Church Committee

The Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, known as the Church Committee after its chairman Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho), was constituted on January 27, 1975, following the Seymour Hersh exposés of December 1974 revealing systematic CIA domestic surveillance activities under Operation CHAOS. The committee ran through April 1976, producing the most comprehensive congressional investigation of U.S. intelligence activities ever conducted. Its final report (S. Rept. 94-755, 94th Congress, 2nd Session, April 26, 1976) and the fourteen volumes of accompanying staff reports constitute the foundational primary documentary record of postwar U.S. intelligence abuses.¹

The committee was constituted in the same period as the Rockefeller Commission (Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States, chaired by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller), which issued its report in June 1975. The Church Committee's scope and independence were substantially greater than the Rockefeller Commission's.

Triggering Events

The December 22, 1974 New York Times article by Seymour Hersh ("Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years") was the proximate trigger. Hersh's article documented the CIA's CHAOS program, which had maintained files on approximately 7,200 Americans and a name index of 300,000 individuals. DCI William Colby had already dismissed James Jesus Angleton on December 17, five days before the article appeared, having been warned of its imminent publication.¹

Earlier contributory revelations included: the discovery of the "Family Jewels" document (a compilation of potentially illegal CIA activities assembled by DCI James Schlesinger in 1973); the exposure of COINTELPRO following the 1971 Media, Pennsylvania FBI break-in; and the Watergate investigations, which revealed CIA involvement in domestic political operations.¹

Scope and Principal Findings

The committee's investigations covered all major U.S. intelligence agencies: the CIA, FBI, NSA, Army intelligence, and IRS. Its principal documented findings included:

Operation CHAOS (CIA): The CIA's Operation CHAOS (MHCHAOS), directed by Richard Ober under James Angleton's Counterintelligence Staff, was documented as "unlawful" domestic surveillance violating the CIA's legislative charter. The HYDRA index of 7,200 American citizens and 300,000 names was documented. The committee also documented Project MERRIMAC and Project RESISTANCE as subprograms feeding CHAOS. The findings are in Book III of the final report: "CIA Intelligence Collection About Americans: CHAOS and the Office of Security."¹

COINTELPRO (FBI): The FBI's COINTELPRO programs were documented as having used infiltration, psychological warfare, fabricated communications, wrongful prosecution referrals, and coordination with local law enforcement in ways the committee found constituted a systematic campaign against legal political activity. The committee found that the FBI had opened more than 500,000 domestic intelligence files since 1960 and that many targeted individuals had never engaged in any illegal activity.¹

Assassination plots: The committee documented CIA programs to assassinate foreign leaders, including Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba, Rafael Trujillo, Ngo Dinh Diem, and Rene Schneider of Chile. The Interim Report, "Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders" (published November 1975), established the documented record of these operations.¹

Illegal mail opening: The CIA's HTLINGUAL program, which opened first-class mail between the United States and the Soviet Union from 1952 to 1973, was documented as an illegal domestic operation conducted without required judicial authorization. The FBI's parallel mail opening programs were also documented.¹

NSA programs: The committee documented NSA watch lists targeting American citizens' international communications, including the MINARET program which monitored communications of antiwar figures and civil rights leaders.¹

MKULTRA and Behavioral Research

The committee's 1975 inquiry into the CIA's behavioral-control research was hampered because the main MKULTRA records had been destroyed in 1973 on the orders of Richard Helms and Sidney Gottlieb; the committee found no evidence that the executive branch or Congress had been informed of the programs across a quarter-century. Gottlieb testified in secret about the assassination programs and was identified in the final report under the false name "Victor Scheider," and professed not to remember most of the behavioral-control details. The committee's report on the unauthorized storage of toxic agents disclosed MKNAOMI and the Fort Detrick operations, and recorded that "the drug program was part of a much larger CIA program to study possible means for controlling human behavior," extending to "radiation, electric-shock, psychology, psychiatry, sociology, and harassment substances." The committee found that the only time in twenty-five years that CIA officials sought White House approval for any of this work was a 1955 contribution of $375,000 toward a research building at Georgetown University Hospital, personally approved by Allen Dulles. A reference to the program buried in the Rockefeller Commission report triggered the Freedom of Information request that ultimately surfaced the surviving boxes of MKULTRA financial records.²

Primary Source Access

The Church Committee final report and accompanying books are available through the AARC Library:

• Book I (Foreign and Military Intelligence): aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/book1/
• Book II (Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans): aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/book2/
• Book III (Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports on Intelligence Activities): aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/book3/
• The Rockefeller Commission report (parallel): aarclibrary.org/publib/church/rockcomm/

Legislative Consequences

The committee's findings led to the establishment of permanent Senate and House intelligence oversight committees (the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence) and contributed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978, which created a judicial framework for domestic national security surveillance. The executive orders prohibiting political assassination issued by Presidents Ford and Carter also emerged from the committee's findings.¹