On Jan. 10, the Republican-led House approved the creation of a new select subcommittee to investigate whether the federal government, particularly its national security bureaucracy, has improperly targeted conservatives in recent years.
Advocates of the new subcommittee compared it to the Church Committee, a select committee led by Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) that investigated the U.S. intelligence community in 1975 and 1976 and remains a model for a successful congressional inquiry into a complex, divisive subject matter. Yet the Church Committee and the just-authorized House subcommittee have only superficial similarities, indicating that this House investigation may be fatally flawed — and could lead to blowback for Republicans.
In 1947, at the dawn of the Cold War, Congress passed the National Security Act, which among other things established the Central Intelligence Agency. But in a crucial oversight, neither the House nor the Senate formed a committee to oversee the new intelligence community. Instead, intelligence officials informally and infrequently met with a handful of sympathetic Senate Armed Services Committee members.
This pattern continued until the early 1970s, when events exposed the possibility of widespread abuses by the intelligence community and called U.S. foreign policy into question more broadly. In 1970, an Army intelligence officer, Christopher Pyle, revealed improper surveillance of domestic political protests. About the same time, word broke of the Phoenix Program, a CIA effort targeting political and military figures in South Vietnam for assassination. In 1973, concerns about possible CIA involvement in the coup that toppled Chilean President Augusto Pinochet prompted sharp criticism from liberals such as Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.).
These developments drove Congress to try to rein in the intelligence community. Pyle’s revelations led to Senate hearings. Congress also tried to use its spending power to gain control. A 1974 law called the Hughes-Ryan Amendment required that six committees (three in the House, three in the Senate, including the Foreign Relations Committee) be informed whenever the CIA undertook a significant covert operation.
The following year, using this new authority, a Foreign Relations Committee member, Sen. Dick Clark (D-Iowa), learned of the CIA’s covert involvement in the Angolan civil war. Clark then successfully shepherded an amendment through Congress to terminate funding for the operation — the first time that Congress had cut off funding for an overseas security operation still in progress in almost 50 years.
Even so, those actions didn’t seem sufficient as revelations kept coming. In late 1974, a New York Times exposé revealed a secret CIA study, colloquially known as the “family jewels,” discussing a variety of the agency’s most problematic initiatives.
That prompted the Senate to vote overwhelmingly in January 1975 to initiate an investigation of U.S. intelligence activities. (Four conservative Southerners — Republicans Jesse Helms, William Scott and Strom Thurmond, and Democrat Herman Talmadge — voted no.) Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-Mont.), in cooperation with his GOP counterpart, Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, worked to select a committee reflecting the range of Senate opinion on the issue.
Mansfield named Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) — a former military intelligence officer and longtime member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — as chair. Church had long been a skeptic about the Vietnam War. Earlier in the decade, he had led the Senate opposition to U.S. intervention in Cambodia, while also championing reducing U.S. military aid to right-wing regimes abroad. Church was a figure of considerable national standing who was comfortably reelected in his largely Republican state.
The Church Committee’s 11 members included senators from all ideological factions. The six Democrats included two moderate first-termers (Dee Huddleston of Kentucky and Robert Morgan of North Carolina) and the veteran, widely respected Michigan liberal Philip Hart. The committee’s vice chairman, John Tower (R-Tex.), led a minority contingent that ranged from Arizona hard-liner Barry Goldwater to Maryland liberal Charles Mathias.
Over a 16-month period, the committee held more than 100 meetings. Many examined classified material and thus remained behind closed doors, but during September and October 1975 the committee went public, including unprecedented public questioning of former CIA director William Colby. The resulting multivolume report reached a “fundamental conclusion … that intelligence activities have undermined the constitutional rights of citizens and that they have done so primarily because checks and balances designed by the framers of the Constitution to assure accountability have not been applied.”
This record wasn’t without dispute. It sometimes seemed unclear whether the committee primarily worried about rogue actions by the intelligence community or the CIA faithfully executing dubious presidential policies. Tower filed a supplementary report implying that Church’s vision for aggressive oversight could harm national security by discouraging necessary future covert actions. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was publicly skeptical about the committee’s work and privately fretted that “these investigations could be as damaging to the intelligence community as [Joe] McCarthy was to the Foreign Service.”
Despite such doubts, the committee’s work brought about lasting institutional change, including the creation of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, improving oversight of the intelligence community.
The House also probed the intelligence community in the 1970s, with the investigation chaired by Long Island Democrat Otis Pike. But unlike the Church Committee, the Pike investigation collapsed in ideological acrimony, partisanship and bitter relations with the Ford administration. The Pike Committee’s report was never officially published and saw the light of day only through a leak to the Village Voice.
This spotlighted the differences between the chambers when it came to providing such oversight: The Senate had long been the dominant branch on foreign policy and national security matters, and the House’s excessive partisanship and larger membership made it even harder for the lower chamber to investigate politically explosive intelligence matters with nuance.
Both the work of the Church Committee and the collapse of the Pike Committee spotlight the flaws in the House GOP’s investigative plans for 2023. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the expected subcommittee chair, bears little resemblance to the well-respected Church. Even Church’s critics conceded that he was deeply knowledgeable about international matters. By contrast, Jordan is primarily known as a partisan warrior. And unlike the overwhelmingly bipartisan vote that created the Church Committee, the House empaneled the Jordan subcommittee on a strictly party-line vote, with the new panel under the umbrella of perhaps the most partisan committee in an exceptionally partisan Congress, the House Judiciary Committee.
Another major difference: The Senate had laid the groundwork for the Church Committee through long-standing efforts to address concerns about the activities of the intelligence community. House Republicans have done nothing of the sort.
Consider, for instance, perhaps the most troubling incident involving “weaponization” of the government in recent years — an FBI lawyer who falsified evidence to obtain a surveillance warrant against 2016 Donald Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
The Page incident exposed a potentially serious abuse of power. But it’s not as if Page was the first person whose civil liberties were violated by the surveillance state, and until the victim was a Trump operative, most House Republicans seemed content with post-9/11 national security laws — a sharp contrast with the record of Senate critics of the intelligence community in the years before the Church Committee inquiry.
The Church Committee’s work also exposes a potential danger for Republicans who serve on Jordan’s subcommittee. In 1980, Church narrowly lost his Senate seat, partly because of a backlash against his foreign policy record. Two years before, Clark similarly went down to defeat. The Democrat’s efforts to check CIA involvement in Angola almost certainly hampered his reelection bid, as outside anti-Clark spending — ranging from the newly created NCPAC, a conservative political action committee, to (covertly) the South African government — poured into Iowa.
Church and Clark discovered that however important providing oversight is in theory, in practice, aggressive congressional investigations of the intelligence community require consistent levels of public support. And that support can be fickle, lest congressional activism be seen by the public as threatening legitimate security concerns. In this case, such risk could extend to all House Republicans, especially if Americans perceive their investigation as partisan.