Wikipedia Deep Dive

Church Committee

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In 1975, Americans learned that their own government had been spying on them, drugging them without consent, opening their mail, and plotting to assassinate foreign leaders. The revelations came not from a whistleblower or a foreign adversary, but from the United States Senate itself.

The Church Committee, named after its chairman, Idaho Senator Frank Church, spent sixteen months pulling back the curtain on decades of intelligence abuses. What they found shocked the nation and fundamentally changed how Americans think about the relationship between security and liberty.

The Year of Intelligence

The investigation didn't emerge from nowhere. By the early 1970s, troubling reports had begun trickling into the press. In January 1970, an Army intelligence officer named Christopher Pyle revealed that the military was spying on American civilians. Senator Sam Ervin, who would later become famous for leading the Watergate hearings, conducted investigations that produced more disturbing discoveries.

Then came the bombshell.

On December 22, 1974, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published a lengthy front-page article in The New York Times. It detailed something called Operation CHAOS, a secret program through which the Central Intelligence Agency collected information on the political activities of American citizens. The agency wasn't supposed to operate domestically at all. That was the entire point of having a separate Federal Bureau of Investigation. Yet here was evidence that the CIA had turned its considerable resources inward, against the very people it was meant to protect.

The uproar was immediate. On January 27, 1975, the Senate voted 82 to 4 to create a special investigative committee. Frank Church, a Democrat serving his fourth term, was chosen to lead it. The eleven-member panel included future Vice President Walter Mondale, future presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, and future presidential candidate Gary Hart.

1975 became known as the "Year of Intelligence." The Church Committee in the Senate was joined by the Pike Committee in the House of Representatives and the Rockefeller Commission appointed by President Gerald Ford. Together, they conducted the most extensive public examination of intelligence activities in American history.

The Mind Control Experiments

Among the committee's most disturbing findings was Operation MKULTRA, a program so bizarre it would seem implausible in a spy novel. Beginning in the early 1950s, the CIA conducted experiments on human subjects to explore mind control and psychological manipulation. The agency was convinced that the Soviets and Chinese had developed techniques for brainwashing prisoners, and they wanted to develop similar capabilities.

What made MKULTRA particularly shocking was that many of the subjects never consented to the experiments. The CIA administered LSD and other drugs to unsuspecting Americans, including their own employees, military personnel, and civilians. In some cases, agents slipped drugs into drinks at bars to observe the effects on random strangers.

The program ran for nearly two decades. When it was finally exposed, CIA Director Richard Helms had already ordered most of the records destroyed. Only a fraction of the documentation survived, hidden in financial records that weren't flagged for destruction.

Watching the Watchers

The domestic surveillance programs revealed by the committee were staggering in scope.

COINTELPRO, short for Counter Intelligence Program, was an FBI operation that went far beyond monitoring suspected foreign agents. The bureau infiltrated and surveilled American political and civil rights organizations. They didn't just watch Martin Luther King Jr. They actively tried to destroy him, sending anonymous letters suggesting he commit suicide, planting false stories in the press, and working to undermine his relationships and reputation.

The targets weren't limited to civil rights leaders. The FBI monitored antiwar groups, student organizations, feminist groups, and essentially anyone J. Edgar Hoover deemed subversive. The bureau kept files on tens of thousands of Americans who had committed no crimes.

Meanwhile, the National Security Agency, whose very existence had never been publicly confirmed by the government, was running its own surveillance operation. Project SHAMROCK involved the major telecommunications companies sharing their traffic directly with the NSA. Every telegram sent through Western Union, RCA, and ITT was copied and handed over to government analysts.

The information fed into something called the Watch List. The NSA compiled a "Rhyming Dictionary" of biographical information that at its peak contained millions of names, including thousands of American citizens. Among those being watched were actors Gregory Peck and Joanne Woodward, columnist Art Buchwald, IBM chairman Thomas Watson, Federal Reserve chairman Arthur Burns, and civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy. Even Senator Frank Church himself, the man leading the investigation, had been on the list.

The committee voted to declassify the details of Project SHAMROCK over the objections of the Ford administration. It was the first time the government had officially acknowledged that the NSA existed.

Opening Your Mail

The CIA and FBI didn't limit themselves to electronic surveillance. Beginning in the 1950s, they ran a program called HTLINGUAL that intercepted, opened, and photographed more than 215,000 pieces of mail before it was finally shut down in 1973.

The program operated through something called "mail covers." This is a process by which the government records all information on the outside of an envelope or package without any requirement for a warrant or notification. The sender's name, the recipient's address, the postmark. All of it was catalogued. But HTLINGUAL went further, actually opening the letters and reading the contents.

The committee found that the CIA was careful to hide this from the United States Postal Service. Agents would move mail to private rooms to open it. Sometimes they stuffed envelopes into briefcases or coat pockets and opened them at night to avoid detection by postal employees. The very people charged with protecting the mail were being deceived by their own government.

Assassination Plots

Perhaps nothing captured public attention more than the interim report titled "Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders." The committee investigated attempts to kill Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam, General René Schneider of Chile, and Fidel Castro of Cuba.

The Castro plots were almost comically elaborate. The CIA explored exploding cigars, poisoned diving suits, and partnerships with the Mafia. They tried to contaminate his shoes with thallium to make his beard fall out, hoping to undermine his public image. None of the schemes succeeded, but they revealed an agency willing to consider almost any option.

