It’s Time for Church Committee 2.0
Congress has revealed the deep corruption of Biden’s Intelligence Community – now, Congress must take the next step towards serious reform
Does history repeat? Few historians would say so. Poets may differ. George Santayana famously opined that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Eugene O’Neill countered with “There is no present or future – only the past, happening over and over again – now.” The less we say about Karl Marx’s take, “History repeats itself, first as a tragedy, second as a farce,” perhaps the better.
That said, with the coming inauguration of Donald Trump as our 47th president in a little over a month, marking his return in triumph to the White House, the history of American intelligence may be set to repeat. Moreover, it should.
A half-century ago, on the heels of a scandal-ridden Republican presidency, in a highly partisan period in Washington, DC, a Democrat-controlled Congress took upon itself the weighty task of exposing the misdeeds of American intelligence, at home and abroad. In 1975, the Senate led the charge with its so-called Church Committee, named after its chair, Sen. Frank Church (D-ID); the House’s equivalent Pike Committee garnered less media attention.
The Church Committee’s hearings, which resulted in a massive public report in the spring of 1976, exposed all sorts of questionable activities by America’s spy agencies. For the first time, Americans learned about some of the Top Secret-plus activities undertaken by U.S. intelligence during the Cold War. These included Central Intelligence Agency activities such as MKULTRA, which dabbled in mind-control experiments with LSD and other drugs. CIA covert action efforts around the world to overthrow pro-Communist governments, including assassination, leading Sen. Church to term the agency “a rogue elephant.” A National Security Agency SIGINT program termed SHAMROCK that spied on domestic dissidents. The secret Counterintelligence Program, COINTELPRO for short, of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which targeted American extremists, Left and Right, for destabilization and infiltration operations.
Church Committee revelations shocked the public and created a long-lasting suspicion of the U.S. Intelligence Community among many Democrats. However, the hearings resulted in overdue reforms of the IC, including permanent Congressional oversight of the spies by House and Senate committees, plus legal frameworks for surveillance activities at home, e.g. the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. Such reforms clarified the legal boundaries of what American intelligence could and could not do, at home and abroad.
In truth, by the mid-1970s, forward-looking leaders across the IC understood that times had changed, and the political culture had shifted. What was tolerated in the first half of the Cold War, including aggressive covert action abroad plus domestic political intelligence operations, no longer passed the “smell test” in Washington. In that sense, the Church Committee for all its criticisms of the IC, ultimately did American spies a favor by getting them on the right side of the law and public opinion.
That compromise endured for decades. Some shortcomings of the 1970s legal framework for IC activities were exposed by the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the U.S. To safeguard civil liberties, the post-Church Committee system placed a high “wall” between domestic and foreign intelligence – meaning, in practice, between the FBI on one side with CIA and NSA on the other – and this meant that some indications of the 9/11 hijackers and their terrible plot got missed.
Nevertheless, it can be stated that the mid-1970s IC reforms birthed by the Church Committee broadly served the country well for nearly a half-century. Recent years, however, have brought America’s spy agencies back to the dark place they were in the early 1970s: mired in scandal, operating beyond legal norms, exploited by a rogue president, sullied by partisan political games, having lost the confidence of much of the American public. The only difference between 1974 and 2024 is that the sides have switched: where Democrats then wanted to reform the IC from the Left, Republicans now seek to do so from the Right. Yet, the underlying issues are nearly identical. American spies need a revised governance system, adapted to a new era.
This sorry state of affairs is why I outed myself as a Deep State Dissident a few months ago. Despite being a former intelligence officer for more than one U.S. spy agency, and the son of two “lifer” NSA officials, I’ve had enough. The Obama and Biden presidencies have abused the spooks for their own partisan ends, and the rot now extends deeply and widely across the IC. Deep, systemic reform is required. Some of this can be accomplished by the incoming Trump administration alone.
