"The Last Honest Man": James Risen on How Former Senator Frank Church Exposed CIA, FBI & NSA

the first time the CIA the FBI and the NSA during hearings from 1975 to 76. it was officially called the select committee to study governmental operations with respect to intelligence activities this is senator Frank Church speaking during one of the committee hearings have seen today the Dark Side of those activities where many Americans who were not even suspected of crime we're not only Spider-Man but they

were harassed they were discredited [Applause] and at times endangered and this is another clip from the church committee Senate hearing CIA director William Colby testifying he was asked if he found the work of the committee unwelcome no I do not I've as I've said to the chairman I welcome the chance to try to describe to the American people what intelligence is really about today it's a

it is an opportunity to show how we Americans have modernized the whole concept of intelligence so that CIA director William Colby testifying by the church committee which investigated U.S assassination targets from Castro and Cuba to lumumba and Congo to Yemen Vietnam this is the focus of the new book by James risen titled the last honest man the CIA the FBI the mafia and the Kennedys and

one senator's fight to save democracy uh Jim this is a fascinating read it is so important even what some 50 years later if you can talk about why you focused on Senator Church who at one time hoped to be president of the United States but the significance of these hearings and what you were most shocked by in the revelations that he discovered around U.S government activity

around the world sure yeah the reason I I wanted to write this book was you know I was covering the CIA for the New York Times at the time of 9 11 and uh I was uh if you remember Dick Cheney uh started after 9 11 started complaining constantly that the reason the CIA and the FBI had failed to uncover the terrorist plots was because of

the church committee which was a very odd thing to say because the church committee had taken place 25 years earlier and Frank church was long dead by that time but it became the Mantra of the Bush Administration that it was the church committee's tighter rules on uh U.S intelligence operations that had led to the weakness of intelligence which was a lie but it was a very

powerful lie that continued for years and so I all after I started a reading about the church committee because of Dick Cheney's constant carping about it and I decided eventually that I it was something that I really wanted to write a book about the church committee I think is probably the most important Congressional investigation in modern American history it was a watershed moment in the history

of the CI and the FBI and the NSA anybody who worked at those organization the intelligence Community knows that there is a before and after there's a before the church committee and what we could get away with and there's an after the church committee and what we were what rules we were now imposed on them to limit their power and their uh flexibility and I think

that's it's it's uh you've got to get back into the mindset of the time and remember there was no congressional oversight whatsoever of the CIA the FBI the to say for three decades and Frank church was brought in this committee was created in 1975 for the to conduct the very first oversight and very first investigation ever conducted of the CIA and at the time you got

to remember the FBI was just as much of a rogue organization J Edgar Hoover had just died and he had run the organization since its founding and no one had ever questioned his authority or his power and the NSA at the time very few Americans even knew it existed it was even more secretive far more secretive even than it is today and so the hearings were

explosive and they led to changes in the laws changes in executive orders led to the creation of permanent Congressional intelligence oversight and it was uh it had a dramatic impact on American national security policy Edgar Hoover he had died in 1972 a few years before the committee would this committee have even been possible had J Edgar Hoover not died because you you point out how how

critical he was to the incipient development of a police state right here in the United States I wonder if you could talk about that as well his role uh in uh in developing this early motion move toward a police state yeah yeah I mean when the church committee was was created it was originally just going to be what they called the CIA committee and they were

just going to investigate the CIA but Frank church and others on the committee very quickly realized they had to investigate the FBI and uh church and others later admitted they never would have been able to investigate the FBA FBI at the time if Jagger Hoover was still alive he was so powerful he had been able to pressure and blackmail and intimidate everyone both in Congress and

in the White House ever since you know before World War II he was probably the most powerful secret figure in modern American history and he was able to turn the FBI into uh like a Gestapo organization especially in the post-world War II era when he began the the whole communist redbaiting witch hunts and then moved on from that in the 1960s to harass the civil rights

movement and the anti-war movement and so he had up this long history of uh constant harassment of anyone who opposed him or opposed the status quo in the United States and he did it in a way that he had intimidated everyone in Congress who believed that he had blackmail material on them whether he did or not they all believed it and so no one was willing

