As the Church Committee inquiry culminated in the fall of 1975, the Ford White House took further steps to obstruct its work and conceal the controversial covert history the Senate investigation had uncovered. On October 31, 1975, Ford sent a letter to the Church Committee members demanding that their pending report on “Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders” remain classified to protect U.S. national security; on November 1, Ford signed a Presidential decision memorandum (Document 2) to oppose Senator Church’s plan to hold an unprecedented public hearing on covert operations in Chile—the first of its kind. According to the Ford White House and the CIA, such a hearing would “establish a precedent that would be seized on by the Congress in the future to hold additional public hearings on covert action,” and “would have a shattering effect on the willingness of foreign political parties and individuals to cooperate with the U.S. in the future on such operations.”
Facing an impasse with the Church Committee, on November 5, CIA director William Colby invited Church and Senator Charles Mathias (R-MD) to an “informal dinner” to work on some sort of cooperative compromise. Among other points, Colby pushed for the Committee to agree to work with the CIA to delete names of CIA agents, foreign officials, and organizations, and agree that, besides Chile, “no other covert action would be made the subject of a public hearing or public report.” The proposed compromise, according to a November 7, 1975, memo drafted by Colby’s special counsel, Mitchell Rogovin, “limits the exposure of covert action to one country,” Chile. Four other Church Committee case histories—on Congo, Indonesia, Laos and one other country that remains censored in the documents—would remain secret.
Release of the Chile Report
To its credit, the Church Committee managed to circumvent these concerted executive branch roadblocks. On November 20, 1975, the Committee released its detailed and sensational report on the CIA’s assassination plots against foreign leaders like Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba and Gen. Schneider in Chile; on December 4, Senator Church released the staff case study, “Covert Action in Chile, 1963-1973,” lifting the shroud of secrecy on a decade-long effort to use clandestine operations to manipulate the politics of a small Latin American nation and foster “a coup climate” to impede Allende’s democratic election, his inauguration, and the ability of his government to succeed. The two-day hearing on Chile, according to Archive analyst Peter Kornbluh, “established a historic marker in congressional efforts to hold the CIA accountable to the principles and values of the American public.”