The family jewels

This Raw Story article on the upcoming CIA "family jewels" document dump is misleading. The article summarizes a document which was actually released some years back, pursuant to the JFK Assassination Records Collections Act of 1992 -- a noble piece of legislation, for which you may thank Bill Clinton and Oliver Stone. The actual "Jewels" document -- a 693 page whopper -- has not yet been released. (At least I was not able to find it at the national Security Archives web page here.)

Why is this document considered a JFK record? Because it references the Nosenko affair, without actually naming poor Yuri. That scandal is intimately tied in with the assassination controversy, and with the even larger story of James Jesus Angleton's madness. Nosenko was considered a false defector in part because Angleton's source, Anatoly Golitsyn, had told him that all subsequent defectors would be fakes.

The six-page memo was put together in 1974, by an easily gulled Associate Deputy Attorney General in the Ford administration. Interestingly, the CIA's behavior modification program is listed as taking place between 1963 and 1973. This is not, as some of you might think, a reference to MKULTRA, ARTICHOKE or BLUEBIRD. MKULTRA lasted, if memory serves, from 1953 to 1963, when it was shut down by CIA Inspector General John Earman, a Kennedy appointee who actually did a little house-cleaning. Within a month, JFK met with, like, an unfortunate accident, and the behavioral modification program started anew. We don't really know the cryptonym or cryptonyms involved. In fact, we know far less than we should about the post-1963 research. (As I recall, seven MKULTRA subprojects did continue after 1963, but they were relatively insignificant.)

Some of you will be amused to learn that Britt Hume -- yes, that Britt Hume! -- was placed under physical surveillance. In those days, Hume worked for Jack Anderson. As the 70s progressed, Anderson started spewing conservative horsecrap -- the "Team B" assessment of Soviet military intentions, the Castro-diddit theory of the JFK assassination, and so forth. As for Hume -- well, we all know what happened to Hume.

Is it possible that the spooks doing the surveillance found something?

The CIA claims, in the same document, that it played no role in the January 1961 assassination of Patrice Lumumba. That's a lie. Another section makes reference to a "Latin American" woman with information about a plot to kill CIA Director Richard Helms and Spiro Agnew. Does anyone know more about that?

There's more, but the point is made. The real "Family Jewels" were a lot nastier than this document may lead you to believe.