40 Committee
U.S. National Security Council covert-action oversight subcommittee (1970–1976)
Not to be confused with
Majestic 12
.
The 40 Committee was the Nixon-administration designation of the National Security Council (NSC) subcommittee that reviewed and approved CIA covert operations. It was established on 17 February 1970, when President Nixon approved National Security Decision Memorandum 40, superseding NSC 5412/2 and replacing the 303 Committee; Henry Kissinger, then National Security Advisor, explained that "in view of recent mention of the 303 Committee in the public media, the directive changes the committee name" to match the new memorandum number.
Function and operations
The 40 Committee carried forward the covert-action approval charter of its predecessors and was chaired by Kissinger, who was "charged with overseeing all covert operations on Nixon's behalf." Its members were the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Director of Central Intelligence, reporting through the NSC to the President. The committee is most closely associated with the U.S. covert effort against the government of Salvador Allende in Chile, including the funding decisions and the so-called "Track I" actions examined in detail by the Church Committee and documented in the records held by the National Security Archive. In practice Nixon and Kissinger kept the committee "out of the loop on almost all the major and sensitive decisions," and it met progressively less often, convening only once in 1972.
The 40 Committee was the successor of the 303 Committee (and, earlier, the 5412 Committee) and was itself replaced on 18 February 1976 by the Operations Advisory Group under President Gerald Ford's Executive Order 11905; comparable bodies under Carter (the Special Coordination Committee) and Reagan (the National Security Planning Group) continued the same oversight function under new names.
Alleged role in the UFO cover-up
In William Cooper's account, the 40 Committee was one more public alias for the secret committee he said governed the alien presence — Majesty Twelve, or MJ-12. He wrote that "under Nixon, Ford, and Carter it was called the 40 Committee," part of a sequence in which "only the name changed." The full renaming theory is set out in the account of the alleged Majestic 12 committee.
The claim is uncorroborated outside Cooper's own testimony. The Church Committee's investigation, the surviving 40 Committee minutes, and the Chile record describe a body whose documented preoccupations were paramilitary and political covert action, not recovered craft or alien affairs; what is independently verifiable is only the underlying renaming pattern Cooper built upon.
See also
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