Foreword / Beverly Gage
Preface: the year of intelligence at fifty
A note on the text
Glossary of agencies, programs, and organizations
Dramatis Personae
Part I: Intelligence activities and the rights of Americans. Introduction ; COINTELPRO: the FBI's covert action programs against American citizens ; Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., case study ; Warrantless FBI electronic surveillance ; Warrantless surreptitious entries: FBI "black bag" break-ins and microphone installations ; CIA intelligence collection about Americans: CHAOS and the office of security
Part II: Foreign and military intelligence. Introduction ; Alleged assassination plots involving foreign leaders ; Testing use of chemical and biological agents by the intelligence community ; National security agency surveillance affecting Americans
Part III: Recommendations. Committee Recommendations

"After fifty years, this --released in a single volume for the first time--is still the most accurate account of US government spying on its own citizens. Fifty years ago, a government investigation led by US senator Frank Church uncovered some of the darkest state secrets of the twentieth century. The Church Committee confirmed the nation's worst fears about the unchecked power of its intelligence agencies: at the FBI, surveillance campaigns against civil rights leaders and clandestine attempts to disrupt antiwar protests; at the CIA, assassination plots against foreign heads of state, experiments with toxic substances and illegal drugs, and covert partnerships with the Mafia. The Church Committee's findings were so explosive that key members found themselves on the watch lists of the very government agencies they were investigating. Three witnesses who cooperated with the inquiry were murdered. Amid the creep of digital surveillance and the upheavals of social protest, this volume, containing revelations of the Church Committee investigation, sheds light on some of today's most urgent concerns"