The Church Committee: MKUltra, COINTELPRO, and the CIA's Family Jewels

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In January 1970 Army intelligence officer Christopher Pyle revealed that the military was spying on civilians, and in December 1974 Seymour Hersh reported in The New York Times on Operation CHAOS, a CIA program collecting information on Americans' political activity. The Senate voted 82 to 4 to create a select committee chaired by Frank Church of Idaho. It examined the CIA's internal compilation known as the family jewels, including MKUltra, in which unwitting subjects were given drugs such as LSD in mind control experiments; the FBI's COINTELPRO operations against civil rights and political groups; and the alleged media program known as Operation Mockingbird. The committee also publicly confirmed the existence of the National Security Agency.

It uncovered Project Shamrock, under which telegraph companies shared traffic with the NSA from 1945 into the 1970s, and HTLINGUAL, which opened and photographed more than 215,000 pieces of mail before ending in 1973. An interim report covered alleged plots against Patrice Lumumba, Rafael Trujillo, Ngo Dinh Diem, Rene Schneider and Fidel Castro, and a review of the Kennedy assassination found the FBI and CIA had failed in their duties, helping lead to the House Select Committee on Assassinations. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence followed, along with Gerald Ford's Executive Order 11905 banning political assassinations.

• A watch list indexed in a rhyming dictionary included Joanne Woodward, Gregory Peck, Ralph Abernathy, Walter Mondale and Frank Church himself.
• Ford's team wanted acting CIA Director William Colby to give only a general briefing, but Colby testified in 1975.
• On Meet the Press on August 17, 1975, Church warned that the NSA's capabilities could enable total tyranny with no place to hide.
• Critics later blamed the reforms for weakening human intelligence before 9/11, while chief counsel Frederick A.O. Schwarz Jr. disputed that view.
• Carl Bernstein wrote in 1977 that the committee had played down the CIA's ties to journalists.