The First Congressman To Battle The NSA, Otis Pike Dies

After the Church Committee had begun its investigation, the Nedzi Committee was created, headed by Democratic Congressman Lucien N. Nedzi which dissolved only after a few months. Its successor was the Pike Committee, officially called the Select Committee on Intelligence which revealed more secret dealings of the US government. This was around the same time as the United States President’s Commission on CIA activities within the United States, commonly called the Rockefeller Commission. The American Prospect gives some background, noting that prior to these investigations, “the U.S. intelligence community had never undergone significant congressional scrutiny” because of a “laissez-faire attitude…but after a 1974 New York Times series by Seymour Hersh revealed that the CIA had conducted “massive” illegal spying activities against American antiwar protesters and dissidents, Congress and the executive branch convulsed into action.” Three separate bodies just described were created to further this investigation. The report was suppressed from the start but was leaked by Daniel Schorr to the Village Voice who asked the publication to give to his legal defense fund, which was refused.Schorr showed the “committee report…on television and discussed its contents,” resulting in his resignation from CBS and to his death, refusing “to identify his source for the Pike committee report.”
The CIA would later write that “these Congressional investigations eventually delved into all aspects of the CIA and the IC [Intelligence Community] and for the first time in the Agency’s history, CIA officials faced hostile Congressional committees bent on the exposure of abuses by intelligence agencies and on major reforms,” while criticizing the Pike Committee for never developing a “cooperative working relationship with the Agency [CIA] or the Ford administration.” Yet the CIA also wrote that “despite its failures, the Pike Committee inquiry was a new and dramatic break with the past [because] it was the first significant House investigation of the IC since the creation of the CIA in 1947.” The London School of Economics and Political Science wrote a similar piece in 2011, saying that the oversight committee chaired by Pike who wanted to publish his committee’s report was stonewalled by the Ford administration.
This piece also notes that the report describes “details of a covert CIA operation in support of Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq, but that in their view there were distortions of “important details” and criticism of Henry Kissinger.In the present, the Mary Farrell Foundation decided to publish the sections of the final report Pike wanted to make public in the first place.
Congress responded to the disturbing charges in 1975, investigating the CIA in the Senate via the Church Committee, chaired by Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho), and in the House of Representatives via the Pike Committee, chaired by Congressman Otis Pike (D-NY). In addition, President Gerald Ford created the Rockefeller Commission,  and issued an executive order prohibiting the assassination of foreign leaders.
During the investigation, Schlesinger’s successor as DCI, William Colby, testified before Congress on 32 occasions in 1975, including about the “Family Jewels”.  Colby later stated that he believed that providing Congress with this information was the correct thing to do, and ultimately in the CIA’s own interests. As the CIA fell out of favor with the public, Ford assured Americans that his administration was not involved: “There are no people presently employed in the White House who have a relationship with the CIA of which I am personally unaware.”
*** A film by the son of CIA spymaster William Colby has divided the Colby clan
*** FBI KILLED COLBY?
Repercussions from the Iran-Contra affair arms smuggling scandal included the creation of the Intelligence Authorization Act in 1991. It defined covert operations as secret missions in geopolitical areas where the U.S. is neither openly nor apparently engaged. This also required an authorizing chain of command, including an official, presidential finding report and the informing of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, which, in emergencies, requires only “timely notification.”
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Swearing-in of the Rockefeller Commission in 1975: Nelson A. Rockefeller (VP), Lyman L. Lemnitzer (Operation Northwoods), Ronald Reagan (Future POTUS), Edgar F. Shannon, Jr., David W. Belin, John T. Connor, C. Douglas Dillon, Erwin N. Griswold, and Lane Kirkland
The United States President’s Commission on CIA Activities within the United States

Otis G. Pike, 92, Dies; Long Island Congressman Took On C.I.A
Otis Pike and US Intelligence Abuses
 
 
(Before It’s News)
Otis Pike

(N.Morgan) Many of you may not have heard of Congressman Otis Pike, but he led the Pike Committee in exposing the NSA scandal and those hearings were far more intense and revealing than the better-known Church Committee’s Senate hearings, which went on at the same time. His death has went unannounced and unnoticed, it seems by the media and this regime.

The Church Committee focused on excesses and abuses, implying that with the proper reforms and oversights, the intelligence structures could be set right. But as the Pike Committee started pulling up the floorboards, what they discovered quickly led Rep. Pike and others to declare that the entire intelligence apparatus was a dangerous boondoggle. Not only were taxpayers getting fleeced, but agencies like the NSA and CIA were a direct threat to America’s security and democracy, the proverbial monkey playing with a live grenade. The problem was that Pike asked the right questions—and that led him to some very wrong answers, as far as the powers that be were concerned.

It was Pike’s committee that got the first ever admission—from CIA director William Colby—that the NSA was routinely tapping Americans’ phone calls. Days after that stunning confession, Pike succeeded in getting the head of the NSA, Lew Allen Jr., to testify in public before his committee—the first time in history that an NSA chief publicly testified. It was the first time that the NSA publicly maintained that it was legally entitled to wiretap Americans’ communications overseas, in spite of the 1934 Communications Act and other legal restrictions placed on other intelligence and law enforcement agencies.