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

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The commission found that top CIA officials knew that the mail openings were illegal. For example, an internal CIA memorandum warned in 1962 that "a flap would put us out of business immediately and give rise to grave charges of criminal misuse of the mail by Government agencies." Similarly the commission learned that during one of the San Francisco operations, CIA representatives abstracted and "concealed selected pieces of mail in an equipment case or a handbag," apparently without the knowledge of a postal official who was present. Later CIA officials analyzed the contents of the purloined letters, resealed the envelopes and surreptitiously returned them to the post office.

OPERATION CHAOS. During the antiwar and black radical protests of the late 1960s and early '70s, both Presidents Johnson and Nixon were obsessed with the idea that the dissidents were financed or otherwise influenced by foreign subversive groups, and put great pressure on the CIA to find evidence to prove it. According to the commission, the agency's repeated reports that it could find no significant foreign connections with domestic disorders led only to more insistent White House demands that CIA officials look harder and "remedy any lack of resources for gathering information."

In 1967 the CIA established within its counterintelligence staff a special group, called Operation CHAOS, ostensibly to gather information abroad about U.S. dissidents' foreign contacts. Located in a vaulted basement area at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., CHAOS operated under secrecy that was excessive by even CIA standards, leading the commission to conclude that top CIA officials knew "that the operation, at least in part, was close to being a proscribed activity." For instance, CHAOS' chief reported directly to then CIA Director Richard Helms, rather than to Counterintelligence Chief James Angleton, who was not even informed of all of the operation's activities. Eventually, CHAOS had 52 full-time employees and about 30 part-time agents and accumulated some 13,000 files, including 7,200 on American citizens and organizations. Drawing from those files and related documents, officials developed an index of 300,000 names, which were stored in a CIA computer. Some of its entries were absurd as well as illegal (because the operation exceeded the CIA's statutory authority). For example, CHAOS analysts opened a file on Grove Press after the firm published a book by British Double Agent Kim Philby. The file was so unduly complete that it even contained reviews of the sexually explicit movie / Am Curious (Yellow) because it was distributed by Grove Press.

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