Central Intelligence Agency

Central Intelligence Agency. The National Security Act of 1947 created the National Security Council (NSC), a presidential advisory body. This act also created the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as successor to the World War II Office of Strategic Services, with responsibility for recruiting and controlling agents, conducting covert actions, and providing intelligence assessments. General Walter Bedell Smith, Dwight D. Eisenhower's wartime chief of staff, was director from 1950 to 1953. Director Allen Dulles (1953–1961) enjoyed broad leeway from President Eisenhower, who respected the agency's intelligence assessments and authorized a wide range of covert actions, including coups in Iran and Guatemala to overthrow regimes viewed as hostile to U.S. interests.

Beginning in the 1960s, the CIA faced rising criticism. Failures like the shooting down of a U‐2 spy plane over Russia in 1960 and the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation in 1961 shook official confidence. Conservatives attacked it as a bastion of the liberal establishment— President Richard M. Nixon derided it as “a muscle‐bound bureaucracy” drawn from the “Ivy League and Georgetown set.” Liberals and radicals criticized the CIA's covert actions against Third World states, including its role in recruiting a secret army in Laos and in the overthrow and assassination of Salvadore Allende, the leftist president of Chile, in 1973. A congressional committee under Senator Frank Church of Idaho documented the agency's failures and excesses, while presidents marginalized it and slashed its staff. In violation of the law, the CIA also carried out various domestic operations that figured in the Nixon Era Watergate scandals. Under director William Casey in the Ronald Reagan administration, the CIA participated in the secret and illegal support of the Nicaraguan contras and thus figured in the Iran‐Contra Affair. The arrest of several double agents operating within the agency did further damage.

From the 1970s to the 1990s, the CIA faced persistent attacks for inadequate security; recruitment failures; assessment errors; illegal domestic operations; and the politicization of intelligence, both in overrating Russia's strength and failing to anticipate Soviet actions. In fact, the CIA's record in recruiting agents was respectable, and its officers generally tried to be law‐abiding even when pressured otherwise. Many of the CIA's more dubious undertakings, such as the far‐fetched schemes to assassinate or discredit Cuban premier Fidel Castro, were initiated on instructions from higher up. The CIA often carried out covert operations effectively and resisted efforts to politicize its intelligence assessments, which were often quite good, involving not only agents but also data analysis and technical means such as photographic satellites. An understanding of the CIA is crucial to understanding Cold War America, both at home and abroad.

With the Cold War's end, the CIA faced new challenges as it reoriented its mission. The Agency's reputation suffered in 1994 with the arrest of Aldrich Ames, a high-level CIA employee who for nine years had passed highly secret information to the Soviet Union. In the political fallout from the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Agency faced intense criticism for intelligence failings and for a lack of coordination with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other government agencies. In 2004, as a blue‐ribbon national panel investigated the intelligence lapses preceding the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush called for a major revamping of the nation's entire intelligence‐gathering apparatus‐a proposal with serious implications for the CIA's future.
See also Foreign Relations: U.S. Relations with Latin America; Foreign Relations: U.S. Relations with the Middle East; Intelligence Gathering and Espionage.

Bibliography

John Ranelagh , The Agency, 1986.
Christopher Andrews , For the President's Eyes Only, 1995.

John Ferris

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Paul S. Boyer