The CIA Family Jewels: The 1973 Inventory of Illegal Activities.

What the Family Jewels are, in a paragraph.

The Family Jewels is the internal CIA name — later adopted as the public title — for a 702-page compilation of memoranda prepared between May 9 and the end of May 1973 by CIA officers in response to a written order from Director of Central Intelligence James R. Schlesinger. Schlesinger's order, signed on May 9, 1973, directed every senior agency official to report to the Inspector General any activity then or in the past that might fall outside the CIA's statutory charter. The compilation that came back — assembled under Inspector General William E. Colby, who became Director in his own right in September 1973 — documented a range of CIA activities of legally and politically doubtful character. The most significant included: the long-running Operation CHAOS, a domestic-surveillance program targeting the American antiwar movement; HTLINGUAL, the CIA mail-opening program at Kennedy International Airport and Andrews Air Force Base, in which an estimated 215,000 international letters had been opened and 28 million envelope-exteriors photographed; wiretaps and surveillance directed at American journalists (notably Jack Anderson, Michael Getler, and others); break-ins at the residences of former CIA employees; the assassination plots and attempts directed at Fidel Castro (Cuba), Patrice Lumumba (Congo), Rafael Trujillo (Dominican Republic), Ngo Dinh Diem (South Vietnam), and Salvador Allende's military supporters in Chile (under the Track II program); surveillance of named American antiwar activists including Jane Fonda; and the residual paper trail of MKULTRA, the agency's behavioral-modification and drug-testing program. The compilation was kept in the DCI's safe and was disclosed to the public only after the underlying activities surfaced through Seymour Hersh's December 22, 1974 New York Times front-page exposure. That exposure triggered the Rockefeller Commission of 1975 and, in turn, the Senate's Church Committee and the House's Pike Committee. The full 702-page compilation, in heavily redacted form, was publicly released by the CIA on June 25, 2007 under sustained Freedom of Information Act pressure led by Thomas Blanton of the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

The documented record.

Schlesinger's May 9, 1973 directive

James R. Schlesinger became Director of Central Intelligence on February 2, 1973, following Richard Helms's removal to the ambassadorship of Iran. Verified Within weeks of his arrival, Schlesinger had become alarmed at the agency's apparent entanglement with the Watergate burglars (Howard Hunt and James McCord were former CIA officers; the CIA's Technical Services Division had provided Hunt with a disguise and a false identification document for an unrelated 1971 operation). On May 9, 1973, Schlesinger signed a memorandum to all senior CIA officials directing them to compile, and report to him through the Inspector General, "all activities now going on, or that have gone on in the past, which might be construed to be outside the legislative charter of this agency" [1][2].

The memorandum was widely circulated within the senior cadre of the agency. The reports came back over the following six weeks. Inspector General William E. Colby assembled them into the 702-page compilation. Verified Schlesinger himself was confirmed as Secretary of Defense on July 2, 1973 and left the agency on July 13; Colby succeeded him as Director on September 4, 1973 and inherited the Family Jewels file [1][3].

What the compilation contained

The Family Jewels compilation documents activities of varying gravity, only some of which had been previously known even within the agency's senior leadership. Verified The principal categories, as reflected in the 2007 release, are:

• Operation CHAOS — the agency's domestic surveillance of the antiwar movement and other domestic political subjects from 1967 through 1974. CHAOS had been authorized by Director Richard Helms under Lyndon Johnson and continued under Nixon. The CHAOS file contained intelligence on approximately 7,200 American citizens and an index of approximately 300,000 American names. (See Operation CHAOS (File 019).) [3][4]
• HTLINGUAL — the New York and Washington mail-opening program. Between 1953 and 1973, the CIA's Office of Security opened, read, and photographed approximately 215,000 international letters to and from U.S. addresses, and photographed approximately 28 million envelope exteriors. Names of approximately 1.5 million Americans were entered into the program's index. (See HTLINGUAL (File 096).) [3][5]
• Journalist surveillance — the agency had wiretapped and physically surveilled a small number of American journalists, including Jack Anderson, Michael Getler of the Washington Post, and several others, in 1971 and 1972 in connection with attempts to identify the sources of agency leaks [3].
• Assassination plots against foreign heads of state — the compilation summarized the agency's involvement in plots and attempts against Fidel Castro (Cuba; the principal plots ran from 1960 through 1965 under Operation MONGOOSE and successor authorities), Patrice Lumumba (Congo, 1960; the agency considered and partially authorized but did not execute a plot before Lumumba was killed by Congolese rivals on January 17, 1961), Rafael Trujillo (Dominican Republic, 1961; the agency supplied weapons to internal Dominican conspirators who killed Trujillo on May 30, 1961), and the relationships with the November 1, 1963 coup that resulted in the death of Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam and the September 11, 1973 coup that resulted in the death of Salvador Allende in Chile. (See Operation MONGOOSE (File 026).) [3][6]
• Surveillance of named American activists — including Jane Fonda, whose international travel to North Vietnam in 1972 had brought her under combined CIA and FBI attention, and a small number of other antiwar movement figures. The CHAOS file is the principal vehicle for this material [3][4].
• Drug testing on unwitting subjects — residual MKULTRA material, including reference to the 1953 death of Frank Olson and to the agency's contracted unwitting-dosing operations (the "Midnight Climax" safe-houses in San Francisco and New York). (See MK-Ultra (File 001).) [3][7]
• Domestic break-ins — including a 1971 entry into the apartment of a former CIA employee in Fairfax, Virginia, and similar incidents [3].
• Detention of a Soviet defector — Yuri Nosenko, the KGB officer who defected in 1964, had been held by the CIA in solitary conditions at a Maryland safe-house and later at "The Farm" for approximately three years (1964–1967) under James Angleton's counterintelligence authority, on the suspicion that he was a Soviet plant [3][8].

Colby's decision to disclose to congressional oversight

Colby's handling of the Family Jewels file from September 1973 forward was, by his own subsequent account, governed by the conviction that the agency could not continue to operate effectively if the underlying activities remained concealed indefinitely. Verified Through 1973 and into 1974, Colby made selective references to the file in closed congressional briefings and in conversations with the Justice Department about specific items (notably the journalist wiretaps and the foreign assassination plots). The full file was not produced in any forum until after the Hersh disclosure of December 22, 1974 forced the matter into public view [3][9].

The Seymour Hersh December 22, 1974 exposure

Seymour M. Hersh's front-page New York Times article of December 22, 1974, headlined "Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years," presented the substance of what was in the Family Jewels file (although the file itself was not named). Verified Hersh's principal source, then and later, was identified as having been a current or former senior CIA official; subsequent journalistic and historical work has identified the source as having included Colby himself in part, and other officials who had been disturbed by the activities the file documented [9][10].

Hersh's article disclosed the CHAOS operation in substantial detail and asserted that the CIA had compiled files on more than 10,000 American citizens. The article forced Colby to brief Congress and the White House over the following days; on January 4, 1975, Colby provided President Gerald Ford with a written summary of the Family Jewels [9][11].

The Rockefeller Commission, January–June 1975

President Ford's response was to establish the President's Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States, chaired by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, on January 4, 1975. Verified The Rockefeller Commission's June 6, 1975 report described, in some detail, Operation CHAOS, HTLINGUAL, the journalist surveillance, the unwitting-dosing operations, and the domestic break-ins. It was thinner on the foreign assassination plots, on which Ford had told the Commission to defer to the parallel Senate investigation [11].

The Church Committee, 1975–1976

The Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities — the Church Committee, chaired by Senator Frank Church of Idaho — was established by Senate Resolution 21 on January 27, 1975. Verified The Committee took testimony from CIA officials including Colby, Richard Helms, James Angleton, Sheffield Edwards, and others. Its November 1975 interim report on assassination plots and its 1976 final report (six books) drew heavily on the Family Jewels material and on the underlying program records to which the Family Jewels had pointed. The House's parallel Pike Committee, chaired by Otis Pike of New York, produced a more politically contested final report whose publication the House blocked in 1976 (the report was leaked to The Village Voice and published in part) [12][13].

