Forty years ago, the CIA was prohibited from engaging in assassinations - again

Forty years ago, the CIA was prohibited from engaging in assassinations - again

Memos in CREST offer a look at the Agency reaction to President Carter’s E.O. 12036

Written by
Edited by JPat Brown

Forty years ago - in the aftermath of a very public American reckoning with the nation’s Intelligence Community that featured the Watergate scandal, the Church and Pike Committees, and the Rockefeller Commission - President Jimmy Carter signed Executive Order 12036 on January 24th, 1978, placing additional restrictions on the Central Intelligence Agency’s ability to operate in the United States …

and further prohibiting the Agency from committing assassinations …

which had also been a part of President Gerald Ford’s E.O. 11905 two years earlier.

The order set up the National Foreign Intelligence Board, which still exists …

as well as the National Intelligence Tasking Center.

CIA’s CREST archive contains a collection of notes and memorandums related to CIA’s negotiations with the Executive prior to the Order, in addition to materials related to the implementation of its details.

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