CIA reveals closely-held historical secrets

WASHINGTON: The Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) recent 'Family jewels' revelations indicate that current debates over secret prisons, aggressive interrogations and spying on Americans, perhaps, have a long history.

An AP report quoted CIA Director Michael Hayden as saying that the newly released 693 heavily censored pages, in which CIA officers in 1973 reported possible abuses, provided 'a glimpse of a very different era and a very different agency.'

The report claimed that the tactics cited in the documents from the Cold War and the Vietnam War have counterparts in the continuing disputes over intelligence tactics in President George W Bush's campaign against terror.

Extracts from the CAESAR-POLO-ESAU papers

• 'The Doctors' Plot'
• Death of Stalin
• Germany
• Soviet Military Strategy and the Chinese Problem
• Soviet Views on Capitalism
• Peking's Support of Insurgencies in Southeast Asia
• The Sino-Indian Border Dispute Section 1: 1950-59
• The Sino-Indian Border Dispute Section 2: 1959-61
• The Sino-Indian Border Dispute Section 3: 1961-62

The CIA released two sets of previously classified historical documents on June 26.

The first collection, widely known as the 'Family Jewels,' consists of almost 700 pages of responses from CIA employees to a 1973 directive from Director of Central Intelligence James Schlesinger asking them to report activities they thought might be inconsistent with the Agency's charter.

In 1974, the CIA provided the documents to Congress. They were exhaustively reviewed by the Presidentially appointed Rockefeller Commission and by the Church and Pike Committees in Congress. Parts of the collection were released to the public in subsequent years.

The release of this collection answers a Freedom of Information Act request from 1992. In the past year, the Agency has made a concerted effort to close out its old cases under the law. Since October 2006 alone, the Agency has reduced the number of FOIA cases older than 5 years old by more than half.

The second collection, the CAESAR-POLO-ESAU papers, consists of 147 documents and 11,000 pages of in-depth analysis and research from 1953 to 1973. The CAESAR and POLO papers studied Soviet and Chinese leadership hierarchies, respectively, and the ESAU papers were developed by analysts to inform CIA assessments on Sino-Soviet relations.

“The CIA fully understands that it has an obligation to protect the nation’s secrets, but it also has a responsibility to be as open as possible,” said CIA Director Michael V. Hayden. “I’ve often spoken about our social contract with the American people, and the declassification of historical documents is an important part of that effort.” (Courtesy: CIA website)