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.
“Cooper”8 pages
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
appured that Agency activities do not. For clarification, some activities which may have been subject to misunderstanding are listed as follows: a. Domestic Contacts. The Domestic Contact Service establishes discreet but overt relationships with American private citizens, commercial, academic and other organizations and resident aliens for the purposes of collecting on a voluntary basis foreign intelligence information or soliciting their cooperation in assisting the Agency to perform its mission overseas. Records of the individuals and organizations cooperating with the Agency are maintained as a necessary practical element of this process. b. Security Investigations. Security investigations are conducted on prospective employees, contractors, and consultants, and on security problems which arise. These investigations involve a wide range of investigative procedures, including neighborhood inquiries, checks with other Government agencies, review of credit reports, and interviews with former employers and business associates. This is essential to assure that our personnel possess a high degree of personal integrity, sense of responsibility, and competence and to protect classified information and sensitive intelligence sources and methods. The resulting files are held separately by the Office of Security and are not merged with other Agency files. c. Foreign Resources. On some occasions, foreign citizens of interest to CIA are connected and recruited in America for work abroad. The purpose of this activity is entirely restricted to the Agency's foreign operations. d. Recruitment. CLA recruiters maintain a wide variety of contacts within the United States, assisting individuals interested in employment with CLA to learn more about it and to join its employee force. c. Contracting. In the course of CLA business and operations, a number of contracts for procurement, research, or analysis are made with a variety of U.S. companies and individuals. This in no way constitutes operations in the U.S. but rather secures the assistance of these groups in carrying out the CLA mission against foreign targets.
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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.