The Church Committee was the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, established in January 1975 and chaired by Senator Frank Church of Idaho. It ran from September 1975 to November 1975, produced 14 published reports, and led directly to the creation of the permanent Senate and House intelligence committees in 1976–1977. For the CIA history that motivated the committee, see the CIA article.
The committee was the congressional response to a year of disclosures that had begun with Seymour Hersh’s December 22, 1974, story in The New York Times about CIA domestic surveillance. The Times account, based on a summary of illegal acts the CIA’s own Inspector General had prepared in 1973 at the request of Director James Schlesinger, listed programs the agency had concealed from Congress for years. President Ford’s appointment of a commission under Vice President Nelson Rockefeller in January 1975 produced a January 1975 report that confirmed the worst of the disclosures and called for reforms. Senator Church, who had been a critic of the intelligence agencies since 1972, pushed the Senate to create a select committee with full subpoena power, a classified-information clearance, and a public mandate to investigate.
The proceedings
The committee was composed of eleven senators, six Democrats and five Republicans, with Senator John Tower of Texas as the vice chairman. It held 126 public hearings in 1975, took testimony from more than 800 witnesses, and reviewed an enormous body of classified material. The senior staff was led by Frederick A. O. Schwarz Jr. and included William B. Bader, an expert on Soviet affairs, and Loch Johnson, who later wrote a comprehensive account of the committee’s work.
The committee’s fourteen reports were published in 1975 and 1976 and covered the major areas of abuse. The most sensational concerned:
- Assassination plots. The committee’s report on CIA assassination plots, chaired by Senator Gary Hart, documented the agency’s involvement in plots against Fidel Castro (including operations with the Mafia), Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, and Salvador Allende of Chile. The report concluded that the United States had “no explicit official policy” to assassinate foreign leaders but that the agency had repeatedly engaged in the practice.
- MKULTRA. The committee’s report on CIA mind-control and drug programs documented the MKULTRA project, which from 1953 to 1973 had dosed unwitting American and Canadian subjects with LSD, given electroshock to mental patients, and run a long list of behavioral-research subprojects at universities and hospitals. The committee’s report forced the declassification of much of the program, including 20,000 pages of files that were supposed to have been destroyed in 1973.
- Domestic surveillance. The committee’s report on unlawful surveillance of Americans documented the CIA’s Operation CHAOS (1967–1974), which had been created to monitor foreign dissidents in the United States and had widened to monitor American citizens; the FBI’s COINTELPRO (1956–1971), which had targeted civil rights, antiwar, and socialist organizations; and the NSA’s watch-list programs, including the so-called MINARET list, which had tracked the domestic telephone calls of more than 1,000 Americans.
- Mail opening. The committee documented the CIA’s HTLINGUAL program, which from 1952 to 1973 had opened and photographed the international mail of American citizens in cooperation with the U.S. Postal Service. The committee estimated that 215,000 pieces of mail had been opened, and that the program had been run from a CIA-controlled room in the New York General Post Office.
The reforms
The committee’s recommendations were embodied in two pieces of legislation. The first, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, replaced the warrantless-surveillance practices the committee had documented with a specialized court (the FISA Court) to consider applications for surveillance warrants. The second, the creation of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in May 1976 and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in 1977, established permanent congressional oversight of the intelligence community for the first time in American history.
Executive action followed. President Ford’s Executive Order 11905, issued in February 1976, prohibited political assassination and restricted the CIA’s domestic activities. President Carter’s Executive Order 12036, issued in January 1978, tightened the rules further. President Reagan’s Executive Order 12333, issued in December 1981, has remained the basic framework for the American intelligence community since.
The committee’s work is now seen as a high point of American congressional oversight. The Iran-Contra affair of 1986–1987 tested the reforms but did not destroy them. The 9/11 Commission’s report in 2004 found that the reforms of 1975–1976 had been effective in preventing the kind of abuses the Church Committee had documented, but that the intelligence community’s failure to share information before September 2001 was a failure of a different kind — a failure of analysis, not of legality.