Church Committee
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The Church Committee was convened in 1975 as part of a broader national reckoning with intelligence community abuses revealed in the early 1970s. John Kiriakou has cited it as a model for what genuine congressional oversight of the intelligence community looks like, and as evidence that such oversight requires a prior national consensus that the status quo is broken: "What we need to reform it is a period like we saw in the mid-1970s with the creation of the Church and Pike Committees where there's got to be this national consensus that we're in a state of crisis." He traces that consensus to the fact that the CIA operated with no congressional oversight at all from its founding in 1947 until 1975, nearly three decades during which, in his telling, it ran essentially unchecked: killing foreign leaders, overthrowing governments, running illegal secret wars in Southeast Asia, and spying on American citizens. He has called the CIA of that era a "rogue organization running around the world assassinating world leaders," and notes that President Eisenhower had warned about the agency as early as 1960, while President Kennedy reportedly said just two weeks before his assassination that the CIA should be "broken into a thousand pieces and scattered to the wind."

The committee's work, along with the concurrent Pike Committee in the House, which Kiriakou says together nearly dismantled the CIA over its running of secret wars, assassinations, and coups, produced permanent oversight structures in 1976: the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. According to Kiriakou, those successor committees "really were the oversight committees for about seven years", real, legitimate congressional oversight lasted until roughly 1982, under CIA Director Bill Casey, a former OSS officer and self-described "true believer" who did his utmost to cut Congress out of intelligence matters entirely. He has given the same timeline in more granular form elsewhere: honest oversight ran from 1975 to 1982, when the committees required the CIA to operate within the confines of the law, but starting around 1982 and culminating by roughly 1995, the committees simply gave up, in part, Kiriakou says, because a congressional staff of 60 to 80 people cannot realistically oversee an intelligence community of 60,000 to 70,000. Their mandate eroded further under the Reagan administration during the period of the Iran-Contra affair, after which they "became really little more than cheerleaders for the CIA." Kiriakou has told the same arc more bluntly: just when it looked like Congress had the CIA under control with the creation of the Church and Pike Committees and their successor intelligence committees, Reagan became president and ordered Iran-Contra, and then September 11 handed the agency "unfettered authorities to just go around the world" unchecked all over again. Fear of the CIA, he says elsewhere, "changed for a while with the advent of" the Church and Pike Committees, but the change "didn't last very long," and the agency reverted to form after September 11. As late as the 1980s, Kiriakou notes, Congress still had teeth: Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan sponsored votes of no confidence in sitting CIA directors, something Kiriakou says would be unthinkable today, when the intelligence committees function purely as cheerleaders even on matters as serious as the CIA's torture, rendition, and secret-prison programs. Kiriakou has said the decline has continued ever since, with the committees now functioning primarily to approve agency budgets and provide cover for whatever the agencies request. He contrasts that bipartisan 1975 consensus with today's partisan Congress, noting that the only members from the other party on a more recent House "weaponization" committee were Eric Swalwell and Liz Cheney.

The committee's namesake, Senator Frank Church, won re-election in 1974 partly on the post-Watergate backlash against Nixon, but was defeated six years later after unusual outside money flowed into the race against him. Kiriakou recalls his own father voting for Church in the 1976 Democratic presidential primaries and telling him, "that guy earned it," while his mother favored Birch Bayh of Indiana. More broadly, Kiriakou says Congress' entire modern intelligence-oversight architecture, the Senate and House intelligence committees, exists only because of the crimes the CIA and FBI were committing before the Church Committee's mid-1970s investigation. Immediately following that investigation, Executive Order 12333 formally banned political assassination by the U.S. government. Kiriakou says a CIA friend assured him before he joined the agency that the Church Commission's reforms had stuck and the agency's "battle days" were behind it, and for a time this held: he describes a genuine respect for human rights at the CIA between the Church Committee and September 11, including a 1990s "cull," ordered under Bill Clinton, in which the agency purged roughly a third of its recruited sources over human-rights problems in their backgrounds, even at some cost to intelligence collection. That era ended, in Kiriakou's telling, the moment September 11 hit: "the gloves came off," and the agency reverted to the pre-Church-Committee pattern of secret wars and targeted killing.

