Central Intelligence Agency

The CIA Headquarters

The Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA is an intelligence-gathering agency in the United States government. As the U.S.'s primary intelligence agency, it is responsible for obtaining and analyzing information about foreign governments, corporations, entities, and persons, and reporting such information to the branches of the U.S. government.

It is also involved in covert espionage and paramilitary operations in support of its mission to protect the national security of the United States.

Based in Langley, Virginia, the CIA is a widespread organization spanning the globe.

The CIA Seal

The CIA and Congressional Committees

The CIA often is requested by Congressional Committees to both supply information relating to the security and defense of the nation, and to evaluate information that has otherwise come to the attention of the Committees. This is particularly true of the Foreign Relations and the Intelligence committees of Congress. The following is an example of the process from Committee reception of information, referral to the CIA for evaluation and verification, CIA input resulting in a Committee report, and Committee action based on the verified information:

History

OSS in World War II

In 1941 President Franklin D. Roosevelt was relying on intelligence information provided by British intelligence (and slanted by them to favor their position.) In 1941 he created the OSS Office of Strategic Services, which was the first independent US intelligence agency. After the war the functions of the OSS were split between the Departments of State and War.

CIA established 1947

In September 1947, the National Security Act of 1947 established both the "National Security Council" and the Central Intelligence Agency. Americans, still mesmerized by the intelligence failure at Pearl Harbor, welcomed the new spy agency because it seemed to promise the nation would always stay on alert. The CIA's Ivy League intellectuals and scions of high society contrasted sharply with the Pentagon brass; an adversarial relationship was born that still sours relations between the two. The CIA's budget was minuscule ($5 million) until NSC-68 in 1950 provided blueprints for an active Cold War.

Congress

From the start isolationists warned of the danger that the CIA might become an out-of-control "American Gestapo" like the Nazi secret police, which could trample American civil liberties On the other side was fear of a nuclear Pearl Harbor without warning.

In general Congress defered to the White House until the 1970s on intelligence matters. Only a few members of a few select committees had any legislative oversight; they kept floor debate and written records to a minimum. Congress supported covert action, even though Roscoe Hillenkoetter (DCI 1947-50) and Walter Bedell Smith (DCI 1950-53), both military men, showed little interest. President Eisenhower, by contrast, demanded more covert activities and Allen Dulles (DCI 1953-61) obliged.

Congressional support for more aggressive policies increased throughout the 1950s. Congress took its oversight responsibilities seriously and even challenged the CIA when an alarming intelligence failure, such as when the CIA failed to predict the Soviet acquisition of the atomic bomb (1950), the Korean War (1953), the Hungarian uprising (1956), or the U-2 downing (1960). Eisenhower discouraged Congressional probes of agency activities, but Dulles, sometimes gained Congressional support by leaking bits of information to influential conngressmen.

Dulles years 1953-51

Allen Dulles, who had been a key OSS operations officer in Switzerland during the Second World War, took over from Smith, at a time where US policy was dominated by a containment policy, with serious discussions of roll-back policies going on, especially in the State Department. Dulles enjoyed a high degree of flexibility, as his brother, John Foster Dulles, was simultaneously Secretary of State. Allen Dulles was head of CIA 1953-61.

Allen Dulles became the trusted advisor on what was going to happen in the world to President Eisenhower and to his brother John Foster Dulles. The CIA gathered information and provided written assessments of the capabilities and intentions of all world leaders. Its regular briefings gave each president the sense that he knew exactly what was happening across the globe. Like ingenious prognosticators through the ages, the CIA's predictions seemed highly explicit yet never could quite be pinned down. They failed to predict any of the major surprises of the postwar era. On the other hand, estimates of the performance of the Soviet economy proved much more accurate than the information Moscow itself possessed, and forecast the failure of that economy in the 1980s.

Numerous covert actions were launched to neutralize perceived Communist expansion in Iran and Guatemala. Some of the largest operations were aimed at Cuba after the coming to power of the communists in early 1960. In 1960-61 the CIA organized Cuban exiles, whose invasion of Cuba failed totally at the Bay of Pigs Invasion.

