The Family Jewels — CIA Internal Compendium, 1973

Audio readout of this dossier.

Background

In early 1973 the Central Intelligence Agency operated under substantial post-Watergate institutional stress. The unfolding Senate Watergate Committee investigation, the parallel House Judiciary impeachment-investigation proceedings, and the substantial press attention to the institutional question of CIA involvement in the Watergate break-in and its associated activities had produced — within the Agency's senior leadership — a substantive concern that the broader pattern of CIA Cold War operational activity might become institutionally vulnerable to disclosure. The institutional position was both defensive (a desire to prevent further institutional damage from unmanaged disclosure) and substantively-anticipatory (a recognition that the broader Cold War record might require institutional acknowledgement on the Agency's own terms rather than through external disclosure).¹

James Rodney Schlesinger took office as the ninth Director of Central Intelligence on 2 February 1973, succeeding Richard Helms. Schlesinger's appointment — preceded by service as an Assistant Director of the Office of Management and Budget and as Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission — was the Nixon administration's substantive break with the Helms-era institutional culture of the Agency, and Schlesinger across his five-month tenure (he was sworn in as Secretary of Defense on 2 July 1973) substantially restructured the Agency's senior personnel, ordered the dismissal of approximately 1,500 CIA officers including substantial portions of the Directorate of Operations, and undertook the internal-review activity that would produce the Family Jewels compendium.²

The Compilation

On 9 May 1973, Schlesinger issued an internal directive to all CIA Deputy Directors and senior officials requiring each to report to him "any 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." The directive's substantive scope — past as well as ongoing activities, with the framing of statutory rather than political vulnerability — was institutionally consequential because it required CIA personnel to compile their own institutional account of activities the Agency's own leadership judged might exceed the foreign-intelligence mandate established by the National Security Act of 1947.³

The compilation that resulted across the following six weeks ran to approximately 693 pages of internal reports. Operational coordination of the compilation fell to William Colby, then Deputy Director for Operations and the senior officer with the broadest cross-directorate access to the activities the directive addressed. Colby succeeded Schlesinger as Director of Central Intelligence on 4 September 1973 following Schlesinger's transfer to the Department of Defense, and Colby's institutional position across the subsequent two-year period — as the Director responsible for managing the institutional response to the Rockefeller Commission and Church Committee investigations — was substantially shaped by his direct familiarity with the Family Jewels document's contents.⁴

The colloquial name "Family Jewels" reflected the institutional position that the document compendium contained the Agency's most sensitive and institutionally vulnerable material. The label was used internally within CIA from substantially the compilation period onward and entered the broader public-record vocabulary through the Church Committee–era disclosures of 1975–76.⁵

Contents

The substantive content of the Family Jewels addressed approximately twenty principal areas of CIA activity that Agency personnel reported as potentially exceeding the foreign-intelligence statutory mandate. The principal items, as subsequently documented in the Rockefeller Commission and Church Committee reports and in the 2007 declassification of the document itself, included:

• The HTLINGUAL mail-opening programme conducted at the international-mail-routing facility at New York's airport from 1952 to 1973.
• The Operation CHAOS domestic-surveillance umbrella run from the Counter-Intelligence Staff's Special Operations Group from 1967 to 1974, indexing approximately 300,000 American names.
• Project MKUltra and the related behavioural-modification programmes (BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE, MKDELTA, MKNAOMI, MKSEARCH) conducted from 1953 to 1973.
• The 1960s assassination plots against foreign leaders — principally Fidel Castro of Cuba, Patrice Lumumba of Congo, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam, and General René Schneider of Chile.
• The CIA wiretapping and physical surveillance of US journalists, including Jack Anderson, Les Whitten, Brit Hume, and Michael Getler, conducted in 1971–1972 in connection with the Agency's investigations of leaks of classified information.
• The surveillance and physical investigation of US Members of Congress, including Representative Michael Harrington (whose disclosure of CIA Chile-coup information to the press the Agency investigated under a partial domestic-surveillance posture).
• The institutional CIA cooperation with the Nixon-administration "plumbers" unit — principally the provision of operational equipment and identification materials for the September 1971 burglary of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist Lewis Fielding, conducted by E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy.
• The Project MOCKINGBIRD wiretap (12 March – 15 June 1963) of Washington-based syndicated columnists Robert S. Allen and Paul Scott, conducted by the CIA Office of Security (a distinct operation from the broader Operation Mockingbird framing in the secondary literature, with which it shares only a name).
• The CIA cooperation with the FBI's HUNTER mail-opening programme through inter-agency liaison.
• The institutional CIA testing of behavioural-modification drugs on US-citizen subjects who had not consented to participation in CIA-funded research.