Kiriakou closes his own retellings of this history by urging listeners to study it directly, to pay close attention to the revelations of the Church and Pike Committees in 1975 and to read Tim Weiner's history of the CIA, Legacy of Ashes.

The Family Jewels and the $500 fine

John Kiriakou says Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho) and Congressman Otis Pike (D-NY) convened parallel investigations in 1975 that demanded the CIA's Family Jewels, with MK-Ultra and its assassination programs surfacing first. Ordered to preserve the MK-Ultra records, the director instead had 85% destroyed; he was fined 500 dollars for contempt of Congress, and Kiriakou says CIA employees lined the halls throwing dollar bills into a hat to pay the fine as a gesture of defiance.

The Senate torture report and The Report

Kiriakou draws a direct line from the Church Committee's model of investigation to the later Senate Intelligence Committee probe into CIA torture, on which he has commented extensively. He was the script consultant on The Report, the film centered on Senate investigator Daniel Jones and the torture-report investigation: writer-director Scott Burns, known for The Bourne Ultimatum and The Informant!, approached him in 2015 to write a spec script, which HBO passed on before Amazon picked it up years later. Kiriakou says he never met Daniel Jones himself, since Jones told him he was uncomfortable meeting him. Kiriakou notes he personally testified about torture before the Senate Armed Services Committee, not the Intelligence Committee, pointedly, since he says the Intelligence Committee was itself "in up to its neck" in the torture program, having approved and financed it before later expressing outrage at how far it had gone. He also faults Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall for not entering the full, unredacted 5,000-plus-page Senate torture report into the congressional record before Udall retired from the Senate, an act that would have declassified the whole report on the spot.

The destruction order, and the fifteen per cent

Kiriakou''s account of what the committee actually recovered is short and damning. When the programs were revealed in the 1975 hearings, "the CIA director was ordered not to destroy the documents. And he went back from Capitol Hill and ordered the destruction of all the documents. And so what we know now is from the 15 per cent of documents that survive."

In a May 2026 telling he named that director as William Colby, and dated the committee's order to 1975, the committee "which became the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence", an institutional succession he treats as the committee's most durable product. (Elsewhere he has attributed the destruction order to Richard Helms; see MK-Ultra for the divergence.)

He also draws a live consequence from the committee's surviving remnant. Because the fifteen per cent is what the record now consists of, he argues it carries a standing obligation: those files "are mandated to be declassified. The American people have a right to know what is in these files."

His judgement on the reforms the committee produced is that they held for a moment and then lapsed: "we all thought that was going to change in 1975, and it changed for a minute, and then by 1982, you know, the CIA was the old CIA again, doing the same CIA things it was doing in the fifties."

The line trainees were taught to draw

Kiriakou uses the committee as the dividing point in agency practice rather than as a historical event. Describing what career trainees were told about recruiting through blackmail, that it is not done, because a long-term agent relationship cannot be built on coercion, he adds the exception without being pressed: "now, certainly they did it in the past, pre-Church Committee."

What it actually investigated

Kiriakou enumerates the committee's subjects whenever a new body claims its mantle. It looked at crimes committed by "the CIA, the FBI, NSA, the Department of the Army, and associated intelligence organizations", specifically at the CIA's international assassinations programme; at the Army's programme to infiltrate peace groups and anti-Vietnam-war groups; at COINTELPRO, the FBI's warrantless surveillance of Americans; and at MKUltra, "in which the CIA dosed unwitting American citizens with LSD just to see what their reactions would be."

He closes the list with the consequence: "people died in these programs."

What made the inquiry work, on his account, was its composition: it was "bipartisan in nature, with intellectual heavyweights on both sides", Frank Church, "an intellectual giant who ran for president in 1976," and Senator Philip Hart of Michigan among them. That is the standard by which he judges the 2023 Weaponization Subcommittee and finds it not a successor at all.

See also

- Pike Committee
- Senior Executive Service
- CIA
