Intelligence Agency Corruption News Stories

Excerpts of Key Intelligence Agency Corruption News Stories in Major Media

Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption from reliable news media sources. If any link fails to function, a paywall blocks full access, or the article is no longer available, try these digital tools.

For further exploration, delve into our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center.

Note: This comprehensive list of news stories is usually updated once a week. Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.

In demanding a congressional investigation into the aborted rescue during the attack of the USS Liberty and subsequent alleged cover-up [the following] conclusions [were] submitted in October 2003 to the Office of the U.S. Secretary of Defense by the USS Liberty Veterans Association, Inc.: 1. That on June 8, 1967 ... Israel launched a two-hour air and naval attack against USS Liberty ... inflicting 34 dead and 173 wounded American servicemen; 2. That ... unmarked Israeli aircraft dropped napalm canisters on USS Liberty's bridge and fired 30mm cannons and rockets into [the] ship; 3. That the torpedo boat attack involved not only the firing of torpedoes, but the machine-gunning of Liberty's firefighters and stretcher-bearers as they struggled to save their ship and crew; the Israeli torpedo boats later returned to machine-gun at close range three of the Liberty's life rafts that had been lowered into the water by survivors to rescue the most seriously wounded; 4. That there is compelling evidence that Israel's attack was a deliberate attempt to destroy an American ship and kill her entire crew; evidence of such intent is supported by statements from Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Undersecretary of State George Ball, former CIA Director Richard Helms, former NSA Directors Lt. Gen. William Odom, USA (Ret.), Adm. Bobby Ray Inman, USN (Ret.), and Marshal Carter; former NSA deputy directors Oliver Kirby and Maj. Gen. John Morrison, USAF (Ret.); 6. The White House deliberately prevented the U.S. Navy from coming to the defense of USS Liberty by recalling Sixth Fleet military rescue support while the ship was under attack.

Note: To view the BBC documentary about the USS Liberty attack, "Dead in the Water," click here. For more information about the USS Liberty, click here.

At least once a year during the 1980s Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld vanished. Cheney was ... a [Republican] congressman. Rumsfeld [was] the head of G. D. Searle & Co.. Yet for periods of three or four days at a time no one in Congress knew where Cheney was, nor could anyone at Searle locate Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld and Cheney were principal actors in one of the most highly classified programs of the Reagan Administration. [It] called for setting aside the legal rules for presidential succession ... in favor of a secret procedure for putting in place a new "President" and his staff. The program is of particular interest today because it helps to explain the thinking and behavior of the second Bush Administration [since] September 11, 2001. The idea was to concentrate on speed, to preserve "continuity of government," and to avoid cumbersome procedures; the speaker of the House, the president pro tempore of the Senate, and the rest of Congress would play a greatly diminished role. "One of the awkward questions we faced ... was whether to reconstitute Congress after a nuclear attack. It was decided that no, it would be easier to operate without them." [Cheney's and Rumsfeld's] participation in the extra-constitutional continuity-of-government exercises ... also demonstrates a broad, underlying truth about these two men. For three decades ... even when they were out of the executive branch of government, they were never far away. They stayed in touch with defense, military, and intelligence officials, who regularly called upon them. They were ... a part of the permanent hidden national-security apparatus of the United States.

Note: If above link fails, click here. The author, James Mann, is a former Washington correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, and senior writer-in-residence at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington, D.C. Apparently, Cheney and Rumsfeld don't find Congress to be very important.

