In 1978, the director of the CIA warned that excessive, impulsive secrecy was a danger — not only to the public’s right to know, but to the agency’s ability to keep the important secrets. 40 years later, that lesson still needs repeating.

A memo uncovered in the Central Intelligence Agency’s declassified archives shows that during his time at the CIA’s Office of Legislative Council, current Attorney General William P. Barr drafted letters calling for the end of the moratorium on destroying records imposed on the Agency ahead of the Church Committee hearings.

On the 48th anniversary of the break-in at the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Media, Pennsylvania field office, reporter Betty Medsger reflects on the role of whistleblowers in the pursuit of truth and government transparency.

On Valentine’s Day eve 1976, the Philadelphia Inquirer published a column by Bob Lancaster, in which the veteran humorist bemoans having the flu. In a self-described malaise, Lancaster ponders what a Valentine’s Day card would look like written in a such a sour state, and then - capturing the post-Church Committee zeitgeist - pens one for our “secret admirers” at the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Lancaster would no doubt be delighted to know that his sweethearts at the CIA were so smitten by his sentiment that they kept a copy, and it remained classified for just shy of 30 years.

Documents obtained by MuckRock reveal both what triggered the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s espionage investigation of The Village Voice, and what caused it to expand to include the Reporter’s Committee for Freedom of the Press.

The Church Committee investigated and exposed some of the largest and most significant scandals in American history, to the point that it was felt that the very existence of the Central Intelligence Agency was threatened. However, a recent FOIA request to the Federal Bureau of Investigation revealed over 18,000 pages that had never been made public - and with your help, we can sue for their release.

A State Department cable in the Central Intelligence Agency’s Kissinger archive claims that pending revelations from the Church Committee would rock the Netherlands, potentially forcing it to leave NATO. Even more drastically, the memo warned that this scandal could lead to “the restructuring of the Dutch political system.”

Mykola Lebed was sentenced to death in Poland in 1934. He died in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1998.

By various accounts, he was an assassin, a freedom fighter, a terrorist, a hero, a villain, a prisoner, a refugee, a Nazi collaborator, a Nazi target, a writer, and a war criminal. To the Central Intelligence Agency, which bankrolled his activities for close to half a century, he was known as “Uncle Louie.”

The human experience is complex, language can only do so much to convey its intricacies, and in some situations, just what would and wouldn’t be considered unforgivable can be determined by just one word. Few government entities understood this better than a post-Church Committee Central Intelligence Agency.

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.