A pair of declassified memos from January 4, 1975 reveal just how contentious things were in the lead-up to the Rockefeller Commission and the Church Committee, with recent exposés having rocked the American public’s faith in the government, already strained by the still-fresh memories of Watergate, and undermined CIA’s legitimacy.

A formerly SECRET memo from the White House shows that not longer after Seymour Hersh published an expose in the New York Times about the domestic operations of CIA, President Ford met James Schlesinger, the Secretary of Defense and former CIA Director to discuss the allegations. When asked about the Agency’s role in Watergate, Schlesinger confessed “there is a layer in the Agency which you can never really find out what is going on.”