Washington - The CIA released hundreds of pages of documents Tuesday outlining a range of questionable and in some cases illegal activities that included assassination plots and domestic spying during the 1960s. The documents reveal plans to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro by enlisting the help of the mafia and the monitoring of two US reporters suspected of receiving classified information from CIA sources.
The CIA released the information based on a request from the National Archives under the Freedom of Information Act after years of resisting demands to publicly disclose the documents.
"The CIA fully understands that it has an obligation to protect the nation's secrets, but it also has a responsibility to be as open as possible," CIA Director Michael V Hayden said.
"I have often spoken about our social contract with the American people, and the declassification of historical documents is an important part of that effort."
The CIA began compiling the documents, known as the "family jewels," in 1973 under the request of then-director James Schlesinger ahead of concerns of a public scandal. Some of the documents were provided to a presidential commission set up to investigate the agency and the congressional Church Committee, named after the senator who chaired it.
Much of the information had already been published through the investigation and later by scholars and former CIA agents, but historians are hopeful the documents will shed new insight and offer more details about the CIA covert operations during the height of the Cold War.
The documents also reveal CIA drug experiments on US citizens and the monitoring of groups and individuals opposed to the war in Vietnam. They also showed the CIA locked a KGB defector in a small cell for more than two years because agents suspected the defection was not genuine.
The CIA's plots to kill Castro have been well known for decades. In addition to the mafia, the CIA also employed Cuban dissidents in the effort. Methods ranged from using a gun to kill the US enemy and getting close enough to poison his food.