President Ford urged the Senate to keep the assassination report secret, but the committee released it anyway. The political pressure was too great. In response, Ford issued Executive Order 11905, which explicitly banned political assassinations by government employees. It remains in effect today, though it has been succeeded by updated versions under subsequent presidents.

The committee also produced seven case studies on covert operations. Only one was released to the public, titled "Covert Action in Chile: 1963-1973." It detailed American intervention in Chilean politics, including efforts to prevent the election and undermine the government of Salvador Allende. The other six case studies remain classified at the CIA's request.

Senator Church's Warning

On August 17, 1975, Senator Church appeared on NBC's Meet the Press. His words that day have echoed through the decades, becoming only more relevant as technology has advanced.

In the need to develop a capacity to know what potential enemies are doing, the United States government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor the messages that go through the air. Now, that is necessary and important to the United States as we look abroad at enemies or potential enemies. We must know, at the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything. Telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide.

Church understood that the issue wasn't whether current officials could be trusted. The issue was what would happen if different people gained control of these tools.

If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know.

His conclusion was stark.

I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.

The Kennedy Assassination

The committee also examined the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, questioning fifty witnesses and reviewing three thousand documents. Their focus wasn't on solving the murder itself, but on evaluating how the FBI and CIA had supported the Warren Commission investigation.

What they found was troubling. The committee concluded that the original investigation had been deficient. Federal agencies had failed in their duties and responsibilities. Information had not been properly shared. Leads had not been adequately pursued.

The Church Committee raised the question of whether there might be a connection between the CIA's plots to assassinate foreign leaders, particularly in Cuba, and the assassination of the thirty-fifth president. They couldn't answer the question definitively, but their concerns helped lead to the creation of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which conducted its own investigation from 1976 to 1979.

The CIA Fights Back

The agency didn't accept the scrutiny passively. On May 9, 1975, the committee called acting CIA Director William Colby to testify. That same day, President Ford's top advisers, including Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and a young Donald Rumsfeld, drafted a recommendation that Colby be authorized only to give a briefing rather than formal testimony. He was instructed to discuss only general subjects, avoiding details of specific operations.

But the committee had full authority to compel testimony, and Colby appeared before them. His message was blunt.

These last two months have placed American intelligence in danger. The almost hysterical excitement surrounding any news story mentioning CIA or referring even to a perfectly legitimate activity of CIA has raised a question whether secret intelligence operations can be conducted by the United States.

Colby was articulating a concern that intelligence professionals would voice for decades afterward. Sunlight might be the best disinfectant for democracy, but it can also burn. How could agencies that depend on secrecy function if everything they did became public?

What Changed

The Church Committee's final report, published in April 1976, filled six books. Seven additional volumes of hearing transcripts were also released. Together, they constituted the most extensive review of intelligence activities ever made available to the public.

The investigations led to lasting institutional changes. The permanent Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was established to provide ongoing oversight. Executive orders banned political assassinations. New guidelines restricted domestic surveillance.

But some critics felt the reforms went too far. After the September 11, 2001 attacks, some blamed the Church Committee for limiting the CIA's ability to gather human intelligence. The restrictions on surveillance and the emphasis on legal oversight, they argued, had created gaps that terrorists exploited.

The committee's chief counsel, Frederick A. O. Schwarz Jr., rejected this criticism forcefully. In a book co-authored with Aziz Z. Huq, he argued that the Bush administration had used the attacks to make what he called "monarchist claims" to executive power that were "unprecedented on this side of the North Atlantic."

Others felt the committee hadn't gone far enough. In 1977, journalist Carl Bernstein, who with Bob Woodward had broken the Watergate story, wrote in Rolling Stone that the relationship between the CIA and the media was far more extensive than what the Church Committee revealed. Bernstein alleged the committee had covered up embarrassing relationships from the 1950s and 1960s with some of the most powerful organizations and individuals in American journalism.

The Legacy

Frank Church paid a political price for his leadership. In the 1980 election, his opponent used the investigation against him, claiming the committee had "betrayed CIA agents and operations." Church lost his seat after eighteen years in the Senate.

The allegation was false. The committee had not received names of agents and therefore had none to release. Later CIA Director George H. W. Bush confirmed this. But the perception that Church had damaged national security proved politically potent.

In September 2006, the University of Kentucky hosted a forum titled "Who's Watching the Spies? Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans." Two former committee members, Walter Mondale and Walter Huddleston, joined Frederick Schwarz to discuss the committee's work and how it pertains to today's society.

The questions the Church Committee grappled with haven't gone away. They've only become more urgent. In the decades since the investigation, the technological capabilities that worried Senator Church have expanded beyond anything he could have imagined. The NSA can collect more data in a single day than existed in all the world's libraries when the Church Committee met.

The tension between security and liberty remains unresolved. The question of how democratic societies can maintain effective intelligence services without sliding toward authoritarianism has no permanent answer. Each generation must decide for itself where to draw the lines.

What the Church Committee demonstrated was that asking the question publicly, even when the answers are uncomfortable, is essential to democracy. The abyss that Senator Church warned about may be closer than we think. The only defense is vigilance, exercised not just by intelligence professionals, but by the citizens they serve.