FAMILY JEWELS

Opening

On 9 May 1973 CIA Director James Schlesinger, after Watergate weather inside the Agency, ordered every office to list activities that might fall outside the charter. The take came back as the Family Jewels: 693 pages in the inventory that later became public, a catalogue of domestic taps, mail opening, surveillance of journalists and dissidents, drug tests, and plots the Agency had preferred to keep in the building. William Colby inherited the pile. The Rockefeller Commission and then Church and Pike walked parts of it into daylight.

A redacted set was released in 2007. Project Mockingbird the tap sits in it. MHCHAOS sits near it. Assassination sketches and the other captions the later books love sit in the same dump without each caption being a completed job. The Jewels are an inventory ordered from above, not a memoir and not a single program name.

Timeline

Early 1973 Schlesinger's orderOffices type. The pile becomes the Jewels.

Colby holds it through the commissions. Church and Pike put selected facts out in 1975-76. The Agency fights scope, not the existence of a pile.

June 2007 a redacted releaseCaptions the public already knew sit next to pages that were only rumoured.

Schlesinger had been at the Agency weeks, not years. The order is a new director cleaning house after Watergate had already taught Washington what a hidden shop costs. Offices that typed returns were not volunteers. They were answering a memo that could end a career if they hid the wrong caption.

Key figures

James Schlesinger owns the order that forced the list.

William Colby owns the inheritance and the briefings.

Office chiefs who typed the returns own the captions they confessed.

Church, Pike and Rockefeller staff own the public table. The 2007 release owns the pile as a readable object.

Physical and documentary trail

The sources:

One: Schlesinger's 9 May 1973 order.

Two: the returned inventory, 693 pages in the later public count.

Three: commission and committee use in 1975-76.

Four: the 2007 redacted release.

There is no unredacted public set everyone agrees is complete. There is no page that makes the order a prank. There is no single caption that eats the whole pile.

An internal inventory is a different object from a committee leak. This pile was requested from the seventh floor. That is why the 2007 release still matters: it is the Agency's own list, cut, but theirs.

Things you might not know

• A newspaper got there first. Seymour Hersh's front-page New York Times story in December 1974 revealed what he called a massive, illegal domestic intelligence operation.
• Nearly 10,000 Americans had files. The CIA had compiled files on more than 9,900 US citizens linked to the antiwar movement.
• The Mafia was hired to kill Castro. The Agency used Johnny Roselli, Sam Giancana and Santo Trafficante, who were given six poison pills for Castro's food.
• A columnist was followed. Jack Anderson, who had written about plots against Castro, was put under physical surveillance with members of his staff.
• Mail was opened for twenty years. Letters to and from the Soviet Union were opened at New York's airport from 1953 to 1973.
• It took fifteen years to get them out. The National Security Archive's Freedom of Information request was filed fifteen years before the 2007 release.
• "Skeletons" was the director's word. William Colby called the reports the skeletons in the CIA's closet.

Competing explanations

A confession of a criminal agency. This is the shocked reading. It has 693 pages. It has redactions still.

A damage-control inventory after Watergate. Also true. An inventory can be both self-protection and evidence.

A stack of proposals never run. Weak against taps and mail opening that did run.

Later life of the case

The Family Jewels became the map for the investigations of 1975 and 1976, and the 2007 release let the public read the Agency's own list for the first time, with the redactions showing where it still drew the line. Many later CIA programmes now known by name first surfaced there. For the Senate inquiry that used it, see the Church Committee.

Finding

James Schlesinger ordered the Agency in May 1973 to list what might be outside the charter, and the offices sent back hundreds of pages the public now calls the Family Jewels.

What still will not resolve: an unredacted complete set, or a page that shows a caption was only a wish.