Central Intelligence Agency

Change you can believe in: In addition to meddling in US elections, by 2023 the CIA was celebrating Pride Month in DC and CIA stations worldwide.

The Central Intelligence Agency, (or CIA in more recent times known as the LGBTCIA) 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. The head is the "Director of Central Intelligence" (DCI).

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.

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 MI6, 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]). In the genre of spy thrillers, the films Three Days of the Condor (1975) and Spy Game (2001) have been among the top box office attractions in American cinema. They both star Robert Redford and both portray the CIA as a wicked organization. The plotlines of Robert Ludlum's novel The Bourne Identity (1980) and the 2002 film based on the novel mix truth and fiction. Some topics are distorted while others stick very closely to the truth. Congressional oversight, ethical dilemmas tied to assassination, and real-life antagonists play significant roles in both the novel and the film. In the book the antagonists are terrorists, particularly Carlos the Jackal, but in the movie version the "bad people" are CIA officials. Although the antagonist changes between the novel and the film, they both are realistic aspects that draw the audience in.

CIA culture places a premium on high-IQs of recruits, and ignores their patriotism and loyalty to the United States. Questioning a person's loyalty is regarded as McCarthyism. This has led to the predominance of leftist ideology and intellectual elitism in the organization. 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 its secrecy and lack of accountability. Was it needed in an age of détente? 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.

In the Obama era, the CIA suffered damage to its reputation under Dir. John Brennan for its role in media manipulation, trying to influence domestic public opinion, and tampering with U.S. elections - all in violation of the National Security Act of 1947 which created the Agency.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion

Under the Obama and Biden administrations' diversity, equity, and inclusion mandates, the CIA switched from hiring personnel based upon language skills and knowledge of a particular country or culture to hiring based upon sexual preference and gender. This led to a bevy of transgender case officers in the CIA's HUMINT programs overseas attempting to recruit spies in foreign cultures where the general reaction of the local population was revulsion.

Amazon/Washington Post deal

In March 2013, the CIA awarded a $600 million contract to Amazon Web Services for a computing cloud system which would allow all 17 agencies of the US intelligence community to coordinate and share information. The General Accounting Office found the deal violated the open bidding process, but a federal court stood by the CIA's decision.

In October of the same year Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com and the 6th richest billionaire on the planet worth $66 billion, purchased the Washington Post with proceeds of the deal. Elements within the CIA then began using the Washington Post to promote Hillary Rodham Clinton as their preferred candidate for president in 2016. After the election but before taking office, the CIA in collusion with the White House, the DNC and Clinton campaign, fraudulently claimed Vladimir Putin and Russian intelligence agencies had rigged Donald Trump's election to the presidency. The CIA and its government and media surrogates put out the false claim that Russian intelligence agencies had delivered embarrassing emails from the Democrats and the Clinton campaign to Wikileaks. In fact, the sources of the compromised information came from disgruntled whistleblowers within the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee. DNC insiders delivered information to Wikileaks.

Russiagate hoax

See also: Russiagate

During and immediately after the 2016 Presidential election CIA director John Brennan, along with the Department of Justice and the FBI, targeted Donald Trump. This covert disinformation campaign became widely known in the fake news mainstream media as Trump-Russia, alleging collusion between Trump and associates with Russia. The side that actually colluded with foreign powers was that of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic party.

2020 presidential election interference

See also: United States Presidential Election, 2020 and Ukrainian collusion

An axis of the CIA, Big Tech and the DNC-allied mainstream media spread an absolute lie in the weeks before the 2020 presidential election. Glenn Greenwald reported that on October 14, 2020, and then October 15, 2020, The New York Post, the nation's oldest newspaper, published two news reports on Joe Biden's activities in Ukraine and China that raised serious questions about his integrity and ethics: specifically, whether he and his family were trading on his name and influence to generate profit for themselves. The Post said that the documents were obtained from a laptop left by Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, at a repair shop.

