By the SPOTLIGHT Staff
January 15, 2001

This Washington-based populist weekly has been given a large quantity of significant files, detailing the covert operations of the CIA.

An important collection of historical papers belonging to former CIA senior official Robert T.Crowley has been donated to The Spotlight in Washington, D.C.
Crowley, who died in a Washington hospital in October 2000, had retired from the CIA as deputy director of clandestine operations. He was a member of the agency since its founding in 1948 and was a close associate of James Jesus Angleton, head of the CIA counterintelligence.
Growing disillusioned with his former associates, Crowley withdrew his membership in various intelligence associations. In his final years, he spoke with bitterness about many of the operations with which he had been involved, coming to see many of the agency's activities as unpatriotic and illegal.
Crowley gave quantities of his significan private files to several journalists. It is a large portion of one of these bequests that was recently donated to The SPOTLIGHT.
These facinating and very important historical records will be cataloged and then made available to scholars, researchers and publishers who wish to study and publicize the inner-workings of the very secretive cloak-and-dagger agency.
Among the papers in the donation are lists of CIA sources and personnel in the United States, Europe and Japan; extensive material on Operation Phoenix, the controversial pacification program in Vietnam; MK-ULTRA, a program of attempted mind-control institued by the CIA, Operation Applepie, the hiring of top Nazi Gestapo and SS officials by the CIA after the war; CIA support of the Quebec Libre movement and the Irish Republican Army; and of the greatest interest to historians, the original in-house official CIA budget for fiscal years 1996-1997. This bulky document reveals clearly how intelligence agencies actually use their congressional funding and shows the radical difference between what is shown to Congress and what is not.
The donations will serve as a resource archive for many SPOTLIGHT articles to come. The newspaper plans to set up a research center to enable historians and scholars alike to gain a fascinating view into the secret world of U.S. intelligence.

The SPOTLIGHT, in its issue of Nov.6, 2000, page 1, has already printed some names from a computer printout, Crowley had which lists all CIA agents in the U.S. at the time of Crowley's departure from the agency.
The gift to The SPOTLIGHT is conditional and will be rescinded or withdrawn if the newspaper is "taken over" by a group connected to any intelligence agency.
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New verification to some things already discussed on this forum!