Digging deeper into CIA "family jewels" docs

Over at Wired's "Danger Room," Noah Shachtman has been digging deeper into the ultraweird '70s CIA docket known as the "Family Jewels," released online earlier this week.

Snip from his latest post:

During the 1960s and 1970s, CIA documents reveal, the Agency mingled with mafiosi to off Fidel Castro, routinely spied on reporters, and detained a Soviet agent for more than five years.  But even at the heights of all that questionable and illegal activity, the CIA's "family jewels" documents show, there was one operation that made Agency officials particularly uncomfortable: widespread electronic surveillance of American citizens — the kind of activities that federal agencies have routinely been engaged in since September 11.

More from Noah: CIA Spooked by Domestic Surveillance (Updated Again).

In another post, Spooks' "Behavorial Drug" Experiments Exposed (Updated), he highlights this gem:

Another document, dated May 8, 1973, mentions the existence of a 1963 account of agency scientists administering mind- or personality-altering drugs on "unwitting subjects" — that is, testing hallucinogens such as LSD on people without their knowledge. The document doesn't provide details.

One of the most notorious such cases involved Frank R. Olson, a CIA germ-warfare expert who died in a fall from a hotel window in 1953, nine days after a CIA doctor spiked Olson's after-dinner drink with LSD. In 1975, President Gerald R. Ford invited Olson's family to the White House to apologize; the government also paid the family $750,000.

Previously on BoingBoing:

  • CIA "family jewels" – docs on wiretapped journos, dissidents – now online
  • CIA secret documents just declassified

    Reader comment: Scott Calonico says,

    Our short film "LSD A Go Go" went into the details of the Olson case. You guys were kind enough to link to us a while back before we had the video up. The whole short film is online now: Link. Also here's the youtube link.