The Middle East is on fire, the planet on the verge of world war, the Homeland Security director just ousted. It’d hard to pay attention to anything else. Still, if you want to know why news that the FBI has begun to turn over long-concealed “prohibited access” files to Congress might matter, just ask Seymour Hersh.

Fifty-two years ago, on December 21, 1974, the famed muckraker printed “Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents In Nixon Years” in the New York Times. Hersh disclosed that “intelligence files on at least 10,000 American citizens were maintained by a special unit of the C.I.A.,” and spoke of “evidence of dozens of other illegal activities.” These misdeeds were part of a trove of dirty secrets in the CIA’s past that came to be known as the agency’s “Family Jewels.” Some sources Racketspoke with this week recalled the case in conjunction with news about the discovery of a cache of secret files at the FBI.

The “Family Jewels” story came to the surface after press reports of potential CIA involvement in the Watergate scandal. The news led then-director James Schlesinger to sign a May 1973 directive mandating that subordinates compile files on all material that “might be construed to be against the legislative charter of the agency.”

The subsequent702-page reportincluded jaw-dropping details of assassination plots, infiltration of dissident groups, human experimentation, surveillance of reporters, a vast mail-opening program, and instructions to foreign police on bomb-making, sabotage, and other dubious activities written by the infamous counterintelligence official James Jesus Angleton. None of it was meant to be publicized, and some remains secret to this day.

“You have to understand, I didn’t get all the Family Jewels,” said Hersh, when reached this week. “We got a chunk. They censored maybe 40, 45 percent of the material. The first stuff I saw, it had a lot of deletions in it. It was just that’s the way they did it internally.” The significance was clear. “There were obviously things they didn’t want to put down in writing. But even in writing, they had an awful lot of bad stuff.”

The “Family Jewels” story rocked the intelligence world and ended up providing significant fodder for Senate hearings to investigate intelligence activities. Led by Idaho Senator Frank Church in 1975, the hearings led to some reforms, but it was never clear that the CIA or any other part of the intelligence community ever stopped engaging in off-books activities.

Hersh never believed the government fully disclosed such programs. He described hearing about things the CIA had been involved with, like foreign assassinations in the 1950s, that weren’t in the files.

“That’s the kind of stuff I know should have been in the Family Jewels,” he said. “There were certain things left out. I know there are things missing.”

While reporting this week on the FBI’s prohibited access materials, which are digital case files designed to be hidden in the FBI’s SENTINEL filing system that turn up false negatives when searched for by anyone but a small club of names around the bureau’s director, both current and former officials brought up the CIA’s “Family Jewels” as an analog.

“It’s James Jesus Angleton all over again,” sighed one.

Source: Racket News