The Family Jewels (9 page)

Who can say that there has been no CIA involvement in any of this? Indeed, there are indications that suggest the opposite. A 1981 presidential directive permits agency technical assistance to police forces. The creation of an array of dozens of so-called “fusion centers,” which bring together federal and local security officials for purposes of sharing information and conducting counterterrorism operations, has certainly involved CIA input, especially in the wake of widespread accusations that Langley's failure to share intelligence and “connect the dots” was a factor in the tragedy of the 9/11 attacks. These charges were substantiated by a major commission investigation whose recommendations included precisely such intelligence sharing.

It is a fact that a senior CIA official, David Cohen, left the agency to take charge of the intelligence unit of the New York Police Department (NYPD). The Reagan-era order that authorized CIA help to local police also required that such assistance be approved by the agency's general counsel, at this time Scott Muller. But the counsel's office never sanctioned Cohen's move to the NYPD. David Cohen began at Langley as an economic analyst—he was a principal in estimates of Soviet oil production in the late 1970s and '80s—but ended as chief of the CIA's clandestine service. Cohen had a penchant for operations, plus many agency contacts to draw upon. And Cohen's NYPD unit has subsequently been
accused of high-handed tactics in its activities. Relations between FBI and the New York police, long delicate, deteriorated with Cohen at the head of the Intelligence Division. The CIA was an obvious alternative. At first the idea was that the New York police would obtain better access to CIA intelligence, but Cohen quickly went beyond that to create field teams, dispatch officers to scenes of major incidents all over the world to gather data firsthand, spy on citizens in their neighborhoods and mosques, and conduct NYPD sting operations like the infamous “red squads” of the 1960s. By 2005 the NYPD was good enough to be supplying data to Langley.
³¹
The FBI now refuses to participate in NYPD stings.

In the wake of 9/11, then–CIA director George Tenet attached an active officer, one Larry Sanchez, to the NYPD to help strengthen its counterterrorism capabilities. In that case Sanchez trained NYPD officers in intelligence tradecraft. Sanchez also selected an NYPD detective to undergo the full agency instructional program at Camp Peary in Virginia. Sanchez became Cohen's deputy in 2004. Until then he had continued on the CIA's payroll, and even now only took a leave of absence, resigning several years later after conflict of interest protests from CIA's own New York base chief. Sanchez remained with the New York police until 2010. His job as police Intelligence Division assistant director was then filled—wait for it!—by a new undercover officer seconded from the Central Intelligence Agency, reportedly one of its most senior men. Langley's General Counsel never approved the Sanchez assignment either.

During this period the New York police undertook an aggressive program of monitoring Muslim groups as potential subversives. Its “Demographics Unit” supposedly simply mapped neighborhoods. But officers listened in on conversations and attended local events, and the merest whiff of suspicion was used to open investigations. In fact, the most recent terrorism conspiracy case in New York, in which
citizens were arrested in an alleged bomb plot, was so heavily infiltrated by NYPD that the FBI refused to participate. What this says about agency domestic activity is not clear.

The most serious terrorist attack attempted in New York City after 9/11 was a car bombing in Times Square, averted in May 2010. Nearby vendors called in as suspicious a parked sport utility vehicle that turned out to be rigged with a bomb. Standard police work traced the license plate number to its owner and led to the apprehension of the perpetrator. Federal Bureau of Investigation special agents quickly took over the investigation. The NYPD Intelligence Division had little role to play. On the other hand, the police spooks and the FBI were very active in gathering data on the “Occupy” Movement, whose march on Wall Street and encampment there in the fall of 2011 sparked a wave of national—and even international—protests against corporate greed and collusion. The protests were activities shielded by citizens' First Amendment rights. To the degree that CIA fed NYPD intelligence to other fronts of the “Occupy” protests, or relayed data gathered elsewhere to the New York police, the agency had arguably engaged in domestic activity.

