Documents / FOIA release
This is a letter dated 24 December 1974 from CIA Director W. E. Colby to the President, with annexes attached. It responds to a New York Times article about CIA domestic intelligence activity. The letter denies that the Agency ran a "massive" domestic effort. It traces a counterintelligence program on foreign links with American dissidents, which ran from 1967 until it was ended in March 1974, and admits improper actions such as mail opening, break-ins and the surveillance of reporters. The attached memoranda restrict such activities.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
Agency. The primary function of the Committee is the evaluation of domestic intelligence for agreement national estimates, and the levying of collection requirements related thereto. The CIA contributions are limited to the foreign aspects. The Chief of the Special Operations Group serves as the representative for the Agency on the Intelligence Evaluation Committee Staff, and as the alternate to the Agency representative in the Committee (who is the Chief, Counter Intelligence Staff). NOTE: Special Problem: There is no written agreement governing the activities of FBI Legal Attaches abroad in dealing with foreign liaison services on collection of information on foreign exploitation of domestic U.S. dissidence and extremism. The DCI has enunciated a policy that the Agency is the action instrumentality of the U.S. Government in this field with foreign liaison services. In actual practice, the FBI levies pertinent requirements directly upon its own Legal Attaches and may or may not come to the Agency for assistance. An informal, usually followed, agreement has been reached, under which the Agency handles FBI requirements in this field (a) in countries where there is no Legal Attache, and (b) in situations in which several countries are involved (including countries in which there is a Legal Attache). Unilateral collection effort is requested of the Agency, however, whether or not there is a Legal Attache.
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 76 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.