Word: mailings
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...place. The Post Office's emblem, a galloping pony express rider from the 19th century, was replaced by a sleek 20th century eagle, and the Postal Service, a quasi-independent Government corporation, was expected to be equally up to date. Its assignment was not only to deliver the mail fast and efficiently but also to pay its own way within just a few years, phasing out a 200-year-old subsidy from the American taxpayer...
...postal employee, I have naturally been concerned with delays in mail service. Imagine my horror when I delivered your issue dated July...
...MAIL OPENINGS. Starting during the cold war, the CIA conducted four programs to examine the mails between the U.S. and Communist countries, chiefly the Soviet Union. The projects were in New York, from 1952 to 1973; in San Francisco, during four separate periods of a month or less in 1969, 1970 and 1971; in Hawaii in late 1954 and early 1955; and in New Orleans for three weeks in 1957. The chief purposes were to keep track of Americans who were corresponding with Communist officials and to assess Communist secret-writing and censorship techniques...
Initially, the CIA led postal officials to believe that the projects would involve only examination of the outside of the envelopes ("mail cover" in CIA parlance), which is legal. But apparently unknown to Postmaster General Arthur Summer field, his successors and most other top postal officials, the CIA used its mail cover to open many of the letters, which is illegal unless authorized by a search warrant. In the last full year of the New York operation, for example, eight CIA employees examined the envelopes of more than 2.3 million items of mail between the U.S. and the Soviet Union...
...commission found that top CIA officials knew that the mail openings were illegal. For example, an internal CIA memorandum warned in 1962 that "a flap would put us out of business immediately and give rise to grave charges of criminal misuse of the mail by Government agencies." Similarly the commission learned that during one of the San Francisco operations, CIA representatives abstracted and "concealed selected pieces of mail in an equipment case or a handbag," apparently without the knowledge of a postal official who was present. Later CIA officials analyzed the contents of the purloined letters, resealed the envelopes...