The substantive volume of the compilation across these areas was uneven — some items received brief institutional summaries; others (principally the assassination plots and the MKUltra-related material) received substantive reconstruction running to tens of pages.⁶

The 1974 Disclosure

The existence and contents of the Family Jewels compendium remained classified within CIA across the remainder of 1973 and 1974, with the document held in the Director's office under restricted access controls. The first substantive public exposure of its contents came through Seymour Hersh's 22 December 1974 New York Times front-page article — "Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years" — which drew on confidential discussions with multiple CIA sources who had been involved in producing the compilation. The Hersh disclosure substantively documented the CIA's Operation CHAOS programme, the HTLINGUAL mail-opening programme, and the broader pattern of CIA activity directed at US-domestic political targets — the substantive content the Family Jewels addressed without identifying the Family Jewels document itself by name.⁷

The Hersh disclosure was the precipitating event for the substantial Congressional and Executive Branch investigation that followed. Within approximately five weeks the President's Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States (the Rockefeller Commission) was established under Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller (4 January 1975); the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (the Church Committee) was established under Senator Frank Church (27 January 1975); and the parallel House Select Committee on Intelligence — established under Representative Lucien Nedzi by H. Res. 138 on 19 February 1975 and reconstituted under Representative Otis Pike by H. Res. 591 on 17 July 1975 after Nedzi's resignation from the chairmanship — produced the inquiry subsequently known as the Pike Committee investigation.⁸

The Subsequent Investigations

The Family Jewels supplied the substantive evidentiary base from which the three investigative bodies worked across 1975–76. Director Colby's institutional decision — coordinated with the Ford administration and with substantial internal-CIA debate — was to provide the Rockefeller Commission and the Church and Pike Committees with substantial access to the Family Jewels compendium under appropriate classification protocols, on the institutional reasoning that the Agency's substantive cooperation with the inquiries would produce a better outcome than would resistance and the subsequent disclosure that the resistance would invite.⁹

The Rockefeller Commission's Final Report of 6 June 1975 addressed substantially all of the Family Jewels content categories within its institutional remit (CIA activities within the United States), producing the first comprehensive public-record account of HTLINGUAL, CHAOS, MKUltra's US-citizen testing, and the CIA cooperation with the Nixon-administration plumbers. The Church Committee's Final Report across April and June 1976 — six books totalling approximately 6,000 pages — provided the most comprehensive public-record account of substantially all the Family Jewels material, including the assassination plots (the Interim Report on Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders of 20 November 1975) and the broader domestic-surveillance pattern documented across Book III. The Pike Committee's institutional product was substantially less than the Church Committee's because of inter-branch friction over classification (the Pike Report itself was suppressed by House vote and circulated only in leaked form), but the Pike investigation's findings on CIA budgeting and analytical performance produced substantive institutional consequence.¹⁰

The institutional consequence of the 1975–76 inquiries — substantially built on the Family Jewels evidentiary base — was the post-1976 framework of standing oversight (Senate Select Committee on Intelligence established 19 May 1976; House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence established 14 July 1977); the post-1976 framework of Executive Orders governing US intelligence activities (Ford EO 11905 of 18 February 1976; Carter EO 12036 of 24 January 1978; Reagan EO 12333 of 4 December 1981, as subsequently amended); and the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act establishing the statutory framework for foreign-intelligence collection on US persons.¹¹

The 2007 Declassification

The Family Jewels document itself remained classified for thirty-four years following its 1973 compilation. The substantive public-record account of its contents had been established by the Rockefeller and Church Committee reports of 1975–76; the document itself remained internal to CIA and was not released through those proceedings.