From the start, the evidence of authenticity was overwhelming. The Post published genuine photos of Hunter that were taken from the laptop. Investigations from media outlets found people who had received the emails in real-time and they compared the emails in their possession to the ones in the Post's archive, and they matched word-for-word. One of Hunter Biden's own business associates involved in many of these deals, Tony Bobulinski, confirmed publicly and in interviews that the key emails were genuine and that they referenced Joe Biden's profit participation in one deal being pursued in China. A forensics analyst issued a report concluding the archive had all the earmarks of authenticity. Not even the Bidens denied that the emails were real. It was clear early on that all the key metrics demonstrated that these documents were real.

Intelligence officials, such as Obama's CIA Director John Brennan and his Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, led a group of dozens of CIA operatives in issuing a public statement that disseminated an outright lie: namely, that the laptop was "Russian disinformation.” Note that this phrase contains two separate assertions: 1) the documents came from Russia and 2) they are fake ("disinformation").

But the complete lack of evidence for these claims did not stop the corporate media or Big Tech from repeating this lie over and over, and, far worse, using this lie to censor the reporting from the internet. One of the first to spread this lie was, Natasha Bertrand, then of Politico and as of 2021 CNN. “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say,” blared her headline in Politico on October 19, 2020, just five days after the Post began its reporting. From there, virtually every media outlet — CNN, NBC News, PBS, Huffington Post, The Intercept, and too many others to count — began completely ignoring the substance of the reporting and instead spread the lie over and over that these documents were the by-product of Russian disinformation.

21st Century

The CIA Headquarters in earlier times.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the "end of history" as it was called, some questioned why the need for an organization with a such a checkered history. Global warming as a strategic threat to national security became the new boogeyman to justify continued funding.

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 intelligence community 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 impedance of 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.

Afghanistan 2001

See also: Afghan war

In 2001, the CIA's Special Activities Division units were the first U.S. forces to enter Afghanistan. Their efforts organized the Afghan Northern Alliance for the subsequent arrival of United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) (United States Special Operations Command) forces. The plan for the invasion of Afghanistan was developed by the CIA, the first time in United States history that such a large-scale military operation was planned by the CIA. SAD, U.S. Army Special Forces and the Northern Alliance combined to overthrow the Taliban in Afghanistan with minimal loss of U.S. lives. They did this without the need for U.S. military conventional ground forces.

The Washington Post stated in an editorial by John Lehman in 2006:

"What made the Afghan campaign a landmark in the U.S. Military's history is that it was prosecuted by Special Operations forces from all the services, along with Navy and Air Force tactical power, operations by the Afghan Northern Alliance and the CIA were equally important and fully integrated. No large Army or Marine force was employed".

In a 2008 New York Times book review of Horse Soldiers, a book by Doug Stanton about the invasion of Afghanistan, Bruce Barcott wrote:

"The valor exhibited by Afghan and American soldiers, fighting to free Afghanistan from a horribly cruel regime, will inspire even the most jaded reader. The stunning victory of the horse soldiers—350 Special Forces soldiers, 100 C.I.A. officers and 15,000 Northern Alliance fighters routing a Taliban army 50,000 strong—deserves a hallowed place in American military history".

Iraq war 2003

See also: Iraq war

The mission that captured Saddam Hussein was called "Operation Red Dawn". It was planned and carried out by the JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command under USSOCOM)'s Delta Force and SAD/SOG (Special Activities Division Special Operations Group) teams (together called Task Force 121). The operation eventually included around 600 soldiers from the 1st Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division. Special operations troops probably numbered around 40. Much of the publicity and credit for the capture went to the 4th Infantry Division soldiers, but CIA and JSOC were the driving force. "Task Force 121 were actually the ones who pulled Saddam out of the hole" said Robert Andrews, former deputy assistant Secretary of Defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict. "They can't be denied a role anymore."

CIA paramilitary units continued to team up with the JSOC in Iraq and in 2007 the combination created a lethal force many credit with having a major impact in the success of "the Surge". They did this by killing or capturing many of the key al-Qaeda leaders in Iraq. In a CBS 60 Minutes interview, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bob Woodward described a new special operations capability that allowed for this success. This capability was developed by the joint teams of CIA and JSOC. Several senior U.S. officials stated that the "joint efforts of JSOC and CIA paramilitary units was the most significant contributor to the defeat of al-Qaeda in Iraq". The CIA-assisted "Phoenix" Program played a similar role in decimating Viet Cong insurgents during the Vietnam war.

