CIA Assassination Plots: The Church Committee Report 50 Years Later

Release of Senate Report on CIA Efforts to Assassinate Foreign Leaders Caused Major Scandal; Prompted New Legal Restraints on Targeted U.S. Murders

Assassinations Report Remains Relevant as U.S. Targets Venezuelan Leader

https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/intelligence/2025-11-20/cia-assassination-plots-church-committee-report-50-years

20.11.2025

Edited by Peter Kornbluh

Source:https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/intelligence/2025-11-20/cia-assassination-plots-church-committee-report-50-years

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.

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 50th anniversary of the release of the assassinations report comes as the Trump administration is openly threatening to kill Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and following a series of deadly attacks by the Pentagon 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.

The Church Committee 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. Among other things, the Committee found that assassination was “incompatible with American principles, international order, and morality” and said it “should be rejected as a tool of foreign policy.”

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 barring the practice.

“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.”