Latest / Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs / Season 3, Episode 8: James & Tom Risen, The Last Honest Man: the CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedy's - and one Senator's Fight to Save Democracy

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Season 3, Episode 8: James & Tom Risen, The Last Honest Man: the CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedy's - and one Senator's Fight to Save Democracy · Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_02: Hello, I'm Jeffrey Sachs.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to Book Club, a monthly conversation with world-leading authors who have written scintillating, inspiring, and remarkably important books about history, social justices, and the challenges of building a decent world.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome to Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs, and today I'm absolutely delighted to have Jim Risen and Tom Risen to talk about their wonderful book: timely, fascinating, fun to read, The Last Honest Man with a long subtitle, The CIA, FBI, The Mafia, and the Kennedys, and One Senator's Fight to Save Democracy.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_02: This is a wonderful book about Senator Frank Church, and we're going to be talking about Frank Church throughout the hour together.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_02: Jim Risen is a very, very esteemed journalist in the United States, a multiple Pulitzer Prize winner, and is now with the Intercept.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_02: He's worked with the New York Times and the LA Times.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_02: Tom Risen is a journalist in Washington, D.C.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_02: with a specialty in the intelligence agencies and intelligence matters.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_02: So Jim and Tom, thank you so much for the book, first of all, and thank you for joining today.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you for having us.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks so much.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I can't tell you how much I enjoyed the book because Jim, we're uh almost uh the same age, and so you will know what I mean when I say that these were very formative years that you're writing about.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_02: Uh you and Tom.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_02: I was 20 at the time of the church committee hearings.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_02: I just knew Frank Church is a big name and a major senator and a major event.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_02: But you know, you look back basically 50 years later, um, and uh you learn a lot in perspective that you didn't appreciate uh, you know, in those days.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_02: And incidentally, in those years, uh 73 and 74, so not in the year that we're going to be mainly discussing 1975, which was the famous committee hearings that Senator Frank Church led.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_02: I was an intern for Senator Philip Hart, who makes uh yeah, who makes a cameo appearance uh in your book.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean more than a cameo appearance, uh, you know, one of the special guest star conscience of the Senate, uh, in fact.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I worked in his office uh uh in the Senate office building and used to go upstairs to the Urban Committee hearings in 1973, which were the Watergate hearings.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_02: So your book brought back lots of personal memories for me, but it also helped fill in uh a lot of uh information uh about uh a senator that I I knew about but didn't know all that much about.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_02: So having uh said all of that, maybe you could get us started.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_02: There are listeners uh all over the world.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_02: They will not know much about Frank Church, maybe even never have heard the name.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_02: You've gone back to a senator whose fame was uh about 50 years ago.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_02: Tell us how you came to that, why, and basically uh uh a bit about Frank Church.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the Frank Church was a liberal Democratic senator from Idaho who is now most famous for chairing the church committee, which was the first ever investigation by Congress of the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency, and the rest of the intelligence community.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: And in 1975, the church committee conducted a historic investigation of the intelligence community, particularly the CIA and the FBI, and revealed the historic abuses that the CIA in particular had been guilty of for the previous three decades.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's hard to remember today, but the CIA went for 30 years, its first 30 years of existence, without any oversight from Congress at all.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: And so it had been operating in total secrecy, and as a result, it had been allowed to commit many, many abuses against both the United American citizens and people overseas.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: And Frank Church was the first person ever to try to hold the CIA to account.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: And his hearings were historic, and the legacy really is that it led to the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community being brought under the rule of law for the first time in American history.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: And even today, the reforms and the legislation and the executive orders and a whole series of uh reforms that were put in place to kind of bring the intelligence community under the rule of law were put in place as a result of the church committee's investigation, and those are still in place today.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: The rules of the road for the United States intelligence community that exist today are all those that were put in place because of the church committee.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_01: It had a historic role in the shaping of the modern U.S.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: intelligence community.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: And while the reforms are deeply flawed and many of them are too weak, you've got to get back into the mindset of 1975 and realize there was nothing before that.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I was gonna say, we'll talk later in our discussion about the current state of affairs and whether the CIA has uh the kind of oversight that we need.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_02: I'm worried about it day by day.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_02: I still find it uh relatively lawless.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_02: But uh compared to 1975, at that point there was basically nothing, right, as you pointed out, and this was a real breakthrough.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_02: By the way, uh, before we jump to today, uh have there ever been comparable hearings uh since 1975?
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_02: This is the weirdest by far.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_01: I think what we now see is that the church committee was so historic that every few years, whenever there is a scandal, people say we need a new church committee.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: We need another investigation, either of the intelligence community or of some other scandal in Washington.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: And so that the name the church committee has become synonymous with a major investigation in Washington.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's part of the political lexicon.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_02: Nothing has superseded it.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there's never really been anything quite like what they did uh since then.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: You mentioned 1975 and Watergate.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the question for both of you.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: I was going over the 70s a lot more because this is obviously the focus of our book.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think that by 1975 people are kind of numb after Watergate?