The 2007 public release

For thirty-two years after the underlying activities had become public knowledge, the Family Jewels compilation itself remained classified. Verified Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the compilation in 1992. The CIA's initial response was a partial denial; subsequent appeals and renewed requests over the following fifteen years progressively moved the agency toward release. On June 21, 2007, then-Director Michael V. Hayden announced the impending release; on June 25, 2007, the CIA published the redacted 702-page compilation on its public website [3][14]. The release was subsequently made available through the National Security Archive's own collection, with additional supporting documentation.

The official explanation.

The position the CIA has held since the 1975 Church Committee testimony is that the activities documented in the Family Jewels were, in the agency's own contemporary judgment, of varying gravity: some (the journalist wiretaps, the domestic break-ins, the Nosenko detention) were clearly outside any reasonable reading of the agency's charter; some (CHAOS, HTLINGUAL) were undertaken in response to specific operational concerns about foreign manipulation of American antiwar activity and grew well beyond their original scope; some (the assassination plots) were authorized at higher levels in the executive branch under doctrines of executive prerogative that the agency cannot retrospectively defend. Claimed Director Hayden's 2007 release announcement characterized the documents as evidence of "a different agency that operated in a different era," and emphasized the reforms instituted in response to the 1975–1976 disclosures — particularly the Executive Order 12333 framework that codified the prohibition on assassination [1][14].

On the foreign-assassination question, the agency's institutional position has been that, while the plots described in the Family Jewels (and more fully in the Church Committee's interim report) are accurately characterized, the executive prerogative under which they were authorized was a Cold War institutional reality that the post-1976 framework has formally repudiated. Executive Order 11905 (Ford, 1976) and its successors have prohibited any U.S. government employee from engaging in or conspiring to engage in political assassination [12][14].

On the domestic-surveillance question (CHAOS, HTLINGUAL, journalist wiretaps), the agency's position is that the activities were, in their core character, violations of the 1947 National Security Act's prohibition on CIA "internal security functions," and that the post-1975 framework — including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 and the formalization of the FBI's primacy on domestic intelligence — has substantially closed the institutional gap that allowed the activities to occur [14].

The unanswered questions.

The redactions in the 2007 release

The 702-page compilation released in 2007 carries substantial redactions, applied under the standard FOIA exemptions for classified information, intelligence sources and methods, and personal privacy. Disputed The redactions are particularly heavy in the sections describing the foreign-assassination plots and the relationship with foreign intelligence services. The National Security Archive's analysis at the time of the 2007 release identified a number of passages whose redaction did not, on inspection, appear necessary under the standard exemption criteria. Subsequent FOIA appeals have produced incremental further releases but the compilation in its fully unredacted form is not publicly available [3][14].

What was not reported in 1973

The Family Jewels compilation is a self-report. Unverified Whether the senior CIA officers asked to report in May 1973 reported comprehensively, or whether some activities (the surviving operational details of MKULTRA, the specifics of foreign-intelligence-service liaison work, the residue of activities the officers in question had concealed from their own predecessors) were omitted, is not fully resolvable from the documentary record. The 1973 destruction of MKULTRA records under Richard Helms's order, which preceded Schlesinger's May 1973 directive by approximately four months, is one of the clearest demonstrated cases of pre-Family-Jewels destruction; whether other categories of record were similarly winnowed before the May 1973 reporting deadline is not documented [1][7][15].

The Hersh source question

The specific identification of Seymour Hersh's principal source(s) for the December 22, 1974 article remains incompletely settled in the open record. Disputed Hersh has consistently declined to identify his sources beyond the broad characterization that they included current and former senior CIA officers. The conjecture that Colby himself was a deliberate channel — in the interest of forcing the disclosure he had concluded was unavoidable — is supported by some contemporary accounts (notably parts of John Ranelagh's 1986 history) and disputed by others [10][16]. Colby's own memoir, published posthumously in 1978, is delicately phrased on the question.