Across the 1990s and early 2000s the National Security Archive at George Washington University pursued declassification of the Family Jewels through successive Freedom of Information Act litigation. The substantive declassification came on 25 June 2007, when Director Michael Hayden — in the context of the broader post-2001 institutional declassification programme and the Agency's then-current institutional posture on Cold War transparency — released a substantially redacted version of the document through CIA's electronic reading room. The released document ran to approximately 702 pages (slightly different from the original 693-page count because of administrative-formatting differences in the declassification release) and confirmed in substantive detail the Church Committee's 1975–76 reconstruction.¹²

Legacy

The Family Jewels is the principal internal-CIA primary-source document for the agency's Cold War operational record. Its institutional position is twofold. First, the document remains the principal entry point for primary-source research on CIA Cold War activity — the operational-records destruction that accompanied the post-1973 institutional unwinding of many of the programmes the document describes (most consequentially the Helms-ordered destruction of MKUltra files in 1973) has meant that the Family Jewels compendium has substantively outperformed the operational records as the primary-source basis for reconstructing the underlying programmes. Second, the document's existence and the institutional architecture under which it was compiled — Schlesinger's directive requiring CIA personnel to compile their own institutional account of potentially-unlawful activity — has been the recurring institutional reference case for the proposition that intelligence-service institutional reform requires internally-generated documentary disclosure as much as externally-imposed institutional oversight.

The Family Jewels sits at the centre of the Church Committee–era cluster of programmes this site documents through dedicated dossiers — HTLINGUAL, Operation CHAOS, HUNTER, MKUltra, Project SHAMROCK, Project MINARET, COINTELPRO, and Operation Mockingbird. Each of those dossiers references the Family Jewels as a primary-source citation; the Family Jewels dossier itself addresses the document and its institutional history as the central editorial subject.

Related agencies

This document is institutionally a Central Intelligence Agency internal compendium and is documented in detail on the agency page of the Central Intelligence Agency. The institutional context is the United States; the principal individual figure associated with the document's compilation is documented on the notorious profile of James Schlesinger.

Sources & Further Reading

1. Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Doubleday, 2007), chapters 24–25; John Prados, The Family Jewels: The CIA, Secrecy, and Presidential Power (University of Texas Press, 2013); Loch K. Johnson, A Season of Inquiry: The Senate Intelligence Investigation (University Press of Kentucky, 1985).
2. James R. Schlesinger biographical materials, CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence; Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, op. cit., chapter 24.
3. CIA "Family Jewels" memorandum (compiled May 1973, declassified June 2007); James Schlesinger, internal CIA directive of 9 May 1973 (declassified with the Family Jewels release through CIA's electronic reading room).
4. William Colby and Peter Forbath, Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA (Simon and Schuster, 1978); Prados, The Family Jewels, op. cit.
5. CIA Family Jewels memorandum, op. cit.; Prados, The Family Jewels, op. cit., on the institutional terminology.
6. CIA Family Jewels memorandum, op. cit. — the principal item-by-item content references derive directly from the 2007-declassified document, available through CIA's electronic reading room and through the National Security Archive's annotated version.
7. Seymour Hersh, "Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years," New York Times, 22 December 1974; Hersh's subsequent reporting across late December 1974 and early 1975.
8. President's Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States (Rockefeller Commission), Executive Order 11828, 4 January 1975; Senate Resolution 21, 94th Congress, 27 January 1975 (establishing the Church Committee); House Resolution 138, 94th Congress, 19 February 1975 (establishing the House Select Committee on Intelligence under Representative Lucien Nedzi); House Resolution 591, 94th Congress, 17 July 1975 (reconstituting the House Select Committee on Intelligence under Representative Otis Pike).
9. Colby and Forbath, Honorable Men, op. cit.; Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, op. cit., chapter 25; Loch K. Johnson, A Season of Inquiry, op. cit.
10. Final Report of the Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States (Rockefeller Commission, 6 June 1975); Senate Church Committee, Interim Report on Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, 20 November 1975; Senate Church Committee, Final Report, Books I–VI (April–June 1976); House Pike Committee, Recommendations of the Final Report, January 1976 (leaked to the Village Voice in February 1976).
11. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, Pub. L. 95-511; Executive Order 11905 of 18 February 1976; Executive Order 12036 of 24 January 1978; Executive Order 12333 of 4 December 1981, as subsequently amended; Senate Resolution 400, 94th Congress, 19 May 1976 (establishing the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence); House Resolution 658, 95th Congress, 14 July 1977 (establishing the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence).
12. CIA Family Jewels memorandum, electronic reading room release of 25 June 2007 (substantially redacted, approximately 702 pages); National Security Archive at George Washington University, annotated Family Jewels collection (2007 onward); Director Michael Hayden, public statements on the declassification, 25 June 2007.