Significant depoliticizing of the IC can be achieved simply by rewriting Executive branch rules regarding partisan political activity. Take the notorious “spies who lied” in Oct. 2020 about Hunter Biden’s seedy laptop, erroneously dismissing it as a Russian disinformation scheme, which probably led to Joe Biden’s election. That’s an easy one to fix, as I recently explained:
Now that he’s back in power, Trump will want to punish the 51 former intelligence officers who suggested that Hunter’s laptop was the product of Russian intelligence service agitprop. What would be an appropriate response? Trump could yank the 51 individuals’ security clearances. That would effectively toss them off the lucrative consulting/contractor gravy train that most retired IC bigwigs enjoy. This would make it clear that IC senior officials — the equivalent of military general officers — cannot play partisan politics while remaining affiliated with the IC in any way. This should apply to everyone in the IC, regardless of party.
You can be an IC affiliate or a political pundit: choose one. Far-reaching bureaucratic reforms of our intelligence agencies, which are urgently needed, will require coordinated Congressional action in a disciplined fashion. There’s good news this week coming out of Capitol Hill on two critical IC-related fronts.
On Monday, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic concluded its massive, two-year investigation into the COVID-19 pandemic and released its summary report, which runs past 500 pages and includes several jaw-droppers. Foremost, the report states that COVID-19 “most likely emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan, China,” the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That hypothesis is no “conspiracy theory,” per the House report, which points the finger directly at Dr. Anthony Fauci and his perfidious retinue for using U.S. taxpayer funds to sponsor hazardous gain-of-function research at the WIV, which had known safety problems. The only conspiracy, in the report’s telling, was the one hatched by Fauci and his dishonest circle, in collaboration with Beijing, to smear any discussions of the “lab leak” hypothesis as a “conspiracy theory.”
The House assessment isn’t just a stark refutation of the official story about COVID-19 origins proffered by the Biden administration for the last four years, it’s a direct negation of the conclusions of Biden’s Intelligence Community. As this newsletter reported in detail, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued two unclassified statements on COVID-19 origins in 2021 – a teaser in late Aug. 2021, then a longer assessment two months later – which collectively punted on the whole issue. If the pandemic hadn’t killed millions of people, this farce amusingly resembled a Coen brothers’ movie more than any serious effort to ascertain where COVID-19 came from.
Despite wasting uncounted man-hours on these assessments, based on highly classified input from a dozen intelligence agencies, ODNI conclusions took no concrete position on the matter: Who can really say where the pandemic came from, anyway? The overall tone exuded skepticism towards any “lab leak” hypothesis. This didn’t surprise, because Biden’s Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, is a retread Obama flunky who is dedicated to following the party line, not integrity or honesty. As I stated in late Oct. 2021: “The public deserves a real intelligence assessment on where COVID-19 came from, to include unclassified findings which actually say something. This doesn’t cut it. If the spooks won’t tell us, Congress needs to force some answers from the executive branch, sooner rather than later.” Fortunately, the House just did that, against the objections of Biden’s IC.
Even worse news for Haines and her ilk landed yesterday with the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence’s report on Anomalous Health Incidents, which is the bureaucratic term for the attacks on U.S. and Allied personnel popularly termed the Havana Syndrome due to incidents in Cuba starting around 2016 (erroneously, because such attacks go back to 1996). Top Secret Umbra has been reporting on this scandal for years. In 2021, I pointedly asked: “How Many American Spies Have to Die Before We Do Something Here?”
I strive to dispassion in my intelligence analysis, but AHI cuts close for me. Several friends and colleagues have fallen victim to these mysterious attacks, which the IC has persistently denied and downplayed. Just a couple months ago, I pronounced AHI the “Greatest Scandal in the History of American Intelligence,” accusing Biden’s intelligence leadership of an active conspiracy to hide the unpleasant truth about what was going on here. I didn’t mince words about the culprits:
The terrible truth is that, for many years, multiple hostile intelligence services have employed a Russian-designed and built acoustic directed energy weapon against Americans to harm and cripple them. The culprits are Russia’s Federal Security Service or FSB (for attacks inside or near Russia), the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff or GRU (for attacks further afield) and Cuba’s Dirección de Inteligencia or DI, a close Kremlin spy partner since the 1960s (many of the attacks in the Western Hemisphere, including inside the U.S., are the DI’s handiwork).
