CIA 'misdeeds' laid bare in documents
Updated on 27 June 2007
Hundreds of pages of internal CIA reports have been released detailing assassination plots against foreign leaders and the secret testing drugs on unwitting citizens.
The documents also provide information on wiretapping of US journalists, spying on civil rights and anti-Vietnam war protesters, opening mail between the US and the Soviet Union and China and break-ins at the homes of ex-CIA employees and others.
Within the CIA the documents were referred to as the "skeletons" but another name quickly caught on and stuck: "family jewels."
One of the more famous misdeeds was a plot where the CIA recruited a former FBI agent to approach two of America's most-wanted mobsters and gave them poison pills meant for Fidel Castro during his first year in power.
Last week, CIA Director Michael Hayden told a conference of historians that "the documents provide a glimpse of a very different time and a very different agency."
CIA spokesman George Little said Mr Hayden has been declassifying historic documents as a way of demonstrating the CIA's accountability.
Thomas Blanton, director of the private National Security Archive which requested the documents under the Freedom of Information Act, said: "It's the first time that we've had in this form the actual highest levels of the government looking at these 'family jewels', these skeletons in the closet and literally panicking, going into total damage control mode because so many of these things were horrors."
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