The Diem and Allende cases

The Family Jewels description of the agency's role in the November 1, 1963 South Vietnamese coup that killed Ngo Dinh Diem and in the September 11, 1973 Chilean coup that killed Salvador Allende is markedly less specific than its description of the Castro, Lumumba, and Trujillo plots. Disputed Whether the Diem and Allende deaths were anticipated, sought, or merely tolerated outcomes of authorized agency activity is a question on which the Family Jewels compilation is not, on its face, definitive. The subsequent Church Committee report developed both cases substantially further but did not, on Diem, reach a definitive conclusion on whether the agency had anticipated Diem's killing as a foreseeable consequence of the coup it had supported [3][12][13].

Post-1973 successor programs

Whether the abuses documented in the Family Jewels were comprehensively curtailed by the 1975–1978 reform framework, or whether they were in part replaced by functionally similar successor programs under reorganized institutional arrangements, is a question subsequent disclosures — particularly the Iran-Contra disclosures of 1986 and the post-2001 disclosures of CIA detention and interrogation practices — have raised but not definitively resolved [14][17].

Primary material.

The accessible primary record on the Family Jewels is held principally at four locations:

• The CIA's FOIA Reading Room (cia.gov/readingroom) hosts the official 2007 release of the 702-page compilation in its redacted form, organized by the original memorandum series.
• The National Security Archive at George Washington University (nsarchive.gwu.edu) hosts the Archive's own annotated edition of the 2007 release, together with the supporting Schlesinger May 9, 1973 directive, the Colby-era cover correspondence, and Tom Blanton's contemporary commentary on the release.
• The Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library holds the January 4, 1975 Colby briefing to President Ford on the Family Jewels and the contemporary White House correspondence leading to the establishment of the Rockefeller Commission.
• The National Archives (NARA) holds the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission records, including the underlying program-by-program documentation on which their reports drew.

Critical individual documents include: the May 9, 1973 Schlesinger directive to senior CIA officials; the underlying memoranda submitted in response by program managers across the agency; Colby's covering memorandum on the assembled compilation; Hersh's December 22, 1974 New York Times article; Colby's January 4, 1975 briefing memorandum to President Ford; the Rockefeller Commission Report (June 6, 1975); the Church Committee interim report on assassination plots (November 1975) and its 1976 six-volume final report; and the June 25, 2007 CIA release of the redacted compilation.

The sequence.

1. February 2, 1973 James R. Schlesinger sworn in as Director of Central Intelligence, succeeding Richard Helms.
2. May 9, 1973 Schlesinger signs the directive ordering senior CIA officials to report any activity outside the agency's charter.
3. May–June 1973 Reports compiled by Inspector General William E. Colby; 702-page document assembled.
4. July 2, 1973 Schlesinger confirmed as Secretary of Defense; departs CIA on July 13.
5. September 4, 1973 Colby succeeds Schlesinger as Director of Central Intelligence; inherits the Family Jewels file.
6. September–December 1974 Colby makes selective references to the file in closed congressional briefings; full file remains in the DCI's safe.
7. December 22, 1974 Seymour Hersh's front-page New York Times article exposes the underlying activities, particularly Operation CHAOS.
8. January 4, 1975 Colby briefs President Gerald Ford on the Family Jewels; Ford announces the establishment of the Rockefeller Commission the same day.
9. January 27, 1975 Senate Resolution 21 establishes the Church Committee.
10. February 19, 1975 House Resolution 138 establishes the Pike Committee.
11. June 6, 1975 Rockefeller Commission report published, covering CHAOS, HTLINGUAL, journalist surveillance, unwitting-dosing operations, and domestic break-ins.
12. November 20, 1975 Church Committee interim report on assassination plots against foreign leaders published.
13. February 18, 1976 Executive Order 11905, signed by President Ford, formally prohibits political assassination by U.S. government employees.
14. April–June 1976 Church Committee final report (six books) published.
15. 1992 Thomas Blanton, National Security Archive, files initial FOIA request for the Family Jewels compilation.
16. June 21, 2007 CIA Director Michael Hayden announces impending release.
17. June 25, 2007 CIA publishes the redacted 702-page Family Jewels compilation on its public website.

