The Church Committee investigated and exposed some of the largest and most significant scandals in American history, to the point that it was felt that the very existence of the Central Intelligence Agency was threatened. However, a recent FOIA request to the Federal Bureau of Investigation revealed over 18,000 pages that had never been made public - and with your help, we can sue for their release.

A State Department cable in the Central Intelligence Agency’s Kissinger archive claims that pending revelations from the Church Committee would rock the Netherlands, potentially forcing it to leave NATO. Even more drastically, the memo warned that this scandal could lead to “the restructuring of the Dutch political system.”

Mykola Lebed was sentenced to death in Poland in 1934. He died in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1998.

By various accounts, he was an assassin, a freedom fighter, a terrorist, a hero, a villain, a prisoner, a refugee, a Nazi collaborator, a Nazi target, a writer, and a war criminal. To the Central Intelligence Agency, which bankrolled his activities for close to half a century, he was known as “Uncle Louie.”

The human experience is complex, language can only do so much to convey its intricacies, and in some situations, just what would and wouldn’t be considered unforgivable can be determined by just one word. Few government entities understood this better than a post-Church Committee Central Intelligence Agency.

Forty years ago - in the aftermath of a very public American reckoning with the nation’s Intelligence Community that featured the Watergate scandal, the Church and Pike Committees, and the Rockefeller Commission - President Jimmy Carter signed Executive Order 12036 on January 24th, 1978, placing additional restrictions on the Central Intelligence Agency’s ability to operate in the United States.

A presentation from Homeland Security on Intelligence Oversight Training appears to include a version of Anonymous’ “man without a head” logo that was modified to depict a surveillance state. Perhaps even more interestingly, the image has a preexisting copyright and appears to have been originally used in an article describing Pakistan’s mass surveillance system - a system that appears to liaise with the National Security Agency.

Forty years after the Central Intelligence Agency’s experiments on U.S. citizens was revealed in a series of Congressional investigations, materials related to their findings and the CIA’s response live easily-accessible online.

A little known but extremely important part of the history of domestic surveillance by intelligence agencies is the CACTUS program. CACTUS was a highly classified channel used by agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to transmit information about “the New Left, Black Militants and related matters.” This channel was never disclosed in the Church Committee reports, even when the reports discuss information that was transmitted through CACTUS.

In testimony before the Church Committee, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Deputy Director acknowledged that the Bureau at one point made up as much as one-fifth of the Klu Klux Klan’s total membership - but were still powerless to curtail the KKK’s violence. His testimony also acknowledged police participation in Klan violence, and that the Bureau had three times as many “ghetto informants” as they did those targeting white supremacist domestic terrorists.

Bayard Rustin was many things: He was a key organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, an advocate for Soviet Jewry, and, “a convicted homosexual,” according to his Federal Bureau of Investigation file. Despite being what many would consider a textbook lefty, Rustin also moonlighted for the Central Intelligence Agency. While that might seem like an irreconcilable contradiction for a man who sat in prison for two years because he refused to serve in World War II, but contradictions aren’t there to be reconciled, they’re there to confound.