The National Security Agency’s capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A. could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.


In 1975 Senator Church of Idaho was tasked leading a bipartisan committee to look into the activities of the intelligence community. While it did not give a complete view of the misdeeds of those who are supposed to be protecting our country, so much was revealed that the remedies discussed were far from sufficient.

The committee found that the FBI and CIA were had not been honest with the Warren Commission. However, thanks to the work of George Joannides their involvement in the event was not revealed.

As a result of their work, they produced the statement that “there is no inherent constitutional authority for the President or any intelligence agency to violate the law”, something that Jame Angleton and Allen Dulles would take issue with.

Among their other discoveries of abuse of power by these government agencies were the following projects:

MKULTRA – involved the dosing with LSD and other torture activities on US citizens and others determined to be “expendable” in search of mind control processes.

Cointelpro – surveillance and infiltration of American political and civil-rights organizations considered to be subversive and anti-government.

Family Jewels – a program to covertly assassinate foreign leaders. Attempted assassinations include Fidel Castro of Cuba, President Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, and Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Shamrock – NSA received information from major telecommunications companies about traffic within the US.

Mockingbird – recruiting US journalists to spread government approved propaganda.

Minaret – monitoring communications of Sen Church and others on the committee as well as oversight of the intelligence community.

HTLingual – monitoring by CIA of mail – in the name of foreign security of US citizens such Martin Luther King Jr

MKNaomi – development and accumulation of biological weapons without the knowledge and over site of congress.

The Last Honest Man: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys―and One Senator's Fight to Save Democracy
by James Risen, Thomas Risen

For decades now, America’s national security state has grown ever bigger, ever more secretive and powerful, and ever more abusive. Only once did someone manage to put a stop to any of it.

Senator Frank Church of Idaho was an unlikely hero. He led congressional opposition to the Vietnam War and had become a scathing, radical critic of what he saw as American imperialism around the world. But he was still politically ambitious, privately yearning for acceptance from the foreign policy establishment that he hated and eager to run for president. Despite his flaws, Church would show historic strength in his greatest moment, when in the wake of Watergate he was suddenly tasked with investigating abuses of power in the intelligence community. The dark truths that Church exposed—from assassination plots by the CIA, to links between the Kennedy dynasty and the mafia, to the surveillance of civil rights activists by the NSA and FBI—would shake the nation to its core, and forever change the way that Americans thought about not only their government but also their ability to hold it accountable.

Father and Son: A Personal Biography of Senator Frank Church of Idaho
by F. Forrester Church

This profile of Senator Frank Church of Idaho is also a revealing autobiography of his son, one of America's leading clergymen and depicts their struggles of family and career