For a quarter of a century, [Eric Olson] has believed that the Central Intelligence Agency murdered his father, a United States government scientist. On Nov. 28, 1953, around 2 a.m. [the] night manager at the Statler Hotel ... in New York rushed out the front door ... to find a middle-aged man lying on the sidewalk. The man had fallen from the 10th floor -- apparently after crashing through a closed window. [In late July, 1975] the C.I.A.'s director, William Colby [provided Olson's] family ... declassified documents relating to Frank Olson's death. Olson had not been a civilian employee of the Department of the Army. He had been a C.I.A. employee working at Fort Detrick. Olson's specialty, it turned out, had been the development of aerosols for the delivery of anthrax. The Colby documents were ... full of unexplained terms like the ''Artichoke'' and ''Bluebird'' projects. These turned out to be the precursors of what became known as MK-ULTRA, a C.I.A. project, beginning in the Korean War, to explore the use of drugs like LSD as truth serums, as well as botulism and anthrax, for use in covert assassination. The documents claimed that during a meeting between the C.I.A. and Fort Detrick scientists ... on Nov. 19,1953, Sidney Gottlieb of the C.I.A. slipped LSD into Olson's glass of Cointreau. Olson, a scientist by training, would have known that he was working for a government that had put Nazi scientists on trial at Nuremberg for immoral experiments on human beings. Now, in the late summer of 1953, [Olson] faced up to the possibility that his own government was doing the same thing. Slipping LSD into Olson's Cointreau was ... designed to get him to talk ... to assess what kind of risk he posed and then eliminate him if necessary.

Note: For those interested in this vital, yet disturbing topic, the entire Times article is well worth reading. For further verifiable information on the CIA mind control programs mentioned in this article, click here.

A bipartisan group of senators is pushing legislation that would force the CIA to release an inspector general's report on the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The CIA has spent more than 20 months weighing requests under the Freedom of Information Act for its internal investigation of the attacks but has yet to release any portion of it. The agency is the only federal office involved in counterterrorism operations that has not made at least a version of its internal 9/11 investigation public. The law requires agencies to respond to requests within 20 days. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and two other intelligence committee leaders -- chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., and senior Republican Kit Bond of Missouri -- are pushing legislation that would require the agency to declassify the executive summary of the review within one month and submit a report to Congress explaining why any material was withheld. "It's amazing the efforts the administration is going to stonewall this,'' Wyden said. "The American people have a right to know what the Central Intelligence Agency was doing in those critical months before 9/11.'' Completed in June 2005, the inspector general's report examined the personal responsibility of individuals at the CIA before and after the attacks. The CIA has not released any documents to The Associated Press or other organizations that began requesting the information at least 20 months ago. Groups including the National Security Archive have clashed with the agency over its FOIA policies. Last year, the archive gave the CIA its prize for the agency with the worst FOIA record. ''CIA has for three decades been one of the worst FOIA agencies,'' archive Director Thomas Blanton said this week.

Note: For more reliable information on what US intelligence agencies knew about the coming attacks, click here.

When the old spymaster thought he was dying, his eldest son came to visit him. In the CIA, [Howard Hunt] had helped to mastermind the violent removal of a duly elected leftist president in Guatemala and assisted in subterfuges that led to the murder of Che Guevara. But his first-born son, [Saint] was by his side now. For years, he and Saint had hardly spoken. Then Saint came to him wanting to know if he had any information about JFK’s assassination. His father had sworn in two government investigations that he didn’t. But now, in August 2003, propped up in his sick bed, he began to write down the names of men who participated in a plot to kill the president. He scribbled the initials “LBJ”, standing for Kennedy’s vice-president, Lyndon Johnson. Under “LBJ”, connected by a line, he wrote the name Cord Meyer. Meyer was a CIA agent whose wife had an affair with JFK; later she was murdered, a case that has never been solved. Next, his father connected to Meyer’s name the name Bill Harvey, another CIA agent; also connected to Meyer’s name was the name David Morales, another CIA man and a well-known, vicious black-operations specialist. Then his father connected to Morales’s name, with a line, the framed words “French Gunman Grassy Knoll”. So there it was: according to Hunt, LBJ had Kennedy killed. And that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t the only shooter in Dallas. There was also, on the grassy knoll, a French gunman, presumably the Corsican mafia assassin Lucien Sarti. A few weeks later, Saint received in the mail a tape recording from his dad. Hunt’s voice on the cassette is weak and grasping, but he essentially remakes the same points he made in his handwritten narrative.

