Church Committee

Not to be confused with the 2005 Church Report about US detention operations.

The Church Committee (formally the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities) was a US Senate select committee in 1975 that investigated abuses by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Chaired by Idaho senator Frank Church (D-ID), the committee was part of a series of investigations into intelligence abuses in 1975, dubbed the "Year of Intelligence", including its House counterpart, the Pike Committee, and the presidential Rockefeller Commission. The committee's efforts led to the establishment of the permanent US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Revelations of the committee include Operation MKULTRA, which involved the drugging of US citizens as part of human experimentation on mind control; COINTELPRO, which involved the surveillance and infiltration of American political and civil-rights organizations; Family Jewels, a set of reports detailing potentially illegal, inappropriate and otherwise sensitive activities conducted by the CIA; and Operation Mockingbird, an alleged campaign during the early years of the Cold War designed to manipulate news media by recruiting journalists as assets in a propaganda campaign.

It also unearthed Project SHAMROCK, a program in which the major telecommunications companies shared their traffic with the NSA, and officially confirmed the existence of this signals intelligence agency to the public for the first time.

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