CHURCH COMMITTEE

Opening

On 27 January 1975 the US Senate voted 82 to 4 to create a select committee to investigate the government's intelligence agencies. Frank Church of Idaho took the chair, with John Tower of Texas as vice chairman. Over the next sixteen months the committee examined the CIA, FBI, NSA, IRS, and military intelligence with access to records that had never been opened to Congress.

What it found reached the public through televised hearings, an interim report on assassination plots in November 1975, and a final report in six books in April 1976. Its recommendations led to a permanent Senate intelligence committee in 1976 and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978.

Timeline

22 December 1974Seymour Hersh reports on the front page of The New York Times that the CIA had spied on American antiwar activists and other dissidents, the programme later known as Operation CHAOS.

21 to 27 January 1975Senator John Pastore introduces the resolution, S.Res. 21. It passes 82 to 4. Majority Leader Mike Mansfield warns against a "television extravaganza". Philip Hart declines the chair for health reasons and Church gets it. The Rockefeller Commission runs in parallel for the White House.

May 1975The committee calls the CIA Director, William Colby, to testify. President Ford's advisers try to limit him to a briefing; the committee has the authority to require testimony.

17 August 1975On NBC's Meet the Press, Church warns, without naming the NSA, that the government's capacity to monitor communications "could be turned around on the American people".

September and October 1975Public hearings, televised from the Senate Caucus Room, cover a CIA biological agents programme, the Huston Plan for domestic surveillance, IRS intelligence work, and the FBI's COINTELPRO. On 16 September Colby testifies about shellfish toxin the CIA had kept despite President Nixon's 1969 order to destroy biological weapons, and a CIA dart gun is shown to the committee.

20 November 1975The committee releases its interim report, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, covering Castro, Lumumba, Trujillo, Diem, and General René Schneider of Chile. President Ford had urged the Senate to withhold it.

December 1975The staff report Covert Action in Chile: 1963-1973 is released. Later that month the CIA's station chief in Greece, Richard Welch, is shot dead outside his home in Athens, and the killing pulls public attention away from the committee's findings.

18 February 1976Ford signs Executive Order 11905, which bans US government employees from engaging in political assassination.

April 1976The final report is issued, with the Senate Historical Office giving the date as 29 April. It runs to six books and 96 recommendations. Book V, on the intelligence agencies and the Kennedy assassination investigation, is released after a committee vote on 26 May 1976, with Tower and Goldwater voting against.

19 May 1976The Senate passes S.Res. 400, creating the permanent Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

1978President Carter signs FISA, requiring warrants from a new court for national security wiretaps, and issues Executive Order 12036 on intelligence activities.

Key figures

Frank Church, a 16-year member of the Foreign Relations Committee, lobbied for the chair and insisted on public hearings for selected cases. He declared for the presidency in March 1976, and critics called the inquiry a platform for that run. The charge that his committee had betrayed CIA agents was used against him in 1980, when he lost his seat.

John Tower, the vice chairman, accepted that there had been "intelligence excesses" but warned in his separate views against restraining the president "unnecessarily".

William Colby, the CIA Director, testified in public and in closed session. In a later CIA oral history he called the committee "responsible", and recalled Church's "rogue elephant" as a question that Church himself answered in the final report.

Frederick A. O. Schwarz Jr. was chief counsel and led a staff that peaked at about 150. Members were Church, Tower, Howard Baker, Barry Goldwater, Gary Hart, Philip Hart, Walter Huddleston, Charles Mathias, Walter Mondale, Robert Morgan, and Richard Schweiker.

Physical and documentary trail

The record is large and public. By the Senate Historical Office's count, the committee held 126 full committee meetings and 40 subcommittee hearings, interviewed some 800 witnesses, and went through 110,000 documents. It published the November 1975 assassination report, the Chile study, seven volumes of hearings, and the six-book final report. More than 50,000 pages of its records were later declassified under the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992.

The CIA's internal "Family Jewels" compilation of questionable activities, gathered in 1973, served the staff as a road map. The agency itself released it publicly in 2007. Six of the seven covert action case studies the committee prepared were kept secret at the CIA's request; only Chile was released.

I might say that last summer I made the remark that there was considerable evidence that the CIA had been behaving like a rogue elephant on a rampage.

The final report itself came down elsewhere: it found that abuses had grown up under every administration from Franklin Roosevelt's, and that checks and balances had not been applied.

Things you might not know

• The NSA had been watching its watchers. A declassified NSA history shows the agency's watch list included Frank Church and Otis Pike, chairmen of the two congressional inquiries, along with Walter Mondale and Howard Baker from Church's own committee.
• The dart gun was a demand, not an offer. Colby later said the committee required him to bring it to the hearing.
• The mail had been read for decades. The committee found the CIA and FBI had opened and photographed more than 215,000 pieces of mail before the HTLINGUAL programme ended in 1973.
• SHAMROCK ran for about 30 years. Major telegraph companies had handed international traffic to the NSA and its predecessors from 1945 into the early 1970s. The committee declassified the programme over the Ford administration's objections.
• "Rogue elephant" lost in the end. The final report signed by Church concluded the agencies had been too much under presidential direction, not out of control.
• The resolution had a deadline. The committee had a year to finish, later stretched to sixteen months.

Competing explanations

A necessary reckoning after Watergate. The committee documented real programmes, from COINTELPRO to mail opening to assassination planning, with the agencies' own records. The laws and rules that followed, FISA, the Senate committee, and the executive orders, are the standard measure of its effect.

A damaging political exercise. Critics, then and after the September 2001 attacks, argued the inquiry exposed secrets, hurt morale, and led to rules that limited human intelligence work. The claim that it exposed agents' names has not held: the committee was not given names, as the later CIA Director George H. W. Bush confirmed.

A partial accounting. Carl Bernstein argued in Rolling Stone in 1977 that CIA relationships with the press were far more extensive than the committee disclosed. Six covert action studies remain unreleased. This reading accepts what was found and questions what was left out.

Later life of the case

Ford's assassination ban was replaced in 1981 by Reagan's Executive Order 12333, which kept the prohibition. Carter's EO 12036 was revoked the same year. In 2007 Schwarz co-wrote Unchecked and Unbalanced, defending the committee's approach against post-2001 criticism. The reports and hearings remain a primary source for historians of Cold War intelligence.

Finding

Settled: the Church Committee, created on 27 January 1975, documented assassination plotting, illegal mail opening, NSA interception of Americans' telegrams, and FBI campaigns against domestic groups, and published those findings over executive objections between November 1975 and mid-1976. The permanent Senate intelligence committee and FISA are direct results. These are the agencies' own records, put on the public record by the Senate.

What still will not resolve: what the committee did not publish. Six of its seven covert action studies were withheld at the CIA's request, and whether they hold anything that would change the picture is not public.