FAMILY JEWELS

1. Public Record

7 May 1973. James Schlesinger, leaving Langley for Defense, ordered senior officers to report any CIA activity that might sit outside the charter. The answers came back as a 693-page loose-leaf. William Colby inherited it, locked it, and later called the contents skeletons. On 31 December 1974 he walked Justice through eighteen items that raised legal questions: Nosenko confined long enough to look like kidnapping, the 1963 tap on columnists Allen and Scott, mail opening, domestic surveillance of the antiwar left, assistance that touched Watergate veterans Hunt and McCord. Seymour Hersh in the New York Times, 22 December 1974, put domestic spying on the street. Kissinger boiled Colby's list into five pages for Ford.

The collection was released in 2007. Project Mockingbird the tap lives in this binder. So do shops already in this archive under other captions. The value here is not a new plot. It is the Agency listing itself.

Skeletons in the CIA's closet.

2. Date of Incident

Schlesinger order May 1973. Hersh December 1974. Public PDF 2007.

3. Location

Langley. Approximate 38°57 N 077°09 W.

4. Official Narrative

An internal inventory after Watergate heat. Official narrative is that the jewels led to Church and new rules. The binder is the evidence, not a rumour.

5. Witness Layer

Schlesinger. Colby. Officers who wrote memos into the 693. Hersh. Ford reading Kissinger's five pages.

Activities now going on, or that have gone on in the past, which might be construed to be outside the legislative charter.

Eighteen issues which presented legal questions.

6. Recovery Logistics

The 693-page book. 2007 FOIA set. No missing volume the Agency admits.

7. Assessment

An inventory file. Keep it beside Mockingbird and Artichoke as the index, not as a double. Schlesinger asked because the papers were already circling Hunt. Colby locked a safe and then had to brief a president. A self-list is rarer than a leak. Read it as that.

8. Materials & Remains

CIA Reading Room Family Jewels PDF. Church as the next reader.

9. Key Personnel

James Schlesinger : The order.

William Colby : The safe. The brief.

Seymour Hersh : The December street.

10. Aftermath

Church. Pike. Executive orders on the Agency's domestic edge. The nickname stuck harder than the page count.

11. Current Archive Status

Status: CIA self-list, 1973. 693 pages. Hersh 1974. Released 2007.

Confidence: High that the binder exists and matches Colby's eighteen. High that Schlesinger ordered it. Low that every outside-charter act of those years is in the 693. Low that the 2007 PDF is unredacted in full.

Filing note

A director on the way out the door, a command to list what should not have been done, six hundred pages of answers, a successor who locked them, a Times story in December, eighteen problems walked over to Justice on New Year's Eve.

Skeletons in the closet. Not a critic's joke first. The Director's own name for the book he had just been handed.