With Release of "Family Jewels", CIA Acknowledges Years of Assassination Plots, Coerced Drug Tests, and Domestic Spying

The CIA has released its so-called "family jewels." On Tuesday, the Agency declassified nearly 700 pages of documents that detail some if its most infamous and illegal operations from the 1950s to the early 1970s. Although many portions of the documents were blacked out, they detail assassination plots against foreign leaders like Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba, the testing of mind and behavior-altering drugs like LSD on unwitting citizens, wiretapping of U.S. journalists, spying on civil rights and anti-Vietnam war protesters, opening mail between the United States and the Soviet Union and China, break-ins at the homes of ex-CIA employees and more.

Announcing the release of the "family jewels" last week, CIA Director Michael Hayden said: "Most of it is unflattering, but it is CIA's history." He added that the declassified documents provided "a glimpse of a very different time and a very different Agency."

Tuesday's release of the documents marks the first time the CIA is publicly acknowledging responsibility for its illegal activities. The file was produced in 1973 in response to a directive from then CIA director James Schlesinger to conduct an internal investigation into the agency's covert operations that were "outside the CIA's charter."

John Prados is a Senior Fellow at the National Security Archive. The archive is an independent research institute that filed the original Freedom of Information Act request for the "family jewels" fifteen years ago. John Prados, joining us from Washington, DC, Welcome to Democracy Now!

John Prados . Senior Fellow at the National Security Archive. He directs the Vietnam Documentation Project at the archive and is the author of Pulitzer-prize nominated books, including "Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA", "Hoodwinked: The Documents that Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War", and "Lost Crusader: The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby."

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