Richard Cheney and the Deletion of CIA Assassination Plans

By Harlan Pryce ·

Handwritten edits by a White House chief of staff scrubbed the Rockefeller Commission's findings on foreign assassinations and domestic spying before the report reached the president.

The American public was told that the excesses of the intelligence community were being purged, while the very men tasked with the cleanup were busy erasing the evidence. The cost was a curated truth: a report that traded the exposure of systemic executive illegality for a few carefully chosen admissions of administrative error.

What survives in the record is a curated archival description of the documents rather than the original pages, but the outline of the intervention is stark. In June 1975, Richard Cheney, then the White House Chief of Staff who would later become the most powerful vice president in the history of the United States, took a pen to the draft of the Rockefeller Commission report. The commission, ordained by President Gerald Ford to investigate the CIA's activities within the United States and led by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, was intended to be a corrective. Instead, it became a canvas for Cheney's edits.

"Improper" vs Unlawful

The record shows a calculated semantic shift designed to shield the CIA—the civilian foreign intelligence service tasked with covert operations—from the legal consequences of its domestic reach. Where the original Rockefeller Commission text concluded that several CIA activities, including domestic spying, were "unlawful," the White House edits watered down these judgments to describe the actions as merely "improper."

This is not a matter of stylistic preference; it is a matter of jurisdiction. "Unlawful" implies a crime and a requirement for prosecution; "improper" implies a breach of etiquette or a lapse in judgment. The pattern suggests a deliberate effort to move the conversation from the courtroom to the HR office. The record further notes that in cases where the government kept files on political dissenters, the Commission had flatly judged the action improper. Cheney's revisions shifted this narrative, creating the impression that these records were "inadvertently created by the application of certain inappropriate 'standards.'"

If this file is shaped the way it looks, the desk's reading is that the framing of political dissenter lists as "inadvertent" was designed to shift the legal narrative from intentional political targeting to administrative incompetence. It is far easier to forgive a clumsy clerk than a calculating spy.

Document imagery from nsarchive.gwu.edu From the files: nsarchive.gwu.edu

The Strategic Concession

There is one instance where the pen of the White House Chief of Staff grew sharper. In the section concerning CIA drug experiments, the Cheney edit inserted more critical language, describing the experiments as "illegal."

On the surface, this looks like a commitment to the truth. In the context of the other deletions, it looks like a decoy. The desk's reading is that the admission of "illegal" drug experiments was a strategic concession used to satisfy the demand for a "smoking gun" while protecting the high-utility domestic surveillance infrastructure. By sacrificing the drug experiments—a horror that, while visceral, did not threaten the ongoing operational capabilities of the state—Cheney provided the public with a villain while safeguarding the machinery of the surveillance state.

Blinding the Inspector General

Beyond the adjectives, the White House targeted the mechanisms of internal accountability. The record establishes that CIA officers already had instructions to take orders they found improper directly to the director. The Rockefeller Commission sought to strengthen this by adding the agency inspector general—the internal oversight officer responsible for reporting waste, fraud, and abuse—as a potential adjudicator for such complaints.

White House editors excised this recourse. The record shows they "removed from the recommendation any recourse to the IG" and narrowed the scope so that employees could only report orders that came from "outside of established channels."

This is the most damaging edit in the file. By removing the inspector general as a point of appeal, the White House did more than protect the CIA; it insulated the chain of command from internal dissent. The pattern suggests that the removal of the Inspector General as a recourse was an effort to permanently blind the Executive's own oversight mechanisms to internal dissent regarding unlawful orders. It ensured that the only way to report a crime was to follow the very channels that may have ordered it.

The Erasure of the Assassins

The most sweeping intervention was not a change in wording, but a total deletion. The report's entire treatment of "Alleged Plans to Assassinate Certain Foreign Leaders" was removed. In its place, the White House inserted a brief text asserting that the commission "had not had the time to cover the subject."

This is a transparent falsehood. The record explicitly contrasts this claim with other documents that show the subject was indeed addressed. The excuse of a ticking clock is the oldest trick in the bureaucrat's handbook, used here to excise a narrative that likely would have been catastrophic for the administration.

The desk's reading is that the "lack of time" justification masks findings that implicated the Executive branch's direct authorization of assassinations, rather than just Agency overreach. To admit that the CIA acted alone is a failure of management; to admit that the White House ordered the hits is a constitutional crisis.

This document represents a professional scrubbing operation. By simultaneously deleting the assassination analysis and restricting how employees could report improper orders, the White House decoupled the CIA's most violent foreign programs from its domestic operations before the final findings ever reached the president's desk. Richard Cheney did not just edit a report; he managed the perimeter of the truth.

If a full and unedited release of the Rockefeller Commission's original drafts were to occur, the desk's reading is that it would show a direct line of authorization from the Oval Office to the targets of the Agency's assassination plots. The still-withheld pages are protecting not the CIA's secrets, but the Executive's fingerprints. The pattern established here—the watering down of "unlawful" to "improper" and the strategic sacrifice of minor scandals to hide systemic crimes—became the blueprint for how the American intelligence community manages its mistakes for the next fifty years. The public paid for this scrubbing with their trust, and the agency paid for it with a license to continue in the dark.

Sources

  1. White House, Richard Cheney, White House Chief of Staff, Extracts of Handwritten Comments on a Draft of the Report to the President on the Commission on CIA Activities within the United States, c. June 1975. — National Security Archive (GWU)
  2. Document PDF (White House, Richard Cheney, White House Chief of Staff, Extracts of Handwritten Comments on a Draft of the Report to the President on the Commission on CIA Activities within the United States, c. June 1975.)
  3. Background: United States President's Commission on CIA Activities within the United States — Wikipedia