Dulles devoted 80% of his much enlarged budget ($82 million) to covert (secret) operations to contain Communism. On the other side was the Soviet KGB. The head of the K.G.B.'s first chief directorate, Leonid Shabarshin later explained, "The essence of the KGB's active undertakings was to inflict political and moral damage on our basic opponent, the United States. . . . [so] We compromised political figures, organs of the press, and Americans whose activities were in some way unwelcome [to the Soviets]." The KGB veteran revealed that every "active measure" against the enemies of the Soviet Union abroad was submitted by KGB to the Politburo “and was implemented only with its permission. The results of the action were also reported to the Politburo." Which side performed better remains an open question. CIA money subsidized anti-communist intellectuals and strengthened liberal political parties across Europe and the Third World. Striking low-cost successes early on reinforced the CIA's mastermind image. CIA-supported parties defeated the Communists in Italy and France in the late 1940s. A handful of agents provided assistance to opposition groups which forced anti-American prime ministers out of office in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954) and Chile (1973). CIA counterintelligence tried to neutralize the KGB and other hostile agencies, like the GRU (Soviet military intelligence), Communist East Germany's Stasi and Cuba's DGI.

Guatemala

In Guatamala in 1954 the CIA operation was marked by chronic lapses in security, the failure to plan beyond the operation's first stages, the Agency's poor understanding of the intentions of the Guatemalan Army, the local communist party (the Guatemalan Labor Party), and the government, the hopeless weakness of invasion leader Carlos Castillo Armas's troops, and the failure to make provisions for the possibility of defeat. Just as the entire operation seemed hopeless, and before there were any significant violentattacks on it, the leftist Guatemalan government suddenly, inexplicably collapsed and a pro-American government took over.

Assassinations

The CIA sent hundreds of agents to Vietnam and Laos to build up anticommunist guerrilla groups. The CIA assisted (but did not actually operate) the "Phoenix" program by which South Vietnamese police forces identified and arrested Viet Cong leaders (torturing many and killing several thousand of them). In the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, it planned several assassinations, with Fidel Castro a target of "Operation Mongoose." Castro was never harmed. Indeed, as a hostile Senate committee concluded, the agency did not in fact assassinate anyone. Congress has never passed a law forbidding assassinations, but every president since Ford has issued executive orders that prohibit direct (or indirect) attempts at assassination.

Revival under Reagan

In 1981 President Reagan appointed his campaign manager Bill Casey to run the CIA; Casey, a dynamic veteran of O.S.S. espionage, revived the CIA into a powerful instrument of rollback policy. With nuclear deterrence tying the Kremlin's hands, Casey used the CIA to attack the weak links in the Soviet empire. In Afghanistan, it funded and trained Mujahidin guerrillas who deliberately created "another Vietnam" to weaken the Soviet invaders, and indeed finally did defeat the Soviet invasion. Anti-Soviet operations in Afghanistan and Cambodia received strong support from Congress, but operations in Angola and especially Nicaragua became the focus of intense political controversy. When Congress one year prohibited the CIA from operating in Nicaragua, Reagan's White House exploited a loophole by sending its own staffer, Oliver North, to funnel arms and money to the Contra guerrillas.

=Post 1989

With the end of the Cold War in 1989 and the collapse of Soviet Communism in 1991, intelligence operations became a natural target for budget cutters. Defenders (including ex-CIA head George Bush) argued that absence of a main enemy meant it was necessary to keep watch on many small potential enemies. Critics responded that it was one thing to spy on Soviet intercontinental missile capability, and quite another to figure out how many AK-47 assault rifles were loose in Somalia.

9-11

A major criticism is failure to forestall the 9-11 Attack in 2001 because of three organizational deficiencies: the inability of multiple American intelligence agencies to work together, organizational incentives to take the wrong analytical actions, and resistance to new technologies and ideas. The 9/11 Commission Report identifies failures in the IC as a whole. One problem, for example, was the FBI failing to "connect the dots" by sharing information among its decentralized field offices. The report, however, criticizes both CIA analysis, and impeding their investigation. The CIA Inspector General in 2007 concluded that former DCI George Tenet failed to adequately prepare the agency to deal with the danger posed by Al Qaeda prior to the 9-11 Attack.

Directorate of Science & Technology

The Directorate of Science & Technology was established to research, create, and manage technical collection disciplines and equipment. Many of its innovations were transferred to other intelligence organizations, or, as they became more overt, to the military services. Albert D. "Bud" Wheeler (1963-66) and Carl E. Duckett (1966-76) built the directorate into a strong component of the CIA and then guided it through its golden age of technical innovation. In contrast, decisions by Ruth David (1995-98) contributed, Richelson (2001) argues, to a decline in the importance and status of the directorate as it lost control over key responsibilities, including the analysis of satellite photography.