What is crystal clear is that CIA practices aroused concern. Thirty-four congressmen addressed a letter to Attorney General Holder requesting action. The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence held a hearing. In October 2011 Michael Morell, acting as CIA director until the swearing in of David Petraeus, ordered an IG inquiry. The Inspector General, David Buckley, conducted a two-month examination and cleared Tenet and the agency of any impropriety for the NYPD relationship. But early in 2012 Langley informed the New York Police Department that its officer's assignment would be terminated come spring.

From what can be gleaned so far, the Vietnam-era surveillance remains the high point of CIA domestic activity. But the record today remains murky. Meanwhile, the act of spying
on citizens is as unacceptable today as it was before. Thus abuses during the Bush era are a potential Family Jewel that cannot be dismissed until the relevant records are released. So far, the documented instances of military domestic spying already raise suspicions. As for U.S. intelligence writ large, a huge Family Jewel—a real one and closely related—exists in the form of National Security Agency electronic surveillance of Americans. That represents an evolution of a different CIA program from the bad old days. Together with the Jewels of CIA renditions, torture, black prisons, and assassination, these are the real scandals that secrecy now protects.

4

SURVEILLANCE II

Private Communications

At the time James Schlesinger demanded that CIA create the Family Jewels documents, its mail-opening figured in a minor key. Intelligence officers understood the chilling aspect of their infiltration of political groups quite well, while the opening of personal mail drew on classic techniques of espionage tradecraft. Yet there were specific prohibitions in law against anyone—the CIA included—tampering with the U.S. mail. During the 1975 Year of Intelligence, mail-opening emerged as a huge scandal: an acknowledged illegality and one that touched the hearts and minds of citizens—ordinary people committing their private thoughts to paper and entrusting them to the sacrosanct U.S. Post Office. The spooks somehow missed the point that this activity, more than a technical violation of law, struck at Americans' personal feelings and expressions. Socially reprehensible, legally criminal, the mail-opening became an instant Family Jewel.

For citizens today, this monitoring of private communications deserves to be regarded as even more sinister. In the 1950s and 1960s, when this surveillance was underway, mail served the same functions as today's cell-phone calls, texts,
and e-mail.
¹
Monitoring the mails meant, then as now, Big Brother peering into the citizenry's major form of casual—and formal—communication. In addition, as a supersensitive project—and this is a problem with today's high security phone monitoring as well—the mail-opening was kept outside the normal project approval process, making abuse that much easier. The more secret the activity the greater the temptation to evade safeguards.

In the spring of 1952 the CIA's operations staff, more specifically its Soviet Russia Division, first suggested a mail-opening program. The avowed purpose was psychological warfare. By opening letters to and from the Soviet Union the spies hoped to discover what bothered Russians. Those raw sores could be picked at by incorporating them into the themes of U.S. propaganda, both overt and covert. No consideration was given to the fact that obstructing the mails, tampering with the mails, and so on were criminal offenses (under Title 18, U.S. Code §1701 and following, and Title 39, §4057). That July a CIA office chief suggested a feasibility study be conducted in conjunction with the Post Office Department.
²

The project moved from experimental to full-scale activity in February 1953. Here the Post Office acquiesced, in effect, to a criminal violation of law, subject to the understanding that there would be
no
tampering with the mails “beyond the minimum necessary for an exterior examination.”
³
Exterior examination meant looking at the envelope and recording sender and addressee. The Soviet Division's cryptonym for this project was Sr/Pointer. Agency inspectors later observed that Sr/Pointer could not be considered a true “project” because
it had never been put through the CIA's formal approval process
.
⁴

The Post Office's limited sanction came at a high point of
the Cold War, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower initiated all manner of covert operations to combat the Russians and their supposed Third World clients. Despite enjoying Eisenhower's favor, the Central Intelligence Agency never sought his permission for this initiative. No doubt believing he was preserving Ike's plausible deniability by not obtaining authorization, CIA Director Allen W. Dulles foolishly ensured by this means that CIA mail-opening was never blessed by higher authority.

