---
title: Keeping an Eye on the Spies
date: 2023-06-09T14:24:00-04:00
author: University of Maryland
canonical_url: "https://today.umd.edu/keeping-an-eye-on-the-spies"
section: Articles
---
# Keeping an Eye on the Spies

*June 9, 2023* — by [Chris Carroll](/author/chris-carroll)


> Journalism Professor’s Book Recounts Senator’s 1970s Campaign to Rein in Intel Agencies

*Church Hearing E115 HD 1920x1080 — U.S. Sen. Frank Church displays the CIA's "heart attack gun," designed to fire a dart of frozen shellfish toxins for use in undetectable assassinations, during a September 1975 hearing of the Church Committee, which investigated U.S. intelligence agency abuses.*

Teaming up with Vegas mobsters to assassinate foreign leaders or getting unwitting people (and dogs) really, really high in mind control experiments sound like TV-ready hijinks, but when these and darker plots were being carried out by secretive, unaccountable government agencies, they may have posed an insidious threat to our system of government.

That belief animated U.S. Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho), the subject of a new book, “The Last Honest Man: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys— and One Senator's Fight to Save Democracy," by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist James Risen, a visiting professor of journalism, with his son, Thomas Risen. It debuted last month on The New York Times’ best sellers list.



*Last Honest man bookcover*




**Topics:** [Research](https://today.umd.edu/tags/research)


**Tags:** [Books](https://today.umd.edu/topic/books), [Research](https://today.umd.edu/topic/research)


**Units:** [Philip Merrill College of Journalism](https://today.umd.edu/topic/philip-merrill-college-journalism)