Central Intelligence Agency

Type: Government Agency
On the web: http://www.cia.gov

Special ops is nothing special for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The CIA is tasked with collecting, evaluating, and disseminating foreign intelligence to the President and senior US policymakers to assist them in making decisions relating to national security. The CIA may also engage in covert actions at the direction of the President and in accordance with applicable law. Part of the US Intelligence Community, which includes the FBI , the National Security Agency, Homeland Security, and number of other federal entities, the director of the CIA reports to the Director of National Intelligence. The CIA's budget is classified, as is the number of people the agency employs.

Officers:
Director: Leon E. Panetta
Director: Michael V. Hayden
CFO and Controller: Mary Corrado

CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). After its predecessor the paramilitary OSS was abolished in 1945, the CIA was created in 1946 to co-ordinate a plethora of US military and civilian intelligence organizations. But by the following year it was fully committed to covert anti-communist operations under the Truman Doctrine. These included working with Nazis in Germany, providing arms for the Greek civil war and the 1952 revolution in Egypt, financing the Italian Christian Democrats, and defeating a communist insurgency in the Philippines. In 1953 it directed the overthrow of Iranian nationalist Mossadegh and in 1954 it organized the paramilitary operation that deposed Arbenz in Guatemala. Cocooned in secrecy and with limitless unaccountable funds at its disposal, it came to see itself as the president's Praetorian Guard, with no restraint on its range of action.

When a U-2 spy plane was shot down over the USSR in 1960 and the pilot admitted he worked for the CIA, the veil began to lift. It slipped further in 1961 after an attempt to reverse the Cuban Revolution ended in humiliating defeat at the Bay of Pigs. Despite this, Kennedy was fascinated by covert action and authorized assassination attempts against Castro, Lumumba in the Congo, and Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. He and his successor Johnson also involved the CIA in the Indochina labyrinth, where it ran a secret war in Laos and the mass-assassination Phoenix programme in Vietnam. It also ran a number of counter-insurgency operations in Latin America and contributed to the destabilization of the Allende regime in Chile.

Throughout this period Angleton, the head of counter-intelligence, was conducting a fanatic ‘mole hunt’ that never did uncover the moles, but did generate widespread paranoia. After his removal in 1974, counter-intelligence was given a greatly reduced priority and very real traitors were able to operate with impunity. It is possible that much of the intelligence on the Soviet bloc produced by the CIA during the 1980s and early 1990s was in fact provided by the Soviet intelligence services, which either turned existing CIA assets or provided new ones as required.

Following the 1972 Watergate scandal, its dirty laundry was washed in public with a vengeance and agents all over the world had their cover blown. A Senate Oversight Committees and other sure sources of leaks were set up, and under Carter-appointee Turner the CIA was purged of the ‘old guard’ and with it much of its agent-handling capability. There was a brief revival of old glories under the Reagan appointee Casey, with covert operations in Afghanistan and Nicaragua. The latter blew up in the Iran-Contra affair and once again the CIA was attacked for following the orders of the office it is sworn to obey.

Long and unfairly accused of being the secret policeman to the world, Pres Clinton's 1995 definition of its post- Cold War function to include industrial espionage and the fight against international crime appears to confirm that this is the direction in which it will be heading.

— Hugh Bicheno

(CIA) was created by Congress in the National Security Act of 1947, recognizing strategic intelligence as a first line of defense and a crucial instrument in warfare. The attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 had demonstrated the need to gather and coordinate intelligence information. Significantly, the CIA was created the year President Harry S. Truman announced the containment doctrine at the beginning of the Cold War.

Truman abolished the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in 1945, transferring some of its intelligence‐gathering functions to the State Department and the army and some to a new Central Intelligence Group, created in January 1946. The CIA was established by Congress, not the president, and as an independent agency; the director (DCI) would report directly to the president. It operated under the National Security Council (NSC), a newly established presidential advisory board, and had legal access to the intelligence information of all other civilian and military agencies.

Concerns about an all‐powerful secret police spying on Americans led Congress to prohibit the CIA from “police, subpoena, law enforcement powers or internal‐security” functions. Domestic counterintelligence was to remain the preserve of the FBI.

The CIA's leaders, many of them former OSS officers, quickly became involved in bureaucratic struggles over jurisdiction and resources with nearly a dozen other military and civilian agencies, and the State Department required that the CIA's overseas personnel come under the jurisdiction of the U.S. ambassador in that country. The first DCI, Rear Adm. Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter (1947–50), lacked influence. Under his successors, Army Gen. Walter Bedell Smith (1950–53) and Allen Welsh Dulles (1953–61), the CIA became a powerful agency. Yet it never achieved anywhere near total control over U.S. intelligence policy because too many other departments retained their own sources of intelligence, especially those under the secretary of defense.

The 1947 National Security Act authorized the CIA to collect, correlate, and evaluate intelligence relating to national security, and to disseminate that information to appropriate agencies within the government. It was also authorized to perform “other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security.” Although the agency's charter did not mention “espionage,” “counterespionage,” or “covert action,” the broad language became the source for later expansion of the CIA's activities.

