Do you remember Frank Church? No? Now would be a good time to learn about him. Frank Forrester Church served as a United States senator (D – Idaho) for 24 years from 1957 to 1981. From January 1975 to May 1976, Church led the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. Mercifully shortened to the Church Committee, it was considered one of the most important oversight investigations ever undertaken by Congress.
The Church Committee was created in response to news that there was a program of domestic surveillance. In short, our government was spying on us. New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh broke the story on December 22, 1974: “Huge CIA Operation Against Antiwar Protesters and other Dissidents.”
In an age when our representatives could still move with the requisite speed—could still move at all—the committee was established in 36 days. Without fear or favor, and unfettered, the Church Committee launched a series of investigations into American intelligence agencies, including the CIA, NSA, and FBI. The fascinating thing about the Church Committee is that there was no congressional oversight of the U.S. intelligence community prior to its creation.
Over 16 months, there were 126 meetings, 40 hearings, and 800 witness interviews conducted by 150 staffers and the 11 committee members (six Democrats and five Republicans). They found eight well-planned and executed hush-hush programs all underway and all illegal. In the report, entitled “Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans,” Church exposed:
- The attempted assassinations of President Fidel Castro of Cuba, President Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, and Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
- COINTELPRO, Counterintelligence Program, a covert operation conducted by the FBI to infiltrate and discredit domestic organizations that it considered “subversive.” That included civil rights activists, feminists, environmentalists, protestors of the Vietnam War, and communists.
- The CIA’s PROJECT MOCKINGBIRD involved the recruitment of journalists to spread propaganda through the media.
- The NSA’s PROJECT MINARET monitored individuals on its “Watch List” with the cooperation of telecommunication companies. Lest you think of the 1930s movie villains with mustaches and foreign accents, those on the “Watch List” were Senator Church, fellow Church Committee members Walter Mondale and Howard Baker, as well as Otis Pike, chair of the House committee investigating the intelligence agencies (known as the “Pike Committee”) and Martin Luther King.
- Copies of all telegrams going in and out of the United States sent by telecommunications companies to the NSA which then disseminated them to other intelligence agencies was called PROJECT SHAMROCK, an off-shoot of PROJECT MINARET.
- HTLINGUAL was a secret project conducted by the CIA under the guise of foreign intelligence to intercept and review any mail sent to the Soviet Union and China. Under the same guise, it investigated prominent civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr.
- PROJECT MKULTRA was a series of CIA experiments conducted on American citizens to determine which drugs made them more susceptible to brainwashing techniques or interrogation.
- PROJECT MKNAOMI was a joint CIA/Army project to develop and stockpile an array of biological agents without the authority of Congress or the president, including poisons in quantities that could kill tens of thousands and offensive weapons capable of delivering them.
Take a minute and re-read the list. Anything sound unfamiliar? The Church Committee reports have been called the most extensive review of intelligence activities ever. Although much was classified, over 50,000 pages were declassified under the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 and made available to the public.
The committee’s findings also led to important reforms: an executive order banning assassinations; permanent Senate oversight of intelligence activities; the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to obtain court permission to surveille; and a ten-year term limit for the FBI director.
Church concluded his investigation with these words. “Now, why is this investigation important … because I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that all agencies … operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”
You can be forgiven for not remembering Church because his hearings were very shortly eclipsed by the Watergate Hearings.
The biography of Church is titled “The Last Honest Man” written by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist James Risen.
Risen said, “I wrote the book because after [September 11, 2001], the Bush administration wanted to roll back a lot of the regulations that governed the CIA and the FBI in the name of counterterrorism.”
They lose, those proponents of autocracy, every time their goals are exposed to the light, but they do not go away. Defeat does not mean dissolution. They keep coming back. They do not waver in their beliefs and their desires. They are always with us—at times loud and proud, and at other times made to scamper from the light and whisper in corners. Which time are we living in?
Read about Project 2025, organized and written by the Heritage Foundation. Project 2025 has brought together right-wing organizations and sympathizers ready to restore Trump to the White House, ready to turn America back to a time when our government thought of its citizens as the enemy. Read about Project 2025 and remember Frank Forrester Church.
