Central Intelligence Agency

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is one of the US federal government's main intelligence-collecting organizations. President Harry Truman established the CIA in 1947 to provide the United States with vital international data that would strengthen the country's national security. The CIA continues performing this task today, gathering and interpreting intelligence to prevent terrorist attacks and other threats to the United States. From 1947 until 2004, the Director of the CIA was the President's principal advisor on intelligence and thus the de-facto head of the nation's entire Intelligence Community. In 2004, this changed as Congress directed the creation of a separate organization to coordinate operations over the myriad of intelligence services in the United States. This new position was called the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The CIA also falls under the oversight of Congress. Committees in both the House of Representatives and the Senate are mandated to exercise this control. These committees include the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI).

Founding of the CIA

Truman's National Security Act of 1947 authorized the creation of the CIA as a successor of sorts to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). This was the clandestine service used during World War II and abolished in 1945. The purpose of the newly created CIA was to strengthen American national security in the postwar world by secretly gathering and analyzing intelligence collected in the field and presenting its discoveries to the highest levels of the US federal government. The president and his numerous cabinet members and advisers would then make informed decisions on international affairs based on the CIA's findings. 

The Twentieth Century

Over the next four decades, the CIA would become concerned primarily with managing the role of the United States in the Cold War and securing various American interests around the world. The Cold War began soon after World War II as a nonviolent standoff between the United States and Soviet Union for global political and military dominance. As each nation raced to assemble the best civil societies and most advanced military technologies, the CIA played a crucial role in America's efforts to spy on its Soviet enemies in attempts to gain the advantage in the deadlock. 

In the midst of its ongoing espionage against the Soviet Union, the agency had also begun working on various other top-secret projects around the world. One of these was the 1953 Iranian coup, in which the CIA helped the British secret service, MI6, overthrow Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh and replace him with the shah, or king, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. This was done so Britain would continue receiving access to Iranian oil under the Western-friendly shah. 

Relations between the United States and Soviet Union continued to sour into the early 1960s. The United States viewed the global spread of Soviet-style communism and socialism—forms of government in which all citizens are considered equal and work for the profit of the entire state rather than themselves individually—as a threat to democracy and especially US influence around the world. Therefore, the American federal government authorized the CIA to attempt to uproot numerous communist and socialist pockets in various countries over the succeeding decades. 

In 1961, the CIA trained and funded Cuban political dissidents to launch a military coup against the communist government of Cuba, a close Soviet ally. The attack came to be known as the Bay of Pigs Invasion. In 1962, the CIA discerned from its collected intelligence that the Soviet Union had moved a number of its ballistic missiles to Cuba, where they sat pointed at the United States, situated nearby to the north. Negotiations between the United States and Soviet Union eventually ended the Cuban Missile Crisis. 

The United States continued its crusade against the worldwide diffusion of communism and socialism in 1970, when it dispatched the CIA to Chile to contain the threat of recently elected socialist president Salvador Allende. That year, the agency paid an organization to kidnap Chilean general Rene Schneider for not opposing Allende's election, but during the event, Schneider was unintentionally killed. In 1973, the CIA stood down when the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, of whom the agency had been aware, overthrew Allende and took control of Chile. 

The US government made several changes to the CIA as the Cold War ended in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter made the CIA directly responsible for its own budget and activities, and in 1982, President Ronald Reagan signed the Intelligence Identities Protection Act into law. This made the intentional revelations of CIA operatives' identities a federal crime. 

The Modern Era

On September 11, 2001, members of the Islamic terrorist group al-Qaeda hijacked several commercial aircraft and used them to destroy the World Trade Center in New York City and part of the Pentagon building in Washington, DC, in one of the world's deadliest terror attacks. Over the following decade, the American media reported that the CIA and various other government organizations had long been suspecting such a terror attack on the United States, but they did not coordinate their information or act diligently enough on their intelligence to prevent it. 

With this dark cloud initiating what came to be called the “Global War on Terror,” the CIA undertook its part in combating terror groups such as al-Qaeda, with a special focus on bringing to justice al-Qaeda's most publicly visible leader, Osama Bin-Ladin. The CIA scored an immediate success when its operatives teamed with Afghanistan ethnic groups called the Northern Alliance that was opposed to al-Qaeda and a partner organization, the Taliban. The Northern Alliance routed the Taliban from power in 2001 and briefly forced the organization underground. CIA members assisted in the clandestine and decades-long effort to locate Bin-Ladin as well as in the US Special Operations-led raid that killed him in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011. The CIA was also instrumental in helping destroy an extremist and ruthless branch of al-Qaeda called the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) that for several years carved out an area of control in northern Iraq and southern Syria.

Owing in part to the public clamor that an event such as 9/11 never be repeated in the United States, the CIA resorted to measures that some have described as extreme and illegal. These included the extraction of information from captured enemy combatants by what some groups described as torture, or “enhanced interrogation techniques,” by Agency leadership.

The CIA was also discovered to have maintained secret prisons, or "Black Sites," where it maintained al-Qaeda detainees in countries such as Romania, Poland, Thailand, and the US Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The CIA was alleged to have mistreated many of the prisoners, including the purported mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

In December of 2014, the US Senate reported that the CIA had tortured many of the suspected terrorists captured in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to gain information about the 9/11 attacks as well as potential future terrorist attacks on the United States. The Senate report revealed that the CIA had employed such interrogation methods as sleep deprivation, beatings, and death threats on captives.

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