Back in the 1970s, the CIA gathered up its most embarrassing secrets, its most shameful skeletons, and tagged them the “family jewels." "Family Jewels" is, of course, a funny thing to call them.
The secret memos released yesterday by the CIA recount a history of law-breaking and dark arts at the agency -- the drugging and bugging of Americans in America, Faustian bargains with gangland murderers, assassination plots, poison pills.
People who first talked about this stuff paid dearly. One ended up in a 55-gallon oil drum off Miami Beach. Now, the CIA is talking itself about what it calls the "family jewels." But what has it learned?
Listen to a discussion on On Point about dirty secrets then and now, and the legacy of the dark side in American intelligence.
When it comes to American Cloak and Dagger work, what’s right, what’s necessary, what’s wrong? What do today’s headlines and struggles tell us we’ve learned from yesterday’s?
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