INVESTIGATIONS: Rocky's Probe: Bringing the CIA to Heel

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The report's detail and comprehensiveness surprised many Administration opponents, especially congressional Democrats, who had feared a whitewash. Still they are unlikely to be satisfied that the entire record has been laid bare until after the Senate committee finishes investigating the CIA later this year. The chairman of the Senate probe, Democrat Frank Church of Idaho, declared that the Rockefeller commission report "may represent just the tip of the iceberg." Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield called the report "good but not complete." In particular, the Democrats were disappointed that Ford had not released 85 pages of the original report that dealt with charges of CIA involvement in assassination plots against foreign leaders. Ford explained that the investigation of assassination plots, which he had asked the commission to look into only after its work was well under way, was "incomplete and involves extremely sensitive matters." But he promised to deliver all of the commission's evidence, including materials on assassinations, to the congressional investigating committees. In addition, he turned the same evidence over to the Justice Department and ordered it to determine whether criminal charges should be brought against anyone because of the CIA abuses.

Even without the section on assassinations, the report provided a wide-ranging picture of CIA misdeeds that went far beyond both previous press accounts and Colby's statements. The major findings:

MAIL OPENINGS. Starting during the cold war, the CIA conducted four programs to examine the mails between the U.S. and Communist countries, chiefly the Soviet Union. The projects were in New York, from 1952 to 1973; in San Francisco, during four separate periods of a month or less in 1969, 1970 and 1971; in Hawaii in late 1954 and early 1955; and in New Orleans for three weeks in 1957. The chief purposes were to keep track of Americans who were corresponding with Communist officials and to assess Communist secret-writing and censorship techniques.

Initially, the CIA led postal officials to believe that the projects would involve only examination of the outside of the envelopes ("mail cover" in CIA parlance), which is legal. But apparently unknown to Postmaster General Arthur Summer field, his successors and most other top postal officials, the CIA used its mail cover to open many of the letters, which is illegal unless authorized by a search warrant. In the last full year of the New York operation, for example, eight CIA employees examined the envelopes of more than 2.3 million items of mail between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, photographed about 33,000 and opened about 8,700, most of those in the latter category, because their senders or intended recipients were on a CIA list of dissidents or suspected Communist sympathizers.

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