The Church Committee: How an Idaho Senator Exposed the CIA's Assassination Plots

In the spring of nineteen seventy-five, the Senate of the United States voted to create a special committee to investigate the intelligence agencies of the federal government. The chairman was Frank Church of Idaho. What the committee found over the next year and a half was not what most Americans had assumed their government was doing.

The Central Intelligence Agency had, over the preceding two decades, plotted to assassinate Fidel Castro of Cuba on multiple occasions, using methods that included poisoned cigars, an exploding seashell, and contaminated diving equipment. It had plotted against Patrice Lumumba of the Democratic Republic of Congo, against Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, and against other foreign leaders. The plots were documented in the Agency's own files.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation's COINTELPRO program had conducted systematic surveillance and disruption campaigns against the civil rights movement, specifically including monitoring and attempted destabilization of Martin Luther King Junior's organization. The FBI had also targeted antiwar groups, socialist organizations, and individual American citizens it considered subversive, using methods that included anonymous threatening letters, planted false evidence, and coordinated harassment.

The Church Committee hearings were televised nationally. They were among the most consequential public congressional proceedings in American history, and they produced the legal framework for intelligence oversight that still exists today, including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of nineteen seventy-eight and the requirement that intelligence agencies notify congressional committees of sensitive operations.

Church paid a price. He lost his Senate seat in nineteen eighty, partly as a result of a well-funded campaign that characterized him as soft on national security. The oversight institutions he built outlasted the political attack. The wilderness he protected outlasted everything.