Libya 2011

See also: Libyan war

After the so-called Arab Spring overthrow of the rulers of Tunisia and Egypt, the neighbours of Libya to the west and east respectively, Libya had a major revolt beginning in February 2011. In response, the Obama administration sent in CIA Special Activities Division paramilitary operatives to assess the situation and gather information on the opposition forces.

During the early phases of the Libyan air strike offensive, paramilitary operatives assisted in the recovery of a U.S. Air Force pilot who had crashed due to mechanical problems. There was also speculation in The Washington Post that President Obama issued a covert action finding in March 2011 that authorized the CIA to carry out a clandestine effort to provide arms and support to the Libyan opposition.

Muammar Gaddafi was ultimately overthrown in the Libyan War.

Drone war in Pakistan

Analysis by the RAND Corporation suggests that "drone strikes are associated with decreases in both the frequency and the lethality of militant attacks overall and in IED and suicide attacks specifically." Civilian deaths from drone strikes fell to 1-2% of the total in 2012.

Ukrainian Nazis

The Postil reported that in 2007, the CIA put together a “conference” of various anti-Russian factions in Ukraine whose purpose was nothing other than to groom neo-Nazis and jihadists, both groups being solidly anti-Russian. Overseeing the conference was Dmytro Yarosh, who led the Trident and the Pravy Sektor, both neo-Nazi organizations.

These various neo-Nazi units, trained by the West, were integrated into the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU). After 2014 Maidan coup, the West actively protected these neo-Nazi groups. Victoria Nuland, in 2021, told Volodymyr Zelensky to appoint Dmytro Yarosh as adviser to the Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian army—because no one can fight Russians better than Nazis. Here are the larger units of neo-Nazis, or Banderites which fought Russians in Ukraine:

• Members of Svoboda (formerly the “Nation-Social Party of Ukraine,” which curiously rhymes with Hitler's “National-Socialist German Workers Party”)
• The AZOV Battalion (based in Mariupol)
• C14 of Kyiv
• The Aidar Battalion (in Luhansk)
• The Wotanjugend (who are actually Russian in origin)
• Ukraine Patriot (co-founded by Parliament Speaker Andriy Parubiy)
• The National Militia
• Karpatska Sich
• Freikorps

There are also many other smaller units (more than 30) that have merged with the larger ones, and all have been integrated into the Armed Forces of Ukraine. And the various symbols of these organizations are common-place in Ukraine (i.e., the Sonnenrad, the Totenkopf, the Wolfsangel). After 2014, Ukraine also became the main “exporter” of Nazi ideology throughout the world.

Fighting alongside the neo-Nazis and the Ukrainian army are a slew of jihadis and mercenaries, many of whom are from other Western neo-Nazi groups like the Misanthropic Division. These mercenaries are known as the International Legion of Territorial Defense of Ukraine.

Maidan regime

See also: Maidan regime

In October 2023 The Washington Post revealed how the CIA had used the Ukrainian intelligence services to initiate war with Russia since 2014. With the US-backed Maidan coup, the CIA spent tens of millions of dollars to transform Ukraine’s Soviet-formed services into allies against Moscow. The agency provided Ukraine with advanced surveillance systems, trained recruits at sites in Ukraine and the United States, built new headquarters for departments in Ukraine’s military intelligence agency. Given concerns that Ukraine’s services were still heavily penetrated by the FSB — the Russian agency that is the main successor to the KGB, the CIA worked with the SBU to create an entirely new directorate that would focus on so-called “active measures” operations against Russia and be insulated from other SBU departments. The new unit was dubbed the “Fifth Directorate” to distinguish it from the four long-standing units of the SBU. A sixth directorate has since been added to work with the UK's MI6 spy agency.

