The Pike Committee was convened in 1975 as the House counterpart to the Senate’s Church Committee. Together, the two bodies constituted what John Kiriakou has described as the last genuine exercise of congressional oversight over the intelligence community: “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,” Kiriakou said, arguing that similar reform today would require an equivalent national consensus that American government is in crisis.[1]
The committee’s work led to the creation of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which Kiriakou says functioned as a genuine oversight body for approximately seven years before degrading into what he described as a rubber stamp.[2] Elsewhere he places that timeline slightly differently: the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, created after the Church and Pike investigations to oversee the CIA day-to-day, worked “great” — he says — only until about 1986, when both bodies fell back to rubber-stamping.[3] Kiriakou says the CIA has not been meaningfully reined in since the Church/Pike era and the end of Bill Casey’s tenure as director in the 1980s, and calls the period after 9/11 a missed opportunity to reform the agency — one where Congress instead “doubled down.”[4]
The House parallel
John Kiriakou credits Congressman Otis Pike (D-Long Island) with convening the House counterpart to the Church Committee in 1975; both, he says, morphed into the permanent House and Senate intelligence committees and together demanded the Family Jewels.[5][6]