◆ SpookStack

• • ,• .. Approved For Release 2008/11/06: CIA-RDP04M01816R000502010009-4 54 the Department believes at the time the potential defendants acted, there was a substantial basis for thinking that the law was otherwise. What would make the contemplated prose- cution particularly unfair is the fact that ignorance of .·· the deveioping law, and the consequent existence of erroneous f\,so/~·assumptions of legality, were in large part the fault of the "' government, and indeed the Department of Justice itself. The .. Department's own attitudes toward mail openings as a means of gathering foreign intelligence must have appeared at least equivocal. Although after 1966 the FBI did not engage in mail opening, it participated in and was the primary beneficiary ·4lt of the CIA's East Coast Project. On two occasions early in the· 1960s the Department considered criminal prosecutions e that would have been based in part on evidence derived from FBI mail openings. In each case the Department declined or with- drew prosecution. Whether it did so because it feared that the evidence would be excluded as illegally obtained, or whether it did so to avoid revealing the existence of the mail opening projects, the effect was the same: it allowed the programs to go on as before, and it did not instruct the FBI or the CIA to cease opening mail. What is more, in the mid-1960s, in connection with Senate subcommittee hearings on possible govern- mental monitoring of the mails, and again in the early 1~70s, A roved For Release 2008/11/06: CIA-RDP04M01816R000502010009-4