Senator Frank Church, Democrat from Idaho, holding up a poison-dart gun designed by the Central Intelligence Agency for potential use in assassinations: in the pantheon of images from congressional hearings stamped upon the American consciousness, it ranks alongside those of Roy Cohn whispering into Joe McCarthy’s ear and Oliver North raising his right hand.
It was September 1975, and Church was presiding over the first open session of his Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, the anodyne name of which belied the shocking facts it would reveal about the C.I.A., the F.B.I., and the N.S.A., none of which had theretofore been subject to much public scrutiny or congressional oversight. Attempting to exhume all the misdeeds committed by the nation’s vast intelligence apparatus was “like trying to air out a house that had been shuttered for 30 years,” James Risen writes in The Last Honest Man: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys—And One Senator’s Fight to Save Democracy.
