In 1974, the CIA fired its legendary spymaster for spying on 10,000 Americans
The dismissal led to the Church Committee, whose 1976 report documented assassination plots, news infiltration, and MK Ultra.
Who Killed JFK? · The Wilderness of MirrorsThe fall of 1974 brought another quiet downfall in Washington, not long after Nixon had stepped down over Watergate.
William Colby, then head of the CIA, quietly dismissed James Jesus Angleton, the agency's spymaster and head of counterintelligence.
Colby had tried to push him out for years, but Angleton's status as an early architect of the agency and his towering internal reputation made that hard.
A front page story in The New York Times reporting that his operation had tracked ten thousand U.S. citizens tied to protest against the war and other dissident causes made the firing a national story.
That disclosure landed when many reporters wanted to follow Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post reporters who had broken the Watergate story, and journalists crowded around the question of why Angleton had been fired and what else the agency had been hiding.
The result was a special investigative panel in the Senate led by Idaho Senator Frank Church. Never before had the agency faced that kind of public scrutiny, with its hidden misdeeds set to come into the open rather than stay classified.
That panel led by Church issued its concluding findings in the spring of 1976. It catalogued widespread hidden misconduct by the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, and the IRS. Those agencies, the report said, had been involved in schemes to kill foreign leaders, in efforts to plant people inside news operations, and in work under MK Ultra, a CIA program testing drugs and hypnosis to control behavior, including on unwitting people.
Questions people ask
Who was Senator Frank Church?
Frank Church was a Democratic senator from Idaho who chaired the special Senate panel created in 1975 to investigate intelligence abuses. His hearings brought CIA assassination plots and domestic spying into public view, and made him a nationally known voice for reform.
What changed after the Church Committee?
The hearings helped lead to standing Senate and House intelligence committees and to new limits on domestic surveillance. They also pushed Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter to ban political assassination by executive order, a prohibition that remains in place.
Who was William Colby?
William Colby served as director of the CIA from 1973 to 1976 and cooperated with congressional investigators, which angered many inside the agency. President Gerald Ford replaced him after the Church inquiry, and Colby left government and later worked as a lawyer and consultant.