Covert Action in Chile: The Significance of the Church Committee Report 50 Years Later

Washington D.C. December 4, 2025 -  Fifty years ago today, Senator Frank Church convened the first public congressional hearing ever held on CIA covert operations to overthrow a foreign government, focusing on the case of Chile. His Senate Select Committee was taking this “unusual step,” Church explained, “because the committee believes the American people must know and be able to judge what was undertaken by their government in Chile. The nature and extent of the American role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Chilean government,” noted the Idaho Democrat, “are matters for deep and continuing public concern. This record must be set straight.”

Simultaneously, Church’s Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities released its groundbreaking and still relevant report, “Covert Action in Chile, 1963-1973.” Based on access to Top Secret CIA operational records, the unprecedented 62-page case study revealed that “covert United States involvement in Chile in the decade between 1963 and 1973 was extensive and continuous,” with the intent of blocking Socialist leader Salvador Allende from being elected president and, after he was elected, destabilizing his ability to govern. In considering future guidelines for covert operations, the report concluded that, “Given the costs of covert action, it should be resorted to only to counter severe threats to the national security of the United States. It is far from clear that that was the case in Chile.”

On the 50th anniversary of the hearing and the release of the report, the National Security Archive is posting a selection of previously declassified documents that record the efforts of the Ford administration to obstruct the Church Committee investigation and prevent an open hearing on the CIA’s role in overthrowing the Allende government. The congressional efforts 50 years ago fostered a full debate over the propriety of clandestine regime change efforts, and the Committee’s recommendations to tightly restrict such activities remain relevant today, as President Trump has authorized the CIA to engage in covert operations in Venezuela with the goal of deposing the government of Nicolas Maduro.

Stonewalling the Committee

The documents posted today reflect the Ford administration’s strategic stonewalling of the Senate committee as well as a special committee in the House led by Congressman Otis Pike (D-NY). When the congressional investigators sought State Department cables dating between 1964 and 1970, Kissinger instructed his aides to say “No,” according to a secret transcript of a July 14, 1975, staff meeting. “You shift it to the White House and let the White House refuse it—and I’ll see to it that the White House refuses it,” he instructed. For months, the White House, CIA and State Department delayed their response to multiple Church Committee requests claiming to be short staffed. In truth, as CIA director William Colby later admitted, “the White House told us not to cooperate. They just didn’t want to turn over documents.”

Eventually, the CIA came to an agreement with the Church Committee to allow investigators to review Top Secret CIA documents, in return for advance access to the Committee’s reports. But the White House continued to claim “Executive privilege” over critical NSC and White House memos and meeting summaries. Revealing documents related to a pivotal November 6, 1970, NSC meeting three days after Salvador Allende’s inauguration were withheld, including the handwritten meeting notes of CIA Director Richard Helms, who recorded President Nixon’s statement during the NSC meeting (“If there is a way to bring A[llende] down, we should do it”) and Henry Kissinger’s detailed explanation to President Nixon about why the U.S. needed to undermine the Chilean president. Kissinger also concealed from the Committee the existence of his “telcons”—transcripts of his many phone conversations with Helms, Nixon and other U.S. officials that would have revealed his role as the chief architect of U.S. efforts to block Allende from taking office and successfully governing. The CIA withheld key records from the Committee that would have revealed payments of $35,000 in “hush money” to the assassins of the pro-Constitution commander of the Chilean armed forces, General Rene Schneider, to help them flee the country after the murder and assure a cover-up of the CIA’s role in the shocking political crime.

As the Church Committee inquiry culminated in the fall of 1975, the Ford White House took further steps to obstruct its work and conceal the controversial covert history the Senate investigation had uncovered. On October 31, 1975, Ford sent a letter to the Church Committee members demanding that their pending report on “Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders” remain classified to protect U.S. national security; on November 1, Ford signed a Presidential decision memorandum (Document 2) to oppose Senator Church’s plan to hold an unprecedented public hearing on covert operations in Chile—the first of its kind. According to the Ford White House and the CIA, such a hearing would “establish a precedent that would be seized on by the Congress in the future to hold additional public hearings on covert action,” and “would have a shattering effect on the willingness of foreign political parties and individuals to cooperate with the U.S. in the future on such operations.”

Facing an impasse with the Church Committee, on November 5, CIA director William Colby invited Church and Senator Charles Mathias (R-MD) to an “informal dinner” to work on some sort of cooperative compromise. Among other points, Colby pushed for the Committee to agree to work with the CIA to delete names of CIA agents, foreign officials, and organizations, and agree that, besides Chile, “no other covert action would be made the subject of a public hearing or public report.” The proposed compromise, according to a November 7, 1975, memo drafted by Colby’s special counsel, Mitchell Rogovin, “limits the exposure of covert action to one country,” Chile. Four other Church Committee case histories—on Congo, Indonesia, Laos and one other country that remains censored in the documents—would remain secret.

Release of the Chile Report

To its credit, the Church Committee managed to circumvent these concerted executive branch roadblocks. On November 20, 1975, the Committee released its detailed and sensational report on the CIA’s assassination plots against foreign leaders like Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba and Gen. Schneider in Chile; on December 4, Senator Church released the staff case study, “Covert Action in Chile, 1963-1973,” lifting the shroud of secrecy on a decade-long effort to use clandestine operations to manipulate the politics of a small Latin American nation and foster “a coup climate” to impede Allende’s democratic election, his inauguration, and the ability of his government to succeed. The two-day hearing on Chile, according to Archive analyst Peter Kornbluh, “established a historic marker in congressional efforts to hold the CIA accountable to the principles and values of the American public.”

The two lead investigators and drafters of the staff report on Chile, Gregory Treverton and Karl Inderfurth, both testified on the opening day of the hearing. Inderfurth’s presentation focused on the CIA’s operational efforts to influence Chile’s political trajectory between 1963 and 1973; Treverton focused on executive branch decision-making. During his testimony, Treverton read aloud, for the first time, President Nixon’s September 15, 1970, order to CIA director Richard Helms to prevent Allende’s inauguration by fomenting a preemptive coup. As part of its report, the Church Committee released Helms’ handwritten notes, which became the most iconic document on CIA covert operations in Chile.

“In preparation for the public hearing on covert action in Chile,” recalled Treverton 50 years later, “we spent several long days in a secured space at CIA headquarters with our CIA colleagues, going through the report line-by-line. Our ostensible purpose was protecting sources and methods, and we did that, sometimes removing the names of honorable Chileans who had worked with the CIA. But we also argued about substance. In the end, what was striking to me, through the long days, was that we were establishing the principle that the highly classified CIA and other documents from which we worked were government documents, not just the Executive Branch’s. The Congress would have access to them more or less on its own terms – though of course protecting sources and methods. It was exciting through the fatigue. It seemed to me [to be] breaking new constitutional ground.”

For Inderfurth, the evidence uncovered in the Church Committee’s groundbreaking investigation remains relevant to the current CIA covert operations President Trump has authorized in Venezuela. “Before proceeding,” he recommends, “the president and his aides should look at the Church Committee’s report on ‘Covert Action in Chile.’ Things did not work out well, most importantly for the Chileans who lived under the brutal dictatorship of General Pinochet for almost two decades. But also, for the reputation of the United States as a ‘beacon of democracy.’”