CIA Assassination Plots: The Church Committee Report 50 Years Later

Washington D.C., November 20, 2025 - Fifty years ago today, a special Senate Committee led by Idaho Senator Frank Church lifted the veil of secrecy on the clandestine efforts of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to target specific foreign leaders for assassination. The Church Committee overcame intense pressure from the Gerald Ford White House to withhold publication of the report, which exposed CIA operations to “neutralize” leaders such as Fidel Castro in Cuba, Patrice Lumumba in Congo, and General Rene Schneider in Chile, and generated a major scandal over the ethics of U.S. foreign policy and the compatibility of unaccountable covert operations with a democratic society.

“The evidence establishes that the United States was implicated in several assassination plots,” states the introduction of the 285-page report, officially titled Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders. “The Committee believes that, short of war, assassination is incompatible with American principles, international order, and morality. It should be rejected as a tool of foreign policy.” 

The 50th anniversary of the release of the assassinations report comes as the Trump administration is openly threatening to kill Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro. According to media reports, the White House Office of Legal Counsel is developing a legal argument alleging that Maduro is a “Narco terrorist” because he is associated with a vague criminal network called the Cartel de los Soles and is therefore a legitimate target for elimination. The State Department announced that on November 25 it will officially designate the Cartel as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), giving the U.S. legal latitude to strike down alleged members of the group.

The Trump administration and the Pentagon have used similar designations to justify the series of deadly attacks on “unlawful combatants” aboard small boats in the Caribbean that were allegedly carrying drugs. Over the last two months, the U.S. military has targeted and killed more than 80 crew members aboard the vessels using drones and Hellfire missiles.

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Church Committee report, the National Security Archive is posting a small selection of documents on efforts by the Ford Administration to keep the report secret and Senator Church’s commitment to ensuring that the American public would learn what the CIA was doing in their name but without their knowledge. These include records about CIA director William Colby’s pressure on President Ford to block publication of the report and the failed White House effort to persuade Church not to do so. The records are drawn from a comprehensive Digital National Security Archive collection on the CIA scandals in 1975 compiled and edited by John Prados and Arturo Jimenez-Bacardi.

The report detailed an array of covert efforts to assassinate foreign leaders, including plots to kill Fidel Castro with toxic cigars, exploding seashells, and hypodermic needles disguised as ballpoint pens, and the ensuing scandal was one of several the CIA faced for its misconduct in the mid-1970s. Officially called the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, the Church Committee issued additional reports on the CIA’s covert efforts to destabilize the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende and a set of volumes detailing the hidden history of the intelligence community, including the CIA, the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

The impact of the Alleged Assassination Plots report was immediate and consequential. Public outrage forced the CIA and the White House to retreat on the use of assassination as a tool of covert operations. In response to the report, on February 18, 1976, President Ford signed Executive Order 11905, which stated: “No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.” Successive presidents have issued similar executive orders. 

In a short epilogue to the report, the Church Committee determined that the targeted assassination of foreign leaders contradicted the principles of the United States as a nation. “The Committee does not believe that the acts which it has examined represent the real American character,” the report concluded. “We regard the assassination plots as aberrations.”

“Despite our distaste for what we have seen, we have great faith in this country. The story is sad, but this country has the strength to hear the story and to learn from it. We must remain a people who confront our mistakes and resolve not to repeat them.”

“Senator Church’s insistence on publishing the assassinations report effectively ended officially sanctioned murder of foreign leaders as a policy tool for nearly half a century,” said National Security Archive senior analyst Peter Kornbluh. “Now, the Trump administration seems ready to return to the dark days of CIA assassination plots and extrajudicial executions.”