The SBU and its military counterpart, the GUR, have carried out dozens of assassinations against Russian officials, alleged Ukrainian collaborators, military officers behind the front lines and civilians inside Russia. Training sites were located outside Kyiv where handpicked recruits were instructed by CIA personnel to form units capable of operating as covert groups. The SBU began mounting sabotage operations and missions to capture separatist leaders and collaborators, some of whom were taken to secret detention sites. Over a three-year period, at least half a dozen Russian operatives, high-ranking separatist commanders or collaborators were killed in violence that was often attributed to internal disputes but in reality was the work of the SBU. Among those killed was Yevgeny Zhilin who was gunned down in 2016 in a Moscow restaurant. In 2017 a rebel commander known as ‘Givi’ was killed in Donetsk. In July 2023, a former Russian submarine commander, Stanislav Rzhitsky, was killed while jogging in a park in the southern Russian city of Krasnodar. A popular war correspondent and blogger, Vladlen Tatarsky, was killed in a blast in a cafe in St. Petersburg. 32 innocent bystanders were injured in the targeted assassination.

GUR

See also: Moscow Concert Hall terror attack

Crocus terror attack, March 22, 2024.

While building the SBU’s new directorate, the CIA embarked on a far more ambitious project with the Main Intelligence Directorate of Ukraine. From 2015 on, the CIA embarked on an extensive transformation of the GUR. With fewer than 5,000 employees, the GUR was a fraction of the size of the SBU and had a narrower focus on espionage and active measures operations against Russia. It also had a younger workforce with fewer holdovers from Soviet times, while the SBU was still perceived as penetrated by Russian intelligence. Some of the GUR’s new recruits were transfers from the SBU. Among them was Vasyl Burba, who had managed SBU Fifth Directorate operations before joining the GUR and serving as agency director from 2016 to 2020. Burba became such a close ally of the CIA that the CIA provided him an armored vehicle.

The CIA helped the GUR acquire state-of-the-art surveillance and electronic eavesdropping systems, including mobile equipment that could be placed along Russian-controlled lines in eastern Ukraine, but also software tools used to exploit the cellphones of Kremlin officials visiting outside of Moscow. Ukrainian officers operated the systems but everything gleaned was shared with the Americans.

Concerned that the GUR’s aging facilities were likely compromised by Russian intelligence, the CIA paid for new headquarters buildings for the GUR’s “spetsnaz” paramilitary division and a separate directorate responsible for electronic espionage. Troves of data were relayed through the new CIA-built facility back to Washington, where they were scrutinized by CIA and NSA analysts.

The GUR had also developed networks of sources in Russia’s security apparatus. The CIA was permitted to have direct contact with agents recruited and run by Ukrainian intelligence.

For the SBU, no target has been a higher priority than the Kerch Bridge that connects the Russian mainland to the Crimean Peninsula. The SBU hit the bridge twice during the NATO war in Ukraine, including an October 2022 bombing that killed five people and put a gaping hole in westbound traffic lanes. SBU director Vasyl Malyuk acknowledged that his service had placed a powerful explosive inside a truck hauling industrial-size rolls of cellophane. Like other SBU plots, the operation involved unwitting accomplices, including the truck driver killed in the explosion. The SBU launched a second strike on the bridge nine months later using naval drones that were developed as part of a top secret operation involving the CIA and other Western intelligence services.

"Peacemaker" kill list

The Myrotovets ("Peacemaker") website, a kill list authorizing on the spot execution of journalists and anyone deemed a "Russian sympathizer", shows Langley, Virgina, home of the CIA as its headquarters.

Myrotvorets (Peacemaker) is an online database of what its owner declares as “enemies of Ukraine,” containing personal doxxing information and addresses. The website's mainpage lists Langley, Virginia, home of the CIA, and Warsaw, Poland as its official home. Journalists who depart from the CIA and Kyiv party line are added to the list. Anyone captured in Ukraine whose name appears in the websites online searchable database can be executed on the spot. The “Peacemaker" kill list has nearly 200,000 names, including Americans, threatening them with extrajudicial killings. American filmmaker Oliver Stone and British rock star Roger Waters of Pink Floyd appear on the "Peacemaker kill list".

