MIAMI – If you ever wanted to know the CIA's secret recipe for invisible ink, how to spot spy messages hidden in suspicious fruit, or which top U.S. spy was asked to appear in Penthouse magazine, you're in luck. Millions of pages of once-classified agency documents are now available for the first time on your home computer after the agency moved one of its databases online.
The documents run the gamut from classic espionage (a Cold War mission to tunnel into East Germany to tap the Soviet Union's military telephone system) to borderline-goofball research (trying to see whether "psychic" Uri Geller could read the minds of intelligence officers) to tediously mundane housekeeping tasks.
Most of the documents have been declassified for decades or longer. But they were available for viewing only on a handful of computers at an outpost of the National Archives, in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. After years of wrangling with open-government advocates, the agency finally relented this month.
"Now you can access it from the comfort of your own home," Joseph Lambert, the CIA's longtime director of information management, said grandly as the database — known as the CIA Records Search Tool, or CREST — went online.
So far there have been few blockbusters, though the bits of intelligence run from the oddly fascinating (East Germany, in the summer of 1973, faced a daunting shortage of barbers) to the monumentally incorrect (a breezy pronouncement that Iran's Muslim clergymen didn't constitute "a well-organized threat to the regime," made barely years before they toppled the government and put the country on a disastrous collision course with the United States that persists to this day).
There are even hints of James Bondish bang-bang. Who drew that hand-drawn map of an explosives plant in Romania, including a diagram of the wiring of its electronic security gate, and why?
But a few days spent sifting random documents reveals a couple of unexpected things. One is the indefinably vast expanse of the CIA's interests. There are large numbers of documents about UFOs and psychic research. One wisecrack title is attached to a package of files on the CIA's interest in UFOs: "Top 5 CIA Documents Mulder Would Love To Get His Hands On," a reference to Fox Mulder, the FBI agent on TV's The X-Files.
The title of one document — "Clarifying Statement to Fidel Castro Concerning Assassination" — sent journalistic hearts pounding across the world. It turns out to be an unremarkable 1977 exchange of notes between then-CIA director Stansfield Turner and an agency press public affairs officer about getting a transcript of a Castro interview by Barbara Walters.
At the bottom of the 26-page file, though, is a payoff of sorts: a letter from the porn magazine Penthouse, requesting an interview. The idea of Turner — a straight-laced Christian Scientist who didn't drink, smoke or swear — agreeing to an interview to be sandwiched between Penthouse's nakeder-than-naked photo displays still makes CIA veterans giggle four decades later.
"It would have been hysterical, if he had done it, which I'm sure he didn't," said one former agency official. But the letter got no reply.
