Frank Forrester Church Lll: Chairman Of The Church Committee

Frank Forrester Church lll : Chairman of the Church Committee
By Zoe Feltz

Frank Church was established as the Chairman of the Church Committee after a reporter wrote an article in 1974, about the CIA, revealing that they had been destabilizing foreign governments and orchestrating illegal operations against many American citizens. This controversial Committee’s venture was to analyze governmental operations and to investigate alleged illegal activity by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency. Church risked his career when he immersed himself with the Committee. Despite all of the criticism he had to acclimatize himself to, the Committee was relatively successful. At first, many Idahoans loathed Church and did not want him to be part of the Committee and concluded that he was using it as a way to get into the presidency, but when the Committee procured a way to somewhat make the intelligence agencies liable for what they were executing by assembling a new and standing Committee to look at their operations.
The panel of elected officials interviewed eight-hundred people and organized two-hundred fifty executive hearings, along with twenty-one public hearings. While interrogating past officers, agents, officials, and directors of the CIA, they discovered many appalling things that the intelligence agencies have done. The Committee’s job at that point was to educate the public about these things, but they did not take the news easily. Many Idahoans presumed that what the Church Committee was doing was mutilating national