The release of the CIA's so-called "Family Jewels" confirmed the agency surveillance that was so well-known to Anderson's family members that they played pranks on the agents.
"We were kind of used to that kind of stuff at that point in time and we just had fun with it," said Kevin Anderson, the son of the late Anderson and now an attorney in Salt Lake City.
He said he and his friends and siblings would try to let the air out of the agents' tires; they would pull up in a car, boxing them in and snapping pictures until the agents fled; and they would dress as their father and drive off, leading the agents on a goose-chase.
"I would describe it almost as a Keystone Kops-ish kind of episode," Kevin Anderson said.
The documents lay out how in 1960, the CIA enlisted an ex-FBI agent to recruit mobster Johnny Roselli, ostensibly as a representative of international corporations that wanted Castro killed.
Roselli introduced the agent to two other notorious mobsters who agreed to arrange the assassination. The CIA provided them with a half-dozen pills consisting of a potent poison that the conspirators purportedly tried unsuccessfully to put in Castro's food.
The plot was abandoned after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, but Roselli later got in legal trouble for trying to swindle members of the Friars Club out of $400,000 in a gin rummy game.
Roselli threatened to go public with the plot if the CIA didn't help make the charge go away and when the CIA refused, Anderson broke the story in a pair of columns in 1971.
The CIA took note of those columns and others where it questioned the sources of leaks of classified material to Anderson. Agents went so far as to set up a surveillance station in the Statler Hilton Hotel across from Anderson's office.
The agents also tried to blow up images from Anderson's television program to see if they could make out information on supposedly classified documents he was holding.
They also attempted on at least one occasion to set a "trap" for Anderson's sources. The documents don't reveal how successful these attempts were.
Kevin Anderson says the CIA's acknowledgment of the plots and activities his father covered is vindication, since some questioned the accuracy of his columns at the time.
"Dad would've loved being around to see this day come," Anderson said. "Hopefully he's smiling about it."
The "Family Jewels" refer to a collection of documents, mostly gathered after the Watergate break-in, after former CIA agents Howard Hunt and James McCord were involved in the break-in. They detail illegal or questionable activities in which the CIA engaged in the years prior.
Pat Shea, now a Salt Lake attorney, was hired as a staffer for Idaho Sen. Frank Church, who was conducting a thorough review of the CIA's operations when Vice President Nelson Rockefeller called Church to his office and turned over information on the Family Jewels.
That led to a long series of hearings on assassinations, drugs, wiretaps and other issues that Shea said ended up being a diversion from the committee's real oversight.
When it comes to Anderson, however, the documents don't shed much new light, says Mark Feldstein, a professor at George Washington University who is writing a biography on Anderson and has more extensive CIA files that Anderson obtained before his death in 2005.
"I think we're looking at old wine in a new bottle," said Feldstein.
"I was hoping for a lot more than was turned over today and they undoubtedly have a lot more on Jack Anderson and are choosing not to release it," he said.
University of Utah political science professor Tim Chambless, who worked for Anderson and is also writing a book about his former mentor, said the documents have enticing and "provocative" details and researchers may "find pieces of the mosaic that are interesting."
When he announced last week that the documents would be released, CIA director Michael Hayden said the documents offer "a glimpse of a very different time and a very different agency."