to take him on uh until uh or even investigate the FBI in any meaningful way until he was dead one of the one of the really interesting things that I learned was the the famous burglary of the FBI office in Medea Pennsylvania I think in 1971 uh where the burglars who were basically anti-war dissidents uh took a bunch of documents and then began to understand what

they were looking at only after they had taken the documents and they started parceling them out to members of Congress and journalists who they thought would would be helpful in disclosing and airing the information that they were providing to them and they were sending up to them anonymously and they were sending to very liberal members of Congress and one of the things that I learned that

it was shocking was that those members of Congress immediately turned them back to the FBI without doing anything with them and some of the journalists they sent him to did the same thing and it was it just showed showed how powerful the whole Jagger Hoover had on people because he was still alive at that time and your your review and uh reporting on several of the

major assassination attempts uh that uh that government agencies especially the CIA were involved in you spent a lot of time talking back about the key Mafia figures uh Johnny roselli a mobster from California and and uh Sam giancana another mobster a key mobster from Chicago they were both assassinated one after testifying before the church commission and the other one just before he was about to testify

before the the church committee could you uh for those especially for younger for younger listeners and viewers who are not aware of this whole uh this whole issue of what happened with attempt to kill Castro and the Kennedy assassination could you go through some of that yeah yeah in the in uh at the end of the Eisenhower Administration uh the CIA uh decided you know Dwight

Eisenhower was very interested it was pushing uh the CIA to try to kill Castro uh and uh the CI decided that one way they could do it is to form a secret alliance with the mafia and so they had a they arranged for a former FBI agent named Bob Mayhew who had been who was also on contract with the CIA to contact uh Mobsters around the

country to see if they would form an alliance to work with the CIA to get into uh to Cuba and kill Castro and so he first contacted Johnny racelli who was a flamboyant mobster both operating both in Los Angeles and Las Vegas and roselli then contacted Sam giancana who was the boss of the Chicago mob and the two of them then contacted Santo trafficante who was

the mob boss of Florida and who had long time Casino operations in Cuba before Castro took over and so they went with Mayhew to Miami Beach and set up a shop in the fountain blue hotel to try to figure out how to get poisons to somebody close to Castro who could kill him but the the plot kind of unraveled very quickly because giancana had a girlfriend

in Las in Las Vegas Phyllis McGuire one of the famous Maguire sisters of a singing act and he was he was convinced that she was sleeping with a stand-up comedian named Dan Rowan who later became famous in the Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In show in the late 60s and so he wanted to leave and go back to Las Vegas and maybe kill Dan Rowan uh but Bob

Mayhew convinced him to stay and keep working on the Castro while he got a private investigator to go wiretap Phyllis McGuire to see if it was true and the private investigator he hired to wiretap Phyllis McGuire did a shoddy job and the local police found the wiretap and called the FBI and suddenly J Edgar Hoover was pulling a thread and finding out all about through the

the arrest in Las Vegas and the investigation of the wiretap of Phyllis McGuire they found out about the cia's mafia Alliance and then that led them to find that Sam giancana had another mistress named Judith Campbell who at the same time was also sleeping with President Kennedy and so very quickly uh Jagger Hoover had blackmail material on uh President Kennedy and he confronted uh Robert Kennedy

his brother who was the Attorney General at the time and then he also confronted President Kennedy and it's very clear if you look at the timing and the uh is that what he wanted was greater freedom to act to spy on Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement and it wasn't long after he confronted the Kennedys with this blackmail material about the fact that Kennedy

was sharing the same mistress as Sam giancana that the Kennedys approved the wiretapping of Martin Luther King by the FBI and so it was a very convoluted story but it's probably one of the most fascinating stories in the history of the CIA and the FBI and Jim ryzen if you can continue on that the wiretapping of Dr King a man who and especially in Jonathan Ike's

new biography king of Life talks about how Dr Martin Luther King suffered from severe depression was hospitalized a number of times and how they tried to drive him to suicide and what the Kennedys knew and when they knew it Jim right one of the things that became clear is that Hoover had been obsessed with uh King beginning in the late 1950s as soon as king began

