Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Central Intelligence Agency was created on the 26th of July 1947, when President Truman signed the National Security Act into law. Its direct predecessor was the Central Intelligence Group, established in 1946 after Truman dissolved the wartime Office of Strategic Services in September 1945.
CIA headquarters is located in Langley, Virginia, inside a building officially called the George Bush Center for Intelligence. The agency is so closely associated with this address that it is often referred to simply as "Langley."
According to the 2013 mass surveillance disclosures, the CIA's fiscal 2013 budget was $14.7 billion, representing 28% of the total national intelligence budget. That figure was almost 50% more than the National Security Agency's budget at the time.
Major CIA covert operations during the Cold War include the 1953 coup in Iran (Operation Ajax), the 1954 coup in Guatemala (Operation PBSuccess), the Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba in 1961, support for Afghan mujahideen during the Soviet-Afghan War, backing for the Nicaraguan Contras, and Operation Chaos, a domestic surveillance program targeting the American antiwar movement that ran for seven years beginning in 1967.
The Family Jewels was an internal CIA compilation of the agency's most sensitive and potentially illegal activities, ordered by Director James Schlesinger in the early 1970s. It linked the CIA to assassination plots against foreign leaders, illegal surveillance of thousands of U.S. citizens under Operation Chaos, and experiments on American and Canadian citizens without consent, including the administration of LSD under the MKUltra program.
The CIA sponsored and trained Brigade 2506, a paramilitary force of over 1,400 Cuban exiles, to invade Cuba on the 17th of April 1961. The CIA also supplied eight B-26 bombers that attacked Cuban airfields two days before the landing. The invading force was defeated within three days and surrendered by the 20th of April 1961, representing a major failure of U.S. foreign policy.