Ukrop Deathsquads

The CIA reportedly operates an entire floor in the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) headquarters at 33 Volodymyrska Street in Kyiv, in a building originally used as the Bolshevik headquarters of Ukraine, later the Gestapo during the Nazi occupation, then the NKVD of the USSR, and as of 2022 serves as the torture chambers for Russian POWs and Ukrainians accused of having ties to Russia. Following the 2014 Maidan coup, the security service was headed by Valentin Nalyvaichenko, who was recruited by the CIA when he was the Consul General of Ukraine in the United States.

Dr. Darya Dugina marked as "eliminated". Dugina's murder in Moscow marked a significant escalation of terrorist attacks against non-combatants and civilians outside of Ukraine.

Vassily Prozorov, a former SBU officer who defected to Russia following the Maidan coup, detailed the post-Maidan security services’ systemic reliance on torture to crush political opposition and intimidate citizens accused of Russian sympathies. According to Prozorov, the SBU have been directly advised by the CIA since 2014. “CIA employees have been present in Kiev since 2014. They are residing in clandestine apartments and suburban houses,” he said. “However, they frequently come to the SBU’s central office for holding, for example, specific meetings or plotting secret operations.”

Murder of Darya Dugina

Journalist and political scientist Darya Dugina was assassinated in Moscow on August 20, 2022. Dugina is the daughter of the Russian political scientist and philosopher Alexander Dugin.

Darya's killer was identified as Natalia Pavlovna Vovk, a Ukrainian citizen and member of the Azov Regiment. The Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation and the Federal Security Service (or counterintelligence service) established the SBU as responsible for the killing.

On August 21, 2022, the day after the killing, Ukrainian Ambassador to Kazakhstan Petro Vrublevskyi explained to an interviewer "We are trying to kill as many of them [Russians] as possible. The more Russians we kill now, the fewer our children will have to kill," according to Yahoo News.

Dugina visited Azovstal after the siege ended in May 2022 and reported on social media on the Nazi paraphernalia and books discovered in the Azov Nazis' bunker and living quarters. She was placed on Western sanctions lists shortly thereafter. Dugina issued a public statement in response:

"I am honored to be in the same boat as my father. The fact that we are under sanctions from the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom is a symbol that we, the Dugins, are on the path of truth in the fight against globalism. For eight years in Ukraine, Russophobia was cultivated by various programmes, and history was rewritten, up to the physical massacre of Russians, in those eight terrible years for Donbass, with daily shelling."

Ukraine missile attack on Poland

The Associated Press tried to ignite World War III with a fake news story sourced to a "senior U.S. intelligence official."

On November 15, 2022, two Ukrainian S-300 missiles, alleged to have been launched to shoot down a Russian cruise missile, were fired westward and hit a Polish grain storage facility, killing two civilians. The Polish government, Ukrainian government, the Associated Press, most of all Western propaganda media and so-called national security and intelligence experts called for invoking NATO Article 5. Zelensky advisor Mykhailo Podolyak declared that the strikes came from Russia. Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba claimed Russian denials were a conspiracy theory and that “No one should buy Russian propaganda or amplify its messages." Ukrainian dictator Volodymyr Zelensky tweeted that the “Russian attack on collective security in the Euro-Atlantic is a significant escalation” of the conflict.

However an AWAC radar plane and other ISR aircraft (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) aircraft regularly flying in the region, and ground radar, tracked the missiles' trajectory and determined the Kyiv regime had launched the missiles. That did not prevent an anonymous "senior U.S. intelligence official" from reporting to the Associated Press that Russia had fired the missiles at Poland. The fake news story was disseminated globally, as all fake news stories emanating from Kyiv, and its CIA counterparts in Kyiv, have been disseminated globally to world media for the entirety of 2022 and late 2021.

When called out on the lies, Ukrainian dictator Volodymyr Zelensky doubled down. Both socialist premier Joe Biden and NATO chief warlord Jens Stoltenberg blamed Ukraine for the attack. Zelensky refuted the Western leaders' statements that the missile which killed two innocent civilians in Poland was Ukrainian. "I have no doubt that it was not our missile or our missile strike." Zelensky insisted that he received reports from the corrupt Armed Forces of Ukraine command that told him the missile attacks did not come from Ukraine," he told the people in a live nationwide address on Ukrainian state-controlled media.

