Family Jewels
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The Family Jewels is the name for the CIA's internal record of its own abuses, which John Kiriakou says the Church Committee and Pike Committee demanded in full in 1975.

The investigation

In Kiriakou's telling the inquiry came out of a low point: the Vietnam War had just been lost, and "everybody in the CIA is like smuggling heroin back from Vietnam", a disaster on all fronts. Senator Frank Church, a Democrat of Idaho, convened a special committee; Congressman Otis Pike, a Democrat from Long Island, convened a parallel committee in the House. Both later morphed into the standing bodies that oversee the agency today, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

The first things to come up, he says, were MK-Ultra and associated assassination programs: the agency was not supposed to be assassinating anyone, yet it had killed thousands. Congress moved to put the brakes on.

The shredding

It was during this same reckoning that Richard Helms, as CIA Director, ordered the destruction of the MK-Ultra documents. Kiriakou's fuller account makes it an act of open defiance: Senator Church specifically told the director not to destroy the MK-Ultra files, a direct order, and the director went from Capitol Hill back to headquarters and said "Destroy everything," leaving the whole building shredding. Eighty-five percent of the MK-Ultra documents were destroyed and fifteen percent survived, which is why, in his words, we have only "this little idea after all these years of what it was" and no real picture of the overall program. The director was fined $500.

What recruits were told

The Family Jewels also functioned inside the agency as a boundary line in time. What a young recruit was led to believe, Kiriakou says, was that the coups, the meddling in friendly governments and elections, all of it "happened, but it happened before 1975. 1975 was the Church Committee and the Pike Committee and the exposure of the family jewels. We don't do that anymore", or only, the qualification ran, when it was really necessary to protect Americans.

His own assessment is that the practice never stopped and instead moved up a scale: after 1975 it became invading Afghanistan and overthrowing a Taliban that he says was never a threat to the United States, installing a democracy in a country with no history of one, and invading Iraq, where, if anyone asked why, "just say something about weapons of mass destruction and terrorism and they'll just forget about it after a while."

See also

- Church Committee
- Pike Committee
- MK-Ultra
- Richard Helms
