The Family Jewels

The CIA's own list of its illegal operations. The released copy is mostly ink.

Imagine you're the new director of the CIA and someone hands you a folder. Inside it is roughly 693 pages of everything your own Agency has done that it was never supposed to do. Assassination contracts. Mail steamed open. Reporters wiretapped. American citizens drugged. Now imagine your job is deciding what to do with that folder. That was William Colby's problem in 1973, and the folder had a nickname: the Family Jewels. So let me walk you through how it came to exist. Documented: in May 1973, in the choking heat of Watergate, DCI James Schlesinger learned that two of the burglars, E. Howard Hunt and James McCord, had CIA ties. Rattled, he issued a directive ordering employees to report any past or current activity that fell outside the Agency's charter. He wanted to know where the bodies were buried. What came back was a compilation of the Agency's own confessed sins. Here's what's documented to be inside. Warrantless mail-opening programs reading Americans' correspondence. Wiretaps and surveillance aimed at journalists, including Jack Anderson and the columnists Robert Allen and Paul Scott. The years-long confinement of Soviet defector Yuri Nosenko. Behavior-modification experiments on unwitting people. Assassination plotting against Fidel Castro and Congo's Patrice Lumumba. Files compiled on more than 9,900 Americans tied to the antiwar movement. Not rumor. The Agency's own inventory of itself. Now here's where it gets strange. This folder sat locked away, and it might have stayed buried, except investigative reporter Seymour Hersh got wind of it. Documented: on December 22, 1974, the New York Times ran his front-page story on a massive domestic CIA operation against antiwar Americans. The dam cracked. But the document itself? It stayed classified for another thirty-three years, finally released in June 2007 under DCI Michael Hayden — and even then it came out heavily redacted, black bars swallowing whole paragraphs. And that's the lesson this file teaches the whole archive, the reason it earns its own node. For decades, skeptics could say there was 'no evidence' the CIA plotted assassinations or spied on citizens. They were right in the narrowest possible sense. There was no released evidence. The evidence existed the entire time, sitting in a safe, wearing a nickname. 'No evidence' and 'no released evidence' are not the same sentence, and the gap between them is exactly where this archive lives. Where does this file connect? It's the pivot point. The Hersh story and the Jewels detonated straight into the church-committee investigations of 1975-76, which turned the private confession into public law. And every dark line item — the mind-control, the plots, the media assets — traces back to the cia hub. The Family Jewels are the moment the hub's rumors became receipts.