The "Family Jewels" (1973)

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family-jewels.pdf · 148 pages · 4.9 MB

Extract

Pages 1-17,20-48,51-150,422-423 of the 702-page original: the first 150 pages (the Office of Security's list and the first replies) and Schlesinger's memorandum of 9 May 1973 that started the exercise; four pages of Washington Post columns attached to the file are left out (still under copyright). The full 702-page release is linked. The full release is at the link below.

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Read it page by page (our OCR of the scan)

Original

CIA FOIA Electronic Reading Room

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26 October 2026, from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine copy of the government page (copy)

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4bb2f7092eb405a68d0fa9e05a82699dee4c077a72f18eb1dd000441e0e8d13e

Licence

Public domain: a work of the US federal government (17 U.S.C. § 105).

The trigger was Watergate. In the spring of 1973 the press reported that the CIA had helped E. Howard Hunt, a former officer by then working for the Nixon White House. James R. Schlesinger, Director of Central Intelligence for only a few months, conceded that the agency had given "limited assistance" at the request of senior officials². On 9 May 1973 he sent a memorandum to every CIA employee. He promised to keep the agency within "a strict interpretation of its legislative charter" and ordered staff, past and present, to tell him about anything that might fall outside it². Anyone with information was to ask his secretary, on extension 6363, to speak about "activities outside CIA's charter"².

The replies came in over the following weeks, as memoranda from directorates, offices and individuals. Bound together, they became the file known inside the agency as the "Family Jewels." It passed to William Colby when he succeeded Schlesinger later in 1973^3,6.

What is in the file

The released compilation runs to about 700 pages, mostly typed memoranda with handwritten routing slips and many blacked-out passages^2,3. It has no single argument and no conclusions.

A typical submission is the Office of Security's of 16 May 1973. Its director said he was reporting activities that in his opinion conflicted with the National Security Act of 1947, going back to March 1959, because many of the people involved were still alive and the matters kept their "flap potential"². His list opens with a redacted first item, then names Johnny Roselli and the use of the Mafia against Castro (see The plots against Fidel Castro). It goes on to Project MOCKINGBIRD, telephone taps on two Washington newsmen from 12 March to 15 June 1963 (see Project Mockingbird (1963)), and the confinement of the KGB defector Yuri Nosenko in a specially built cell from August 1965 to October 1967². Other items cover surveillance of reporters and equipment lent to local police².

The rest of the file covers similar ground. It includes the opening of mail between the United States and the Soviet Union, the MHCHAOS program that watched American dissidents for signs of foreign support (see Operation CHAOS), papers on Sidney Gottlieb's drug experiments (see Project MKUltra), a plan to poison the Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba (see The CIA and the Congo crisis, 1960–61), warrantless wiretapping, and material involving James Angleton's counterintelligence staff³. A January 1975 summary prepared for the White House listed 18 matters that raised legal questions⁶.

From leak to investigation

The file stayed secret, but its contents did not. On 22 December 1974 Seymour Hersh reported in the New York Times that the CIA had run a large domestic operation against the antiwar movement during the Nixon years³. The story led President Ford to appoint a commission under Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. In January 1975 the Senate set up the select committee chaired by Frank Church, and the House set up its own inquiry^4,6.

The Senate Historical Office describes the Family Jewels as the best-known of the internal reports the investigators obtained, and says they used it as a road map⁴. The committee's interim report on assassination plots, published in November 1975, is described at Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders (1975).

Release in 2007

For more than three decades the CIA refused FOIA requests for the file. On 21 June 2007 Director Michael Hayden announced that it would be declassified. On 26 June CIA officers delivered the release to the National Security Archive, which had asked for it 15 years earlier³. Hayden spoke of a 693-page file. The archive counted 702 pages in what it received³. Whole pages and many names are still withheld, and the first item on the Office of Security list is entirely blacked out².

How to read it

The file is a set of answers to a question, not a history. Its contents depend on what officers chose to report in a few weeks of May 1973, and on what the 2007 reviewers chose to release. It says little about who authorized what. The Office of Security assured the reader that each activity it listed had been approved by "higher authority," meaning the Director, Deputy Director or senior support officials². Historians use it mainly as the agency's own catalogue of what it feared the public would find out, read alongside the congressional reports that turned the leads into evidence.