to rise to prominence after the Montgomery uh bus boycott he was in the sights of Hoover and Hoover began to be very quickly became convinced that the king and his Civil Rights Movement were controlled by Moscow and that they were communist puppets and there were two members of the of Kings organization that had some background in the American Communist party but there was no evidence of

any real influence communist influence in the civil rights movement and the FBI staff Intelligence Division staff continually told uh Hoover that and he kept telling them that he didn't agree with them and he wanted them to change their opinion and change their reports and he put so much pressure on them that they finally just began to harass uh come up with plots to harass King however

they could originally the wiretapping that the Kennedys approved was supposed to be to find communist infiltration in a king's movement but very quickly they realized they weren't there was no evidence of that but they were finding evidence that he was having Affairs extramarital Affairs and so they began to focus on his extramarital Affairs and then tried then ultimately once he won was awarded the Nobel Peace

Prize they that so enraged Hoover that he uh and his intelligence Chief William Sullivan began to set up a uh I think where they record took all the recordings her highlights of the recordings of the wiretaps of his extramarital affairs and sent them to his house along with a note saying um you have 34 days you know what you should do meaning essentially that he I

think he was about to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and they wanted him to kill himself before that can you can you talk about um uh in this book uh the revelations what you learned and talking to it's hard to say the late Den Ellsberg but Daniel Ellsberg who's just died um the information of what he gave to Frank church and how this relates to

the assassination of the um leader DM yeah I mean he gave he had a lot of information about uh Vietnam but he also just a step back one one step he had a provide he told me while I was interviewing him the whole back story to how he ended up leaking the Pentagon papers and how it and he first went to uh J William Fulbright the

chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to try to leak the uh to get the Senate to conduct hearings and Fulbright refused to do it and he put the Pentagon papers I think in 1969 he he put them in a safe at the Foreign Relations Committee and didn't do anything with them and that was one of the reasons ultimately that uh that he that Ellsberg went

to the New York Times was because he had kept going to uh this uh the Senate and being turned down that ultimately LED uh Fulbright who was so embarrassed by what happened it led him to leak information to later to Jack Anderson about the CIA and itt's work in Chile to overthrow Salvador Allende and that then led to the creation of a subcommittee to investigate all

uh Chile that was chaired by Frank Church which was a subcommittee that kind of led to the creation of the church committee and his larger investigation of the CIA so it was a very it was kind of an indirect investigation in Thai but and then he later also provided information to church about the DM assassination and to the fact that there was evidence that Kennedy knew

about he understood in detail what was going to happen in the coup plots against DM that the CI was involved with and the question really boils down to whether or not uh Kennedy Kennedy clearly knew there was going to be violence and uh and the question was whether he actually knew that the assassination was was going to be uh conducted or not but it was it

was interesting he he really wanted to uh provide new documents to the church committee and so he met privately with church Jim I wanted to ask you briefly about another pivotal assassination the killing of Patrice lumumba and the involvement of the CIA in that you write about that in your book as well yeah the LA Mumba uh the the was one of the assassinations of foreign

leaders along with Castro and others that the church committee investigated and really exposed for the first time they um the CIA if you remember Congo was in the midst of uh uh extreme violence because it was a Belgian colony and Belgium had been uh pressured to get Grant its independence and Patrice lumumbo was the first independent leader of the independent country but Belgium very quickly wanted

to regain control they realized they kind of had uh virus remorse about granting Belgium it's I mean granting Congo its independence Jim I want to warn you you just have a minute oh okay well anyway so uh Patrice lumumba was overthrown with the backing of Belgium and the CIA uh and then he was uh assassinated and the question really was the role of the CIA in

that assassination I believe was much stronger than what the CI has said over the decades uh there's this clearly uh the CIA helped track uh La Mumba as he tried to escape and also had sent Hitmen to uh Congo to try to kill him so it was a it was very clear that the CIA played a pivotal role in all that James rise and we're going

to do part two of this discussion and we're going to talk more about what ultimately the church committee was able to publicly expose with these assassinations James risen the Pulitzer prize-winning reporter at The Intercept his new book is called the last honest man the CIA the FBI the mafia and the Kennedys and one Senators fight to save democracy I'm Amy Goodman Juan Gonzalez