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 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.[2][3][4] The two committees also forced the CIA’s leadership to testify under oath in public hearings, which is how MK-Ultra was made public.[5]
His assessment of what they achieved is admiring but bounded. Church and Pike “got it right when they tried to rein in the CIA,” but the only instrument available to Congress was to create the two permanent intelligence committees — a great step, and yet within six or seven years the new overseers had let the agency slip back into its old habits of overthrowing governments and killing people.[6][7]
The golden age and its end
Kiriakou dates a golden age of congressional oversight from 1975 to about 1982 — “real oversight with giants sitting on them,” he says, naming Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Frank Church, Birch Bayh and Barry Goldwater as heavyweights of twentieth-century American politics who took the constitutionally mandated oversight authority of Congress seriously.[8][9]
What ended it, in his account, was Nicaragua. By 1982 the gloves came off; the contras were armed with Iranian help and Saudi middlemen, cocaine came into the country, and the thing went off the rails.[10][8] He describes the mechanism as institutional rather than personal: “they will push, push, push, push until somebody pushes back. And if nobody pushes back, well, they’ve just claimed new territory and they’re not giving it up.”[11] Put to him as regulatory capture — the regulated entity ending up in control of its regulator — he agrees, and adds the lever that made it work: for many years all anyone at the CIA had to say was “9/11,” and whatever was being pushed back on was dropped.[12]
The decline is a recurring theme with slightly varying dates. Through the 1970s and into the early 1980s the committees did exactly what they were built to do; the slippage began under Reagan; and by the George W. Bush presidency they were, in his phrase, “really no more than cheerleaders for the CIA” — “in up to their necks in the torture program. There was nobody to stop them.”[13][14][15] Elsewhere he gives the working life of the new committees as about seven years, or as “great” until roughly 1986.[16][17] 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.”[18] His prescription is a repeat: “It’s going to take another Church and Pike Committee, period, to rein the CIA in” — while conceding that technology may now be advanced enough to make even that impossible.[11]
The classified annex
Kiriakou tells one story that, by his own account, punctured his picture of the golden age itself. A senator and committee chairman called him up to Capitol Hill and asked for help getting documents from 1975 that he could not obtain. Kiriakou’s reaction was that a committee chairman should simply pick up the phone and have them delivered by noon; the senator answered that he had been trying for seven years and been told to go fly a kite.[19][20]
What he was after was a classified annex to the 1975 report. Kiriakou objected that there could not be one — the whole point of the 1975 report was that it was unclassified and released to the public. “Right,” the senator said, “that’s what they want everybody to believe.” Its existence had been denied for seven years until it was found in a storage area in the basement of the Senate: sealed, covered in decades of dust, and still off limits to him. Leadership declined to intervene in a dispute between two committee chairmen. And because these are congressional documents classified by a congressional committee, they fall outside the Freedom of Information Act — Congress having, in Kiriakou’s phrase, exempted itself in its infinite wisdom from the laws it passes.[21][22]