Church Committee

The Senate opened the basement door in 1975. What it found had names like MKULTRA.

Here's a thought that should probably keep you up at night: for about twenty-five years, some of the most powerful agencies in the United States were operating with essentially no one watching them. No court. No congressional committee with real teeth. Nobody. And then, in 1975, the lid came off. So let me walk you through the room where it happened. January 27, 1975. The Senate passes S. Res. 21 by a vote of 82 to 4, creating the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. Everyone just calls it the Church Committee, after its chairman, Frank Church of Idaho. Over the next year, his investigators pry open files nobody outside those agencies had ever seen. And what they documented — this is the important word, documented — is staggering. The CIA had plotted to assassinate at least five foreign leaders, including Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba; the committee's interim report, 'Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders,' laid it out in cold detail. The CIA's HTLINGUAL program had opened and photographed something like 215,000 pieces of Americans' mail. The NSA, through Projects SHAMROCK and MINARET, had been quietly vacuuming up telegrams. And the FBI's COINTELPRO had gone after civil rights and antiwar figures — most infamously mailing Martin Luther King Jr. an anonymous letter that read as an invitation to kill himself. But here's the part most people don't know. A lot of the paper trail was already gone. When the committee went looking for MKULTRA, the CIA's mind-control program, they found the records had mostly been destroyed on the director's order in 1973. What survived was almost an accident — and it's why mkultra, our neighbor node in this map, is still only half-visible to this day. That's the thing to understand about this file: the Church Committee is the citation node. When you read about cointelpro, you're reading the committee's findings. When you read about the CIA's internal confession — the family-jewels, another neighbor here — you're looking at the very document that helped hand Church his roadmap. Half this archive traces back through this one room. The reforms were real and they still shape your life. The committee's work produced the permanent Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (S. Res. 400 in 1976), President Ford's Executive Order 11905 banning political assassination, and, in 1978, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — the FISA you still hear argued about today. And then there's the warning. Looking at the NSA's raw capability, Frank Church said that technology could be turned inward on Americans so completely that there would be 'no place to hide,' an 'abyss from which there is no return.' Documented words, spoken in 1975, about machines far cruder than the one in your pocket. So place this file at the center of the board. Threads run out from here to cointelpro, to mkultra, to the family-jewels — and from those, everywhere else. If the rest of the archive is a web, the Church Committee is the knot holding it together.