The CIA today released hundreds of pages of formerly top-secret documents on activities ranging from a plot to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro to domestic espionage against Americans.
"Mr. Helms instructed me to restrict knowledge of the existence of the letter to an absolute minimum number of people."
It was certainly a marriage of convenience. After Fidel Castro led a revolution that toppled a friendly government in 1959, the CIA was desperate to eliminate him. So the agency sought out a partner equally worried about Castro -- the Mafia, which had lucrative investments in Cuban casinos.
The CIA was eager to examine the use of dangerous pharmaceutical drugs to modify the behavior of targeted individuals, and so it asked commercial drug manufacturers to pass along samples of medicines rejected for commercial sale "because of unfavorable side effects," according to an undated...
In the early 1970s, as Vietnam War-era protests swirled around the Washington area, local police borrowed riot equipment and received intelligence training from an unusual source: the CIA.
When a young analyst of Soviet affairs named Melvin A. Goodman started work at the CIA in 1966, he was ushered into a room to read special collections of reports on the Soviet Union and China. His bosses "thought this was the best work the CIA had produced at the time," Goodman said yesterday of the...