Russia

In a February 2024 commentary by former CIA analyst Larry Johnson entitled The Delusions of CIA Director William Burns, Johnson reviewed "Burns’ January 30, 2024 article in Foreign Affairs — Spycraft and Statecraft: Transforming the CIA for an Age of Competition – is a shocking display of ignorance and misinformation about Russia, the state of the war in Ukraine and NATO's military capabilities...Although Burn’s is an educated man and experienced diplomat, this article displays a profound arrogance seasoned with provably false claims...The so-called vision he presents for “transforming the CIA” is a childish fantasy and signals that the CIA is drifting towards being irrelevant as well as incompetent".

History

See also: History of the CIA

The CIA Seal

In 1974, former President Harry S. Truman spoke to his biographer Merle Miller about the CIA: “I think it was a mistake…if I’d known what was going to happen, I never would have done it… They’ve become … it’s become a government all of its own and all secret. They don’t have to account to anybody.”

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 U.S. intelligence agency. Due to extensive penetration by the Soviet Union and the Communist Party, the OSS was disbanded after the war and its functions were split between the Departments of State and War. A Central Intelligence Group was reorganized in January 1946.

Every U.S. president since George Washington has used covert action as a part of their broader foreign policy, whether Republican or Democratic, liberal or conservative. The majority of these covert action operations were successful. Most of the operations that were not successful were directed by the President over the objections of the CIA. Some of the most controversial "covert action" programs, such as the Iran-Contra affair, were not primarily the work of the CIA. Covert action programs are also much less expensive than overt political or military actions. The Pentagon commissioned a study to determine whether the CIA or the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) should conduct covert action paramilitary operations. Their study determined that the CIA should maintain this capability and be the "sole government agency conducting covert action." The DoD found that, even under U.S. law, it does not have the legal authority to conduct covert action, nor the operational agility to carry out these types of missions. The operation in May 2011 that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden was a covert action under the authority of the CIA.

The OSS produced a sabotage manual in 1944. The introduction reads: “Sabotage varies from highly technical coup de main acts that require detailed planning and the use of specially trained operatives, to innumerable simple acts which the ordinary individual citizen-saboteur can perform.”

CIA established 1947

in 1944, William J. Donovan, the OSS's head, proposed a new organization directly supervised by the President: "which will procure intelligence both by overt and covert methods and will at the same time provide intelligence guidance, determine national intelligence objectives, and correlate the intelligence material collected by all government agencies." Under Donovan's plan, a powerful, centralized civilian agency would have coordinated all the intelligence services, including those run by the military. He also proposed that this agency have authority to conduct "subversive operations abroad," but "no police or law enforcement functions, either at home or abroad."

President Truman appointed Clark Clifford as White House general counsel. In this post Clifford drafted the National Security Act of 1947 which 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. Clifford went on to head up the American branch of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International which was heavily involved in money laundering for illegal dope smuggling and intelligence agencies, and weapons transfers including nuclear weapons technology.

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 deferred 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 congressmen.

The CIA often functions as a resource to both individual legislators and congressional committees supplying related background and assessment for congressional decision. An example of this is the 1991 referral to the agency by Senator Jesse Helms, ranking member of Minority Staff of the Committee on Foreign Relations, requesting information and verification of information coming from Israel concerning the survival of the passsengers and crew (including Cong. Larry McDonald) of Korean Airlines Flight 007, shot down by the Soviets in 1983. Helms wrote his letter [2] to Boris Yeltsin requesting the military communications of the shootdown and locations of camps holding survivors based on the CIA response to his request [3].

Soviet Estimates

The CIA began systematic estimates of the Soviet Union 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 lacked 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, realizing 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 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 11-13%, indicating a severe economic burden that slowed Soviet growth.

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.

Dulles years 1953-61

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 U.S. 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 KGB'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) and Guatemala (1954). 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.

