Surveillance

4

Surveillance II:
Private Communications

5

Detention and Interrogation

6

Assassination

7

Cloaking the Dagger

8

Plugging the Dike

9

Circling the Wagons

10

Clarity

NOTES

INDEX

ACRONYMS

BNDD

Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs

CI

Counterintelligence (CIA)

CIA

Central Intelligence Agency

CTC

Counter-Terrorism Center (CIA)

DCI

Director of Central Intelligence

DO

Directorate of Operations (CIA)

DOJ

Department of Justice

FAS

Federation of American Scientists

FBI

Federal Bureau of Investigation

FISA

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act

FISC

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court

FOIA

Freedom of Information Act

HVD

High Value Detainee

IG

Inspector General (CIA)

IOB

Intelligence Oversight Board

IRA

Irish Republican Army

IRS

Internal Revenue Service

KGB

Soviet Intelligence Service

NSA

National Security Agency

NSC

National Security Council

NYPD

New York Police Department

OGC

Office of the General Counsel (CIA)

OLC

Office of Legal Counsel (DOJ)

PDB

President's Daily Brief

PFIAB

President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board

PR

Public Relations

PRB

Publications Review Board (CIA)

TSP

Terrorist Surveillance Program

INTRODUCTION

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 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.

The National Security Archive posted the Family Jewels documents on our website along with introductory material, plus an index that I compiled from the material. We wanted to do more. The first idea was for a document reader. Examination of the actual contents of The Family Jewels revealed them to be quite disappointing: we could see that a host of other materials—long-released documents, the CIA's own papers—describe the abuses covered in The Family Jewels in much greater depth. But our idea for an expanded reader that melded the Jewels with this other material became lost in the press of other business.

The “Family Jewels” compilation proved as explosive as it was not for its actual contents but because of the real abuses that underlay this sparse reporting. Its impact was demonstrable in the flurry of investigations that followed the press revelation. That season of inquiry took its course and led to
creation of the system of formal intelligence oversight that exists in the United States today. However, the issue of abuse in intelligence activities has not gone away in the years since 1975, and in the first decade of this century it mushroomed with the excesses of President George W. Bush's war on terror. It was and still is important to engage with this problem if there is to be public confidence in the intelligence activities conducted by a democratic nation. It came to me that “The Family Jewels” really serves as a metaphor: Family Jewels designate a certain category of operations, ones that become sensitive as exuberance exceeds proper boundaries. Family Jewels are eternal. Only their specific content changes over time. I retrieved my notes and documents from the original project, and the result you see before you.

The Family Jewels
is
not
the story of the Year of Intelligence. My aims are broader than that. Its core is also not a review of the investigations themselves—although interactions between investigators, spooks, and presidential emissaries are central to the narrative. Nor is this book about the CIA documents known as The Family Jewels, although evidence from those figures in what is presented here. Rather, this tale begins with the sudden revelation of CIA domestic operations—the original Family Jewels—and continues through White House efforts to craft a response. The narrative then describes certain intelligence activities. The focus is the Jewels—the operations, the spooks who conducted them, the efforts to uncover them, the politicos who ordered them or attempted to stymie inquiry. Finally, the focus settles on the techniques the CIA and other intelligence agencies have used to protect their image. All of this is based on
real
records. None of it is made up. Viewed as a whole, the resulting picture of the Family Jewels in play is stunning.

This is the story of an
attitude
, a private presumption of
superiority based on the possession of secret, and supposedly superior, knowledge. That attitude led dedicated and conscientious men and women to reach too far, do too much, and dispense with limits to follow misguided orders. Their cohorts worked equally assiduously to prevent the public from learning what was happening. The result is the creation of Family Jewels—legal and political time bombs, which can lie dormant for years or even decades, but which eventually explode with a force that not only ends careers but can threaten institutions and even governments. These are the
real
Family Jewels. Individually, the epics each have their discrete details, but the trajectories of the histories become disturbingly familiar. For the sake of proper governance, it is necessary to shine a spotlight on the Family Jewels.

In the intelligence business the standard response to revelations is to invoke national security and appeal to responsible people not to touch the emergent scandal for fear of damaging important interests. The argument here is that the true damage to the nation is wrought by the operations themselves—and by efforts to evade investigation of them. The attempt to prevent public knowledge, suppress inquiry, and avoid accountability harms essential elements of the system for oversight and control—and ultimately public confidence in the enterprise. Evasion corrodes the legal framework erected to govern intelligence activities—which protects the agencies themselves—and it undermines the political support necessary when issues of growth, reform, or mission require forging a fresh consensus. Evasion subverts internal morale by creating cleavages that divide officers implicated in abusive activities from those who follow the rules, and by throwing factions of rank-and-file and management into what is fundamentally a conspiracy, sometimes to obstruct justice, other times simply to avoid responsibility. Depending on the provenance of the original operations, evasion also pulls other institutions—whether different intelligence
units, the Justice Department, or the White House—into the obstruction conspiracy. The political dangers are real. What is false is the idea that activities cannot be scrutinized.