Latest / The Shadow Dossier / The Shadow Dossier — The Committee That Exposed the Agencies

Transcript

The Shadow Dossier — The Committee That Exposed the Agencies · The Shadow Dossier

• 0:00
  The Shadow Dossier. Act I, a scandal that opened
• 0:06
  a door. In the wake of the Watergate scandal
• 0:11
  and mounting public revelations about domestic
• 0:13
  surveillance abuses, the United States Senate
• 0:16
  voted in January 1975 to establish a select committee
• 0:21
  with an unusually broad mandate. Investigate
• 0:25
  the full scope of American intelligence agencies'
• 0:28
  activities. both at home and abroad, and determine
• 0:32
  whether the CIA, FBI, NSA, and other agencies
• 0:37
  had operated outside their legal authority. Chaired
• 0:41
  by Senator Frank Church of Idaho, the committee's
• 0:44
  work would, over the following year, produce
• 0:47
  one of the most consequential public reckonings
• 0:49
  with intelligence overreach in American history.
• 0:55
  Act II, a mandate that kept expanding. The Church
• 1:02
  Committee's investigation began against a backdrop
• 1:05
  of specific, already public concerns, including
• 1:09
  revelations published by journalist Seymour Hersh
• 1:12
  in late 1974 detailing illegal CIA domestic surveillance
• 1:18
  of American anti -war activists and other citizens,
• 1:21
  activities that had been explicitly prohibited
• 1:24
  under the CIA's founding charter. which restricted
• 1:28
  the agency to foreign intelligence operations
• 1:31
  rather than domestic ones. What the committee's
• 1:37
  investigators found, once granted access to classified
• 1:41
  agency records and internal testimony, extended
• 1:45
  dramatically beyond the specific abuses that
• 1:48
  had initially prompted the inquiry. The committee
• 1:51
  documented systematic FBI surveillance and disruption
• 1:56
  campaigns targeting civil rights leaders, including
• 1:59
  extensive wiretapping and harassment of Martin
• 2:03
  Luther King Jr., conducted under a program called
• 2:07
  COINTELPRO that had also targeted a wide range
• 2:10
  of other domestic political organizations across
• 2:13
  the ideological spectrum, from civil rights and
• 2:17
  anti -war groups to... in some documented instances
• 2:20
  entirely legal political organizations whose
• 2:25
  activities posed no plausible security threat
• 2:29
  at all act 3 the assassination revelations Among
• 2:39
  the committee's most explosive findings were
• 2:42
  details of CIA involvement in plots to assassinate
• 2:47
  foreign leaders, including documented plans targeting
• 2:51
  Cuban leader Fidel Castro that involved remarkably
• 2:54
  unconventional methods, poison cigars, exploding
• 2:59
  seashells, and... in one especially widely reported
• 3:03
  detail, an attempted collaboration with organized
• 3:07
  crime figures to carry out an assassination.
• 3:10
  Arrangements the committee's report characterized
• 3:13
  as reflecting a striking absence of the kind,
• 3:17
  of oversight or formal authorization structure
• 3:20
  that might reasonably be expected for operations
• 3:23
  of this magnitude and risk. The committee also
• 3:29
  examined American intelligence involvement in
• 3:33
  the political destabilization and eventual overthrow
• 3:36
  of foreign governments, including Chile's democratically
• 3:40
  elected President Salvador Allende in 1973, documenting
• 3:46
  CIA support for opposition groups working to
• 3:49
  undermine his government. Findings that added
• 3:52
  considerable weight to long -standing international
• 3:55
  criticism of american intelligence operations
• 3:58
  conducted with minimal transparency or accountability
• 4:02
  to congress act 4 and cultura comes to light
• 4:09
  the committee's work brought significant public
• 4:15
  attention to mk ultra The CIA's clandestine program
• 4:19
  investigating mind control and behavioral modification
• 4:23
  techniques. Conducted from the 1950s through
• 4:26
  the early 1960s and involving, according to documents
• 4:30
  that survived an agency -wide destruction of
• 4:33
  MKUltra records ordered in 1973. Experiments
• 4:37
  on both witting and unwitting human subjects.
• 4:42
  including the administration of LSD and other
• 4:45
  psychoactive substances without informed consent,
• 4:48
  sometimes two. American citizens who had no idea
• 4:52
  they were part of any experiment at all. The
• 4:58
  near total destruction of Mkultra's records meant
• 5:01
  the committee's investigators, and every subsequent
• 5:04
  historical examination of the program since,
• 5:07
  had to work from an incomplete picture. reconstructed
• 5:11
  largely from financial records and the surviving
• 5:14
  testimony of officials involved, rather than
• 5:17
  the program's own comprehensive internal documentation,
• 5:20
  a gap that has left significant aspects of Mkultra's
• 5:24
  full scope permanently unclear. Act V. The Oversight
• 5:32
  Structure Built in Response. The Church Committee's
• 5:39
  final report, published in 1976, concluded that
• 5:43
  American intelligence agencies had operated for
• 5:46
  decades with insufficient legal constraint and
• 5:50
  virtually no meaningful congressional oversight.
• 5:53
  A structural gap the committee argued had allowed
• 5:56
  abuses to develop and persist across multiple
• 5:59
  agencies and multiple presidential administrations
• 6:03
  without any external check capable of identifying
• 6:06
  or stopping them before journalists. And, eventually,
• 6:10
  the committee itself intervened. The committee's
• 6:16
  recommendations led directly to the creation
• 6:20
  of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees.
• 6:23
  Permanent oversight bodies specifically established
• 6:26
  to provide ongoing congressional review of intelligence
• 6:30
  agency activities going forward, along with the
• 6:33
  Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978,
• 6:36
  which created formal legal requirements and judicial
• 6:40
  oversight for domestic intelligence surveillance
• 6:43
  activities that had previously operated with
• 6:46
  essentially no external check at all. What the
• 6:51
  Church Committee ultimately demonstrated was
• 6:54
  the scale of activity intelligence agencies could
• 6:57
  accumulate over decades when operating with minimal
• 7:01
  external accountability and a significant, if
• 7:04
  imperfect, structural reforms that became possible
• 7:07
  once a sustained, well -resourced legislative
• 7:10
  investigation finally forced that activity into
• 7:14
  public view, a reckoning that for all its impact,
• 7:18
  Several later intelligence controversies in the
• 7:21
  decades since have shown was never fully permanent
• 7:25
  or complete. This concludes declassified file
• 7:32
  number 0043 of the Shadow Dossier, the committee
• 7:36
  that exposed the agencies. What dangerous secrets
• 7:42
  await in our next file? If you want early access
• 7:49
  to upcoming files and censored intel briefings
• 7:52
  and bonus dossiers, join our Patreon network
• 7:56
  at patreon .com slash storiesbymia. Subscribe
• 8:03
  on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS .com, and YouTube
• 8:08
  so you never miss an official declassification.
• 8:14
  This is the Shadow Dossier. Thank you for listening.