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The CIA released hundreds of pages of internal reports on Tuesday detailing assassination plots against foreign leaders such as Cuba’s Fidel Castro and the secret testing of mind-and-behaviour altering drugs like LSD on unwitting US citizens. The documents also provide information on wiretapping of US journalists, spying on civil rights and anti-Vietnam war protesters, opening mail between the United States and the Soviet Union and China and break-ins at the homes of ex-CIA employees and others. Inside the Central Intelligence Agency, 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 The 693 pages, mostly drawn from the memories of active CIA officers in 1973, were turned over at that time to three different investigative panels: President Gerald Ford’s Rockefeller Commission; the Senate’s Church committee and the House’s Pike committee. The panels spent years investigating and amplifying on these documents, and their public reports in the mid-1970s filled tens of thousands of pages. The scandal sullied the reputation of the intelligence community and led to new rules for the CIA, FBI and other spy agencies and new permanent committees in Congress to oversee them. Last week, CIA Director Michael …
