CIA Documents Show U.S. Dirty Deeds
From an unsuccessful government plot to have a Chicago mobster assassinate Cuban dictator Fidel Castro to a failed effort to bug the Las Vegas hotel room of comedian Dan Rowan and a sidelines role in the Watergate scandal, recently released CIA documents show a plethora of dirty deeds committed by the United States in the 1960s and 1970s and kept secret under the cloak of national security.
A 693-page report compiled by the Central Intelligence Agency decades ago and released this week, as the Chicago Tribune puts it, “documents some of its worst historical abuses, from failed assassination plots against world leaders and illegal spying on Americans to its links with the hapless Watergate burglars whose arrests eventually toppled the presidency of Richard Nixon.”
The so-called “family jewels” report resulted from the CIA’s peripheral involvement in Watergate. Then-Director James Schlesinger asked CIA departments to send him summaries in 1973 of potentially illegal activities, so he could evaluate their embarassment quotient.
At one point, the CIA set up surveillance outside the offices of the Washington Post, to try to figure out who might be leaking intelligence information to the newspaper, the Washington Post reports today.
A link to the report, which was made public under the federal Freedom of Information Act, is provided on a CIA Web site .