Within a year, the agency—often called “the company” by its personnel—had expanded its roles under NSC directives to include covert activities. These included secret psychological warfare as well as undercover political, economic, and paramilitary operations overseas. Originally, most of these anti‐Communist operations were in Europe, designed to be secret and planned and executed in such a way that the U.S. government could “plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them.”

In large part because of such clandestine operations Congress amended the statute (1949) to permit the CIA to receive funds secretly under budget cover of other federal agencies. Under the so‐called black budget, the director was given extraordinary authority to spend money and to impose absolute secrecy for sources and methods. The justification was to prevent foreign governments from learning the scope of the CIA's activities, but this secrecy also protected the CIA from domestic budgetary and accounting agencies.

The Korean War, and the massive national security buildup that accompanied it, led to a huge expansion of the CIA. The U.S. intelligence community's failure to anticipate the North Korean invasion of South Korea, like the Pearl Harbor attack, demonstrated the failure of intelligence gathering and coordination of information. The CIA was finally given access to military signals intelligence, and Truman replaced Hillenkoetter with Smith (1953), who had been Eisenhower's chief of staff during World War II. With increased funding and mandate, Smith largely created the CIA in its modern form. By 1953, the agency had more than 10,000 employees, including nearly 3,000 in the Office of Policy Coordination (which ran the covert operations), and more than 3,000 additional personnel serving overseas. Headquarters were moved to Langley, Virginia, in 1963.

Allen Dulles, former OSS officer, deputy director, and brother of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, was the first civilian to head the CIA; under his leadership, the agency reached a peak strength of 18,000. The CIA created and ran Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe as propaganda services beamed at Eastern Europe and the USSR.

NSC directives in the 1950s expanded the agency's covert operations, which came to overshadow information‐gathering functions. While covert actions by def inition remained secret and presidents were given plausible deniability, secrecy was undermined in major cases when its coups achieved success, for example, Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954). Most of the public controversy about the CIA involved covert foreign interventions where policy as well as secrecy failed, especially the Bay of Pigs invasion (1961). Although photo reconnaissance increased dramatically in the 1950s with the high‐flying U‐2 “spy” planes, the agency and the Eisenhower administration were publicly embarrassed when a plane was shot down over the USSR in May 1960 and the pilot captured. The public came to know of many intelligence failures, too, most dramatically the failure to predict the onset of the Korean War.

Dulles was replaced by John A. McCone (1961–65), a former chair of the Atomic Energy Commission, who shifted emphasis from covert operations to intelligence gathering and analysis. Through human intelligence gathering (HUMINT) by a Soviet military officer, Col. Oleg Penkovsky, and photoimage intelligence (IMINT) U‐2 flights over Cuba, the CIA learned in 1962 about Soviet missile technology and the deployment of nuclear‐tipped, medium‐range missiles in Cuba. The agency continued its covert operations, for example in a successful coup in Guyana in the early 1960s.

The CIA was hard hit during the Vietnam War. Pessimistic about conventional forces winning a guerrilla war, its own covert and counterintelligence operations in Southeast Asia became increasingly controversial. President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Vice Adm. William F. Raborn, Jr. (ret.) as DCI, but he was soon replaced by Richard M. Helms (1966–73), the first career intelligence officer to head the agency. Neither Johnson nor President Richard M. Nixon paid much attention to intelligence reports that contradicted their views, and Nixon and his NSC adviser, Henry Kissinger, tended to fashion their own intelligence estimates.

In the 1970s, in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam, the media and Congress launched major investigations into illegal or inappropriate activities by the CIA. These revealed that under orders from the Johnson and Nixon administrations, the CIA had violated its charter through surveillance (Operation Chaos) of domestic opponents of the Vietnam War, and that some U.S. intelligence officials had been involved in programs since the early 1960s to assassinate Communist leaders, most prominently Fidel Castro and the Congo's Patrice Lumumba.

Such revelations, especially by the investigating committee headed by Senator Frank Church, contributed to calls for abolition of the agency. Instead, the investigation precipitated reforms begun under DCIs James R. Schlesinger, William E. Colby, and George Bush. Assassination plots in peacetime were prohibited by executive order (1975) by President Gerald Ford, who also created an Intelligence Oversight Board and reinvigorated the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. In 1976–77, Congress created permanent intelligence committees in both houses to oversee all aspect of intelligence. President Jimmy Carter appointed Adm. Stanfield Turner, an active duty naval officer, as DCI (1977–81); under Turner, the agency shrank by more than one‐third of its peak size.

