The Church Committee — Senate Investigation of US Intelligence Activities, 1975–1976

Audio readout of this dossier.

Background

In the late autumn of 1974 the institutional environment for substantive Congressional investigation of US intelligence-service activity was transformed by Seymour Hersh's 22 December 1974 New York Times article — "Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years" — which documented the CIA's Operation CHAOS domestic-surveillance programme and the HTLINGUAL mail-opening programme. The substantial press attention that followed the Hersh disclosure produced — across the immediately-following five weeks — the establishment of three substantively distinct investigative bodies addressing the underlying institutional questions: the President's Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States (the Rockefeller Commission, established by President Ford via Executive Order 11828 on 4 January 1975); the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (the Church Committee, established by Senate Resolution 21 on 27 January 1975); and the House Select Committee on Intelligence (initially chaired by Representative Lucien Nedzi from February 1975, subsequently reconstituted under Representative Otis Pike via H. Res. 591 on 17 July 1975 after Nedzi resigned over disclosure that he had previously been briefed on portions of the Family Jewels compendium).¹

The Senate Resolution 21 establishing the Church Committee specified a substantive remit covering "intelligence activities of the United States Government" — a broader institutional scope than the Rockefeller Commission's executive-branch mandate (limited to "CIA activities within the United States") and broader than the Pike Committee's focus on intelligence-community budgeting and analytical performance. The breadth of the Senate Resolution remit was the substantive enabling condition for the Church Committee's eventual documented reconstruction of programmes across not only CIA but also the FBI, NSA, military intelligence services, and the Internal Revenue Service.²

The Committee

The Committee comprised eleven Senators — six Democrats and five Republicans. Senator Frank Church of Idaho served as Chairman; Senator John G. Tower of Texas as Vice-Chairman. The remaining Democratic members were Philip A. Hart of Michigan, Walter F. Mondale of Minnesota, Walter D. Huddleston of Kentucky, Robert Morgan of North Carolina, and Gary Hart of Colorado. The Republican members were Howard H. Baker Jr. of Tennessee, Barry Goldwater of Arizona, Charles McC. Mathias Jr. of Maryland, and Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania. The Committee's institutional composition substantively reflected the bipartisan institutional weight the Senate leadership had assigned to the inquiry; Church, Tower, Baker, Goldwater, and Mondale were all senior figures with substantial national-security and foreign-policy experience.³

The Committee staff was led by William G. Miller as Staff Director and Frederick A. O. Schwarz Jr. as Chief Counsel. The staff complement across the Committee's institutional lifetime grew to approximately 135 to 150 personnel, including former intelligence officers, academic specialists, lawyers, and investigators. The institutional independence of the Committee staff from the Executive Branch — and the substantive cooperation the Committee staff was able to maintain with successive Directors of Central Intelligence (William Colby across 1975 and George H. W. Bush across 1976), with FBI Director Clarence Kelley, and with NSA Director Lew Allen Jr. — was the principal enabling condition for the substantive documentary reconstruction the Committee subsequently produced.⁴

Investigation

The Committee's investigative work across 1975 operated in three principal phases. The first phase, from January through August 1975, was substantively closed-door: the Committee staff conducted approximately 800 interviews with current and former intelligence officers, reviewed the Family Jewels compendium and substantial portions of the supporting CIA documentary record, and prepared the substantive areas for public hearing. The second phase, from September through December 1975, was the public-hearing phase: across more than 60 days of public hearings the Committee took testimony from approximately 250 witnesses on the principal substantive areas the Committee had identified. The third phase, from January through June 1976, was the report-drafting phase: the substantive Committee staff product was compiled across the Interim Report on Alleged Assassination Plots (released 20 November 1975, during the public-hearing phase) and the six-book Final Report (released across April 1976, with the associated Hearings volumes published across 1975 and 1976).⁵

The substantive areas the Committee investigated covered approximately fifteen principal categories of activity:

• CIA assassination plots against foreign leaders — Fidel Castro of Cuba, Patrice Lumumba of Congo, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam, and General René Schneider of Chile.
• The HTLINGUAL CIA mail-opening programme (1952–1973).
• The Operation CHAOS CIA domestic-surveillance umbrella (1967–1974).
• The MKUltra CIA behavioural-modification programme (1953–1973), including the use of LSD on unwitting subjects.
• The Project SHAMROCK NSA-and-predecessor cable-interception programme (1945–1975).
• The Project MINARET NSA watchlist programme (1967–1973).
• The FBI COINTELPRO counter-intelligence-and-disruption programmes (1956–1971).
• The FBI HUNTER mail-opening programme (1959–1966) and the broader pattern of FBI mail interception.
• The FBI surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil-rights figures across the 1960s.
• The IRS targeting of political organisations via the Special Service Staff (1969–1973).
• The military-intelligence domestic-surveillance programme conducted by US Army Counter-Intelligence Analysis Branch and adjacent units across the Vietnam-era period.
• The CIA institutional cooperation with the Nixon-administration "plumbers" unit.
• The CIA surveillance of US journalists, including Jack Anderson, Les Whitten, Brit Hume, and Michael Getler, conducted in 1971–1972.
• The Operation Mockingbird CIA press-engagement and journalist-wiretap activity.
• The institutional structure under which these activities had been conducted — the absence of substantive Congressional oversight, the institutional positions taken by successive Directors of Central Intelligence on the boundary between foreign-intelligence collection and domestic activity, the role of the National Security Council in authorising covert action under the pre-Hughes-Ryan-Amendment framework.