Note: Though this article interesting refers to Saint as a "conspiracy nut," if you take the time to read it, you will find it raises many serious questions about the Kennedy assassination. The History Channel has an excellent documentary series showing beyond doubt there was more than one gunman. To order, click here. For the banned final episode of this series, which presents powerful evidence LBJ was directly involved in the JFK assassination, click here

George J. Tenet, the former director of central intelligence, has lashed out against Vice President Dick Cheney and other Bush administration officials in a new book, saying they pushed the country to war in Iraq without ever conducting a “serious debate” about whether Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat. [His book] is the first detailed account by a member of the president’s inner circle of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the decision to invade Iraq and the failure to find the unconventional weapons that were a major justification for the war. “There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat,” Mr. Tenet writes in a devastating judgment. Nor, he adds, “was there ever a significant discussion” about the possibility of containing Iraq without an invasion. Mr. Tenet ... makes clear his bitter view that the administration made him a scapegoat for the Iraq war. As violence in Iraq spiraled beginning in late 2003, Mr. Tenet writes, “rather than acknowledge responsibility, the administration’s message was: Don’t blame us. George Tenet and the C.I.A. got us into this mess.” Mr. Tenet takes blame for the flawed 2002 National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq’s weapons programs, calling the episode “one of the lowest moments of my seven-year tenure.” Mr. Tenet largely endorses the view of administration critics that Mr. Cheney and a handful of Pentagon officials, including Paul D. Wolfowitz and Douglas J. Feith, were focused on Iraq as a threat in late 2001 and 2002 even as Mr. Tenet and the C.I.A. concentrated mostly on Al Qaeda. Mr. Tenet has spoken rarely in public, and never so caustically, since stepping down in July 2004.

Note: Was the Iraq war based largely on lies and deception? Now that Hussein is gone and there are no weapons of mass destruction, who is the enemy in Iraq? For the comments of a top U.S. general, click here.

In a letter written Saturday to former CIA Director George Tenet, six former CIA officers described their former boss as "the Alberto Gonzales of the intelligence community," and called his book "an admission of failed leadership." The letter, signed by Phil Giraldi, Ray McGovern, Larry Johnson, Jim Marcinkowski, Vince Cannistraro and David MacMichael, said Tenet should have resigned in protest rather than take part in the administration's buildup to the war. (Read the full letter) Johnson is a former CIA intelligence official and registered Republican who voted for Bush in 2000. Cannistraro is former head of the CIA's counterterrorism division. The writers said ... "your lament that you are a victim in a process you helped direct is self-serving. You were not a victim. You were a willing participant in a poorly considered policy to start an unnecessary war. CIA field operatives produced solid intelligence in September 2002 that stated clearly there was no stockpile of any kind of WMD in Iraq. This intelligence was ignored and later misused." The letter said CIA officers learned later that month Iraq had no contact with Osama bin Laden and that then-President Saddam Hussein considered the al Qaeda leader to be an enemy. Still, Tenet "went before Congress in February 2003 and testified that Iraq did indeed have links to al Qaeda. "You helped set the bar very low for reporting that supported favored White House positions, while raising the bar astronomically high when it came to raw intelligence that did not support the case for war. You betrayed the CIA officers who collected the intelligence. Most importantly and tragically, you failed to meet your obligations to the people of the United States."

Sidney Gottlieb, who presided over the Central Intelligence Agency's cold-war efforts to control the human mind and provided the agency poisons to kill Fidel Castro, died on Sunday. He ... spent his later years caring for dying patients ... and fighting lawsuits from survivors of his secret tests. He will always be remembered as the Government chemist who dosed Americans with psychedelics in the name of national security. Mr. Gottlieb joined the C.I.A. in 1951. Two years later, the agency established MKUltra and Mr. Gottlieb was running it. He served two decades as the senior scientist presiding over some of the C.I.A.'s darkest secrets. The first of these were the LSD experiments. Mr. Gottlieb was fascinated by the drug [and] took it hundreds of times. In the 1950's and early 1960's, the agency gave mind-altering drugs to hundreds of unsuspecting Americans in an effort to explore the possibilities of controlling human consciousness. In one case, a mental patient in Kentucky was dosed with LSD continuously for 174 days. Other experiments involved agency employees, military officers and college students. In all, the agency conducted 149 separate mind-control experiments, and as many as 25 involved unwitting subjects. At least one participant died, others went mad, and still others suffered psychological damage after participating in the project, known as MK Ultra. The C.I.A. ... deliberately destroyed most of the MKUltra records in 1973. Mr. Gottlieb was also involved in the C.I.A.'s assassination plots. [He] developed a poison handkerchief to kill an Iraqi colonel, an array of toxic gifts to be delivered to Fidel Castro, and a poison dart to kill a leftist leader in the Congo.

