A bit OT -- but I saw this in my morning paper (online) and thought a few may be interested....
http://www.miamiherald.com/569/story/156989.htmlINTELLIGENCE FILES
Psst, the secret's out!
S. Florida was hub for CIA in '60s, '70s
Long-hidden documents reveal that Miami was a favorite stomping ground of the Central Intelligence Agency.
BY CAROL ROSENBERG
crosenberg@MiamiHerald.comMIAMI HERALD ILLUSTRATION
Two sets of previously classified CIA documents, including what the CIA calls its "Family Jewels," have been released under the Freedom of Information Act for public viewing.
CIA's "Family Jewels" released online
CIA papers on Cold War internal politics
Excerpt from the CIA's "Family Jewels"
In the summer of 1971, CIA agents saw Miami Beach as a sultry U.S. stand-in for Saigon, South Vietnam. So they secretly set up an antenna on a hotel rooftop -- and field-tested then state-of-the-art eavesdropping equipment.
It was just blocks away from the Fontainebleau Hotel, where, in late 1960, a CIA operative met two mobsters to discuss killing Fidel Castro, by poisoning his food.
When the CIA opened some long-classified files last week detailing dubious 1960s and 1970s agency activities, it cast a spotlight on a murky world of domestic wiretapping, foreign assassination schemes and Mafia alliances.
But it also showed just how many of the skeletons in the spy agency's closet were buried in and around Miami.
Home to Cuban operatives of the blundered Watergate break-in and a former CIA lock picker's final resting place, retiree- and exile-rich Florida served as a CIA stomping ground -- despite rules that largely ban the foreign intelligence agency from functioning on U.S. soil.
''I'm sure there were some people that knew about [the CIA activities]. But most of the people who were active at that time are all dead,'' said Seymour Gelber, octogenarian and former mayor of Miami Beach.
Then, Gelber served as the Miami-Dade County prosecutor's security liaison to the 1968 and 1972 conventions of the Republican and Democratic parties, and Miami, he said, was ''kind of a cauldron'' with ``all the spies meeting to try to control the dissenters.''
TOP SECRET FILES
The release of declassified CIA documents last week emerged from an era of internal reckoning at the fabled spy agency after former CIA agents were found among the spooks who broke into Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington in June 1972.
A year later, CIA Director James Schlesinger sent out an agency-wide memo asking employees to report what they knew about the Watergate affair and former agents and others implicated in it. And he asked them for accounts of ``any other illegal activity in which they believe the Agency was involved in any way.''
Now called ''The Family Jewels,'' some 700 pages that emerged from that process were amassed at headquarters and stamped TOP SECRET or CONFIDENTIAL or SENSITIVE.
Yes, in capital letters.
Even with their release Tuesday, a significant chunk was still hidden. Whole pages and paragraphs were censored.
An example: On May 7, 1973, an agency employee wrote a memo whose subject line was ``Potentially Embarrassing Activities Conducted by Division D.''
When it was released Tuesday, Item 3 was censored. Entirely.
But Item 4 describes CIA technicians in the summer of 1971, during the Vietnam War, setting up an antenna on a hotel roof near the Miami Beach Convention Center to simulate spying on a ``Soviet agent in South Vietnam.''
Why? They were field-testing a new kind of monitoring device -- and muggy South Florida simulated soggy Saigon.
The pages do not name the hotel. Nor do they identify a curious desk clerk to whom the CIA agents lied when they responded affirmatively to the clerk's question asking if they were scouting security locations for the upcoming 1972 Republican and Democratic conventions to nominate their presidential candidates.
''The Secret Service had already been checking for possible sniper sites,'' said one report.
But disclosure of the intelligence could be embarrassing, the agents reported, because it might be misconstrued as related to the coming Democratic National Convention, when in fact the ``location in Miami Beach, Florida, was selected for the tests because of similarity to the actual target site and environment in Saigon.''
Miami was tropical, virtually the last stop on the edge of Latin America. In the 1960s, it had 300 to 400 agents, making it the world's largest CIA station after the headquarters in Langley, Va.
And it was awash in former operatives -- notably Cubans who had been trained and supported for the Bay of Pigs and other ill-fated covert missions.
CUBAN AGENTS
''They were certainly comfortable working in Miami,'' said John Prados of the private National Security Archive at George Washington University, which has been trying for 15 years to pry open the secrets.
``All of the Miami Cubans were their friends -- even the ones who weren't working for the agency anymore. Probably half of them had friends who had worked for the agency before.''
A few examples:
• E. Howard Hunt, the retired CIA spy master turned White House security consultant, recruited the Watergate burglars from former Cuban operatives, many from Miami.
He would later settle here, after serving 33 months in prison for conspiracy.
• Months before the Watergate break-in, according to the documents, Hunt turned to the CIA's ''External Employment Assistance Branch'' in search of a lock picker. The documents name a then recently retired 20-year CIA technician, Thomas Amato.
The Miami Herald tried to determine whether Hunt offered Amato the mission. But Hunt died in January of pneumonia -- after years of writing spy thrillers, off Biscayne Boulevard.
Also dead is the fellow named in the documents. Amato had retired to Satellite Beach, Fla., and had a heart attack in 1978.
• In 1973, the U.S. Agency for International Development, or AID, teamed up with the CIA to train foreign police forces about bomb-making. The course was conducted in Washington, D.C., and Dade County, as it was then called.
James Angleton, the legendary CIA chief of counterintelligence, wrote that, in cooperation with the Dade County Bomb Squad, ''trainees'' got hands-on experience in ``handling, preparing and applying the various explosive charges, incendiary agents, terrorist devices and sabotage techniques.''
• The documents also detail long-ago-revealed, 1960s-era consultations between the CIA and the Mafia on whether and how to assassinate Castro.
CASTRO PLOT
One such brainstorming session took place at the famed Fontainebleau Hotel on Collins Avenue, where Chicago mob leader Momo Salvatore Giancana suggested having a Cuban with U.S. sympathies slip six lethal pills into Castro's food.
That account came as no surprise last week to Fontainebleau marketing director Paul Pebley, who said mob ties and CIA intrigue are part of the lively history of a hotel that was also frequented by Frank Sinatra and his ''Rat Pack'' and served as the setting for more than a few Hollywood films.
''By its sheer size and history,'' said Pebley, ``this property has drawn a host of celebrities -- and all kinds of colorful characters.''
• In May 1973, the head of CIA logistics, John F. Blake, included a South Florida real estate transaction in a list of ``Sensitive Activities.''
``This office is aware, although it had no cognizance nor responsibility, that an apartment was rented in Miami Beach, Florida, during the period of the Democratic National Convention, 10-14 July 1972, and the Republican National Convention, 21-24 August 1972.''
The CIA's Latin American division was aware, Blake wrote, as was the Secret Service. Its precise purpose beyond ''a meeting place'' was censored. No location was provided.
