Covert Action and Accountability

The Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations, known as the Church Committee, began work in January 1975 and published its final report in April 1976. Its Book III staff study reviewed more than 20,000 pages of FBI documents on the Bureau's counterintelligence programs, called COINTELPRO.

On 25 August 1967 FBI headquarters instructed 23 field offices to open a program against black nationalist groups. The Committee quotes the letter as directing the field to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" the activities of those organizations, their leadership, spokesmen, membership and supporters (Book III, Part II.B.5, p. 20). A letter of March 1968 listed the prevention of the rise of a "messiah" among the goals. The original FBI letters are known here through the Committee's quotation.

The Committee's King case study records that on 21 November 1964 the FBI mailed Martin Luther King Jr. a tape with an anonymous note. King and his associates read the note as an invitation to suicide. The Committee quotes a draft supplied by the FBI and found in the office files of William Sullivan, an assistant director: "You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy fraudulent self is bared to the nation." The Committee reports that Andrew Young stated the last paragraph matched the letter sent to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (Book III, King case study, Part VI.B).

The Book III study reports that the Bureau informed no one outside the FBI of three of the programs. It also reports that no Bureau witness could recall anyone raising the legality or constitutionality of COINTELPRO, and that Attorneys General were not told of the later programs. FBI Director Clarence Kelley defended the purposes of COINTELPRO (Book III, p. 14). The Bureau ended the programs on 27 April 1971, after the 8 March 1971 burglary of its Media, Pennsylvania resident agency (Book III, p. 3 and note 1). Page numbers for Book III are derived from the PDF and should be confirmed against the printed volume.

The Act authorizes court orders for foreign-intelligence electronic surveillance. Section 103 provides that the Chief Justice shall designate seven district court judges to hear applications, and Section 108 requires semiannual reports to the House and Senate intelligence committees. Judicial warrants for this surveillance were among the Committee's recommendations.

Book II contains 96 domestic recommendations, and Tower's separate views refer to 183 recommendations in all. The enactments named in Finding DEF-6.2 are the Senate and House intelligence committees and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The Iran/contra affair became public after the 5 October 1986 shootdown of Eugene Hasenfus's aircraft, and the diversion of Iran arms-sale proceeds to the Contras was announced on 25 November 1986. Lawrence Walsh, appointed independent counsel, filed his Final Report on 4 August 1993.

Walsh also recorded the Reagan Justice Department's position that the 1985 arms shipments did not violate the law. He disputed the congressional majority's account of a "cabal of zealots," and he attributed the failed North and Poindexter prosecutions to congressional grants of immunity (Final Report, Part XI). The Final Report's locators are by section because the HTML copy carries no printed page numbers.

The two convictions were vacated for reasons connected to the immunity that Congress had granted North and Poindexter, which Walsh named as the cause of the failed prosecutions. On 24 December 1992 President George H. W. Bush pardoned Elliott Abrams, Duane Clarridge, Alan Fiers, Clair George, Robert McFarlane and Caspar Weinberger (Proclamation 6518, 107 Stat. 2606). Weinberger and Clarridge had not been tried.

A Senate Foreign Relations Committee subcommittee chaired by Senator John Kerry published its report on drugs, law enforcement and foreign policy as S. Prt. 100-165 in 1989.

The printed total is $806,401.20. The four line items on the page image sum to $806,402.32. The exhibit note records the difference of $1.12; the report does not explain it.

Inspector General Frederick Hitz issued Volume I on the California allegations in classified form on 17 December 1997 and in unclassified form on 29 January 1998. A team of 17 reviewed 250,000 pages and conducted more than 365 interviews. Volume I found no CIA relationship with Ross, Blandon or Meneses, and recorded a CIA cable stating that about $36,000 seized from Zavala at his arrest was returned to him by the prosecutors at the CIA's request, on the claim that the money belonged to the Contras.

