The CIA came apart in public in 1975. A chain of events — Watergate, the publication of the "Family Jewels" (CIA's internal record of its worst abuses), and journalist Seymour Hersh's New York Times exposé on domestic surveillance — forced the first comprehensive congressional investigation of the intelligence community.
Senator Frank Church of Idaho chaired the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. What it found shocked the nation: assassination plots against foreign leaders (Castro, Lumumba, Trujillo, Diem, Allende), MKUltra's drug experiments, mass mail opening, Operation CHAOS (domestic surveillance of anti-war activists), and NSA programs collecting millions of telegrams.
Church called the CIA "a rogue elephant rampaging out of control." The metaphor stuck, though insiders disputed it — the evidence suggested the President had authorized most of what the CIA did, which was perhaps worse.
At least 8 foreign leaders targeted for assassination: Castro (8 confirmed plots), Lumumba (Congo), Diem (Vietnam), Trujillo (Dominican Republic), Allende (Chile), Schneider (Chile, killed), Sukarno (Indonesia), Nkrumah (Ghana).
FBI's COINTELPRO program infiltrated and disrupted civil rights groups, anti-war organizations, and Black Power movements. CIA's Operation CHAOS compiled files on 7,200 American citizens — in violation of the CIA's charter, which forbids domestic operations.
CIA opened and photographed approximately 215,000 pieces of domestic first-class mail between 1953 and 1973 — illegal under US law. Recipients included senators, professors, journalists, and ordinary citizens with foreign correspondence.
In the aftermath of the Church Committee, President Gerald Ford needed to stabilize the CIA — restore morale, rebuild congressional relations, and show that the Agency was under control. He chose George Herbert Walker Bush, then the US Ambassador to China and former Republican National Committee chairman, as the 11th Director of Central Intelligence.
Bush had no intelligence background. Democrats suspected he was positioned for the 1980 presidential race and opposed the appointment (he ran in 1980 and won the Vice Presidency). In the event, Bush served only 357 days — but proved an effective manager who rebuilt relationships between the CIA and Congress after the Church Committee trauma.
Bush was present when President Ford received the "Team B" assessment — a politically charged outside review of CIA Soviet estimates that concluded the CIA had been systematically underestimating Soviet military power. Team B's alarmist conclusions, later shown to be largely wrong, became the intellectual foundation for the Reagan defense buildup.
When Jimmy Carter became President in 1977, Bush offered to stay on — unusual for a political appointee. Carter appointed his own man. Years later, as Vice President and then President, Bush's knowledge of CIA operations — including Iran-Contra — would create permanent questions about what he knew and when.
To incoming Director ███████:
Operations requiring immediate attention:
— Angola: ████████████████████████████
— Chile: ████████████████ Pinochet ████████
— Iran: ████████████████████████████████████
— ████ ████████████████████████████████
Recommend no congressional briefings on ██████████ until further review.
The Iran-Contra affair was arguably the most constitutionally dangerous episode in CIA history. Congress had explicitly prohibited aid to the Nicaraguan Contra rebels via the Boland Amendment. The Reagan administration found a workaround: sell weapons to Iran (then holding US hostages), use the profits to fund the Contras, run the entire operation through a back-channel at the National Security Council staffed by a Marine lieutenant colonel named Oliver North.
CIA Director William Casey was central to the scheme. CIA assets helped facilitate the weapons transfers. The CIA's Latin America division provided logistical support. When the operation was exposed in November 1986 — via a Lebanese newspaper — it revealed an NSC staff running covert operations outside all legal frameworks, without congressional notification, with CIA involvement that raised questions about who the CIA actually served.
Casey died of a brain tumor in May 1987, before he could testify. North shredded documents. Vice President Bush's diary from the period was withheld from prosecutors. Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh concluded there had been a "systematic" cover-up. President George H.W. Bush pardoned the convicted Iran-Contra figures on Christmas Eve 1992, days before they were to testify in further proceedings.