Early Operations

The principal problem facing the first generation of covert operators was murky objectives. Was covert action designed merely to "contain" the Soviet Union or to "roll it back?" Covert operations were handled by the CIA's "Office of Policy Coordination" (OPC). There was confusion on its mission OPC—was it merely to stir up trouble behind the Iron Curtain or to "liberate" and rollback the Kremlin's Eastern European satellites? One early covert operation was a total failure in Albania, where the OPC worked with Britain's MI6 to train and deploy anti-communist commandos committed to overthrowing the Soviet-backed regime of Enver Hoxha. Frank Wisner, the first OPC director, regarded the Albanian operation as "a clinical experiment to see whether larger rollback operations would be feasible elsewhere," but Kim Philby, a Soviet mole inside MI6, leaked the details to the Kremlin, with ghastly results for the anti-Hoxha forces.

The CIA supported resistance movements and dissidents in the communist regimes of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. One example is the counterespionage operations following the discovery of the Farewell dossier which some argue contributed to the fall of the Soviet regime.

Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists 1947-1954

See also: Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists

President Harry Truman approved the creation of a guerrilla army code-named “Nightingale” in Ukraine. Originally setup by the Nazis in 1941, it was made up of ultra-nationalists. They would, as Oliver Stone described in his documentary Untold History, wreak havoc on the “famine-wrecked region where Soviet control was loose, carrying out the murder of thousands of Jews, Soviets and Poles, who opposed a separate Ukrainian state.” The CIA would parachute “infiltrators” into the country as well to further “dislodge Soviet control.”

American historian and former Under Secretary of the Air Force Townsend Hoopes and Rice University history professor Douglas Brinkely confirm:

One group that particularly attracted CIA attention and support was the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), a political-military underground movement that had long fought for Ukrainian independence—first against the Poles in the 1920s when Poland controlled the Ukraine and after 1939 against the Soviets. ‘Though violently anti-Russian, the OUN was itself totalitarian and Fascist in character. as well as anti-Semitic. The Nazis poured money into the OUN after the German invasion of Russia and pretended to support the goal of Ukrainian national independence. In return, a large OUN militia, code-named Nachtigall, or Nightingale, provided local administrators, informers, and killers for the German invaders. Nazi-sponsored OUN police and militia formations were involved in “thousands of instances of mass murders of Jews and of families suspected of aiding Red Army partisans.”

When the Germans were driven out of the Ukraine, many OUN members who had served the Nazis’ police formations and execution squads fled with them, but several thousand retreated into the Carpathian Mountains to fight another day. This remaining Nightingale group fascinated the CIA and was recruited essentially en bloc. Its leaders were brought to the United States for training. Nightingale leaders were then parachuted into the Ukraine to link up with their compatriots and to carry out measures of subversion, agitation, and sabotage, including assassination. The leader of the Nightingale group was the notorious Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera.

Korea

The CIA sponsored a variety of activities during the Korean War. These activities included maritime operations behind North Korean lines. Yong Do Island, connected by a rugged isthmus to Pusan, served as the base for those operations. These operations were carried out by well-trained Korean guerrillas. The four principal U.S. advisers responsible for the training and operational planning of those special missions were Dutch Kramer, Tom Curtis, George Atcheson and Joe Pagnella. All of these Paramilitary Operations Officers operated through a CIA front organization called the Joint Advisory Commission, Korea (JACK), headquartered at Tongnae, a village near Pusan, on the peninsula's southeast coast. These paramilitary teams were responsible for numerous maritime raids and ambushes behind North Korean lines, as well as prisoner of war rescue operations. These were the first maritime unconventional warfare units that trained indigenous forces as surrogates. They also provided a model, along with the other CIA-sponsored ground based paramilitary Korean operations, for the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam-Studies and Observations Group (MACV-SOG) activities conducted by the U.S. military and the CIA/SAD in Vietnam. In addition, CIA paramilitary ground-based teams worked directly for U.S. military commanders, specifically with the 8th Army, on the "White Tiger" initiative. This initiative included inserting South Korean commandos and CIA Paramilitary Operations Officers prior to the two major amphibious assaults on North Korea, including the landing at Inchon.

Iran 1953

Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh