By: David Bibo
Then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy signed off on illegal wiretaps of American journalists, according to the recently declassified CIA “Family Jewels.”
From the declassified CIA documents:
Project Mockingbird, a telephone intercept activity…targeted two Washington-based newsmen who, at the time, had been publishing news articles based on, and frequently quoting, classified [CIA] materials…
Telephone intercept connections were installed at the newsmen’s office and at each of their homes…The connections were established with the assistance of a telephone company official…authority for the activity was Mr. John McCone, Director of Central Intelligence…in coordination with the Attorney General (Mr. Robert Kennedy) [and] the Secretary of Defense (Mr. Robert McNamara)…
From the New York Times Blog:
According to the transcripts of the tapes that President John F. Kennedy secretly recorded in the Oval Office, shortly after 6 p.m. on August 22,1962, JFK and Director of Central Intelligence John McCone discussed a plan for the CIA to wiretap members of the Washington press corps.
“How are we doing with that set-up on the Baldwin business?” the president asked. Four weeks before, Hanson Baldwin, the national security reporter for The New York Times, had published an article on Soviet efforts to protect intercontinental ballistic missile launch sites with concrete bunkers. Baldwin’s highly detailed reporting accurately stated the conclusions of the CIA’s most recent national intelligence estimate.
The president told McCone to set up a domestic task force to stop the flow of secrets from the government to the newspapers. The order violated the agency’s charter, which specifically prohibits domestic spying. Long before Nixon created his “plumbers” unit of CIA veterans to stop news leaks, Kennedy used the agency to spy on Americans.
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