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Illegalities International Mail Thank you so much for sending [E. E. Cummings, a Miscellany] to us and for inscribing it . . . Jim reads it in bed and for a while escapes bombs and pashas in the poems & the world of the twenties which he loves . . . It was wonderful to see you both again and to hear the beautiful poems. And no, no more enfant terrible? He is back in Italy again, so we read, declaring that we are all mad! Have you heard from him?1 One of Angleton’s first tasks when he had returned to Washington from Italy had been to lay the foundations for a CIA “registry”—the heart of an intelligence organization—along X-2 lines. These efforts culminated, shortly after he became chief of the Counterintelligence Staff, in a program that computerized documents on first-generation, punch-card-driven IBM computers.2 Angleton envisioned something like Yale’s Horace Walpole project—that effort to interpret the writings of a minor eighteenth-century figure against the totality of what was known about his times—applied to the tasks of counterintelligence. For such an enterprise no piece of information was irrelevant. He included in his files, for example, every American interested in Soviet matters, by the simple expedient of intercepting, noting, and sometimes opening their mail. This program was one of the closest-kept secrets of the CIA. It began early in 1952 as an effort to examine mail sent between the United States and the USSR and then gradually extended to other destinations of interest to the Agency. Each evening, mail addressed to interesting locales arriving at Idlewild Airport in New York on its way overseas was brought to the nearby Federal Building No. 111, the Jamaica Airmail Facility, and then taken by courier to the CIA’s office in New York City. In the early days of the project each envelope was held in the steam from a teakettle, a stick was slipped under the flap and the letter removed, photographed, replaced in the envelope, which was resealed and sent on its way the next morning. Approximately two-thirds of the letters that were examined were selected at random. Others were selected from a watch list that included Linus Pauling, Bella Abzug, Senator Hubert Humphrey, John Stein- 172 chapter nine beck, Edward Albee, Thomas Merton, Jay Rockefeller, Martin Luther King, and, of course, Richard Nixon.3 The mail-opening program was given the cryptonym HT/LINGUAL and eventually was a prominent item on the list of “family jewels” of illegal operations revealed by William Colby in the early 1970s. Angleton told the Church Committee, in Top Secret testimony, that he thought the mail-opening program “was probably the most important overview that Counterintelligence had.”4 According to Mark Riebling,Angleton thought that“precisely because the enemy regarded America’s mails as inviolate, mail coverage was likely to provide clues to the identities of Soviet agents . . . Angleton understood that the mailopening operation was illegal, and that if it were ever exposed, ‘serious public reaction in the United States would probably occur’ . . . Angleton believed that any restrictions on government mail-opening must similarly have read into them an exception that would allow CIA to cover mail in time of secret war.”5 (Emphasis added.) In spite of the Post Office Department’s and the American public’s understanding that the contents of international mail were inviolate, the 1975 Report to the President by the Commission on CIA Activities within the United States (the “Rockefeller Commission”) found that from February 1953 mail was being opened and the contents analyzed by the CIA.6 By late 1955 the CIA had eight full-time and some part-time employees opening the mail. Angleton asked Helms, then chief of operations in the Plans Directorate, on November 21, 1955, for formal approval of a mail project to “gain access to all mail traffic to and from the USSR which enters, departs or transits the United States.” He requested that “raw information acquired be recorded, indexed, analyzed and that various components of the Agency be furnished with items of information .” The project was approved in January 1956, but organizational difficulties delayed operations until November 1956.7 There is, among the exhibits to the Church Committee hearings, a memorandum from Angleton to Helms laying out the bureaucratic mechanisms necessary for HT/LINGUAL.8 It recommends expansion of an existing illegal mail-opening program so as to cover all mail going through New...

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