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: Because this doesn't get as much attention as it should.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's by far the weirdest hearings Congress has ever done.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: But it's kind of like everybody's checked out and they gotten jaded after Watergate.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, there's tons and tons of press coverage.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: You can go back and see the political cartoons and there's video online and there's interviews.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: But Jeff, you were interning in Congress and you know, you were the journalist, dad.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: But do you think that the average American is kind of checked out by 1975?
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I'll let Jim uh give the first answer.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: I think Tom's raised an interesting point, which was that Watergate overshadowed the church committee.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: And that was really one of the issues that church and others uh involved of the church committee really worried about.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: The Watergate had been so all-consuming for the country as a scandal that when the church committee came, really less than a year after Nixon's resignation, that there was a lot of there were a lot of people who were jaded at that time.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: And that was one of the things that church tried to deal with and tried to overcome in the way that he conducted the hearings.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think, at least for me, the church committee was part of an overall feeling that our institutions had gotten completely out of control.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_02: And so I don't think it was lost in that sense, but it was part of a tsunami of terrible things, which in a way uh started with the Kennedy's assassination, because uh this was uh, of course, uh maybe the most traumatic or tumultuous uh event of uh modern American history in its way.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_02: But then Vietnam was so unbelievably uh divisive and awful, and those were my first political awakenings, uh actually marching on the streets of Detroit in protest of the Vietnam War in 1968.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_02: And Frank Church, uh, I want to come to that, played an amazing role in that.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_02: And then came Nixon, and on my side of the political divide, we hated him from the first day, but uh then was uh the Watergate scandal and all the corruption around that because we learned names of shady figures, you know, giving bags of money and so forth, and that led to this idea of how corrupt the government was, which wasn't such an obvious idea at the time.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_02: Now it's commonplace, but I think it was something new.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_02: It's a turning point.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_02: Frank Church again showed up again because he chaired a remarkable subcommittee exposing corporate corruption.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_02: And then of course the Pentagon Papers, which exposed all the lying of the U.S.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_02: with regard to the Vietnam War, then the church committee on the CIA and FBI terrible malfeasance uh and crimes.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_02: I think it was this enormous wave that for the general public you wouldn't separate it into one thing after another.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah, if you look at the opinion surveys by 1976, basically confidence in American institutions had plummeted.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and they never really recovered uh except for a brief moments since then.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_02: So it was a it was a defining period.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_02: And it seemed to be a sea change, and and the president was elected in 1976 elections, Jimmy Carter, who basically was elected on the slogan, I will never tell you a lie.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, you know, that was the main uh campaign, uh, which is you've been lied to, lied to, lied to, and I won't tell you a lie.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_02: So in that sense, I don't think it was overshadowed, except, yes, in a technical sense, but it was numbing in the sense that it was one thing after another where the blinders were removed from our eyes, I would say.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, that's a good way to put it.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_01: I think uh one of the things that Church thought when he started the church committee, he thought it was going to be a continuation of the Watergate investigation.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: He saw this as Watergate 2.0.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_01: And what surprised him the most was that as soon as they began to investigate the CIA, they found that it wasn't just Richard Nixon who had been abusing the CIA.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: It went every president since World War II had been doing it.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_02: So if we could go back, I found Frank Church to be a fascinating young man.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_02: You know, he came out of Idaho, and uh, with all due respect to people listening in from Idaho, I would not expect one of the giants of American foreign policy necessarily to emerge from Idaho.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_02: Liberal foreign policy.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_02: So maybe maybe uh you could take us through a little bit of uh his early years, and then I want to hear from uh both of you about two preliminaries to the church committee before we turn to what he found, and that was his stance on Vietnam.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, incredible.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and then second, this subcommittee on multinational corporations that he chaired, which was also absolutely pathbreaking.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: And they were both in 1975.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: He had an incredibly busy year.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_02: So let's uh go back to the beginning, if we could, just a bit about who Frank Church is and how this young man from uh Idaho made it to Washington and then started this period where he was catapulted to the absolute forefront of thinking about America and the world.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, he was a he's a fascinating character because he he was born in 1924 in Idaho, in Boise, in downtown Boise.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: His father was uh really kind of unremarkable.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: He owned a sporting goods store in downtown Boise.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_01: His grandfather had been the first Frank Church to come to Idaho as the chief essayer for the gold rush era in uh the late 19th century in Idaho.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_01: He had been given a minor political patronage job in Idaho by the Democratic Party to be the chief essayer for all the gold miners.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_01: But there was nothing remarkable about his family, and yet from the beginning of his life, he was seen as a special child.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: It was almost like he was born unique in a way that no one around him could understand.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_01: It was nothing about his family that was remarkable, and yet from the beginning, he became the most remarkable child and young man in Boise, and everyone saw that about him from the beginning.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_01: When he was 14, he wrote a letter to the editor of the Boise newspaper, defending Senator William Bora, who was the leading senator from the Mountain West, a Republican who was an isolationist.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_01: And at 14, Bora was uh Church's role model, and he wanted to defend him.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_01: And the letter was so articulate and so well written that the editor of the newspaper couldn't believe that it was written by a kid in middle school.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_01: After it was published, they got letters uh to the editor saying, I can't believe this was written by a kid, a 14-year-old.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_01: And that was just the first moment in which church had a public uh appearance, but it was very much uh part of the way he evolved.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_01: A couple years later, he won the national American Legion Oratory Contest when uh a competition.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: He traveled to South Carolina for the national competition and gave a remarkable speech that uh echoed uh Franklin Roosevelt's for freedom speech.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_01: And it showed how he was evolving from supporting William Borah and isolationism to Franklin Roosevelt within two years, and it showed the evolution of this boy.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: He ended up going to Stanford and then uh joined the army during World War II and became an intelligence officer for the U.S.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_01: Army and China, and um was only 20 years old when he was giving briefings to uh the commanding general of the for the U.S.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: Army and China.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: And then after World War II, he went to law school, went to Harvard, and then transferred to Stanford Law School, then developed cancer after he got he got married and had a son, and then developed cancer and almost died when he was still a very young man.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_01: And that experience convinced him I've got to take risks in my life.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_01: And so he went home to Idaho and ran for Senate and beat uh one of Joe McCarthy's closest allies in the Senate, a guy named Herman Welker.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_01: And he was in the United States Senate when he was only 32 years old.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: He was elected in 1956 as a liberal Democrat.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_01: It's funny to think about Idaho today.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it's so conservative, but back then it was not impossible for Democrats to get elected in Idaho.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Roosevelt carried Idaho, like four straight elections.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_01: And his family, he was his wife was the daughter of an I a Democratic governor of Idaho.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: And so it was a he became part and a leader really of the Democratic Party in Idaho.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_01: And um when he got to Washington in 1957, he was a very conventional liberal Democrat of the 1950s.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_01: And it was Vietnam, as you suggested, that forever altered him.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he's so young that John F.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: Kennedy introduces him as my junior colleague at um, I think a party rally.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: So he becomes close with John F.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: Kennedy uh because they're both so young, they're both Democrats.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: And uh Frank Church begins, like Dad was saying, he begins as a much more conventional Cold War Democrat.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: You know, before 1960, there's a much more centrist politics going on, and Nixon and Kennedy are actually not that different before 1960.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so he has a much more conventional view of the Cold War, that it's communism and this existential challenge, and he's not really asking questions about the security state.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: That quickly changes.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: He he was uh in World War II in China working for the attache to uh Shang Kai-shek, who was the nationalist Chinese leader, and he sees the rampant corruption.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's a much more murky situation when you look at Chang's war, but still, there's a ton of corruption, and people do not like him.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: He floods the Yellow River and kills millions of people to cover in advance for the from the Japanese, for one example.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: That's a war crime that he commits on his own people.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: So people hate Shankai-shek.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: And when he goes to Vietnam in 1962, he does kind of an inspection with a couple of other senators and he says, Oh, I've seen this before, and he doesn't like it.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: And they're actually, you know, forcibly removing Vietnamese peasants to these little strategic hamlets, is what they call them.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so basically, just forcibly removing people in an effort to win a war.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: He saw this with Shang Kai-Shak.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: He knows it's not gonna work, and so after that, he becomes more and more disillusioned with the war.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: But he likes Kennedy, so he kind of pulls punches on Kennedy.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: But when Johnson becomes president, then he becomes more openly critical of it.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_02: But he becomes one of the earliest opponents of the war because the the mainstream of the political uh leadership of the United States certainly was this is uh the Vietnam War is a war to fight, it's a war against communism, uh, it's uh it's a war that uh the United States must lead and demonstrate.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_02: And so for this young senator to uh have this realization something's not right with this picture, we're uh dragging our country into something we don't understand, uh, which is not going to work, it's going to end up in a disaster.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_02: By 1968, early 68, he's already recognizing this.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_02: This is extraordinary uh in the Senate.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: He was actually, even before that, early, he became uh Lyndon Johnson's main nemesis in the United States Senate because he felt betrayed by Johnson.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_01: In 1964, Church had very reluctantly voted for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, even though he had already turned against the war.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_02: And just to let people know what that is, that was a uh a resolution that essentially empowered the president, President Johnson, to send troops to Vietnam on a phony pretext.
• 20:13
  unknown: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_01: And that was in August 1964, in the middle of the presidential campaign between Johnson and Barry Goldwater.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: And in order to distinguish himself from Goldwater, Johnson said, I'm not going to send American troops to Vietnam.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_01: We're not going to have, we're not going to get involved in a land war in Vietnam.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_01: And then as soon as he won re-election or won election, and in then in uh early 1965, he began to send troops to Vietnam and use the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution as his justification.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: And so Frank Church by early 1965 felt totally betrayed by Lyndon Johnson.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_01: And he became very uh an open critic.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: And there were others in W other politicians in Washington who opposed the war, but no one who had Frank Church's credibility or who was considered as important as he was.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_01: And he led the, he really led the opposition throughout the late 60s and into the early 70s.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_02: Your book introduced me to this speech that he gave, which I had not been aware of, called The Torment in the Land.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_02: I printed it out of the congressional record February 21st, 1968.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_02: So anybody that wants to get uh Frank Church's speech, The Torment in the Land, you can uh find it uh directly online in the congressional record.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_01: It's unbelievable.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's it is I think it's his greatest speech ever.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_02: It's unbelievable on the hall of the Senate, explaining in detail and with uh uh uh Frank Churchian uh eloquence how we have walked into a disaster.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: And a very radical speech.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: He became a radical.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_01: Vietnam changed him completely.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_01: He became an uh ideological radical uh who was willing to say that the United States was no better than the Soviet Union, that he compared, he began to compare the U.S.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_01: occupation in Vietnam with the uh Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_01: And he said that Soviet and American foreign policies were the same, that we were becoming a militaristic empire, that we were seeking hegemony around the world, just like the Soviets.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_01: And he would say that both in Washington and in Idaho, which is the remarkable thing about it.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_01: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_02: It's uh it's extraordinary because uh some of us say things like that now about American hegemony, and you write books uh about that, but this was 50 years ago by a U.S.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_02: senator, and we don't hear that on the floor of the Senate by anybody.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_00: You hear imperialism and colonialism, hegemony is definitely the right word for it.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_02: So in 1968, he's making this incredible diagnosis in a basically pretty conservative uh button-down state.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_02: And he has he faces re-election that year, actually.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's the remarkable thing.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_01: His wife, who was very politically astute, told him early on that you've got to stop this uh anti-war rhetoric.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_01: You're gonna get defeated in Idaho.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_01: And he said, basically, I don't care.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna keep saying what I believe.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_01: And in 1967, a bunch of right-wing radicals tried to recall him from the Senate because of his stance on Vietnam, and they were unsuccessful.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_01: And then in 1968, he had to run for re-election in probably the most chaotic and turbulent political year in the 20th century, and easily won re-election because what he realized was the people of Idaho, even though they were conservative, they had turned against the war as well.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_01: And they saw that Johnson uh was their enemy.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_01: And so anyone like Church who was fighting against Johnson on Vietnam was someone that they could support.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so a lot of Republicans crossed to support Church in 1968.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_02: So Church becomes uh this outspoken leader of uh a call for America to cleanse its all and to adopt a new foreign policy.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_02: And from there, take us to the uh subcommittee that he led and what he found about Chile and uh because it's an amazing story.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_02: The next few years, from one stance to the next, he is way, way, way out in front and right and brave.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, amazing.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_01: He began, as I said, Vietnam radicalized him, and he began to realize that Vietnam was just a symptom of American militarism and it was not the cause.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_01: And when everyone else in Washington wanted to go back to the status quo after Vietnam, he was not willing to do that.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_01: He realized that there were deep forces in American society that were making America lose its uh stance as a republic.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_01: And so he he focused really on two major institutions, corporate America and the intelligence community.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_01: And he believed that multinational corporations were subverting American foreign policy around the world, as well as the CIA, that the CIA and the intelligence community were also conducting a secret rogue foreign policy that no one understood.
• 26:04
  unknown: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_02: He was not taking on easy opponents, let's say.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_02: He was taking on the core, the absolute core of the power structure of America.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_02: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: And there was a lot of interplay between those two groups.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_00: So they were very already kind of united against him because they'd already been working, partnering together before.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell And so and those two forces converged in his first major investigation, which was of ITT and uh the CIA working together in Chile to overturn the government of Salvador Allende in the early 1970s.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_00: His corporate bribery uh uh subcommittee is a good example of how he was much more right than he knew.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_00: We have 50 years of hindsight, but even in 1973 and 75, he could see something was there and he wanted to dig for it.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: Like, we didn't include this in the book, but um this is this is kind of a companion piece to your recent um episode about uh covert regime change with Lindsay O'Rourke.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_00: She was talking about bribery of foreign governments and everything.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_00: So he's investigating corporate bribery.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_00: Lockheed is bribing the Japanese government, for instance, to buy its planes.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_00: Lockheed is also, Frank Church didn't know this, Lockheed is the bagman for the CIA to bribe conservative politicians in Japan.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_00: And what do they do?
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_00: They say, I have a bag of money from the CIA.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_00: Would you like to take my bag of money and buy my planes?
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: Because this enables bribery.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_00: So the CIA is enabling corruption.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's kind of the same problem.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, he he started with ITT in Chile and then moved on to Lockheed or in Japan and elsewhere.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_01: That investigation mushroomed far beyond what I think Church ever thought he would find.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_02: And what is amazing is uh, and you describe it so well, uh, both of you, is uh the complete disbelief of the senior CIA officials and others that anyone would dare be asking us these questions.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, who are you to ask us about these things?
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_02: Just come and why would you expect us to tell you the truth?
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_02: You're a senator, we're from the CIA.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_02: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_01: One of the things that was really depressing as a journalist was to see the way in which reporters at that time defended the CIA against Church's investigations.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, especially Richard Helms, who was the CIA director, he lied to Church, to Church's committee.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_01: And and Church went to the Justice Department to have them prosecute him, and they did because he was perjuring himself.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_01: And yet most of the Washington press corps defended Helms.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_01: And you they said, well, he had to lie, of course he had to lie.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_01: He has to defend America.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_01: And it it was just shows you how depressingly uh establishment the press was.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I don't think it's very different today.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_00: Helms in particular, this is a guy who basically lived at the CIA, so he was connected, you know.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so a lot of the people he was going up against were already connected, even if they weren't national security figures.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_02: No, no.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_02: So he uh starts this uh and and uncovers these shocking facts.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_02: Isn't there uh uh there's a Lockheed suicide uh in the middle of this?
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, yes.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_01: Can you one of the Lockheed executives committed suicide?
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_02: As uh these revelations of corruption were being uh uh unfolded.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the uh a Japanese nationalist took a small airplane and crashed it into the home of one of the Japanese uh politicians who was involved with Lockheed after Church's uh revelations.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_01: So it had it had uh repercussions everywhere.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell It's also interesting, uh I mean, not only interesting, but important.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_02: The whole idea that companies should not pay bribes abroad wasn't a commonplace idea.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_02: He basically invented the standard that it cannot be legal to make bribes abroad by our companies.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_02: And so the Corrupt Foreign Practices Act, which is a beacon of international law and has been replicated, uh, of course, violated also, but replicated around the world, is his creation.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, his investigation led to the passage of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_02: One of the things you point out uh in the book also is, you know, the colleagues in the Senate are looking at this and saying, hmm, you Frank, you know, come on, stay in your lane a bit.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_02: Don't take it so seriously.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_02: Uh calm down.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_02: It's okay.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, you could do a little bit of investigation, but don't go too far, Frank.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_01: They, in fact, his multinational subcommittee of the for Center Foreign Relations Committee was disbanded after his uh investigation because no one wanted to allow that kind of investigation again.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_00: And the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in the decades after that also wasn't very rigorously enforced.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_00: There was a lot that slipped through the cracks.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_00: As you know, as is the case, he helps create a lot of regulation, and uh it's important on paper, you know, it's it's got to be enforced, but at least he did his part.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, exactly.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_02: But uh, you know, we're talking about power versus ah, some regulations, don't take them too seriously.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_02: But, you know, so he went from this uh which uh linked Lockheed, the CIA, the brazen line.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_02: That brings us to 50 years ago, that brings us to the church committee.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_02: Tell us how how he got that permission to do this, uh, and uh and then what happened, because it's uh it's truly both amazing and extremely important to understand uh these events and how rare and unusual this kind of self-examination by a government is and how hard it is.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's gotta step back and remember Watergate happened uh beginning in 1972, the break-in, led to Richard Nixon's resignation in uh August 1974.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_01: And then immediately after that, Gerald Ford is president and he pardons Richard Nixon in September 1974, and that leads to a landslide victory for the Democrats in the 1974 midterm elections.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, after the 1974 midterms, the Democrats hold 60 seats in the Senate and something like 295 seats in the House.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_01: It was overwhelming majorities.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_01: And suddenly, Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield from uh Montana, who has has had a long interest for throughout his entire career in trying to do conduct oversight of the CIA, he had been unsuccessful in previous attempts to create a CIA committee, as he called it.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_01: So he began to think about it.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_01: And just when in December 1974, right after that election, Cy Hirsch of the New York Times publishes a blockbuster story on the front page of the New York Times revealing that the CIA has been spying on American citizens throughout the Vietnam War, and that they've had this massive program of domestic spying.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_01: And the story also hints at a number of other abuses.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_02: Let me remind listeners that uh Seymour Hirsch, the great uh investigative reporter who at the time was with the New York Times, is the one who broke the story more recently about uh blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_02: So this is 50 years of uh investigative reporting and inside reporting about the intelligence uh agencies, and he breaks this major story, and you tell an incredible, uh fascinating point about how even back then the New York Times wouldn't really cover it, it covered Seymour Hirsch, but then the beginning findings it would not actually follow through.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the uh the funniest part of that whole story is after his story ran and it led to calls for congressional investigations of the CIA, uh the editors of the New York Times met with President Ford at the White House a couple weeks later in January 1975.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the editors said, What else should we be looking for?
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_01: And Ford said, I'm not gonna, you know, there are secrets, there are things that should stay secret.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_01: And uh they say, like what?
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_01: And he said, Well, like assassinations, but that's off the record.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_01: And all the New York Times editors go back to their office and say, Well, I guess we can't print that because he said it's off the record.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_01: And one of them one of them doesn't agree with that, and he goes to Cy Hirsch, who was not in the meeting, and tells him what happened.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_01: And so he leaks it to CBS News because he knows he can't get it published in the New York Times.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_01: And CBS breaks the story saying that the CIA has been conducting assassinations against foreign leaders around the world.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_01: And that becomes the first thing that Frank Church investigates once the church committee is created in January 1975.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he's trying to get attention from the American people who are a little bit burnt out from government scandal by 1975.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_00: So they focus on five assassinations, and uh yeah, that becomes the main focus of the church committee.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_00: They touch on all sorts of things.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there's something for everyone.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: The church committee reports are online.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_00: You can go check them out.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_00: There's thousands of pages of all sorts of weird stuff.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_00: We know we can only touch on a little bit of it today, but just it's got something for everyone.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_00: This is a book which has all its ups and downs, 24 years of service in the Senate, and a lot of weird stuff.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_00: So the church committee alone is pretty epic.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_02: The number of shocking revelations.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_02: It is stunning.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_02: And the casualness of these assassinations, uh, the one that haunts, I mean, there are many, but the one that haunts me as uh so disgusting and brazen and consequential, among others, is uh Patrice Lumumba.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and and what he learns about how the United States got into the business of assassinating a young, charismatic, intelligent leader of uh a newly independent African country on almost a casual White House meeting.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_01: Tom did a lot of work on Lumumba.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe you could talk about that, Tom.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's really crazy because Frank Church was actually in Congo in December, uh, just a couple of months after he was overthrown by a CIA coup, and a couple of months before he was killed, with the tacit awareness of the CIA.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_00: CIA kept trying to kill him, and in the end, they just made it easier for Joseph Mabutu to kill him.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_00: Joseph Mabutu was an officer and friend of Lumumba, actually, who went to the only CIA agent in Congo, Larry Devlin, says, Hey, I want some money to bribe officers and I'll stage a coup and I'll do what you want.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_00: And they do, and he becomes the CIA's man in Africa and a kleptomaniac dictator for the next few decades.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_00: But eventually they help him kill him because they can't do it themselves.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_00: There's kind of a bumbling effort by the CIA in the early years to kill people.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_00: They're not very good at it, but they try.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_00: And um, so Frank Church in December is in 1970.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_02: December of 1960, this is.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_00: 1960, yes.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_00: This is 15 years before.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_00: So by the time he finds out in 1975, he says, Oh, I remember that guy.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_00: I was there.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_00: So it's kind of personal for him.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_00: And uh the State Department is kind of lying to him because he's on a tour of Africa.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_00: He goes to a bunch of African nations with Teddy Kennedy for part of it, and it's kind of like John F.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_00: Kennedy is coming into office.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_00: He wants to know like a dozen countries become independent in Africa in 1960.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_00: So Lumumba is in good company that year.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_00: So he's on a fact-finding mission, and the State Department is just like, oh, nothing to see here, everything's fine.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_00: But the State Department helped capture Patrice Lumumba and hand him over to Mabutu.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_00: And then they find out that he's going to be killed at the hands of Mabutu and the Belgians who had ruled Congo and had no intention of giving up the vast, vast mining interests.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, they f the CIA and the State Department find out about it and they don't tell anyone.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_00: They don't even tell Kennedy.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_00: So they just kind of decide to keep it secret.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, so they're definitely complicit in the murder of Lumumba.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_02: If I'm not mistaken, uh, the kind of tacit order or order to take him out, if I understand correctly, was uh at an almost casual remark of Eisenhower in the White House.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you know, get rid of him, basically.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, Eisenhower really felt strongly about uh Lumumba.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_01: And uh this became one of the running uh questions and running issues throughout the church committee's investigation.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_01: What level of presidential authority had been given in each of the assassination attempts that the uh CIA was involved in and which the church committee was investigating?
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_01: There was the Lamumba case, there was Fidel Castro, there was Diem in Vietnam, uh Renee Schneider in um Chelle and others.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_01: And um that was the big question.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_01: How much was the CIA doing this as a rogue operation versus under orders from presidents?
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_01: And that's where Church came down believing largely that the CIA was doing this on its own.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_01: But the evidence that his committee gathered really showed shows that the presidents were usually involved in some way.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_00: They knew the Lumumba example is very good at that.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_00: It shows how the State Department and you know the president and everyone's involved.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_00: They don't like Lumumba.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_00: They don't think he's they didn't like neutral countries.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_00: This is a lack of imagination in the 1950s.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_00: They thought if you're neutral, you're not on our side, you're with us or against us.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_00: So Lumumba asked the United States for help in his civil war before he went to the Soviets.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_00: He eventually goes to the Soviets and asks for help.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_00: He asked us first.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_00: Eisenhower said no.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_00: Remember that.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_00: So they just wanted to, you know, have somebody on the inside there.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_00: So that's a good example of how the whole government is working together, and it's not a rogue elephant situation, like Frank Church says.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_00: The CIA is working as part of the combined government.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_02: Tom, I would say uh only one footnote it's not just then that the U.S.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_02: doesn't like uh uh neutral governments until today.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_02: The slogan, uh, which actually uh we heard from George Bush Jr., you're either with us or you're against us.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_02: Means uh the U.S.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_02: often doesn't give much cover or respect for a country that says we just want to stay out of it.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and uh Lumumba, as you say, asked for some transport.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_02: The U.S.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_02: declined.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_02: The Soviets uh said yes, Eisenhower said, well, it must be a commie.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_02: Uh you know, and it was uh that shows the kind of uh reckless mentality uh that uh got us into so many troubles.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_02: It's amazing.
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_02: So what since uh time is short, and uh of course people need to read uh The Last Honest Man to get the richness of it, but give us the picture of what happens uh with the committee, what they learn.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_02: I know it's in a few minutes you can't summarize this vast, vast story, but it's the CIA, it's the FBI.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_02: What's the big picture 50 years ago?
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_01: There were three main investigations or landmark investigations that I would say that they are remembered for or should be remembered for.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_01: One is the investigation of the CIA's assassination attempts against foreign leaders.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_01: Another was the FBI's harassment and abuse of Martin Martin Luther King Jr.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_01: And the third was they conducted the first ever investigation of the National Security Agency, which at that time no one most Americans didn't even know existed.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yep, that's when I first learned about it.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_01: The legacy of the committee was that, as I said earlier, it it really forced change and reforms, a whole series of reforms, legislative and executive orders and administrative actions, that in aggregate brought the intelligence community under the rule of law in some fashion for the very first time.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, we can argue today about whether they need more regulation and tighter controls.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_01: But at the time there was nothing.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_01: There was no oversight.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_01: The church committee led to the creation of the Senate Intelligence Committee Committee and the House Intelligence Committee.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_01: So the congressional oversight of the intelligence committees, of the intelligence community exists today because of the church committee.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think its legacy is is historic, and it's uh, you know, I think it needs to be remembered uh for the incredible role in in modern American history.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_02: I I think uh before we turn to the present, uh very briefly.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_02: It's so sad for me and also notable and uh perhaps uh just a measure of how things work.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_02: This giant of uh a senator leads so bravely on Vietnam ahead of his time, on uh the corruption of uh foreign business ahead of his time, on uncovering decades of horrible abuses of the uh CIA and the FBI.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_02: These great triumphs, which I think make him perhaps the greatest uh senator in modern times in foreign policy, or maybe second uh to J.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_02: William Fulbright or equivalent to Fulbright, but it's the two of them as the giants, he loses re-election.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, you have this giant figure, and suddenly he loses to the Idaho voters.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_02: Can you just tell us quickly about that?
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's very, very close.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, in 1980, he ran for president in 1976 uh against Carter and lost.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_01: Carter considered him for his running mate, but decided instead for to choose a different church committee member and Walter Mondale.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_01: Uh but then uh Church became chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the late 1970s.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_01: He was in charge of pushing for the Panama Canal Treaty ratification by the Senate, which was very controversial in among conservatives and was widely hated in Idaho because Idaho was slowly becoming much more conservative than it had been before.
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_01: And he had the uh misfortune of having to run for re-election in 1980, the same year that Jimmy Carter was running against Ronald Reagan.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_01: And Reagan was extremely popular in Idaho, and uh Carter was very unpopular.
• 46:03
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think the main reason that Church lost was because Carter was such a drag on the ticket for him, and he still only lost by 4,000 votes.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_01: But he lost to a guy who was a very forgettable Republican Reaganite, whom we interviewed.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, did you?
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_00: And uh he had told us something interesting, uh, didn't he, Dad?
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_00: He told us that James Angleton, the ousted, drunken, paranoid counterintelligence chief of the CIA, who was also from Idaho, was working to undermine Frank Church in that election.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_00: So he was getting the CIA vote.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my god.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I didn't know that.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_01: Sims uh met repeatedly with Angleton during that time.
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_02: And then Church uh dies uh just a few years later of cancer, tragically.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_01: Uh at uh he was only 59, I think, when he died.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my god.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_02: We lost a a true uh a true leader, the last honest man, as you powerfully call him.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_02: Let me bring us up to the present next year.
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_02: If I've got my arithmetic right, is the 50th anniversary of the church committee.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_02: Uh my own sense, and and uh Jim, you've uh written uh books about this.
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_02: I'm no fan of uh the CIA uh to this day.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe it's uh partly under control, but uh my feeling is we need another church committee.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_02: I'd just like to close with uh both of your thoughts about that.
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, Tom, what do you think?
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_00: I think we do need another church committee, and I think that there's a growing awareness that the church committee benefited the CIA.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_00: There have been former CIA officers and CIA chiefs who've said that the church committee benefited the CIA.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_00: House and South Intelligence Committees filter out the worst crazy, you know, like the 1950s.
• 47:53
  SPEAKER_00: Anything you hear that the CIA did that was crazy and bad, the worst of it is in the 1950s.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_00: And that's partly because of Frank Church, because he kind of filters out the worst impulses of gee, I wonder if we did this, you know, because that's a frequent trend of the CIA.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_00: And they now they'll say, nah, bro, we get caught.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, it's kind of just someone just paying attention will do good, even if you don't have the power to stop them.
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's a very powerful point.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_02: The sane people would say we need exposure, and if you don't have it and it builds up for decades, God, what can happen?
• 48:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 48:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I think we do need a new church committee.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_01: I think, I think the systemic problem is that while there are intelligence oversight committees in Congress, they are deeply embedded now with the intelligence community and with the defense contracting industries.
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's very tempting for staffers or for members of those committees to look forward to jobs at, you know, some major defense contractor uh or intelligence contractor or homeland security contractor.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_01: And so they the last thing they want to do is uh get a reputation for rocking the boat.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_01: And as a result, the intelligence committees rarely do anything that is really going to upset the intelligence community.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_00: I think the CIA should focus on spying.
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we also mentioned brief, brief shout-out to the House Pike Committee.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_00: We write about that the House uh counterpart to the church committee focused on the money, and what do we get for all of this money we gave you, which was a lot.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_00: And they determined that the CIA wasn't actually very good at spying and they wasted too much of their time and money on covert action.
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, I want the CIA is a federal agency.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a voter, I want them to succeed, but they should focus on spying.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_02: If I could put it this way, they should focus on intelligence.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_02: In other words, understanding the world.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_01: The the irony is that was their original charter was to gather together in one place all the intelligence reporting and then analyze it.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_01: But what happened, I think, mainly because of Dwight Eisenhower and his administration, it became focused much more on covert action and destabilizing other countries during the Cold War.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_01: And that legacy has never gone away.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I think they should get out of the business of covert action and focus just on intelligence.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_01: And that would be a revolutionary change for uh the CIA.
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_02: Here, here, I think that this is a uh a very good message for uh what I hope will be a 50th anniversary uh uh new committee to look at this and uh an intelligence agency that focuses on being intelligent uh and on understanding, uh, not one uh that focuses on destabilization.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_02: That would be really the most phenomenal and deepest legacy.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_02: Let me thank both of you for this wonderful book.
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_02: It's so uh interesting, important, and timely.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_02: I hope it will serve uh as uh a call for a new 50th anniversary church committee in its way.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_02: Let me also close, uh Jim, you are with the Intercept.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_02: I just want to add a word of praise for the Intercept.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's an amazing institution at a time when so much of our mainstream media refuse to look.
• 51:29
  SPEAKER_02: We are learning one thing after another from the Intercept of tremendous importance.
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_02: So thanks to you, and please thank your colleagues for the great work that they do.
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks.
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_02: And uh I want to thank both Jim and Tom Risen for their book, for being with us today on Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_02: I'm sure you have enjoyed this discussion as much as I have, and please uh be sure to read The Last Honest Man.
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_02: It's a very important book and a wonderful read.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you so much to both of you for being with us.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for having us.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_02: This is fun.
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you for joining in the conversation.
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_02: Please subscribe, rate, and write a review on whatever platform you listen for your podcast.