The CIA will declassify hundreds of pages of long-secret records detailing some of the intelligence agency's worst illegal abuses -- the so-called "family jewels" documenting a quarter-century of overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying, kidnapping and infiltration of leftist groups from the 1950s to the 1970s, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said yesterday.Some of it has come out over the years, of course. This should make the agency somewhat more transparent for control purposes.The documents, to be publicly released next week, also include accounts of break-ins and theft, the agency's opening of private mail to and from China and the Soviet Union, wiretaps and surveillance of journalists, and a series of "unwitting" tests on U.S. civilians, including the use of drugs.
"Most of it is unflattering, but it is CIA's history," Hayden said in a speech to a conference of foreign policy historians.
On the opposite side of the issue, no major nation can afford to try to operate without an effective Intelligence Agency. This is going to be ancient history, not anything current. That in my opinion is as it should be. You don't want to give away current sources and methods, but you don't want the people in the bureaucracy of the CIA to believe that their decisions will never be known, either. This should provide that transparency so that we Americans know what has being done in our name. With luck, the historical research that will result will lead to more effective Intelligence gathering and analysis methods.
For example, I'd bet this will permit the first outside review of what happened when the CIA tried to focus almost entirely on technical Intelligence gathering and supplemented that with Human Intelligence from allied nation Intelligence agencies.
If nothing else, it is going to be interesting.
Side note: I wonder if this is designed to take some heat off the Bush administration as the news is filled with events that happened decades in the past?
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