Otis Grey Pike died on January 20, 2014. His death was almost unnoticed. Pike was a nine-term Democratic Congressman from New York... and the bane of the NSA.
The 1976 report of the Church Committee, which exposed the illegal activities of the CIA, is well known. We often see calls for a similar investigation now. Far less-known is the parallel House of Representatives investigation of the Pike Committee, chaired by Otis Pike. This is a pity, because the Pike Committee investigation was in many ways more hard-hitting than the Church Report; so much so that it never issued a final report due to Congressional opposition.
Pandodaily has a thorough review of Pike's life and his committee's investigation into the abuses and overreach of the spies. I have nothing to add to it really; I simply want to bring Pike to the attention of DKos. The pandodaily article was cited by Kossack anyname last night in the Overnight News Digest, and Pike's death was noted at the time by jncca, but Pike deserves more attention than he's received. More than Church, he truly got under the skin of the intelligence community.
The pandodaily article aptly highlights this:
“Pike will pay for this, you wait and see—we’ll destroy him for this.” —Mitchell Rogovin, CIA special counsel, 1976.
I'll let the article speak for itself, but this seems eerily prescient:
It was Pike’s committee that got the first ever admission—from CIA director William Colby—that the NSA was routinely tapping Americans’ phone calls. Days after that stunning confession, Pike succeeded in getting the head of the NSA, Lew Allen Jr., to testify in public before his committee—the first time in history that an NSA chief publicly testified. It was the first time that the NSA publicly maintained that it was legally entitled to wiretap Americans’ communications overseas, in spite of the 1934 Communications Act and other legal restrictions placed on other intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
I don't want to run afoul of fair use, so one more example will have to suffice:
Pike ordered the NSA to produce its “charter” document, National Security Council Intelligence Directive No. 6. The Pentagon’s intelligence czar, Albert Hall, appeared before the Pike Committee that day—but without the classified NSA charter. Hall reminded Pike that the Ford White House had offered to show the NSA charter document to Pike’s committee just as it had done with Church’s Senate Committee members, who had agreed to merely view the charter at a government location outside of Congress, without entering the secret document into the Senate record. Officially, publicly, it still didn’t exist. Pike refused to accept that:
“You’re talking about the document that set up the entire N.S.A., it’s one which all members [of Congress] are entitled to see without shuttling back and forth downtown to look at.”
The whole article is well worth reading, and Otis Pike deserves commemoration and gratitude.
The more things change... Who is today's Pike or today's Church?
Rest in Peace, Mr. Pike.