Cases on this archive that connect.

MK-Ultra (File 001) — the CIA mind-control program whose residual paper trail was a substantial component of the Family Jewels compilation. The 1973 Helms destruction of MKULTRA records preceded the Schlesinger directive by months; what survived the destruction is largely what entered the Family Jewels.

Operation CHAOS (File 019) — the CIA domestic-surveillance program. CHAOS was the single largest substantive item in the Family Jewels file and the principal target of Hersh's December 22, 1974 exposure.

Operation MONGOOSE (File 026) — the early-1960s anti-Castro program. The Castro-assassination material in the Family Jewels overlaps substantially with the MONGOOSE record and with the post-MONGOOSE assassination authorities documented by the Church Committee.

COINTELPRO (File 009) — the FBI counterintelligence program. The Family Jewels and the COINTELPRO disclosures were prosecuted as related institutional crises by the Church Committee, on the recognition that the two programs had operated in adjacent domains against substantially overlapping target populations.

More related files coming as the archive grows. Planned: the Rockefeller Commission as a standalone file, the Church Committee documents, the Pike Committee report, Executive Order 12333.

Full bibliography.

1. Schlesinger, James R., Director of Central Intelligence, Memorandum for All CIA Senior Officials, May 9, 1973. Released as part of the 2007 Family Jewels disclosure.
2. Colby, William E., Director of Central Intelligence, covering memoranda on the assembled compilation, June–September 1973. Released 2007.
3. Central Intelligence Agency, "Family Jewels" compilation, 702 pages, originally compiled May–June 1973; redacted public release June 25, 2007. CIA FOIA Reading Room.
4. U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (Church Committee), Final Report, Book III: Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, April 1976. Coverage of Operation CHAOS.
5. Church Committee, Final Report, Book II: Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, April 1976. Coverage of HTLINGUAL and other mail-opening programs.
6. Church Committee, Interim Report: Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, November 20, 1975. Covers the Castro, Lumumba, Trujillo, Diem, and Schneider (Chile) cases.
7. Marks, John, The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate": The CIA and Mind Control, Times Books, 1979. Establishes the MKULTRA destruction context against which the Family Jewels was compiled.
8. Bagley, Tennent H., Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games, Yale University Press, 2007. Includes a substantial treatment of the Yuri Nosenko detention.
9. Hersh, Seymour M., "Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years," The New York Times, December 22, 1974, p. 1.
10. Hersh, Seymour M., The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House, Summit Books, 1983. Provides additional context on the 1974 disclosure.
11. President's Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States (Rockefeller Commission), Report to the President, June 6, 1975.
12. Executive Order 11905, "United States Foreign Intelligence Activities," February 18, 1976; superseded by Executive Order 12036 (Carter, 1978) and Executive Order 12333 (Reagan, 1981).
13. U.S. House Select Committee on Intelligence (Pike Committee), final report, suppressed by House vote but leaked to The Village Voice, February 1976.
14. National Security Archive (Blanton, Thomas S. and Kornbluh, Peter, eds.), The Family Jewels: The CIA, Secrecy, and Presidential Power, electronic briefing book, 2007–present.
15. Powers, Thomas, The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA, Knopf, 1979. Covers the 1973 MKULTRA destruction.
16. Ranelagh, John, The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA, Simon & Schuster, 1986. Discusses the Colby-Hersh interaction.
17. Colby, William E. and Forbath, Peter, Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA, Simon & Schuster, 1978. Colby's own account of his decision-making during the 1973–1975 period.