CIA History and Mission - VOA Story

The Central Intelligence Agency marks its 60th birthday this month. The CIA has had a colorful and often controversial history. Some historians say various sectors of the government had enough information to warn of the impending Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. But no one -- as spies say -- connected the dots. That led President Franklin Roosevelt to create the Office of Strategic Services to carry out espionage and sabotage in German and Japanese-occupied territories. Sixty years after Pearl Harbor and billions of dollars spent on intelligence, the United States was the target of another surprise attack on September 11th, 2001. The debate over the failure to intercept that attack continues. With the end of the war the old OSS faded into history -- replaced by the CIA on September 18, 1947. The man known as "Wild Bill" -- OSS chief William Donovan -- lobbied vigorously for a post war intelligence agency to ensure that America's leaders would not make policy in ignorance. "America cannot afford to resume its prewar indifference," he said, "and here's a fact we must face: today there is not a single permanent agency to take over in peace time certain of the functions which OSS has performed in war time." But the CIA has often come under fire for intelligence lapses such as the failure to foresee the collapse of the Soviet Union and the mistaken assertion that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Most controversial were the CIA's covert actions, such the 1953 coup in Iran that installed the Shah, or the overthrow of the Salvador Allende government in Chile in 1973 -- both by presidential order. Many CIA veterans concede that the U.S. officials came to favor spy technology in place of the spies themselves -- or what professionals call "HUMINT," human intelligence. Almost half of the CIA's current workforce was hired after September 11th, 2001. This new computer-literate generation of analysts and field officers are now on watch -- snooping with technology the old Cold War spies never envisioned.