Volume II, released in unclassified form on 8 October 1998, found that the CIA did not tell Congress about 8 of 10 Contra-related individuals during the fiscal year 1987 prohibition, and that 11 individuals were not reported to law enforcement. In his 16 March 1998 statement to the House intelligence committee, Hitz said six former CIA employees and a former DEA agent declined to be interviewed.

The Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) pleaded guilty in 1991 and forfeited its U.S. assets. Senators Kerry and Hank Brown published the Senate Foreign Relations Committee report, S. Prt. 102-140, in December 1992.

Kerr, the CIA's witness, testified on 25 October 1991 that the CIA had not violated any law and had no relationship with BCCI founder Agha Hasan Abedi. The Committee found that the CIA's first information to it was "untrue," and later "incomplete." A September 1995 Justice Department release reported that a federal court had released more than $393 million of the funds forfeited in 1992, including $223 million for a victims' fund and $10 million for New York.

The Joint Inquiry of the House and Senate intelligence committees into the 11 September 2001 attacks published its report in December 2002. The Executive Branch withheld Part Four, "Finding, Discussion and Narrative Regarding Certain Sensitive National Security Matters," in full. Portions were declassified on 15 July 2016, with redactions. No body listed here concluded that the U.S. government carried out or assisted the attacks. Part Four concerns possible Saudi-linked contacts with the hijackers.

The finding is graded reported because the ODNI statement is known through a trade-news reprint. Part Four states on printed page 421: "It should be clear that this Joint Inquiry has made no final determinations as to the reliability or sufficiency of the information regarding these issues that we found contained in FBI and CIA documents." The FBI's November 2002 response in Part Four states that there was no evidence that Omar al-Bayoumi was an intelligence officer, and the same part records inconsistencies elsewhere in the Bureau's accounts (pp. 424–426).

The ODNI release also cited the FBI 9/11 Review Commission, directed in 2013, which found no new evidence changing the 9/11 Commission's findings on responsibility. A joint FBI–CIA assessment dated 1 September 2005, declassified in 2016, found no evidence that the Saudi government or members of the royal family knowingly provided support for the attacks. The same assessment found evidence that official Saudi entities and associated nongovernmental organizations had funded individuals tied to terrorism, and it found no information that Bayoumi or Osama Basnan wittingly supported the hijackers.

News coverage of the FBI records released on 11 September 2021 reports that they describe Omar al-Bayoumi's assistance and the contacts of Fahad al-Thumairy, and that they do not state that the Saudi government was complicit. Attorneys for victims' families argue that the records support their claims against Saudi Arabia.

The Church Committee's Book I reports on covert relationships between the CIA and the American press. The Committee's own section heading is "Covert Relationships with the United States Media." The CIA announced a new policy toward accredited media correspondents on 11 February 1976.

The Committee noted that most of the media contacts were bona fide journalists who were witting, while their organizations mostly were not aware of the arrangements. The CIA said that propaganda "fallout" in the United States could not be prevented. Book II separately records that the FBI fed derogatory material about its targets to "friendly" media.

A footnote to that passage quotes a CIA email of 31 October 2005 from John Rizzo: "Sen. Levin's legislative proposal for a 9/11-type outside Commission to be established on detainees seems to be gaining some traction, which obviously would serve to surface the tapes' existence." Rizzo then wrote that he needed to see "if the Director is willing to let us try one more time to get the right people downtown on board with the notion of our [sic] destroying the tapes." A senior CIA attorney who had viewed the tapes replied: "You are correct. The sooner we resolve this the better."

The Committee presents these emails as the CIA's own record of its reasoning. The executive summary also describes the CIA's proposed redactions to the public text of the study in a footnote on page 10. This section covers the summary's account of the sequence in November 2005 and does not cover the later Justice Department inquiry into the destruction.

Chapter 12 of the Medicine report, Military Exposures, covers MKULTRA.

The FBI Vault documents of 2021 and 2022 are reported through news coverage, and the 2021 release is cited as an exhibit to DEF-6.9 on that basis.