Senator Church Calls CIA “Rogue Elephant”
Senator Frank Church (D–Utah), chair of the Church Committee, created on January 27, 1975, to investigate abuses by the intelligence agencies (the FBI, CIA, NSA), on this day, described the CIA as a “rogue elephant.”
The label referred to his belief that past covert CIA activities had been secret and illegal, and done without proper presidential authority. Most analysts today, however, disagree with that interpretation, and Senator Church himself later repudiated it. The evidence on CIA practices clearly indicates that most, but not necessarily all, covert CIA operations were known to and in many cases authorized by the president then in power.
The best example is the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 which had early approval from President Dwight Eisenhower and was well known to President John Kennedy and members of this administration. After the embarrassing failure of the invasion, President Kennedy acting largely through his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, pressed hard for covert CIA actions against Cuba and Fidel Castro.
Learn more about the Church and Pike Committee investigations: Kathryn Olmstead, Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI (1996)
Learn more about CIA misdeeds: Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (2008)
Read the reports of the Church Committee: http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/contents/church/contents_church_reports.htm
Read the biography of the CIA’s notorious spymaster, James Jesus Angleton: Jefferson Morley, The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton (2017)