Note: Read more about the CIA's MK-ULTRA program. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on mind control from reliable major media sources. Then explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our Mind Control Information Center.

The Supreme Court today gave the Central Intelligence Agency broad discretion to withhold the identities of its sources of intelligence information from public disclosure. The exemption applies regardless of whether the information is shown to have a bearing on national security and regardless of whether the source of the information is a newspaper or magazine in general circulation. The decision, written by Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, overturned a ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. That court, in ordering the release of the names of researchers who participated in a long-running C.I.A. study of the control of human behavior, had adopted a considerably narrower definition of the ''intelligence sources'' entitled to exemption. The C.I.A. project, code-named MKULTRA, was in existence from 1953 to 1966 and was designed to develop techniques for controlling human behavior. At least 185 private researchers and 80 institutions participated in the research. Officials of two organizations ... filed requests under the Freedom of Information Act in 1977 for the names of the researchers. Last fall Congress partly excluded from the Freedom of Information Act the C.I.A.'s ''operational files,'' which involve intelligence methods and sources.

Note: The official story is that all of the experiments to control human behavior failed. Yet if this is true, why did they spend so much money and so many years on it? And why is it necessary to keep secret who the researchers were? For reliable, verifiable information suggesting not only that the experiments were quite successful, but that they may be ongoing to this day, click here.

Concerned about the growing dependence of the nation’s spy agencies on private contractors, top intelligence officials have spent months determining just how many contractors work at the C.I.A., D.I.A., F.B.I., N.S.A. and the rest of the spook alphabet soup. Now they have an answer. But they cannot reveal it, they say, because America’s enemies might be listening. Steven Aftergood of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, said the decision not to reveal the numbers was a sign of dysfunctional policies. “It reveals how confused the government is about what is really sensitive and what is not,” Mr. Aftergood said. “What would Osama bin Laden do with the fraction of intelligence workers who are contractors? Absolutely nothing.” The government’s use of contractors has accelerated greatly during the Bush administration. Nowhere has the increase been more striking than in the spy agencies. The agencies have long fought efforts to make public their budgets and work force numbers. But not all officials have been punctilious about keeping the secrets. At a conference in 2005 ... a deputy director of national intelligence, let slip that the annual spy budget was $44 billion. Last year, John D. Negroponte, then the intelligence director, said in a speech “almost 100,000 patriotic, talented and hard-working Americans” work for the agencies. Why was Mr. Negroponte permitted to reveal that number? “It was an estimate,” said Ross Feinstein, a spokesman for the current intelligence chief.

Former CIA director George J. Tenet bitterly complains in a forthcoming television interview that White House officials set him up as a scapegoat when they revealed that he had assured President Bush the intelligence on Iraq's suspected weapons arsenal was a "slam dunk." Tenet, who was one of the longest-serving CIA directors in U.S. history, resigned abruptly in June 2004 after administration infighting over the flawed intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war. Bush awarded him the Medal of Freedom six months later. Tenet then remained publicly silent about his role in the presentation of prewar intelligence that turned out to be wrong. CBS News's "60 Minutes" released excerpts of its Tenet interview. In the interview, Tenet acknowledged that he used the phrase "slam dunk" during a conversation with Bush and other key advisers in December 2002. But Tenet said the phrase was an offhand remark used to describe the ease with which a public case for war could be made. Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward first wrote about the conversation between Tenet and Bush in his 2004 book "Plan of Attack." Bush told Woodward then that Tenet's "slam dunk" assurance had been "very important" as he weighed decisions about the invasion. In the television interview, Tenet takes special exception with Bush's comments. Tenet initially denied having used the phrase "slam dunk." But, in a 2005 speech at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania, he said he regretted using the phrase to describe the case against Iraq. "Those were the two dumbest words I ever said," Tenet said.

