1975 to 2000
Investigations and deregulation
The Church Committee, the secret surveillance court, Iran-Contra and its pardons, Waco, and the repeal of Glass-Steagall.
Key facts
- The Church Committee found 500,000 FBI files on Americans. Congress was asked for a law against assassination and did not pass one.
- In 1978 Congress created a secret court for surveillance warrants. It hears only the government.
- Glass-Steagall was repealed in 1999. In 2000 swaps were exempted from regulation.
Timeline
13 events in CIA, War & Covert Operations, oldest first
- 1975November 20, 1975CIA, War & Covert Operations
Church Committee: assassination should be rejected as a tool of foreign policy
Congress asked for a statute; none passed.
- 1976February 18, 1976CIA, War & Covert Operations
Executive order bans political assassination
Carried into Executive Order 12333 in 1981; an order, not a law.
- April 26, 1976CIA, War & Covert Operations
Church Committee reports on the CIA's journalists, books, and files on Americans
About 50 journalists, well over 1,000 books, the CHAOS program, and the FBI's COINTELPRO.
- September 19, 1976CIA, War & Covert Operations
An Iranian F-4 loses its instruments and its weapons panel closing on an object over Tehran; the DIA rates the report confirmed and of major significance
The defense attaché's report of September 23; visual sightings confirmed by radar, electromagnetic effects on three aircraft.
- 1977August 3, 1977CIA, War & Covert Operations
Senate hearing: 149 subprojects, 80 institutions, unwitting subjects
Reconstructed from the invoices.
- 1981January 13, 1981CIA, War & Covert Operations
An Air Force deputy base commander reports unexplained lights and a metallic triangular object in Rendlesham Forest
Three depressions, radiation readings, a red light that broke into five white objects; no explanation offered.
- 1986November 1986CIA, War & Covert Operations
Iran-Contra revealed; officials deceive Congress and withhold documents
The independent counsel's findings.
- 1987March 5, 1987CIA, War & Covert Operations
The FAA releases its file on Japan Air Lines flight 1628 and says it is unable to confirm the event
The second radar target a split return from the 747; no further investigation.
- 1992December 24, 1992CIA, War & Covert Operations
Six Iran-Contra pardons twelve days before Weinberger's trial
Walsh: the cover-up has now been completed.
- 1995July 28, 1995CIA, War & Covert Operations
GAO finds the Roswell field's outgoing messages for 1946 to 1949 were destroyed without a record of who did it or under what authority
The search Rep. Steven Schiff asked for; the Air Force's own reports found a Mogul balloon and, later, test dummies.
- 19971997CIA, War & Covert Operations
The CIA writes that over half of the UFO reports of the late 1950s and 1960s were its own U-2 and OXCART flights, covered by misleading Air Force explanations
Gerald Haines in Studies in Intelligence: ice crystals and temperature inversions.
- 1999April 28, 1999CIA, War & Covert Operations
House ties 213 to 213 on the Kosovo air war; bombing continues
78 days without authorization.
- 2000January 2000CIA, War & Covert Operations
CIA learns a hijacker holds a U.S. visa and does not tell the FBI
The report an FBI agent drafted at the agency's bin Laden unit was held. Mihdhar and Hazmi arrived in Los Angeles on January 15.
Stories (5)
- 1960 to 1975The 1975 Church Committee Report on CIA Plots to Assassinate Foreign LeadersIn 1975 a Senate committee established from the government's own records that officers of the United States had plotted to kill the leader of Cuba from 1960 to 1965, using American organized crime figures among others, and had sent poison to the Congo to kill Patrice Lumumba, and had been involved with the people who killed the leaders of the Dominican Republic, South Vietnam, and Chile's army. It found that no foreign leader died as a direct result of a plot the United States began. It also found that the chain of command was so ambiguous that it is difficult to be certain at what levels assassination activity was known and authorized, which was the point of the arrangement. It said assassination should be rejected as a tool of foreign policy and asked for a law. Congress never passed one.CIA, War & Covert Operations
- 1953 to 1977CIA Project MKULTRA: Unwitting LSD Experiments, the Death of Frank Olson, and Destroyed RecordsFrom 1953 to 1964 the CIA ran a program of research into drugs and behavioral modification that gave LSD and other substances to Americans who did not know they were taking them. It ran 149 subprojects through 80 institutions, 44 of them colleges and universities, 12 of them hospitals, and three of them prisons, using 185 outside researchers, many of whom did not know who was paying. In 1953 a scientist from the Army's laboratory at Fort Detrick, Frank Olson, was given LSD without his knowledge at a meeting the agency convened and died about a week later in a fall from a New York hotel window. In 1973 the director of the CIA ordered the program's records destroyed. What Congress learned in 1977 came from seven boxes of financial records the destruction had missed.CIA, War & Covert Operations
- 1975 to 1989Former CIA Task Force Chief John Stockwell on Covert Wars, Coups, and PerjuryJohn Stockwell ran the CIA's Angola task force in 1975, quit, wrote a book in 1978, and was sued by the agency, which took the book's royalties. In a lecture at American University in 1989 he went through MKUltra, the Church Committee's findings on journalists and books, COINTELPRO, the drug trade in every theater the agency worked in, and the perjury he took part in over Angola. He asked his audience not to take his word for any of it and gave them the books to read. He died in June 2026 at 88.CIA, War & Covert Operations
- 1985 to 1994The Iran-Contra Affair: Illegal Arms Sales, Shredded Documents, and the 1992 Christmas Eve PardonsIn 1985 and 1986 the Reagan administration sold arms to Iran, which the government's own policy forbade, and used the money to arm the contras in Nicaragua, which Congress had forbidden by law. When it came out in November 1986, officials of the administration deliberately deceived the Congress and the public about what they had known and done, and withheld the documents that showed it. An independent counsel spent seven years on it. Fourteen people were charged and eleven convicted; the two most senior convictions were overturned because Congress had immunized their testimony; and on December 24, 1992 the president pardoned six of the rest, twelve days before the former defense secretary's trial. The counsel's conclusion was that the cover-up had been completed by the pardon.CIA, War & Covert Operations
- 2000 to 2025What the CIA Knew About Two 9/11 Hijackers Before the Attacks—and Hid from the FBIIn January 2000 the CIA knew that Khalid al-Mihdhar, an al-Qaeda operative on his way to a meeting in Malaysia, held a visa to enter the United States. An FBI agent assigned to the CIA's bin Laden unit drafted a report to tell his own agency and was told not to send it. Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi lived openly in San Diego for more than a year. A former FBI agent assigned to the unit says the agency was trying to recruit them. The public record shows what was withheld; the reason is still disputed.CIA, War & Covert Operations