Even French dissidents approached the CIA to have President Charles deGaulle liquidated in 1965.
Kennedy had inherited from the Eisenhower administration the Lumumba kill, while he himself had concentrated his efforts on bumping off Cuba's leader Fidel Castro -- employing the Mafia, who had gambling operations they'd lost in Castro's ascent, to get the job done. The revelation was huge. As Risen writes,
[The] CIA's alliance with the Mafia to kill Castro has since become the most infamous episode in the Agency's history. The CIA's decision in the early 1960s to work with the mob to murder the leader of a foreign country revealed the degree to which CIA officials believed there were no rules they had to follow, and no limits on what they could do or who they could do it with. They believed they could get away with anything"Operating in total secrecy and with no independent supervision, the CIA had drifted so far from its 1947 charter that joining forces with the mob no longer seemed unreasonable.
This shock to the system was followed up by an understanding that maybe the CIA also worked in the interests of American corporations overseas, rather than in fealty to the US Constitution and/or even the much-ballyhooed panacea rationale -- national security interests. Church found the most notable example of this alliance with corporates in the case of ITT position in Chile prior to the 1970 national elections. Risen writes,
In the months before Chile's election in September 1970, former CIA director John McCone, a member of ITT's board of directors, held a series of meetings with his successor at the CIA, Richard Helms, to discuss ITT's fears of a possible Allende victory, and to ask what the CIA and the Nixon Administration were going to do about it.
This is around the time Henry Kissinger is said to have uttered his famous veiled directive:
"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves."
The beginning of the end for the Nixon administration came when it came to light that the Justice Department settled an antitrust suit against ITT in return for a $400,000 donation to help pay for holding the Republican National Convention in San Diego in 1972. A year later, Salvadore Allende was assassinated in Chile.
But by far the most famous revelations that came out of the Church Committee hearings were expressed by the Senator in response to a question on Meet the Press, referred to above. It's worth viewing again:
No place to hide, and here we are.
Another choice bit of information discussed by Risen comes in the Epilogue, where he alludes to then Dick Cheney as an excellent example of the kind of man and politician who would scoff at the need to uphold Constitutional principles in his decisions regarding covert activities and the need to disclose them to the public for scrutiny. Cheney did what he could to erode the efforts of Frank Church. This may have been a good thing, writes Risen:
But by trying to erase Church Committee reforms in order to engage in illicit and immoral activities, Cheney reminded the country of the importance of those reforms. Cheney's constant harping against the Church Committee's reforms eventually convinced many Americans that if Cheney hated them so much, maybe they weren't so bad. Dick Cheney became an unlikely salesman for the Church Committee.
But Cheney may have gotten his way in the end. Five days after 9/11 Cheney went on Meet the Press and gave his famous 'dark side' speech, where he describes a national security need to "spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we're going to be successful"." It's worth a re-viewing:
https://youtu.be/dcWGkEu_fz8 (full video: tu.be/yT6CNd25Jvc)
The question becomes whether the Church reforms are any longer relevant.
The Last Honest Man is an excellent read about a bygone, almost quaint past when we could say with a straight face there were honest wo/men in politics and mean it. I highly recommend it to those who still cherish the Good Fight that occurred in the 60s and 70s.(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
