Rockefeller Commission 1975

The Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States (commonly called the Rockefeller Commission after its chair, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller) was established by President Gerald Ford on January 4, 1975 to investigate CIA domestic abuses, in the context of investigative reporting by Seymour Hersh in the New York Times and the parallel congressional investigations of the Church Committee and Pike Committee. Critics immediately noted that Rockefeller, as chairman of the NSC Special Group under Eisenhower, had personally overseen and approved at least one MKULTRA project, making his chairing of the commission to investigate the same programs a direct conflict of interest. The commission's membership was stacked with individuals connected to the Rockefeller family network or to the programs under review.

Establishment

President Gerald Ford established the Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States by Executive Order 11828 on January 4, 1975, appointing Vice President Nelson Rockefeller as its chair.¹ The executive order authorized the commission to investigate whether the CIA had complied with statutory limitations under 50 U.S.C. 403, set a three-month deadline for the final report, and directed the General Services Administration to provide administrative support. Ford appointed David W. Belin, a former Warren Commission staffer and Iowa attorney, as the commission's executive director. Senior counsel included Harold A. Baker, Ernest Gellhorn, Robert B. Olsen, and William W. Schwarzer.²

The commission was convened in the context of the year of intelligence revelations, triggered when Seymour Hersh published "Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Anti-War Forces" in the New York Times on December 22, 1974.³ The article, based in part on conversations with James Jesus Angleton, the CIA's counterintelligence chief, revealed that the CIA had maintained intelligence files on at least 10,000 American citizens and operated a massive domestic surveillance program targeting antiwar groups. The article also drew on the findings of CIA Director James Schlesinger's 1973 internal review, which had uncovered what became known as the Family Jewels, a 693-page internal compendium of CIA abuses. Ford and CIA Director William Colby hoped that a presidentially appointed commission under Rockefeller would preempt and contain the congressional investigations that senators including John Sparkman, John Stennis, and representative Lucien Nedzi announced for January 1975.⁴

Membership

The composition of the commission drew criticism for the conflicts of interest among its members. All had ties either to the intelligence community or to the Rockefeller family network. Members included:⁵

C. Douglas Dillon: Nelson Rockefeller's confidant, Kennedy's treasury secretary, and chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation board of trustees. As undersecretary of state in the Eisenhower administration from June 1959 through January 1961, Dillon attended NSC meetings at which discussions of foreign leaders including Patrice Lumumba took place. In an affidavit submitted to the commission, Dillon stated that he had heard no discussion of assassination attempts against any foreign leader during his tenure, though he acknowledged to investigators that it was "perfectly possible" that Allen Dulles might have translated strong presidential language into operational orders.⁶

General Lyman Lemnitzer: Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1960-1962. Lemnitzer had actively supported the CIA's call for direct U.S. military intervention during the Bay of Pigs invasion, only to be overruled by Kennedy. He also signed Operation Northwoods in March 1962, a Joint Chiefs proposal for staged false-flag terrorism on U.S. soil to justify military action against Cuba, which Kennedy rejected. Kennedy subsequently denied Lemnitzer another term as chairman, transferring him to command of U.S. European Command and NATO.⁷

Lane Kirkland: AFL-CIO researcher who had been a director of the CIA-funded AIFLD (American Institute for Free Labor Development) during the Kennedy-Johnson years. Kirkland had served on a Johnson administration commission that recommended continuing CIA-backed labor programs under overt funding as a workaround when CIA involvement was exposed. He was also a member of Nelson Rockefeller's Commission on Critical Choices. Kirkland was elected president of the AFL-CIO in November 1979.⁸

John T. Connor: Director of David Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan Bank, former commerce secretary in the Johnson administration, and chairman of Allied Chemical, in which the Rockefellers held $52 million in stock.⁹

Erwin Griswold: Former Harvard Law School dean who, as Johnson-appointed U.S. solicitor general, had argued against the New York Times publishing the Pentagon Papers and had argued that Army surveillance of Vietnam War protestors did not violate First Amendment rights. The White House later suppressed a footnote Griswold had written in the commission's final report recommending public disclosure of the CIA's budget.¹⁰

Ronald Reagan: Former actor and California governor. Reagan attended only eleven of the commission's 26 sessions, which irritated Rockefeller, who as a liberal Republican regarded Reagan as a political rival. Rockefeller's counsel Peter Wallison later said Rockefeller considered Reagan "a lightweight who was not taking his responsibilities seriously."¹¹

Edgar Shannon: President of the University of Virginia from 1959 to 1974, with no CIA experience. Shannon had stepped down from the UVA presidency the year before his appointment to the commission. The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, which had received more than $79 million in Rockefeller family funding by the end of the 1960s, maintained ties to Shannon's institutional network.¹²

Scope and Limits

The commission held 26 sessions over approximately six months. Its investigation covered CIA mail-opening programs, MKULTRA, domestic surveillance of political activists, and CIA relationships with police departments. CIA Director William Colby provided the commission with access to the Family Jewels documents, the same compendium he had provided to the Justice Department and subsequently shared with the Church Committee and Pike Committee.

