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.”[1] 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.[2][3] 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.”[4]
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.[5] 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.[6][7][8] 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.[9] 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.”[10] 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.[11] 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.[12] 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.[13] 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.[14]
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.[15] 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.[16] 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.[17] Immediately following that investigation, Executive Order 12333 formally banned political assassination by the U.S. government.[3] 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[18] — 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.[19][18] 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.[19][3]
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.[20]
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.[21][22] 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.[23][24][25]
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.[26] Kiriakou says he never met Daniel Jones himself, since Jones told him he was uncomfortable meeting him.[27] 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.[28] 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.[29]