The Committee's substantive cooperation with the Ford administration on the assassination-plots material was contested. President Ford initially sought to prevent public disclosure of the assassination-plot findings on national-security-and-foreign-relations grounds; the Committee voted on 4 November 1975 by a margin of 9–2 to publish the Interim Report on Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders over the administration's objection. The Interim Report was released on 20 November 1975 and remains the principal public-record document on the CIA assassination plots of the early 1960s.⁶

The Reports

The Church Committee produced two principal substantive documents. The first was the Interim Report on Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, released 20 November 1975. The Interim Report — approximately 350 pages — documented the CIA's plots against Castro (substantially through 1965), Lumumba (1960–61), Trujillo (1960–61), and the institutional CIA cooperation with US military and diplomatic activity that produced the deaths of Diem (1963) and Schneider (1970). The Report did not formally name the senior officials whose direct authorisation of the plots could not be conclusively established from the documentary record, but it substantively documented the institutional knowledge of the activities within CIA's senior leadership and within the broader Executive Branch.⁷

The second substantive document was the Final Report in six books, released across April 1976:

• Book I — Foreign and Military Intelligence (released 26 April 1976) addressed the institutional structure of US foreign-intelligence activity, the National Security Act of 1947 framework, the relationship between CIA and the military intelligence services, and the institutional history of CIA foreign operations.
• Book II — Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans (released 26 April 1976) addressed the substantive findings on intelligence-service activity directed at US citizens, including CHAOS, COINTELPRO, the FBI surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil-rights leaders, MINARET, and the broader institutional pattern.
• Book III — Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans (released 23 April 1976) provided the substantive primary-source detail underpinning Book II — the HTLINGUAL, HUNTER, COINTELPRO, MINARET, and SHAMROCK programme reconstructions remain the principal documentary base for the contemporary public-record account of those programmes.
• Book IV — Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Foreign and Military Intelligence (released 23 April 1976) provided substantive primary-source detail on foreign-intelligence activity.
• Book V — The Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: Performance of the Intelligence Agencies (released 23 April 1976) addressed the institutional intelligence-community response to the 1963 Kennedy assassination, finding substantial failures in the institutional cooperation between CIA and FBI in the period preceding the assassination.
• Book VI — Supplementary Reports on Intelligence Activities (released 23 April 1976) covered residual substantive areas including the National Security Agency, the Internal Revenue Service Special Service Staff, and the legal-and-policy framework recommendations.⁸

The total Final Report volume across the six books ran to approximately 5,000 to 6,000 pages of substantive findings, recommendations, and supporting documentation, depending on whether appendices and supplementary volumes are included in the count.

Legacy

The institutional consequences of the Church Committee's work substantially constitute the foundational architecture of contemporary US intelligence oversight. The principal consequences include:

The establishment of standing Congressional intelligence-oversight committees: the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), established by S. Res. 400 on 19 May 1976; and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), established by H. Res. 658 on 14 July 1977. The two standing committees substantively replaced the ad hoc inquiry mechanism that the Church and Pike Committees had operated under, and have been the principal Congressional institutional mechanism for intelligence-community oversight across the post-1976 period.⁹

The post-1976 framework of Executive Orders governing US intelligence activities: Ford EO 11905 of 18 February 1976 (the first comprehensive intelligence Executive Order, issued in direct response to the Rockefeller and Church Committee reports); Carter EO 12036 of 24 January 1978 (which substantially tightened restrictions on collection directed at US persons); and Reagan EO 12333 of 4 December 1981 (which loosened some Carter-era restrictions while retaining the broad institutional architecture and which remains the principal Executive Order on intelligence activities across the subsequent four decades, as substantially amended in 2008 to incorporate the ODNI framework).¹⁰

The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — passed in direct institutional response to the Church Committee's documentation of NSA SHAMROCK and MINARET activity and CIA HTLINGUAL activity — established the statutory framework for foreign-intelligence collection on US persons and created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court as the principal judicial-oversight mechanism for that collection. The FISA framework, as substantially amended by the 2008 FISA Amendments Act and the 2015 USA FREEDOM Act, remains the principal statutory framework for foreign-intelligence collection directed at US persons.¹¹