Richelson (2001) explains the major DS&T's achievements, especially reconnaissance airplanes and a series of increasingly sophisticated surveillance satellites, with cameras that could photograph Soviet bomber bases and missile sites with startling clarity from orbits deep in space. In 1960, the first effective satellite produced coverage of more than one million square miles, surpassing all previous U-2 photography combined. This imagery revealed that the Soviets had far fewer bombers and (later) ICBMs than the Pentagon expected. The worst-case estimates of the U.S. Air Force proved wildly exaggerated, and the myths of the bomber and missile "gaps" were punctured by empirical data.

Soviet estimates

The CIA began systematic estimates of the Soviet economy during Max Millikan's tenure as the founding director of the Office of Research and Reports (1951-1952). The strategy was to start with an "inventory of ignorance" and then reduce the list of unknowns through successive approximations. Soviet military expenditures were estimated by the "building-block method," which began by estimating the number ships, planes, jeeps, barracks and even soldiers in use, then estimating the procurement and operating costs of each, and adding them up using estimated prices. The building blocks had advantages in that published data on physical units seemed accurate and in any case were easier to verify through covert means. The elaborate reports of the 1990s included almost 1800 such categories. Since the Soviets lackd computers and had rudimentary accounting procedures, the CIA had a better overall picture of Soviet military spending than did the Kremlin. The reports emphasized physical units, realzing that expenditures alone could not predict what sort of military threat in the future would be presented by the Red Army. To estimate costs the CIA used analogs--using Soviet trucks or American tanks, for instance, to estimate the costs of Soviet tanks--and then adjusted for differences in weight and performance. Analog-based data, far shakier than direct-cost data, accounted for over half of earlier estimates, dropping to about one-third by the late 1980s. In the 1960s the CIA increasingly used quantitative techniques, of the sort promoted in American business schools. A crisis in the mid-1970s was caused by as a combination of external pressures, new data (some from a key Russian who defected to the West) and internal works forced a major revision of the defense burden, showing the proportion of of the overall Soviet economy devoted to the military. The crisis sparked heated public debate when the CIA announced that their earlier estimates of Soviet defense spending at 6-8% of GNP was too low by as much as half; the revised estimated burden ranged from 11-13%, indicating a severe economic burden that slowed Soviet growth.

Watergate

Attacks on the CIA came to a head in the early 1970s, around the time of the Watergate political burglary affair. A dominant feature of political life during that period was the attempts of Congress to assert oversight of U.S. Presidency, take control of war-making, and more closely supervise the executive agencies. Revelations about past CIA activities, such as assassinations and attempted assassinations of foreign leaders, illegal domestic spying on U.S. citizens, provided the opportunities to execute Congressional oversight of U.S. intelligence operations. Hastening the Central Intelligence Agency's fall from grace were the burglary of the Watergate headquarters of the Democratic Party by ex-CIA agents, and President Richard Nixon's subsequent use of the CIA to impede the FBI's investigation of the burglary.

Image and reputation

Cloak and dagger stories became part of the popular culture of the Cold War in both East and West, with innumerable novels and movies that showed how polarized and dangerous the world was. Soviet audiences thrilled at spy stories showing how their KGB agents protected the motherland by foiling dirty work by America's nefarious CIA, Britain's devious MI 6, and Israel's devilish Mossad. After 1963, Hollywood increasingly depicted the CIA as clowns (as in the comedy TV series "Get Smart") or villains (as in Oliver Stone's "JFK" (1992). Leftists around the globe routinely blamed the mysterious CIA for events that displeased them, putting the image of the USA as a champion of freedom and democracy in disrepute. The CIA lost influence after 1963. President Lyndon B. Johnson disliked its pessimistic forecasts about Vietnam; President Richard M. Nixon and his national security advisor Henry Kissinger did not seek its advice. After Watergate (1974) it came under heavy attack for promoting right-wing governments, hampering the success of genuinely democratic protest movements, illegally monitoring dissent inside the USA, and frustrating democracy at home by its secrecy and lack of accountability. Was it needed in an age of detente? With 15,000 employees in 1973, it had a budget of about $740 million, of which $440 went to clandestine operations. Congressional committees began to monitor the agency closely. Employment and budgets were cut sharply (the totals are secret), and most covert operations were abandoned. Morale plummeted as the agency retreated to a mission of collecting and interpreting information about the Soviets.

External Links

• The website for the International Committee for the Rescue of KAL 007 Survivors