Central Intelligence Agency

• 1. Introduction

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  The Central Intelligence Agency was born on the 26th of July 1947, when President Harry Truman signed the National Security Act into law. Its headquarters sit in Langley, Virginia, inside a building called the George Bush Center for Intelligence. So familiar is that address that the agency is often simply called "Langley" as a shorthand for the entire apparatus of American foreign intelligence. From that campus, the CIA has shaped the course of elections, wars, and governments on nearly every continent. The questions worth asking are how an organization meant to prevent surprise became so often caught off guard, how a civilian intelligence service became a practitioner of coups and killings, and what the record of seven decades of covert action actually shows. The answers reach from a blown airdrop over Korea in 1952 to a spy satellite photograph arriving at the Oval Office on the 4th of August 1995 - three weeks after one of the largest mass killings in postwar Europe had already ended.

• 2. From OSS to CIA

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  Before the CIA existed, American intelligence ran through the Office of Strategic Services. Four future directors of Central Intelligence served in the OSS during World War II. Truman abolished it on the 20th of September 1945, dividing its functions between the Departments of State and War. That arrangement lasted only a few months. The first public mention of a "Central Intelligence Agency" appeared in a command-restructuring proposal put before the Senate Military Affairs Committee at the end of 1945, presented by Jim Forrestal and Arthur Radford. Army Colonel Sidney Mashbir and Commander Ellis Zacharias spent four months drafting the first implementing directives for what would become the CIA, working under the direction of Fleet Admiral Joseph Ernest King. Truman established the National Intelligence Authority in January 1946, and its operational extension, the Central Intelligence Group, was the direct predecessor of the CIA. Lawrence Houston, who had served as head counsel for the SSU and CIG, was the principal draftsman of the National Security Act of 1947, which dissolved the NIA and CIG and brought the CIA into formal existence. Two years later, Houston helped draft the Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949, which exempted the agency from most Congressional oversight and allowed its director to spend "unvouchered" government money - a power no other federal employee holds. That same act permitted the CIA to conceal its organization, functions, and number of personnel from public disclosure, and created the program known as PL-110 to handle defectors who fell outside normal immigration procedures.

• 3. Coups and Cold War Gambits

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  CIA Director Allen Dulles oversaw Operation Ajax in 1953, targeting Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. Mosaddegh had nationalized the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which included the largest oil refinery in the world, and had survived a first coup attempt before the CIA paid demonstrators to pose as communists and deface public symbols associated with the Shah. The violence that followed on the 19th of August forced Mosaddegh to flee his own house. He surrendered the next day. The apparent success in Iran directly prompted planning for Operation PBSuccess against Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz. That plan was exposed in major newspapers after a CIA agent left the coup documents in his Guatemala City hotel room. Despite that breach, on the 18th of June 1954, Carlos Castillo Armas led 480 CIA-trained men across the border from Honduras into Guatemala. A CIA plane bombed Guatemala City on the 25th of June, destroying the government's main oil reserves. Arbenz resigned on the 27th of June 1954. Armas was the first in a series of military dictators whose rule led to the Guatemalan Civil War from 1960 to 1996, in which roughly 200,000 people were killed, most by the U.S.-backed military. In Indonesia, the CIA pursued regime change against President Sukarno after he hosted the Bandung Conference and declared neutrality in the Cold War. On the 18th of May 1958, a B-26 piloted by CIA agent Allen Lawrence Pope was shot down over Ambon, Indonesia. When Indonesian forces captured Pope, they found his personnel records, after-action reports, and his membership card for the officer's club at Clark Field. After the Indonesian operation collapsed, a CIA analyst named Abbot Smith said the agency had "constructed for ourselves a picture of the USSR, and whatever happened had to be made to fit into this picture."

• 4. Cuba: Invasion, Sabotage, and Blowback

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  By the 11th of December 1959, a memo on the CIA director's desk recommended Fidel Castro's "elimination." Allen Dulles replaced that word with "removal" and set a plan in motion. By mid-August 1960, CIA officer Dick Bissell sought, with the full backing of the agency, to hire the Mafia to assassinate Castro. The Bay of Pigs Invasion came on the 17th of April 1961, when Brigade 2506, a CIA-sponsored paramilitary group of over 1,400 paramilitaries who had set out from Guatemala by boat on the 13th of April, landed in Cuba. Eight CIA-supplied B-26 bombers had attacked Cuban airfields two days earlier. By the 20th of April, the invaders surrendered. President Eisenhower had allocated $13.1 million to the CIA in March 1960 for planning Castro's overthrow. The failure of the invasion strengthened Castro's ties with the USSR and contributed directly to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. In November 1961, President Kennedy authorized Operation Mongoose, a CIA-run campaign of sabotage and terrorist attacks against civilian and military targets in Cuba. The CIA established its base of operations with the cryptonym JMWAVE at a disused naval facility on the University of Miami campus. At its height, JMWAVE housed some four hundred CIA officers, making it the largest CIA station outside of Langley. Several thousand agents in the agency's clandestine pay operated out of Florida. A CIA officer named Luis Posada Carriles remained on the agency's payroll until mid-1976 and is widely believed to be responsible for the October 1976 bombing of Cubana flight 455, which killed 73 people, the deadliest instance of airline terrorism in the Western Hemisphere before September 2001.

