A High Official of the Bureau and the Secret UN Post

By Miriam Adler ·

Kept secret for nearly fifty years and marred by missing pages, a Top Secret memo describes how the FBI used the CIA as a shield to spy on the United Nations.

Diplomats from the French Republic and delegates at the United Nations were subjected to clandestine intrusions that violated the basic tenets of sovereign immunity and international law. The cost was a systemic erosion of diplomatic trust, processed through a series of illegal break-ins and monitoring posts that operated in the shadows of the American capital and New York City.

What survives of this history in the current release is an archival description of the record rather than the original pages. This summary focuses on a Top Secret memorandum dated July 23, 1975, sent by William Crager, a member of the FBI's intelligence division, to W. Raymond Wannall, the assistant director who received the review. The memo, designated "SENSTUDY 75," serves as a post-mortem of the CIA's "Family Jewels"—the internal dossier of the agency's own misdeeds—specifically those that implicated the FBI.

Breaking and Entering

The record establishes a startling level of complicity at the highest echelons of the American government during the early 1960s. According to the memo, President Kennedy, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and Attorney General Robert Kennedy were all aware of a CIA operation that involved "breaking and entering and the removal of documents from an unknown location in Washington, D.C." The public record identifies Rusk as the Secretary of State from 1961 to 1969, a man tasked with navigating the Cold War's diplomatic minefields, and Robert Kennedy as the Attorney General who managed the legal front of the administration's covert wars. The target of this burglary was later identified as a French diplomatic establishment, a sovereign outpost in the capital where the sanctity of the archive is supposed to be absolute.

The line here is not merely one of operational awareness but of legal surrender. When the President and the Attorney General—the nation's chief law enforcement officer—sanction a burglary of a foreign embassy, the law is no longer a boundary but a suggestion. The fact that these three men are listed in a 1975 internal review suggests the FBI was meticulously cataloging who among the deceased or departed could be held responsible for these breaches. The record treats the awareness of the Kennedy brothers and Dean Rusk as a matter of fact, effectively anchoring the illegality in the executive branch's direct consent.

Document imagery from nsarchive.gwu.edu From the files: nsarchive.gwu.edu

Project SALVAGE

The most revealing portion of the memo concerns "Project SALVAGE." The record describes this as the CIA's "custodianship of an FBI monitoring post in New York City targeted against the United Nations," the intergovernmental body designed to maintain global peace. The phrasing is precise: the post belonged to the FBI, but the CIA held the "custodianship."

The public record defines the FBI as the domestic intelligence and security service of the United States, an agency strictly prohibited from conducting foreign intelligence operations on U.S. soil. By transferring the "custodianship" of the UN post to the CIA, a civilian foreign intelligence service, the Bureau created a layer of plausible deniability. If the operation were ever exposed, the FBI could claim the surveillance was a CIA foreign intelligence matter, shielding the Bureau from the legal fallout of spying on international diplomats in Manhattan.

The record adds a layer of internal dysfunction to this arrangement. Project SALVAGE was reportedly "done at the request of a high official of the Bureau who desired to maintain the capabilities, despite the fact that the FBI Director had ordered the operation terminated." The name of this high official is withheld, leaving a gap where a name should be. This gap is shaped like a conspiracy of two: a director who gave an order and a subordinate who simply ignored it, using the CIA as a laundry for an illegal domestic capability.

WUDOOR and the Chilean Embassy

The memorandum further details a clandestine operation against the embassy of Chile, the South American republic whose government was under intense pressure in the early 1970s. Under the code name "WUDOOR," the FBI performed surveillance that "ran intermittently during the period May, 1971, to February, 1973."

The record is explicit: this operation was "initiated at the request of CIA." Here, the relationship between the two agencies is inverted from Project SALVAGE. Instead of the CIA shielding the FBI, the FBI acted as the operational arm for the CIA's interests in the Western Hemisphere. The timing is not a coincidence. The window of surveillance—ending in February 1973—precedes the September 1973 military coup in Chile by only a few months.

Connecting the dots between the UN monitoring post and the Chilean surveillance reveals a pattern of agency fluidity. The FBI and CIA, often portrayed as rivals competing for budget and influence, operated here as a single, seamless apparatus of surveillance. Whether the FBI was using the CIA to hide its tracks at the UN or the CIA was using the FBI to watch the Chileans, the result was the same: the erasure of the legal boundaries between domestic law enforcement and foreign espionage.

The SENSTUDY Scrub

The provenance of this memo—appearing within the National Archives JFK Assassination Records release—and its designation as "SENSTUDY 75" points to a specific purpose. The memo was written in July 1975, a period of intense congressional scrutiny and the height of the Rockefeller Commission's investigation into CIA activities.

The desk's reading is that the "SENSTUDY 75" series was not a neutral internal review, but a coordinated effort to sanitize and align the narratives of both agencies. If the shape of this file is what it appears to be, the detailed listing of President Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Dean Rusk's awareness of the French B&E was a controlled disclosure. By documenting the knowledge of deceased principals, the Bureau could admit to the illegality of the act while ensuring that the blame stopped at gravesites, protecting the living officers who had executed the orders.

The pattern suggests that the "missing pages" are not an accident of time but a deliberate withholding. These gaps likely contain the identities of the "high official" who defied the FBI Director and the specific overlaps between the "Family Jewels" and the timeline of the JFK assassination investigation. The desk's reading is that the FBI was scrubbing its own ledger to ensure that no living official could be linked to the unauthorized maintenance of the UN monitoring post or the specifics of the Chilean operation.

Ultimately, this record shows the FBI and CIA functioning as a mutual insurance policy. When the Bureau wanted to spy domestically on the UN, it used the CIA for cover; when the CIA wanted to pressure a foreign embassy on U.S. soil, it used the FBI for muscle. The missing pages and the redacted names are the remaining fortifications of this arrangement. A full release would likely show that the "high official" who defied the Director was not an outlier, but a representative of a parallel internal command structure that viewed the Director's orders—and the law—as optional. The cost of this autonomy was paid by the diplomats and delegates whose privacy was traded for the convenience of a shadow state.

Sources

  1. FBI memorandum, William O. Cregar to Assistant Director W. Raymond Wannall, “SENSTUDY 75,” Top Secret, July 23, 1975, 6 pp. [missing pages] — National Security Archive (GWU)
  2. Document PDF (FBI memorandum, William O. Cregar to Assistant Director W. Raymond Wannall, “SENSTUDY 75,” Top Secret, July 23, 1975, 6 pp. [missing pages])
  3. Background: Parbuckle salvage — Wikipedia