The commission's findings on Operation CHAOS were among the most specific it produced. Operation CHAOS, run under Angleton and overseen by Richard Ober, had by the time of its termination on March 15, 1974, accumulated files on approximately 7,200 Americans and a computerized index of 300,000 names of civilians and approximately 1,000 organizations.¹³ The commission's report, released on June 10, 1975, confirmed this as a violation of the CIA's charter.

On the CIA's mail-opening program, the commission found that HTLINGUAL, which intercepted mail between the United States and the Soviet Union from 1952 to 1973, had resulted in the examination of more than 215,000 pieces of correspondence. The program operated through CIA facilities in New York City and Los Angeles. The commission characterized this as unlawful.¹⁴

The commission's report on MKULTRA confirmed the CIA's program of behavioral modification research, including experiments on unwitting subjects using LSD and related compounds, conducted during the 1950s and 1960s through the Technical Services Division. The commission publicized MKULTRA's existence to a general audience for the first time, though the full scope of the program was not revealed until the Church Committee's subsequent investigation surfaced additional documents in 1977.

Suppression of Assassination Findings

The commission's most consequential suppression was of its own investigation into CIA assassination plots. In January 1975, Ford inadvertently revealed to press editors that the CIA had been involved in assassination plotting against foreign leaders. On March 31, 1975, the White House authorized the commission to investigate the matter, with a caveat about whether findings would appear in the final report. Belin, as executive director, pressed for the investigation over the objections of Rockefeller himself, using favorable press coverage to compel the commission to continue.¹⁵

By June 5, 1975, commission staff had completed an 86-page section documenting CIA plots against Fidel Castro, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, and briefer references to plots against Lumumba and Sukarno of Indonesia. Commission staff members including public affairs director Peter Clapper warned in a May 2, 1975 memorandum that suppressing the assassination findings would appear as a cover-up and damage the commission's credibility.¹⁶

The White House removed the entire 86-page section before publication. Richard Cheney, then serving as deputy assistant to the president and deputy to Donald Rumsfeld as chief of staff, made handwritten edits to the commission's draft report. Cheney's edits removed the section on "Alleged Plans to Assassinate Certain Foreign Leaders," eliminated a provision that would have allowed CIA employees to report improper activities to the CIA's Inspector General, and changed the commission's characterization of several CIA activities from "unlawful" to having "exceeded statutory authority." The White House also suppressed Griswold's footnote recommending public disclosure of the CIA budget.¹⁷

On October 31, 1975, Ford wrote to Frank Church urging him to suppress the Church Committee's parallel assassination report. On November 4, 1975, Church rejected Ford's request. The Senate voted to release the Church Committee's "Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders" report on November 20, 1975, revealing publicly what the Rockefeller Commission had withheld.¹⁸

The commission had also encountered obstruction in its attempts to investigate CIA records. CIA denied commission staff access to NSC records. Henry Kissinger withheld State Department cooperation. The commission was denied access to minutes of the 40 Committee and its predecessor bodies, meaning it could not document the full chain of authorization for covert operations.¹⁹

Rockefeller's Position

Nelson Rockefeller had been CIA Director Allen Dulles's point of contact in the NSC when Dulles gave the Family Jewels briefing in 1955. As chairman of the NSC Special Group, Rockefeller had approved at least one major MKULTRA project involving a research hospital. His chairing of a commission to investigate the CIA programs he had helped authorize and oversee represented a direct conflict of interest that contemporary critics noted. Rockefeller initially opposed even permitting the commission to investigate assassination plots, and it was only Belin's persistence and the threat of adverse publicity that extended the commission's mandate into that territory.²⁰

Report Structure and Outcome

The commission's final report, submitted to President Ford on June 10, 1975, comprised four main parts with 19 chapters plus seven appendices. The chapters covered CIA legal authority, supervision and control mechanisms, mail intercept programs, Operation CHAOS, domestic surveillance of political activists, CIA files on American citizens, and an examination of allegations regarding the assassination of President Kennedy (where the commission upheld the Warren Commission's single-assassin finding). The report contained 27 recommendations, of which 20 were agency-level reforms recommended for immediate implementation and 7 addressed CIA structure, function, and presidential oversight.²¹

The Ford administration's response to the report was coordinated by a memorandum dated August 9, 1975, from Kissinger, White House counsel Philip Buchen, and Office of Management and Budget director James Lynn, which argued for prompt action on the domestic-improprieties recommendations while deferring broader intelligence restructuring questions, explicitly noting that congressional committees were simultaneously investigating related matters and that delay risked losing "the initiative entirely."²²

The commission's records, totaling approximately 41 cubic feet (82,000 pages), are held at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Materials related to Kennedy assassination allegations and anti-Castro activities from 1960 to 1964 were processed for research access following the JFK Records Act; significant portions of the collection remain classified.²³