Note: The head of the CIA admits he lied about something as vital as the use of a phrase involving gross manipulation of the public in support of war. Who else is lying here?

The depositions of the parents of Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold will be kept under seal in the National Archives for 20 years, a federal judge ruled Monday. No one, including violence prevention experts, will be able to see them until they are unsealed, U.S. District Judge Lewis Babcock ruled. They will be kept permanently in the National Archives, where they are considered to be of historical value. The depositions of the parents took place in 2003 in connection with a lawsuit filed by the families of five slain Columbine High School students. Brian Rohrbough, the father of slain student Daniel Rohrbough, said he was angered by the ruling. Rohrbough, who watched as attorneys interviewed the parents during the deposition sessions, said there is nothing in them that would cause any harm. Instead, their release could prevent further school shootings, he said. Rohrbough is under court order not to divulge details. "There is no rational reason to lock them up," Rohrbough said. "It's just the idea that it would be OK in 20 years, and can't be OK today."

Note: Why all the secrecy? Could it be to hide evidence showing it could have been stopped?

Melvin Goodman was a senior analyst in Soviet affairs at the Central Intelligence Agency, where he worked for two decades (1966-1986). He currently is professor of international studies at the National War College. [In the CIA], not only do you have political assassinations -- attempts at least -- throughout the Fifties and the Sixties ... but you even have assassination attempts against international leaders: the Mongoose operation in Cuba [and] assassination attempts in Chile, where you were dealing with a country that wasn't even in the vital national interests or concerns of the United States. All of these assassination attempts were done with the authorization of the White House. I think the major problem at the CIA -- and it exists to this day -- is that you have two cultures. You have an intelligence or analytical culture that must remain open. The opposite of that is the clandestine side: it's secret, it's a policy branch of the government. The White House basically uses the operational component of the CIA to do its bidding. It's very useful to have a clandestine corps to carry out military or paramilitary actions very cheaply, without the hand of the United States or a particular president being obvious. In many ways, you're getting worst-case assessments, because quite often the contacts of the CIA are people on the CIA payroll, telling the CIA what these people believe the CIA wants to know -- in return for payment. So the whole tradecraft is somewhat suspicious and somewhat corrupt from the very outset.

Note: Melvin Goodman is one of many senior government officials who question the government's 9/11 story. For his comments on this, click here. For other senior officials with similar sentiments, click here.

In December 1974, the New York Times reported that the CIA had conducted illegal domestic activities, including experiments on U.S. citizens during the 1960s. That report prompted investigations by both Congress (in the form of the Church Committee) and a presidential commission (known as the Rockefeller Commission) into the domestic activities of the CIA, the FBI, and intelligence-related agencies of the military. Congressional hearings and the Rockefeller Commission report revealed to the public for the first time that the CIA and the DOD had conducted experiments on both cognizant and unwitting human subjects as part of an extensive program to influence and control human behavior through the use of psychoactive drugs (such as LSD and mescaline) and other chemical, biological, and psychological means. They also revealed that at least one subject had died after administration of LSD. Frank Olson, an Army scientist, was given LSD without his knowledge or consent in 1953 as part of a CIA experiment and apparently committed suicide a week later. Subsequent reports would show that another person ... died as a result of a secret Army experiment involving mescaline. The CIA program, known principally by the codename MKULTRA, began in 1950 and was motivated largely in response to alleged Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean uses of mind-control techniques on U.S. prisoners of war in Korea. Most of the MKULTRA records were deliberately destroyed in 1973 by order of then-Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms.

Note: This highly revealing article on a U.S. government website shows that the CIA was actively involved in mind control projects. Explore also an excellent summary based on thousands of pages of declassified CIA documents showing the secret creation of unknowing assassins or "Manchurian Candidates."

