Documents Show Decades Of CIA's Domestic Spying

By MARK MAZZETTI and TIM WEINER The New York Times

Published: Jun 27, 2007

WASHINGTON - Long-secret documents released Tuesday provide new details about how the CIA 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.

Known inside the agency as the "family jewels," the 693 pages of documents released Tuesday catalog domestic wiretapping operations, failed assassination plots, mind-control experiments and spying on journalists from the early years of the CIA.

Internal memorandums detail CIA contacts with E. Howard Hunt, the Watergate conspirator, and James McCord, a retired operative who was one of the Watergate burglars. One has the heading "Hunt Requests a Lockpicker" and reveals that in spring 1972, a CIA official helped Hunt, the mastermind of the Watergate break-in, track someone "accomplished in picking locks."

Historians have generally concluded that far from being a rogue agency, the CIA was following orders from the White House or top officials.

In 1967, for instance, President Johnson became convinced that the U.S. antiwar movement was controlled and financed by communist governments, and he ordered the CIA to produce evidence.

Richard Helms, director of central intelligence, reminded him the CIA was barred from spying on Americans.

In his posthumous memoir, 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."

Although a violation of the CIA's charter, Helms obeyed the president's orders.

The CIA undertook a domestic surveillance operation, code-named Chaos, which went on for almost seven years under Presidents Johnson and Nixon. Helms created a new Special Operations Group to conduct the spying.

A squad of CIA officers grew their hair long, learned the jargon of the New Left and went off to infiltrate peace groups in the United States and Europe.

The agency compiled a computer index of 300,000 names of American people and organizations, and extensive files on 7,200 citizens. It began working in secret with police departments across the United States.

One document titled "Foreign Support for Activities Planned to Disrupt or Harass the Republican National Convention" in 1972 lists BeatleJohn Lennon, "a British subject," as having given money to a protest group.

A rare gem among the documents for CIA buffs is a pair of detailed reports signed by James J. Angleton, the legendary chief of the agency's counterintelligence staff from 1954 to 1974. They describe an American program to create and exploit foreign police forces, internal-security services and counterterrorism squads overseas.

The documents explain that the CIA and other American agencies trained and equipped foreigners to serve their countries - and, in secret, the United States. Once the Americans set up a foreign service, it could help carry out American foreign policy by suppressing communists and leftists and gather intelligence on behalf of the CIA.

Angleton, who was dismissed from the CIA in 1974 after disclosures that he had overseen the opening of first-class mail in the United States since the early 1950s, was the CIA's chief of the overseas training program.

CASTRO PLOT

CIA Office of Security Director Howard Osborn described a plot begun in August 1960 to kill the Cuban dictator. Ex-FBI agent Robert Maheu, a top aide to Howard Hughes in Las Vegas, was recruited to approach mobster Johnny Roselli and pass himself off as the representative of international corporations who wanted Castro killed because he'd caused financial losses for their Cuban operations.

Roselli was to be told the U.S. government should never hear of the plot. Roselli introduced Maheu to "Sam Gold" and "Joe," who were actually 10-most wanted mobsters Salvatore Giancana, Al Capone's successor in Chicago, and Santos Trafficante. The mobsters turned down $150,000 and worked for free. CIA gave them six poison pills; they tried unsuccessfully for several months to have several people put them in the Cuban leader's food. That particular plot was dropped after the failed CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, but other plots continued against Castro although they are not detailed in the documents.

At one point, Giancana asked Maheu to bug the Las Vegas hotel room of entertainer Dan Rowan to see whether Giancana's girlfriend, singer Phyllis McGuire, was sexually intimate with Rowan. The technician, however, was arrested planting the bug, and Osborn's office eventually had to tell Attorney General Robert Kennedy how the episode came about in order to get the Justice Department to drop charges against Maheu and the technician.

The Associated Press