PIKE COMMITTEE

Opening

In 1975 the House of Representatives set up its own inquiry into the CIA and other intelligence agencies, alongside the Senate's Church Committee. Chaired from July by Otis Pike, a Long Island Democrat, it spent months fighting the Ford administration for documents and wrote a report that was harshly critical of intelligence costs, failures, and covert action.

On 29 January 1976 the full House voted 246 to 124 not to release the report until the President certified that it contained no classified information. Within two weeks the Village Voice published most of it, from a copy obtained by CBS reporter Daniel Schorr. The leak became a second scandal, with its own investigations.

Timeline

19 February 1975The House creates a Select Committee on Intelligence under Lucien Nedzi of Michigan.

5 June 1975The New York Times reports that CIA Director William Colby had briefed Nedzi in 1973 on the agency's internal review of abuses, and that Nedzi had taken no action. Nedzi offers to resign; on 16 June the House refuses the resignation, and the committee stalls.

17 July 1975The House abolishes the Nedzi committee and creates a new one under Pike, leaving off both Nedzi and his main critic, Michael Harrington.

4 August 1975First public hearings, on what intelligence costs.

12 September 1975After the committee votes to make public four words the executive branch had classified in a post-mortem on the 1973 Middle East war, the White House cuts off classified material and demands the return of documents. A compromise on release procedures is reached later that month.

14 November 1975The committee votes 10 to 2 to cite Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for contempt of Congress over a subpoena for covert action records. On 10 December Pike tells the House the administration has substantially complied, and the citation is not taken further.

Late January 1976The committee completes its final report as its mandate runs out. Selected passages leak to the press.

29 January 1976The House votes 246 to 124 to withhold the report pending presidential certification.

About 11 February 1976The Village Voice issue dated 16 February goes on sale with a 24-page supplement headlined "The Report on the CIA That President Ford Doesn't Want You to Read". The FBI's own files give the publication date as "on or about February 11th".

February 1976The Washington Post names Schorr as the source. CBS takes him off the air. The House directs its Committee on Standards of Official Conduct to investigate the leak, and the FBI opens its own inquiry.

September 1976Schorr refuses to name his source before the ethics committee, which decides not to cite him for contempt. He leaves CBS.

1977Spokesman Books in Nottingham publishes the leaked text as CIA: The Pike Report. On 14 July the House creates a permanent intelligence committee.

Key figures

Otis Pike, chair from July 1975, was a former Marine pilot who represented a conservative Long Island district. He said the committee's work showed the CIA had not acted on its own, but with White House approval.

Lucien Nedzi chaired the first committee and was removed after being shown to have known of CIA abuses since 1973.

Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State, was the main target of the committee's document fights and of its contempt citation.

Daniel Schorr, a CBS correspondent, got hold of the report and arranged its publication through the Voice after book publishers showed little interest. Proceeds were promised to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

William Colby, CIA Director, was the committee's main agency witness and a party to the document disputes.

Physical and documentary trail

The record holds the committee's published hearings, the Voice supplement (a copy is now online, declassified by the CIA in 2012), the 1977 Spokesman edition, the House roll call of 29 January 1976, FBI files on the leak investigation released through FOIA, and the ethics committee proceedings. The House did not formally release the report. The Voice text is the one historians use.

The report's findings on cost are specific. Accountants on loan from the General Accounting Office concluded that "the foreign intelligence budget is three to four times more costly than Congress has been told". An Office of Management and Budget review found the domestic intelligence budget "may be five times" the figure given to Congress.

Congressional and Executive scrutiny of these budgets was found to range somewhere between cursory and non-existent.

On intelligence failures, the report reviewed warnings before the Tet offensive in 1968, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the 1973 Middle East war, the April 1974 coup in Portugal, India's nuclear test in May 1974, and the Cyprus crisis of July 1974. On access, it described its experience with the agencies as "foot-dragging, stonewalling, and careful deception".

Things you might not know

• Four words started the cut-off. The September 1975 break with the White House was over whether four classified words in a report on the 1973 war could be made public.
• The famous missionary line is unattributed. The report quotes a high-ranking witness, unnamed, saying that "covert action should not be confused with missionary work", about the abandoned Kurdish rebellion. It is popularly credited to Kissinger.
• One CIA station's liquor bill was $41,000 a year. The report gives this as an example of weak spending controls. The Spokesman edition dates it to 1971.
• Elections were the biggest covert category. According to the report as summarised in the 1977 edition, interference in foreign elections made up 32 percent of covert actions approved by the Forty Committee.
• The FBI ran an espionage inquiry into the Voice. FBI records released through FOIA show the Bureau investigated the newspaper's publication, and later the Reporters Committee, because of the payment arrangement.
• The Voice ran it in two parts. The section on the agencies' delays and obstruction followed in the 23 February issue.

Competing explanations

Why the House withheld the report is the only real dispute. One view is that members were protecting secrets and sources, as the administration argued. The other is that they were protecting the executive branch and the House's own past oversight from embarrassment, a reading supported by the Nedzi episode and the report's own account of obstruction. The two aren't mutually exclusive. Schorr never publicly named who gave him the report.

Later life of the case

The Pike and Church inquiries led to permanent intelligence committees in both houses: the Senate's in 1976 and the House's in 1977. The Pike report itself has remained an unofficial document, known through the Voice and the 1977 book. Its budget findings fed a long fight over publishing the total intelligence budget.

Finding

Settled: the Pike Committee investigated US intelligence in 1975, the House voted on 29 January 1976 to withhold its report, and the Village Voice published most of it in mid-February from a copy leaked to Daniel Schorr. The report's findings on cost, failures, and covert action are on the record in that text.

What still will not resolve: who gave Schorr the report, and how far the leaked version differs from the final text the committee approved, since the House never released an official copy to compare.