United States President's Commission on CIA Activities within the United States

Swearing-in of the Rockefeller Commission in 1975: Nelson A. Rockefeller, Lyman L. Lemnitzer, Ronald Reagan, Edgar F. Shannon, Jr., David W. Belin, John T. Connor, C. Douglas Dillon, Erwin N. Griswold, and Lane Kirkland

The United States President's Commission on CIA Activities within the United States was set up under President Gerald Ford in 1975 to investigate the activities of the Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence agencies within the United States. The commission was led by the Vice President, Nelson Rockefeller, and is sometimes referred to as the Rockefeller Commission.

The commission was created in response to a December 1974 report in The New York Times that the CIA had conducted illegal domestic activities, including experiments on U.S. citizens, during the 1960s. The commission issued a single report in 1975, touching upon certain CIA abuses including mail opening and surveillance of domestic dissident groups. It publicized Project MKULTRA, a CIA mind control study.

It also studied issues relating to the John F. Kennedy assassination, specifically the head snap as seen in the Zapruder film (first shown on television in 1975), and the possible presence of E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis in Dallas, Texas.^[1]

A larger investigation, the Church Committee, was set up on 27 January 1975 by the U.S. Senate. The Nedzi Committee was created in the U.S. Congress on 19 February 1975. It was replaced by the Pike Committee five months later.

See also

• Church Committee
• COINTELPRO
• Family Jewels (Central Intelligence Agency)
• Human experimentation in the United States
• Nedzi Committee
• Pike Committee
• Plausible denial
• Project MKULTRA
• Hughes–Ryan Act
• Werner Spitz

Notes

Books

• Lee, Martin A. Shlain, Bruce. 1992. Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond. Grove Press. ISBN 0-8021-3062-3.

References

• Kitts, Kenneth (2006). "Chapter 3, The Politics of Spying: The Rockefeller Commission and the CIA". Presidential Commissions & National Security: The Politics of Damage Control. Boulder, Colo: Lynne Rienner Publishers. ISBN 978-1-58826-404-6. 

External links

• Rockefeller Commission Report – the full text of the report, as scans
• Another version of the Rockefeller Commission Report including interview transcripts, memos, correspondence and other Commission files released under the JFK Records Act.
• The Pike Committee Investigations and the CIA