CIA ASKING HILL TO CUT BACK PUBLIC ACCESS TO AGENCY'S FILES

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00552R000303290001-5
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: July 29, 2010
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: February 29, 1980
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2010/07/29: CIA-RDP90-00552R000303290001-5
A;`l T 1 c LE A.:'t ii..=%?'-
Oil PAG3-
THE WASHINGTON POST
29 February 1980
-"-.By George Lardner Jr.'
washingtoD Post Start Writer
On June 8, 1965, a CIA security offi-
cer met with an informant in the Hil-
ton Hotel in d)wntown Washington to
discuss the progress of his spying on
the civil rights movement and espe-
cially on the Rev. Martin Luther King
Jr.
The ? meeting, which lasted' nearly
four hours, dealt with "highly deroga-
tory information" involving King and
allegations of "communist-directed in-
filtration into the movement," accord-
ing to a nine-page memo prepared the
.next day for the chief of CIA's Secu-
rity Research Staff-. The highly placed-
informant, who-had "long provided in-
formation on the Negro civil rights
movement and its leaders" to the CIA,
promised to stay in touch. Ile empha-
sized he did not 'want to be `,`down
graded" by being- asked to report to
the FBI.
The CIA's spying on King, which'
`produced a file including some of his
haberdashery bills, Diners' Club re-
ceipts and notes.listing -phone calls
and appointments, was never dis-
closed in the extensive congressional
or executive branch investigations of
the agency conducted in recent years.
It has come to light solely as the. re-
sult of litigation under the Freedom
of Information Act (FOIA).
Thousands of documents on CIA ac-
tivities-from reports on =President
Kennedy's assassination. to ? controver-
sial mind-control experiments - and
other excesses-have been made pub=
Ile under FOIA since the agency was
-effectively brought under the law five
years ago
Now the CIA is seeking to' halt all
but the most limited disclosures. Un-
der a bill pending. In both the House
and the Senate, the agency has asked
for' an, extraordinary. exemption that
would put- its operational and techni-
cat files: alriiost completely beyond
-'reach of FOIA_ Even illegal activities.
it appears, could.be legally covered up.
'Public inquiries could. be. rejected
without any -.inspection' of. the.. docu-
'_ ments sought- ?i Lawsuits .would be
fruitless. The. files would be immune
from court action, except for individu-
als seeking..records about thenjselves.
The CIA has described the proposal
in more modest terns. According to
.CIA Deputy' Director dank Carlucci.
,the bill would provide only "a limited
-exemption to protect our most sensi-
tive information." He maintains that
`4the loss to the public from the re-
moval' of 'these files from:the FO IA
?.
-process would be minimal."
Despite such assurances,- the law
has forced the CIA to release a great
deal of information that would still he
buried in the agency's files if the bill
it wants had been the prevailing rule.
Some documents that have been
made public expand, or contradict.
what the CIA reported in the l975-76^
e
investigations. Some deal with. issus
that the investigators never touched,
such as the CIA's spying on Dr. King.
(That was disclosed in an FOIA law-
suit brought..by author-critic-k Harold
Weisberg of: Frederick, .Md.ti
Item: The- Rockefeller Commission,
appointed byi President, Ford-in 1975
to investigate, ;CiA: activities im the
United'States, came, across`a program
startediii I967.by the CIA's Office of
Security "to identify 'threats to CIA
personnel, projects and installations,
especially those stemming from the
anti-war movement on college cam-
-puses.
-.The commission was satisfied that,
the. operation "used no infiltrators,:
penetrators or monitors and relied`
-primarily on press clippings, campus
officials and police authorities.
'Records later released under t'he
Freedom of Information Act'about the
-program, which the CIA. styled "Pro-
ject Resistance,", show that 'it ' used
confidential informants repeatedly in
Texas, California, , Washington,, D.C.,
and elsewhere. The CIA file even in-
cluded a blank "Confidential ' Infor-
mant Identification" form for Project
Resistance:
Item: The Senate investigating com-
inittee headed by Frank Church (D:
-Idaho)said. in its final,'report that Pro,.
ject Resistance, which, lasted., until
1973,..,eventually:.deveio{?2fl?a 1latitln-
*ide'liiddx of;12,000 to; 16;000 names.
' ?But_according to records later made'',
public under ? FOIA,' the'CIA's- Office
of 'Security' indexed 50,000-members
of; the California Peace and 'Freedom'.
Party 'alone,` primarily- college stu=
dents ?In. Just. two. counties.
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Item: The CIA told the church .f
committee that the records for 1 IK-
ULTRA, the agency's premier mind-
control program, had- been destroyed-
in 1973, reportedly with concurrence
of then-director Richard Helms.
Some 16,000-pages of records deal-
ing with MKULTRA, and other CIA
experiments with exotic drugs were`
subsequently- unearthed and, turned
o.er:to-.John Marks, a former State
Department :'emptoYe and--frequent
CIA critic, under the Freedom of Ih
formation Act. -
Testifying about some of the newly
cliscovered-documents in 1977, CIA Di-
-rector Stansfield Turner said they
showed'the CIA carried out 149 pro-
jects-involvina drug testing, behavior
modification and secret administra-
tion of mind" altering drugs at 80
-American and 'Canadian universities,
hospitals, research: `foundations and
prisons. But-he assured Congress that
the mind- control work. had been al-
most completely phased out In the
mid-1960s.
According to Marks,.. who kept
pressing for more documents as he
wrote a book on the subject, the CIA
replacedMKULTRA with another
-vide-ranging, supersecret behavior
control project that' continued into
the 1970s under the agency's Office of
Research and Development. The ,CIA
told b'Iar'ks in June 1978 it had discov.
ered "130 boxes" of mind control. ma-
terial, in response to his inquiry about
the ORD:?project,`.but he is still wait-
ing to. find out what is in them beyond
a few, "trivial documents" that were
,released.
"They've been diddling me "ever
since," Marks says. "In effect, they've
already repealed the FOIA,?at least as
far as mind control is concerned."
Item: The CIA's view of its once-se-
cret war in Laos was reflected in still
another release under" FOI:A. Its. posi-
Lion was set down Oct. 30, 1969, in a
memo' from CIA General -.Counsel
Lawrence R. Houston regarding con-
gressional-inquiries on the issue, espe-