As I explained: “Team Biden doesn’t want to know the truth. Indeed, they refuse to. One more time for the seats in the back: They don’t want to know.” Fortunately, the House of Representatives does seek the truth, and the Biden IC coverup just got blasted into bits by the HPSCI’s report. I encourage you to read it, it’s less than ten pages long, and its statements reveal that the Biden administration is even more dishonest than you think. Here are some snippets, starting with this blockbuster introduction:
In March 2023, the National Intelligence Council (NIC) issued an Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA), titled “Updated Assessment of Anomalous Health Incidents (AHIs),” which found that “it is ‘very unlikely’ a foreign adversary is responsible for the reported AHIs.”1 However, the Subcommittee has uncovered evidence that the ICA lacked analytic integrity and was highly irregular in its formulation. It appears increasingly likely and the Chairman is convinced that a foreign adversary is behind some AHIs.2 The Intelligence Community (IC) has attempted to thwart the Subcommittee’s investigative efforts to uncover the truth at every turn. Despite this, the Subcommittee has uncovered information illustrative of problems with the ICA’s creation, review, and release. The Subcommittee recommends that the IC expeditiously release a new ICA on AHIs in which all information collected by the IC is appropriately considered.
It continues:
Numerous IC whistleblowers have come forward, often in fear of retaliation, to inform the Subcommittee they believe the IC’s conclusions on AHIs were not based on the available facts … AHIs represent a genuine and compelling danger to the IC workforce. This danger has not been fully realized by IC leadership … Because of this lack of cooperation and the Subcommittee’s inability to access specific information, the Subcommittee concludes there must be something IC leadership has sought to prevent Congress from discovering. Specifically, the IC routinely delayed productions of requested information to the Subcommittee, placed hurdles on who could testify to congressional investigators in transcribed interviews, and provided productions so heavily redacted that the nature of the information underneath was wholly obfuscated. These actions resulted in a subpoena issued to the National Security Agency (NSA) in May 2024.
In other words: AHIs are real, some of the attacks, at home and abroad, are being perpetrated by multiple hostile intelligence services, and IC leadership at the highest level has engaged in a multi-year conspiracy of silence to prevent the terrible reality of these attacks from being known to the public – or even Congress.
This isn’t the end of the matter either. The chair of the CIA Subcommittee of the HPSCI, Rep. Rick Crawford (R-AR) came out, guns blazing, stating that the interim report is just the beginning of his Subcommittee’s work on the IC’s response to AHIs, moreover he is currently finalizing a substantial and highly classified report which involves very sensitive information gathered over the past two years that was previously unknown to the HPSCI. He added:
After years of traveling the world holding meetings and hearings with credible whistleblowers and leaders in our Intelligence Community (IC), I have discovered that there is reliable evidence to suggest that some Anomalous Health Incidents (AHIs) are the work of foreign adversaries. Sadly, the IC has actively attempted to impede our investigation, but we have nonetheless been able to gather significant evidence, and I have reason to believe that its claims of environmental or social factors explaining AHIs are false. This interim report is just the beginning, and our investigative work through the CIA subcommittee will continue until we get full cooperation and thorough answers from the IC.
Joe Biden’s IC is corrupted by politics and decided to lie rather than determine what caused the worst pandemic in modern times, which killed more than a million Americans. It then chose to cover up foreign attacks on hundreds of IC personnel, in many countries and several U.S. states, lying to everyone, including Congress, to prevent the truth from emerging. Many brave Americans have had their health permanently ruined by AHI, some have even died, all the while being undermined by their own IC leaders. The lies must stop.
Congress has done excellent work with its analysis of COVID-19 origins and AHI, but this is only the beginning. We need a Church Committee 2.0 to expose and rectify the misdeeds of the U.S. Intelligence Community. There is a persistent pattern of politicized dishonesty in Biden’s IC, whose leaders have served the Democratic party, not the American people. Congress in 2025 must lead the charge, unmasking IC crimes and misdemeanors, with an aim to comprehensive reform, lest the outrages of recent years be repeated.
The incoming Trump administration can help, but Congress must take the lead here, just as it did 50 years ago, dragging our spy agencies into a new era with enhanced oversight. However, if John Ratcliffe, Trump’s nominee to head CIA, is confirmed by the Senate, as he’s expected to be, I recommend that he immediately empanel an Accountability Review Board specifically for the AHI issue, to determine who at the Agency lied and covered up these attacks on IC personnel. Anyone involved in this vile deceit, the biggest scandal in the history of U.S. intelligence, must be fired and investigated by the Justice Department for possible prosecution. Congress will want to know such information too.