Post Office guidelines permitted CIA to track who (or, more properly, what addresses) sent mail to or received it from the Soviet Union, but nothing of the contents. The Post Office's “minimum necessary” also meant restricting intelligence officers to making handwritten notes of addresses. The procedure did not afford the speed CIA sought and made it impossible to handle more than a fraction of the mail. The program was still in its infancy when, in September 1953, the Soviet Russia Division pressed to go beyond this restriction by photographing rather than noting the “covers” (envelopes) of
all
the mail addressed to Russia. The Post Office refused.

Director Allen Dulles and then–chief of operations Richard Helms of the Soviet Russia Division met with Postmaster General Arthur E. Summerfield on the afternoon of May 17, 1954. They tried to break the logjam. The Soviet Russia Division also wished to move beyond covers to copy the actual contents of letters. Dulles did not mention that the CIA wanted more than covers. The CIA director spoke of photographing covers of U.S. mail, but, the agency's notetaker recorded, “also said we wanted very much to be able to review first-class correspondence of this same sort directed to
Latin America
.”
⁵
Mr. Summerfield “
did not comment specifically
,” but, according to Helms's record of the meeting, nevertheless gave the impression “he was in favor of giving us any assistance which he could.” The CIA took those assurances to the bank. It immediately ordered expansion of the Sr/
Pointer project. The very next day a postal official went to New York, the mail transit point and locale for Sr/Pointer, to check on the necessary arrangements.
⁶
In 1975 Church Committee investigators established that the CIA had deliberately
avoided
mentioning its larger goals in discussions with postal officials.

The CIA project proceeded. But virtually all the letters examined contained no real intelligence. The agency's Soviet Division tired of investing resources in a project that yielded so little. A key change took place late in 1955. At that point James Angleton of the Counterintelligence Staff made a bid to take over the action, with the fieldwork to be done by the Office of Security. Angleton's proposal memorandum reveals the agency was
already opening
letters, noting, “The only added function . . . is that more letters will be opened,” as opposed to the “very limited number” already being processed. Angleton also frankly added, “Presently letters are opened without the knowledge of the Post Office Department on a completely surreptitious basis” in a CIA office in New York, and that so far no one in the Post Office suspected the truth. The revised project would be known as HT/Lingual. Its purpose would be counterintelligence. The CIA aimed to identify possible Russian spies or their accommodation addresses so as to detect enemy agents. Richard Helms, now risen to assistant deputy director for operations, approved this scheme on a fateful day—December 7, 1955. The directorate consented to Lingual's budget several months later.

Project Lingual functioned smoothly for a very long time. Mail transiting the Port of New York was handed over to CIA by the bagful. The work took place after-hours, when post offices were closed. An agency facility in a secure room at LaGuardia Airport photographed the covers. Letters selected for interior examination were carried to a CIA office in Manhattan. There the letters were steamed open—the CIA never found a better way to do this than over boiling water from
a teapot—and the letters themselves photographed and checked for such esoterica of the spy trade as microdots or secret handwriting. They were then replaced and the envelopes closed with an iron on an ironing board. Letters from both Manhattan and LaGuardia were then reinserted into the U.S. mail.

Volume increased tremendously: 832 pieces of mail got the heavy-duty treatment in 1956, but there were 8,000 a couple of years later. The first bump in the road came in January 1958 when the FBI, wanting to start something similar, discovered CIA was already opening mail. Instead of turning in the agency, the FBI wanted in on the take, which the spy service was happy to share. Project Hunter became the FBI's name for its collection effort on the mail, and it received 57,000 items from the CIA over the period of the program. In all but three years, the FBI received more spot reports from agency mail-opening than any CIA component. Over twenty years, the mail-opening program in New York alone (there would be several lesser adjuncts) handled 28,322,796 letters, which works out to slightly fewer than 4,000
a day
.