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.
MICHAELS is restricted to the collection abroad of information on foreign activities related to domestic matters. CIA will focus clearly on the foreign organizations and individuals involved and only incidentally on their American contacts. As a consequence, CIA will not take on the primary responsibility for following Americans abroad, although CIA can accept a request by the FBI to be passed to an appropriate lieutenant service in a foreign country for the surveillance of such an American and the transmission of the results back to the FBI. It must be plainly demonstrated in each such transmission that the CIA is merely a channel of communication between the FBI and the appropriate foreign service and is not to be directly engaged in the surveillance or other action against the American involved. With respect to Americans abroad who become suspect for security or counterintelligence reasons, any official U.S. personnel will be reported to their parent agency's security authorities, CIA will merely serve as a transmission belt for the information concerned. Specific CIA operations will not be counter against such individuals, but they will be reported when their
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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.