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September 2007 GW Receives CIA’s ‘Family Jewels’ Documenting Decades of Abuse
By Julia Parmley Plans to poison Congo leader Patrice Lumumba, a request for a lock picker from Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt, and surveillance of John Lennon’s funding of anti-war activists are among the CIA undercover operations detailed in newly declassified documents released to GW’s National Security Archive this summer. Dubbed the “Family Jewels” in CIA internal documents, the 702-page collection airs decades of the agency’s dirty laundry from the late 1950s through the mid-1970s. It was released to the archive on June 26, a full 15 years after the archive filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the report. The CIA release created a media sensation with camera crews from ABC, NBC, BBC, CBC, CBS, and CNN filming its arrival—the report was actually delivered in a cardboard box to the entrance of Gelman Library, where the National Security Archive is housed—and Thomas Blanton, archive director, discussing the documents with a variety of media outlets, including NPR’s All Things Considered, CNN’s The Situation Room, and Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report. “People have waited more than 30 years for this. It was huge news all over the country and really all over the world,” says Blanton. He explains that the Family Jewels originated from a request from then-CIA director James R. Schlesinger to collect memos outlining all of the “bad” CIA operations and connections, including Watergate in 1973. “Schlesinger found there were tons of programs inside the CIA that even he hadn’t really known about,” says Blanton. “In a way, the Family Jewels marked the first time that the leadership of the CIA itself knew the extent of the violations of the law and civil liberties that had been going on for 25 years.” The National Security Archive first requested the documents in 1992, but the CIA’s progress in releasing the classified documents slowed after the arrest of former CIA operative-turned-spy Aldrich Ames in 1994 and President Bill Clinton’s impeachment in 1998. Blanton says pressure to clean up old FOIA requests, the amount of the report that had already been published, and CIA Director Michael Hayden’s invitation to speak at the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations’ annual meeting—at which he announced the release of the report—were all catalysts for the report’s release. “Openness is the main way we prevent corruption, abuse of power, and violations of the law by top officials,” Blanton says. “It’s the main way we can keep officials on the straight and narrow by looking over their shoulder. It’s implied in our Constitution and almost explicit in the First Amendment. Those rights were essential to what I think the founders saw as a way to restrain power and keep power from being corrupted and abused.” The National Security Archive is a nonprofit research institution and library that advocates for greater government openness and collects and publishes FOIA documents. The archive files more than 2,000 FOIA requests every year for items such as briefing books for presidential meetings and White House records. Blanton says GW President Emeritus Stephen Joel Trachtenberg encouraged the archive to join GW from its original location at the Brookings Institute. “President Trachtenberg was the one who saw the incredible synergy of having our research institution and primary sources as a part of the University,” Blanton says.
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