ABSTRACT
On January 27, 1975, the U.S. Senate created the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities.1 Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat, chaired it. Some 25 years later, following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, a number of critics asserted that Church and his committee had left the United States naked before its enemies. “The CIA was gutted by people on the historical left,” the popular novelist Tom Clancy charged. “As an indirect result of that, we have lost 5000 citizens.”2 The noted historian John Lewis Gaddis apparently agreed, contending that congressional efforts in the 1970s to harness U.S. intelligence capacities had made the nation virtually “its own worst enemy.”3
