On June 25, 2007, the CIA quietly released 693 pages of their darkest secrets to the website.

No announcement, no press conference.

Just a document dump of operations so illegal they've been hidden since 1973.

The CIA called this collection their family jewels.

Assassination plots, mind control experiments, journalists on CIA payroll, surveillance of hundreds

of thousands of Americans who'd committed no crimes. These weren't conspiracy theories. These were real.

Each page of the family jewels revealed operations approved at the highest levels, operations that

violated every law meant to constrain the CIA.

And taken together, they revealed something darker than isolated crimes.

They told a story.

The story of the family jewels is the story of the real CIA.

The story of the family jewels didn't start in 2007.

It starts in 1973, when the walls started closing in on the CIA.

On May 9th, James Schlesinger had been CIA director for only three months,

and his timing couldn't have been worse. The Watergate break-in scandal was spreading.

The five intruders were all connected to the CIA, some as officers, some as assets.

The planners of the break-in were E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy. Hunt was former CIA.

Liddy was former FBI with a background in intelligence. Congress and the press were asking questions the CIA didn't want to answer. But the director had a problem. He didn't know what

his own agency had done. He knew there were secrets buried that could destroy them

if ever discovered, so he issued an order to every department head, report any activity that may

have violated the CIA's charter. This was supposed to be a routine investigation, a way to get

the agency out of the headlines. The rumors were bad. He had no idea that the truth was much worse.

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