![]() ![]() And that was the extent of the congressional oversight. There were a handful of kind of old barons in the House and the Senate who ran the Armed Services Committees, who the CIA director would occasionally go have drinks with and whisper a couple secrets. intelligence community prior to the Church Committee. There was no - the fascinating thing about the Church Committee is that there was no congressional oversight of the U.S. I wonder, was that not true before Church and his committee did its thing? You know.ĭAVIES: When you do this work on reporting on the intelligence services and national security, I would imagine that congressional sources are important, both members and staff, in getting information to you and also, you know, just generally putting information in the ecosphere which you can, at some point, access. Because he was a deputy chief of staff back in the '70s for the - for President Gerald Ford when this was going on. And it's also interesting that Dick Cheney himself figures into this.ĭAVIES. And ever since that time, I was thinking - I had in the back of my mind that I would like to learn more about Frank Church and the Church Committee and to eventually write a book about it.ĭAVIES: Yeah. But Dick Cheney really reintroduced Frank Church and the Church Committee to America and to me, frankly. And so at that point, I didn't really know very much about Frank Church. And he blamed the Church Committee, which had operated in the 1970s, for the problems after 9/11 that the government had. government to target and dismantle terrorist organizations.Īnd the - Dick Cheney, who was then the vice president and who really took the lead after 9/11 in the Bush administration's war on terror, constantly talked about how the problem was all of these old rules that dated back to the Church Committee. And there - they claimed that there were old rules that limited the ability of the U.S. But after 9/11, if you remember, the Bush administration wanted to roll back a lot of the regulations that governed the CIA and the FBI in the name of counterterrorism. ![]() I actually started covering the CIA before 9/11. That's exactly why I wrote this book - was - I was covering the CIA at the time of 9/11 and after 9/11. I'm just wondering, as you were doing all of this reporting over the past couple of decades, were you aware of Frank Church and his impact on public knowledge and government oversight of the intelligence forces? You've broken huge stories, and you were, for years, targeted by the government and threatened with jail unless you would answer their questions about your sources. His new book is "The Last Honest Man: The CIA, The FBI, The Mafia, And The Kennedys - And One Senator's Fight To Save Democracy." James Risen, welcome back to FRESH AIR.ĭAVIES: You have quite a history of reporting on national security and intelligence issues. He's the author of four previous books and is currently the senior national security correspondent for The Intercept. He shared another Pulitzer in 2002 for the paper's coverage of the September 11 attacks and terrorism. James Risen earned the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 2006 for his stories at The New York Times about the National Security Agency's domestic spying program. Risen writes that, more than anyone else in American history, Frank Church is responsible for bringing the CIA, the FBI and the rest of the government's intelligence apparatus under the rule of law. Our guest today, veteran journalist James Risen, tells the story of Frank Church, a senator from Idaho who, in the mid-1970s, held hearings which exposed shocking crimes and cover-ups by the intelligence agencies, including assassination attempts on foreign leaders, the surveillance and harassment of Martin Luther King and other activists and CIA mind control experiments with LSD. And while much of what they do is classified, it's also understood that they're ultimately accountable to Congress and the American people for what they spend and what they do. We live in a world today where it's understood that the United States has a powerful array of intelligence agencies, including the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency and others. ![]()
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