A Kick In The Family Jewels

The CIA has released documents detailing their past misdeeds to distract us from their current misdeeds.

It's 702 pages of redactiony goodness, in some pain in the ass Javascript format that you can't directly link to or copy and paste from. Thanks guys. Oh, and they've apparently hosted the documents on a server made of bearskins and stone knives, connected only loosely to the interweb by a small cardboard tube partially blocked by a sleepy kitten. Which is to say that this site is really slow, no matter what your bandwidth is.

In any case, I present the first illegal activity in the report, in its post-redaction entirety:

1.

Uh, guys, that was put together in nineteen SEVENTY THREE. Seriously, is that shit still a matter of national security, or do your fingers just get itchy if you go too long without redacting something?

The second is a little more interesting:

2. Johnny Roselli -- The use of a member of the Mafia in an attempt to assassinate Fidel Castro.

Ah, what sweet patriotic guys these mobsters were back in the 60's. They turned down 150 large to poison Fidel, and took on the job out of the goodness of their hearts. The Cuban Exile Junta wanted $11,000 for their part, the chiseling bastards. The mobsters were acting pro bono and it wasn't even their country.

It gets better. Even though the mob tried six times and never actually managed to make the hit, they did get the CIA to bug a hotel room for them so they could find out if one of their girlfriends was boinking some other dude. Or they would have, except the CIA operative bungled the job and got arrested. The CIA had to go to Bobby Kennedy to call off the DoJ, who were planning to prosecute the guy. Way to go assholes. No wonder you're handing off the tough jobs to the mafia. You can't even pull off Operation Is Phyllis Getting Laid? ...which is probably just as well for Phyllis, all things considered, seeing as her boyfriend was a jealous mobster and all.

Of course, all of this became known in 1970 when Roselli ratted them out to the Washington Post for not coming to his aid when he faced deportation over a variety of charges including rigging a gin rummy game, but there's plenty of other juicy stuff in here. Here's the link again: www.foia.cia.gov, look for the Family Jewels link.