The CIA burglar who went rogue

[Pigeon]

This is a fascinating story of a CIA burglar, who worked for the CIA until he tried to work against the CIA. The fact that he stole code books and keys from foreign embassies makes it extra interesting, and the complete disregard for the Constitution at the end makes it extra scary.

The Link

[Royal]

After the 31-year-old, auburn-haired spy and her lover stripped in the hall outside the code room, Cynthia, naked but for her pearls and high-heeled shoes, signaled out a window to a waiting OSS safe expert...

She has an interesting story:

As the political and economic tensions of the 1930s buckled into conflict, the couple changed diplomatic postings. Cynthia seemed oblivious to the tensions. In Spain, in 1935, she was more interested in dancing at Jimmy's, a Madrid jazz club, than in the city's murderous politics. She became a kind of metaphor for the complacency of the "neutral" British legation, moving easily among the wealthy Carlists and influential fascists, and having affairs with Spanish aristocrats.
http://hnn.us/blogs/74.html

In a secret program called HTLINGUAL, the CIA screened more than 28 million first-class letters and opened 215,000 of them between 1953 and 1973, even though the Supreme Court held as far back as 1878 in Ex parte Jackson and reaffirmed in 1970 in U.S. v. Van Leeuwen that the Fourth Amendment bars third parties from opening first-class mail without a warrant. The program’s stated purpose was to obtain foreign intelligence, but it targeted domestic peace and civil rights activists as well. In a 1962 memo to the director of the CIA’s Office of Security, the deputy chief of the counterintelligence staff warned that the program could lead “to grave charges of criminal misuse of the mails” and therefore U.S. intelligence agencies must “vigorously deny” HTLINGUAL, which should be “relatively easy to ‘hush up.’

Room 1A?

...but former CIA director William E. Colby confirmed in the French edition of his memoir, which slipped through the agency’s censorship, that the operation fell short of its main objective—recovering the part of the sub containing Soviet nuclear missiles and codebooks.

So where are the nukes?

The way Groat saw it, he had risked his life for nearly a decade to perform some of his country’s most demanding, valuable and risky work. He was the best at what he did, and yet that didn’t seem to matter; some bureaucrats had forced him out of the Shop for speaking out.

So he decided to run his own operation. Against the CIA

[Royal]

“My eyes were covered with a pair of goggles, the lenses masked over with duct tape,” he says. He was moved by van, with a police escort, to a waiting helicopter. After a short ride, he was taken to a windowless room that would be his home for the next six months. He was never told where he was, but he was told he was being treated as an “extreme risk” prisoner. The lights in his cell were kept on 24/7, and a ceiling-mounted camera monitored him all the time.

Logical progression... sad he couldn't get a decent deal going given his work. At least he's alive (I think).

[Pigeon]

The government has to decide between paying or killing the guy. Then some genius just goes with locked up.

Nice people we pay to be world police.