http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,912967-1,00.htmlTHE CIA: Prying into Mail, Plotting Murder
Monday, Mar. 17, 1975
"Let's get one thing clear right away," declared the angry chairwoman, flashing fiery eyes at the uncomfortable witness. "Opening the mail of a lawyer representing a client is clearly illegal."
CIA Director William Colby drummed his fingers on a table and fidgeted. He avoided the legal issue, but did not deny that CIA agents had frequently opened the mail of his accuser, New York's bellicose Congresswoman Bella Abzug. Nor could he if he had wanted to. Lawyer Abzug had demanded that the CIA turn over its file on her, and purged of what Colby considered sensitive items, it now lay at her elbow in a long, fat manila envelope.
Presiding over a House subcommittee hearing, Congresswoman Abzug drew admissions from Colby that the CIA had begun compiling a file on her 22 years ago when she represented a client before the House Un-American Activities Committee—long before her national prominence and election to Congress in 1970. What she termed the "rotten stuff' in the envelope also included copies of letters she had written to Soviet officials trying to locate heirs to an estate, a report on an anti-Viet Nam War speech she had made in New York, details of her meeting with Vietnamese Communists in Paris in 1972. Colby conceded that some of this information gathering "may not be appropriate today." He said obscurely that the CIA would not keep a "continuing file" on her but would still collect material on U.S. citizens engaged in what he termed "questionable" political activities. Snapped Bella: "You say you're not going to do it any more, and yet you are going to do it."
Routine Denials. On another front, pressure on the CIA was accumulating. At a press conference, President Ford obliquely confirmed published reports that Colby had privately told him of CIA support of assassination plots against foreign political figures in the past. Almost any time an anti-U.S. leader anywhere is toppled or killed, of course, rumors of CIA involvement arise. The CIA routinely denies any connection with any political assassination, and Ford said that it would be "inappropriate" for him to comment on the subject,
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