The 1980 Intelligence Oversight Act — which narrowed the Hughes-Ryan Amendment Congressional notification requirement from six committees to two (SSCI and HPSCI) and substantively codified the standing-oversight framework. The Intelligence Authorization Act of 1991 subsequently added Section 503 to the National Security Act of 1947, codifying the covert-action authorisation framework directly within the Act.¹²

The substantive institutional restrictions on activity directed at US persons that the Church Committee findings produced have been the principal frame for academic and policy discussion of US intelligence-service institutional accountability across the post-1976 period. The Committee's documented reconstruction of programmes including HTLINGUAL, Operation CHAOS, HUNTER, MKUltra, SHAMROCK, MINARET, COINTELPRO, and the Family Jewels compendium remains the principal documentary base for contemporary public-record discussion of US Cold War intelligence activity directed at US persons.

The Church Committee's institutional position in subsequent intelligence-policy debate has been consistently invoked as the reference case for substantive Congressional investigation of intelligence-service activity. The post-2001 institutional debates on bulk collection and the post-2013 Snowden-disclosures-era debates on surveillance reform were both substantively framed against the Church Committee's institutional architecture — the question of whether the post-1976 oversight framework had operated effectively or had been substantively eroded across the post-9/11 expansion of intelligence activity. The 2014 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Committee Study of the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program (the "Senate Torture Report") was characterised by multiple SSCI members as a successor inquiry to the Church Committee's institutional work.

Related agencies

The Committee's substantive scope addressed the principal US intelligence services. The agency pages for the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency, and the Defense Intelligence Agency all document substantial Church Committee findings on their respective programmes. The country-level context is the United States; the principal individual figure associated with the Committee is documented on the notorious profile of James Schlesinger (who commissioned the Family Jewels compendium that supplied the Committee's evidentiary base).

Sources & Further Reading

1. Seymour Hersh, "Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years," New York Times, 22 December 1974; Executive Order 11828, 4 January 1975 (establishing the Rockefeller Commission); Senate Resolution 21, 94th Congress, 27 January 1975 (establishing the Church Committee); House Resolution 138, 94th Congress, 19 February 1975 (establishing the House Select Committee on Intelligence under Lucien Nedzi); House Resolution 591, 94th Congress, 17 July 1975 (reconstituting the House Select Committee on Intelligence under Otis Pike).
2. Senate Resolution 21, 94th Congress, op. cit.; Loch K. Johnson, A Season of Inquiry: The Senate Intelligence Investigation (University Press of Kentucky, 1985) — the principal institutional history of the Church Committee, written by a former committee staff member.
3. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Final Report, Book I, "Foreign and Military Intelligence" (April 1976), Committee membership listing; Senate historical records on the 94th Congress.
4. Frederick A. O. Schwarz Jr., Democracy in the Dark: The Seduction of Government Secrecy (The New Press, 2015) — Schwarz's institutional memoir of his Church Committee tenure; Johnson, A Season of Inquiry, op. cit.
5. Senate Church Committee, Final Report, Books I–VI (April 1976); Senate Church Committee, Hearings, Volumes 1–7 (1975); Loch K. Johnson, A Season of Inquiry, op. cit.
6. Senate Church Committee, Interim Report on Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, 20 November 1975; Loch K. Johnson, A Season of Inquiry, op. cit., on the Ford administration's institutional position regarding publication; New York Times contemporaneous reporting (October–November 1975).
7. Senate Church Committee, Interim Report on Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, 20 November 1975 — the document itself, approximately 350 pages, has been declassified in full and is available through the Senate intelligence-committee archive and the National Security Archive at George Washington University.
8. Senate Church Committee, Final Report, Books I–VI (April 1976), available through the Senate intelligence-committee archive (Intelligence-Related Commissions) and through the Mary Ferrell Foundation annotated collection.
9. Senate Resolution 400, 94th Congress, 19 May 1976 (establishing the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence); House Resolution 658, 95th Congress, 14 July 1977 (establishing the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence).
10. Executive Order 11905, "United States Foreign Intelligence Activities," 18 February 1976; Executive Order 12036, "United States Intelligence Activities," 24 January 1978; Executive Order 12333, "United States Intelligence Activities," 4 December 1981, as amended.
11. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, Pub. L. 95-511; subsequent amendments including the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, Pub. L. 110-261, and the USA FREEDOM Act of 2015, Pub. L. 114-23.
12. Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980, Pub. L. 96-450; Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1991, Pub. L. 102-88, § 602 (adding Section 503 to the National Security Act of 1947).