CIA Requests Own Documents

Told ya' it was "a keeper."

Thanks to Millegan Stews for this one! Though, I confess, I don't know quite what to make of it.

CIA Requests Its Own Documents From Author

In a bizarre about-face, the secretive Central Intelligence Agency has requested documents from an investigative journalist, even though the writer had earlier obtained them from the CIA itself under the Freedom of Information Act.

The strange request was made last week to author H.P. Albarelli Jr., whose recently published book A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, details a myriad of CIA drug experiments and exposes a large number of previously anonymous physicians and business officials who contracted with the agency. The experiments resulted in the deaths of a number of people and sent hundreds more seeking medical help.

“The caller, an agency official, who identified himself by a name I was quite familiar with from past requests,” explained Albarelli, “asked if I would be so kind as to send by fax two documents my book referenced in its narrative and footnotes. I suppose I should have been bowled over by the request, but I wasn’t. It happened once before.”

“The crazy thing,” added Albarelli, “is that all of the requested documents came from my FOI requests to the agency in the early 1990s.”

The documents requested from Albarelli centered on two subjects. The first top-secret CIA document details a meeting between an official of the Sandoz Chemical Company and an undercover CIA operator. The document reveals a close relationship between the firm and the agency, and provides stunning details about a mysterious 1951 outbreak of “insanity” in a small French town, Pont St. Esprit. In a covert experiment, the village was surreptitiously administered the powerful hallucinogen LSD in an attempt to see if there was a viable method of waging war without killing people or destroying property. A related document appears to reveal that famed LSD inventor, Albert Hoffmann, maintained a close relationship with the CIA.

Ahh, some juicy bits...

The second document requested reveals intelligence links between one of the criminals who murdered Frank Olson and the assassination of JFK, including a possible working relationship with suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.

The CIA, the ISI, and Johnnie Walker Blue

Who cannot help to laugh at the "warily" part? Really? The CIA and the ISI find each other suspect? Wonder whatever led to that?

C.I.A. and Pakistan Work Together, but Do So Warily

Inside a secret detention center in an industrial pocket of the Pakistani capital called I/9, teams of Pakistani and American spies have kept a watchful eye on a senior Taliban leader captured last month. With the other eye, they watch each other.

The C.I.A. and its Pakistani counterpart, the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, have a long and often tormented relationship. And even now, they are moving warily toward conflicting goals, with each maneuvering to protect its influence after the shooting stops in Afghanistan.

Yet interviews in recent days show how they are working together on tactical operations, and how far the C.I.A. has extended its extraordinary secret war beyond the mountainous tribal belt and deep into Pakistan’s sprawling cities.

Beyond the capture of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, C.I.A. operatives working with the ISI have carried out dozens of raids throughout Pakistan over the past year, working from bases in the cities of Quetta, Peshawar and elsewhere, according to Pakistani security officials.

The raids often come after electronic intercepts by American spy satellites, or tips from Pakistani informants — and the spies from the two countries then sometimes drive in the same car to pick up their quarry. Sometimes the teams go on lengthy reconnaissance missions, with the ISI operatives packing sunscreen and neon glow sticks that allow them to identify their positions at night.

Successful missions sometimes end with American and Pakistani spies toasting one another with Johnnie Walker Blue Label whisky, a gift from the C.I.A.

More ...

CIA Operation Azorian: "New Details" Released

More declassification.

In 1974, far out in the Pacific, a U.S. ship pretending to be a deep-sea mining vessel fished a sunken Soviet nuclear-armed submarine out of the ocean depths, took what it could of the wreck and made off to Hawaii with its purloined prize.

Now, Washington is owning up to Project Azorian, a brazen mission from the days of high-stakes - and high-seas - Cold War rivalry.

After more than 30 years of refusing to confirm the barest facts of what the world already knew, the CIA has released an internal account of Project Azorian, though with juicy details taken out. The account surfaced Friday at the hands of private researchers from the National Security Archive who used the Freedom of Information Act to achieve the declassification.
...
In it, the CIA describes in chronological detail a mission of staggering expense and improbable engineering feats that culminated in August 1974 when the Hughes Glomar Explorer retrieved a portion of the submarine, K-129. The eccentric industrialist Howard Hughes lent his name to the project to give the ship cover as a commercial research vessel.

Despite the declassified article, the greatest mysteries of Project Azorian remain buried three miles down and in CIA files: exactly what parts of the sub were retrieved, what intelligence was derived from them and whether the mission was a waste of time and money. Despite the veil over the project, its existence has been known for decades.

"It's a pretty meaty description of the operation from inception to death," said Matthew Aid, the researcher who had been seeking the article since 2007, when he learned of its publication thanks to a footnote he spotted in other documents. "But what's missing in the end is, what did we get for it? The answer is, we still don't know."

CIA Asset Erik Prince: Tycoon, Contractor, Soldier, Spy

Well, I'm sure it is "not all," but a fascinating tale from this century's privatized version of Oliver North. A venerable CIA asset has been "thrown under the bus," and he just can't quite believe it.

I put myself and my company at the C.I.A.’s disposal for some very risky missions,” says Erik Prince as he surveys his heavily fortified, 7,000-acre compound in rural Moyock, North Carolina. “But when it became politically expedient to do so, someone threw me under the bus.” Prince—the founder of Blackwater, the world’s most notorious private military contractor—is royally steamed. He wants to vent. And he wants you to hear him vent.

Venting ...

CIA Operation Span: Spraying LSD on France

This one's a keeper.

In 1951, the southern French town of Pont-Saint-Esprit experienced what has been described as an episode of "mass insanity," which was blamed on an hallucinant "bread mold" by scientists from the locally-stationed Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company. Few believed this, but the story was forced to stick. For decades, the episode remained a mystery.

Until now. Now, it has been discovered that the localized hysteria in Pont-Saint-Esprit was not the result of mass simultaneous consumption of moldy bread, or any other toxic natural agent. It was the result of a toxic, entirely unnatural agent.

Actually, it was the CIA.

In the recently published book, A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, H.P. Albarelli reveals documentary evidence that the mysterious incident was the result of the top secret covert CIA LSD experiment, Operation Span, conducted under the umbrella Project MK/NAOMI, cousin to the more notoriously infamous Project MK/ULTRA. The Pont-Saint-Esprit event resulted from a covert LSD aerosol experiment directed by the US Army’s top-secret Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, Maryland. When Sandoz Pharmaceutical scientists explained the bizarre affair with bread mold, the company had been selling LSD to the CIA and the US Army for "research."

the Pont-St.-Esprit outbreak in 1951 was the result of a covert LSD aerosol experiment directed by the US Army’s top-secret Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

...the scientists who produced the bogus cover-up explanations of contaminated bread and or mercury poisoning to deflect from the real source of the events worked for the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company, which was then secretly supplying both the US Army and CIA with LSD for research.

Now, and apparently secretly, the French government is expressing some dismay.

According to reliable US sources, the US State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research has been given a confidential inquiry from the office of Erard Corbin de Mangoux, head of the French intelligence agency DSGE (Directorate General for External Security). According to the report the inquiry regards a recently-published account of U.S. government complicity in a mysterious 1951 incident of mass insanity in France in the village of Pont-Saint-Esprit in southern France.

Favourite part:

When Shane asked a former top ranking Special Operations officer to speak about the division’s projects in general, Andrew M. Cowan, Jr. said, “I just don’t give interviews on that subject. It should still be classified—if nothing else, to keep information the division developed out of the hands of some nut.”

Yes, we wouldn't want "some nut" running around with aerosolized LSD, spraying it on people, now would we?