LAUNDRY.

LAUNDRY. This is really quite exciting:

The CIA will declassify hundreds of pages of long-secret records detailing some of the intelligence agency's worst illegal abuses -- the so-called "family jewels" documenting a quarter-century of overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying, kidnapping and infiltration of leftist groups from the 1950s to the 1970s, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said yesterday.The documents, to be publicly released next week, also include accounts of break-ins and theft, the agency's opening of private mail to and from China and the Soviet Union, wiretaps and surveillance of journalists, and a series of "unwitting" tests on U.S. civilians, including the use of drugs.

Michael Hayden has certainly outperformed expectations as CIA Director. In the entrance foyer to the CIA, they have a book listing all of the agents killed in duty since the founding of the Agency, with a gold star next to each name. About a third of the stars, dating from 1965, have no names. It will be interesting to see if any of those names can finally be revealed. In any case, this should prove a boon to scholars of the CIA and of American foreign policy during and after the Cold War.--Robert Farley