A San Jose man who claimed the CIA secretly had given him LSD in 1957 as part of a mind-control experiment -- causing him to try to hold up a San Francisco bar ... offered enough evidence of possible drugging to go to trial on his $12 million damages suit. The decision by Chief U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel cited what appeared to be an admission by a former operative in the CIA program ... that he had slipped LSD into one of Wayne Ritchie's drinks. "I drugged guys involved in about 10, 12 (instances)," former federal narcotics agent Ira Feldman, who worked for the CIA's Project MKULTRA, told Ritchie's lawyer. The [MKULTRA] program ... was an attempt to find chemicals or techniques that could control human consciousness. The CIA and federal narcotics agents started giving mind-altering drugs to unsuspecting government employees, private citizens and prison volunteers in the early 1950s. Ritchie believes he was drugged during an office Christmas party. He ... was overcome with depression and a feeling that everyone had turned against him. He ... drove to a Fillmore District bar, demanded money ... and was hit over the head and knocked unconscious. He pleaded guilty to attempted robbery. Ritchie quit his job in disgrace, found work as a housepainter and spent years fighting off suicidal urges. Then in 1999, he read the obituary of MKULTRA's director, Sidney Gottlieb, and began to believe he had been one of the program's guinea pigs -- especially after the diary of a now-deceased MKULTRA agent showed he might have attended the same Christmas party.

Note: Though Ritchie lost the first round in court, he plans to appeal. For an abundance of reliable, verifiable information on secret government mind control programs, click here.

[There are] many examples of "missed leads" that the Bush administration was given prior to Sept. 11. An Iranian in custody in New York City told local police last May of a plot to attack the World Trade Center. German intelligence alerted the Central Intelligence Agency, Britain's MI-6 intelligence service, Israel's Mossad in June 2001 that Middle Eastern terrorists were training for hijackings and targeting American and Israeli interests. Based on its own intelligence, the Israeli government provided "general" information to the United States in the second week of August that an Al Qaeda attack was imminent. Russian President Vladimir Putin has said publicly that he ordered his intelligence agencies to alert the United States last summer that suicide pilots were training for attacks on U.S. targets. An Islamic terrorist conspiracy was uncovered in 1996 in the Philippines to hijack a dozen airplanes and fly them into CIA headquarters and other buildings. U.S. investigators confirmed in October that a 29-year-old Iranian ... made phone calls to U.S. police from his deportation cell that an attack on the World Trade Center was imminent in "the days before the attack." [A] memo from the FBI Phoenix office about Arabs training in U.S. flight schools never reached headquarters. In 1999, the Federal Research Division at the Library of Congress published its own report ... which described that "Suicide bomber(s) belonging to Al Qaeda's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the [CIA], or the White House."

Note: For lots more evidence that suggest 9/11 at the very least may have been allowed to happen, click here.

Thousands of white-collar criminals across the country are no longer being prosecuted in federal court -- and, in many cases, not at all -- leaving a trail of frustrated victims and potentially billions of dollars in fraud and theft losses. It is the untold story of the Bush administration's massive restructuring of the FBI after the terrorism attacks of 9/11. Five-and-a-half years later, the White House and the Justice Department have failed to replace at least 2,400 agents transferred to counterterrorism squads, leaving far fewer agents on the trail of identity thieves, con artists, hatemongers and other criminals. The hidden cost: a dramatic plunge in FBI investigations and case referrals in many of the crimes that the bureau has traditionally fought, including sophisticated fraud, embezzlement schemes and civil rights violations. In 2005, the bureau brought slightly more than 20,000 cases to federal prosecutors, compared with about 31,000 in 2000 -- a 34 percent drop. White-collar crime investigations by the bureau have plummeted in recent years. In 2005, the FBI sent prosecutors 3,500 cases -- a fraction of the more than 10,000 cases assigned to agents in 2000. Civil rights investigations, which include hate crimes and police abuse, have continued a steady decline since the late 1990s. FBI agents pursued 65 percent fewer cases in 2005 than they did in 2000. Large numbers of FBI agents also were transferred out of violent-crime programs. The gaps created by the Bush administration's war on terrorism are troubling to criminal justice experts, police chiefs -- even many current and former FBI officials and agents.

