Reply #2: The "family jewels" and Seymour Hersh

[starroute]

http://edition.cnn.com/2004/LAW/02/20/findlaw.analysis.dean.wmd

In December 1974, during the Ford presidency, a four-column headline-grabbing story by Seymour Hersh appeared in the New York Times. The headline was as follows: "Huge CIA Operation Reported In U.S. Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents In Nixon Years." Hersh laid out a "massive, illegal domestic intelligence operation" by the CIA, which by its charter was restricted to foreign intelligence gathering.

Dick Cheney was well aware of the story. At the time, he was deputy chief of staff under Donald Rumsfeld at Gerald Ford's White House (and traveling with the president during the holiday). Cheney can't have forgotten the lessons that were garnered from President Ford's response, given his role in crafting it.

The story broke after Sy Hersh picked up a few trinkets from the CIA's later infamous "family jewels." In 1973, as Watergate was falling apart, CIA Director James Schlesinger had sent a memorandum throughout the agency requesting information about past "questionable activities." The responses were summarized in a seven-hundred page document that became known as the CIA's family jewels. More accurately, it was a time bomb.

President Ford's initial response to the Hersh story was to do nothing. But in Washington, Ford's CIA Director, William Colby, later wrote, Hersh's story "triggered a firestorm." Colby told Ford it was likely to get worse, for amongst the "jewels" were detailed reports of the assassination plots against foreign leaders (Castro in Cuba, Lumumba in the Congo and Trujillo in the Dominican Republic).