• 5. The Family Jewels and Congressional Reckoning

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  Domestic surveillance inside the CIA dated at least to 1967, when President Johnson demanded that CIA Director Richard Helms substantiate claims that Moscow and Beijing were financing the American antiwar movement. That fall, the CIA launched Operation Chaos, a domestic surveillance program that ran for seven years. Police departments across the country cooperated, and by program's end the CIA had assembled a computer index of 300,000 names of American people and organizations, along with extensive files on 7,200 citizens. Eleven CIA officers grew long hair, learned the jargon of the New Left, and infiltrated peace groups in the United States and Europe. In December 1974, the New York Times reported that the CIA had collected intelligence files on at least 10,000 Americans and engaged in dozens of illegal activities from the 1950s onward, including break-ins, wiretapping, and mail inspections. These revelations built on what Director James Schlesinger had already discovered internally. During his 17-week tenure, Schlesinger ordered a compilation of the CIA's most sensitive and potentially illegal activities, documents that became known as the Family Jewels. They linked the CIA to assassination plots against foreign leaders, the illegal surveillance of thousands of American citizens, and experiments on U.S. and Canadian citizens without consent, including the administration of LSD as part of the MKUltra program. Before Schlesinger's predecessor Richard Helms left office, he destroyed every tape he had secretly made of meetings in his office and many of the papers on MKUltra. Congress responded by creating the Church Committee in the Senate and the Pike Committee in the House. President Gerald Ford created the Rockefeller Commission and issued an executive order prohibiting assassination of foreign leaders. DCI William Colby leaked the Family Jewels papers to the press, stating he believed disclosure was ultimately in the CIA's interests.

• 6. Afghanistan, Contras, and Secret Wars

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  In Afghanistan, the CIA funneled several billion dollars in weapons through Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence to tens of thousands of Afghan mujahideen resistance fighters during the Soviet-Afghan War. Among those weapons were approximately 2,300 FIM-92 Stinger surface-to-air missiles, a transfer that created a substantial black market for the weapons across the Middle East, Central Asia, and parts of Africa that persisted well into the 1990s. Perhaps 100 of the Stingers were acquired by Iran. The CIA later ran a cash buyback program to recover them. In Nicaragua, the CIA armed and trained the Contras in Honduras in hopes of deposing the Sandinistas. The agency's involvement in the Iran-Contra arms smuggling scandal produced the Intelligence Authorization Act of 1991, which defined covert operations as secret missions in geopolitical areas where the U.S. is neither openly nor apparently engaged, and required an authorizing chain of command including an official presidential finding report. In Lebanon, the CIA's prime source was Bashir Gemayel, a member of the Christian Maronite sect. On the 18th of April 1983, a 2,000-pound car bomb exploded in the lobby of the American embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people, among them 17 Americans and 7 CIA officers, including Robert Ames, one of the CIA's foremost Middle East experts. The CIA station chief in Beirut, Ken Haas, also died in the blast. His replacement, Bill Buckley, was kidnapped eighteen days after U.S. Marines left Lebanon. On the 7th of March 1984, CNN's Bureau Chief in Beirut, Jeremy Levin, was also kidnapped. Twelve more Americans were captured in Beirut during the Reagan administration.

• 7. Intelligence Failures and the Road to September 11

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  When Mikhail Gorbachev announced the unilateral reduction of 500,000 Soviet troops, the CIA was caught off guard. Doug MacEachin, the CIA's Chief of Soviet analysis at the time, later said that even if the CIA had told the president and Congress in advance, the information "would have been ignored." All of the CIA's numbers on the Soviet economy were wrong. Few CIA officers stationed in the Soviet Union even spoke the relevant languages. Bob Gates, who preceded MacEachin as Chief of Soviet analysis, had never visited the Soviet Union. On the 25th of January 1993, Mir Qazi opened fire at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, killing two officers and wounding three others. Between 1985 and 1986, the CIA lost every spy it had in Eastern Europe; it was later discovered that many of the sources underlying its most important analyses of the USSR had been feeding CIA analysts Soviet disinformation through controlled agents. On the 21st of February 1994, FBI agents arrested Aldrich Ames, a CIA officer who had been responsible for that catastrophic loss of sources. In 1996, the CIA created a team specifically to hunt Osama bin Laden. They closed the CIA's Sudan station that same year on the word of a source who was later found to be a fabricator. In 1998, bin Laden declared war on the United States and struck in Tanzania and Nairobi on the 7th of August. On the 6th of August 2001, President George W. Bush received a daily intelligence briefing warning that al-Qaeda was capable of planning attacks on American soil. The agency's warnings were dire but carried little weight with the president's defense staff.

• 8. Structure, Budget, and Reach

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  As of 2013, the CIA's five stated priorities were counterterrorism, nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction, indications and warnings for senior policymakers, counterintelligence, and cyber intelligence. The agency is organized around five major directorates: Analysis, Operations, Science and Technology, Support, and Digital Innovation. The Directorate of Digital Innovation had been covertly operating since approximately March 2015 before formally beginning operations on the 1st of October 2015. According to classified budget documents, the CIA's computer network operations budget for fiscal year 2013 was $685.4 million. The NSA's budget was roughly $1 billion at that time. According to the 2013 mass surveillance disclosures, the CIA's total fiscal 2013 budget was $14.7 billion, representing 28% of the total national intelligence budget and almost 50% more than the NSA's allocation. The CIA's HUMINT budget alone was $2.3 billion, its SIGINT budget was $1.7 billion, security and logistics of CIA missions accounted for $2.5 billion, and covert action programs, including drone operations and anti-Iranian nuclear program activities, accounted for another $2.6 billion. The CIA established its first training facility, the Office of Training and Education, in 1950. Following the Cold War, its training budget was cut sharply, which damaged employee retention. Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet established CIA University in 2002 to address that gap. CIA University offers between 200 and 300 courses each year and includes the Sherman Kent School for Intelligence Analysis. The primary communications training facility is the Warrenton Training Center near Warrenton, Virginia, which was established in 1951 and has been used by the CIA since at least 1955.