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Intelligence Activities: Senate Resolution 21: Hearings before the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities of the United States Senate Ninety-fourth Congress first session: Volume 1 Unauthorized.

1976 · 67803 — Washington DC: U.S. Government Printing Office 1976. Presumed first edition/first printing. Wraps. Good. Letter J written in ink on front cover. Cover soiled and scuffed. VOLUME 1 ONLY. iv 245 pages. 24 cm. Title continues: "Storage of Toxic Agents September 16 17 and 18 1975." From a United States Senate website: "In 1973 CIA Director James Schlesinger told Senate Armed Services Chairman John Stennis that he wished to brief him on a major upcoming operation. No no my boy responded Senator Stennis. Don t tell me. Just go ahead and do it but I don t want to know. Similarly when Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman J.W. Fulbright was told of the CIA subversion of the Allende government in Chile he responded I don t approve of intervention in other people s elections but it has been a long-continued practice. Late in 1974 investigative reporter Seymour Hersh revealed that the CIA was not only destabilizing foreign governments but was also conducting illegal intelligence operations against thousands of American citizens. On January 27 1975 an aroused Senate voted overwhelmingly to establish a special 11-member investigating body along the lines of the recently concluded Watergate Committee. Under the chairmanship of Idaho Senator Frank Church with Texas Senator John Tower as vice-chairman the select committee was given nine months and 150 staffers to complete its work. The so-called Church Committee ran into immediate resistance from the Ford administration concerned about exposing American intelligence operations and suspicious of Church s budding presidential ambitions. The committee interviewed 800 individuals and conducted 250 executive and 21 public hearings. At the first televised hearing staged in the Senate Caucus Room Chairman Church dramatically displayed a CIA poison dart gun to highlight the committee s discovery that the CIA directly violated a presidential order by maintaining stocks of shellfish toxin sufficient to kill thousands. Lacking focus and necessarily conducting much of its work behind closed doors the panel soon lost any hope of becoming a second Watergate Committee. Critics from Bing Crosby to Paul Harvey accused it of treasonous activity. The December 1975 assassination of a CIA station chief in Greece intensified the public backlash against its mission. The panel issued its two-foot-thick final report in May 1976 without the support of influential Republican members John Tower and Barry Goldwater. Despite its shortcomings the inquiry demonstrated the need for perpetual surveillance of the intelligence community and resulted in the creation of the permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Historian Henry Steele Commager assessed the Committee s legacy. Referring to executive branch officials who seemed to consider themselves above the law he said It is this indifference to constitutional restraints that is perhaps the most threatening of all the evidence that emerges from the findings of the Church Committee. " From Wikipedia: "The Church Committee was the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities a U.S. Senate committee chaired by Senator Frank Church D-ID in 1975. A precursor to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence the committee investigated intelligence gathering for illegality by the Central Intelligence Agency CIA National Security Agency NSA and Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI after certain activities had been revealed by the Watergate affair. By the early years of the 1970s the unpopularity of the Vietnam War and the unfolding Watergate scandal brought the era of minimal oversight to an abrupt halt. The United States Congress was determined to rein in the Nixon administration and to ascertain the extent to which the nation's intelligence agencies had been involved in questionable if not outright illegal activities. A series of troubling revelations started to appear in the press concerning intelligence activities. First came the revelations of Christopher Pyle in January 1970 of the U.S. Army's spying on the civilian population and Sam Ervin's Senate. U.S. Government Printing Office paperback