Note: For an article on how the FBI knowingly allowed innocent people to be sentenced to death, click here.

The FBI used murderers as informants in Boston for three decades, even allowing innocent men to be sentenced to death to protect the secret operation, a government report has found. The FBI's policy "must be considered one of the greatest failures in the history of federal law enforcement" and had "disastrous consequences", the report by the House Committee on Government Reform said. More than 20 people were murdered by FBI informants in Boston from 1965, often with the help of FBI agents, it said. But no FBI agent or official has ever been disciplined. The FBI's policy of using murderers grew out of a belated effort by a former director, J. Edgar Hoover, to go after the Mafia, which Hoover had earlier denied even existed. In the early 1960s, the bureau began recruiting underworld informers in its new campaign. The report focuses heavily on one episode, the 1965 murder of Edward Deegan, a small-time hoodlum who was killed by Jimmy Flemmi and Joseph Barboza, who had just been recruited by an FBI agent in Boston. The FBI knew the two men were the killers because it had been using an unauthorised wire tap and had heard Flemmi ask the Mafia boss, Raymond Patriarca, for permission to kill Deegan. A few days later, Deegan was shot dead. Four men who had nothing to do with the killing were tried and convicted, with two sentenced to death and two to life in prison. Two of the men died in prison and two had their sentences commuted and were freed after serving 30 years behind bars. Hoover was kept fully informed about this murder and the wrongful convictions, the report said.

Law-enforcement officials were told that terrorists were building a bomb that was eventually used to blow up the World Trade Center. The informer was to have helped the plotters build the bomb and supply the fake powder, but the plan was called off by an F.B.I. supervisor who had other ideas about how the informer, Emad A. Salem, should be used. The account, which is given in the transcript of hundreds of hours of tape recordings Mr. Salem secretly made of his talks with law-enforcement agents, portrays the authorities as in a far better position than previously known to foil the Feb. 26 bombing of New York City's tallest towers. The explosion left six people dead, more than 1,000 injured and damages in excess of half a billion dollars. The transcript quotes Mr. Salem as saying that he wanted to complain to F.B.I. headquarters in Washington about the bureau's failure to stop the bombing, but was dissuaded by an agent identified as John Anticev. "He said, I don't think that the New York people would like the things out of the New York office to go to Washington, D.C." Another agent ... does not dispute Mr. Salem's account, but rather, appears to agree with it. Other Salem tapes and transcripts were being withheld pending Government review, of "security and other issues." William M. Kunstler, a defense lawyer in the case, accused the Government this week of improper delay in handing over all the material. The transcripts he had seen, he said, "were filled with all sorts of Government misconduct." But citing the judge's order, he said he could not provide any details.

Note: If the above link fails, click here. For a two-minute CBS News clip the same day giving more information on this little-known story, click here.

For at least a year before the 2004 Republican National Convention, teams of undercover New York City police officers traveled to cities across the country, Canada and Europe to conduct covert observations of people who planned to protest at the convention, according to police records and interviews. From Albuquerque to Montreal, San Francisco to Miami, undercover New York police officers attended meetings of political groups, posing as sympathizers or fellow activists. They made friends, shared meals, swapped e-mail messages and then filed daily reports with the department’s Intelligence Division. In hundreds of reports stamped “N.Y.P.D. Secret,” the Intelligence Division chronicled the views and plans of people who had no apparent intention of breaking the law. These included members of street theater companies, church groups and antiwar organizations. Three New York City elected officials were cited in the reports. In at least some cases, intelligence on what appeared to be lawful activity was shared with police departments in other cities. In addition to sharing information with other police departments, New York undercover officers were active themselves in at least 15 places outside New York — including California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montreal, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas and Washington, D.C. — and in Europe. To date, as the boundaries of the department’s expanded powers continue to be debated, police officials have provided only glimpses of its intelligence-gathering.

Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.