With the U.S. defense buildup that began in 1980, and especially under President Ronald Reagan and his first director, William J. Casey (1981–87)—a former OSS station chief, successful lawyer, and Reagan's 1980 campaign manager—the CIA was “unleashed,” its budget increased and clandestine operations reemphasized, especially in Afghanistan, Angola, and Nicaragua. The Intelligence Reform Act (1980) freed the CIA from earlier restraints: although presidential approval of covert operations was required, in “extraordinary circumstances” congressional oversight committees might be notified only later. New photo and satellite imagery and signals/communications intelligence (SIGINT) increased U.S. information on Soviet military capability. But tensions over covert op erations grew between the Republican president and the Democratic Congress, culminating in the Iran‐Contra Affair (1986), which revealed that the CIA had violated congressional restraints. Following Casey's death, FBI director William H. Webster became DCI (1987–91). The Intelligence Authorization Acts (1991, 1992) tightened legislative oversight and required prior notice for all covert actions.

With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which the agency had failed to predict, fundamental questions were raised about the future of the CIA, widely perceived as a Cold War institution. The agency's reputation was further hurt when CIA officer Aldrich H. Ames was exposed (1994) as a “mole” who had sold secrets to the Soviets for nearly a decade, causing the deaths of a dozen foreign agents. In 1997 a former CIA station chief, Harold Nicholson, was convicted of spying for Russia.

Robert Gates, R. James Woolsey, Jr., John M. Deutch, and George J. Tenet sought to find new roles for the CIA, especially technological surveillance for economic and ecological as well as security purposes, and monitoring drug traffic and terrorist threats. At century's end the future of the CIA remained uncertain.

[See also Intelligence, Military and Political; Pentagon, The.]

Bibliography

• U.S. Senate, 94th Congress, Select Committee (Church Committee) to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Hearings and Reports, 1975–76.
• Anne Karalekas, History of the Central Intelligence Agency, 1977.
• Harry Rositzke, The CIA's Secret Operations: Espionage, Counterespionage, and Cover Action, 1977.
• Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War, 1996.
• Loch K. Johnson, Secret Agencies: U.S. Intelligence in a Hostile World, 1996.
• Commission on the Roles and Capabilities of the U.S. Intelligence Community, Report, “Preparing for the 21st Century: An Appraisal of the U.S. Intelligence Community,” 1996

An independent U.S. agency responsible to the president through its Director and to the people of the United States through Congressional intelligence oversight committees. It was officially created by President Harry S. Truman in 1947 when he signed the National Security Act, but its history is usually traced back to the Office of Strategic Services active during World War II. The National Security Act charged the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) with coordinating U.S. intelligence activities, as well as correlating, analyzing, and providing that information to the president, the National Security Council, and all the officials responsible for formulating and carrying out U.S. national security policy.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

The US government agency charged with collecting and analysing intelligence. The agency was established in 1947 to advise the National Security Council. The Intelligence Directorate assesses economic and military information on foreign countries, and the Operations Directorate coordinates covert operations. Involvement in the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the Watergate break-in, and the Iran-Contra affair, have led to the role of the CIA being questioned, and a growth in Congressional oversight. The failure of the agency to anticipate the attacks on the US on 11 September 2001 brough criticism, forcing the CIA to reform its counter-terrorism operation. (See intelligence services.)

For more information on Central Intelligence Agency, visit Britannica.com.

Not until World War II did the United States feel the need for an intelligence gathering espionage agency outside of the military. During the war, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) collected information and sent agents behind enemy lines to work with resistance groups. When the war ended, the OSS was disbanded. But the start of a cold war with the Soviet Union soon revived the need for a permanent intelligence agency. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was created in 1947 with the passage of the National Security Act.

The CIA is an independent agency that supports the President, the National Security Council, and all other government officials who make and execute national security policy. The CIA fulfills this responsibility by providing accurate, comprehensive, and timely foreign intelligence on national security topics. The agency also conducts counterintelligence activities as directed by the President.

The head of the agency, the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), is the primary adviser to the President and the National Security Council on intelligence matters. The director is appointed by the President, with the confirmation of the Senate. The DCI is not a cabinet-level position, but some Presidents have elevated it to cabinet-level status by executive order.

In the 1950s, President Dwight Eisenhower relied on the CIA as an extension of U.S. foreign policy. In 1953 and 1954, the CIA directed the overthrow of what were seen as pro-communist governments in Iran and Guatemala. The CIA also flew high-altitude U-2 surveillance missions over communist nations to monitor missile deployment. In 1960, the Eisenhower administration was embarrassed when the Soviet Union shot down one of the U-2 planes and captured the pilot, who admitted to working for the CIA. In 1961 the CIA also sponsored the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Congressional investigations in the 1970s also revealed that the CIA had plotted assassinations of several communist leaders.

To gain more control over the intelligence community, President Bill Clinton issued an executive order in 1995 that established a committee of officials from the Departments of State and Defense, as well as the White House, to oversee CIA operations.

See also Director of Central Intelligence

World War II stimulated the creation of the first U.S. central intelligence organization, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), whose functions included espionage, special operations ranging from propaganda to sabotage, counterintelligence, and intelligence analysis. The OSS represented a revolution in U.S. intelligence not only because of the varied functions performed by a single, national agency but because of the breadth of its intelligence interests and its use of scholars to produce finished intelligence.

In the aftermath of World War II, the OSS was disbanded, closing down on 1 October 1945, as ordered by President Harry S. Truman. The counterintelligence and secret intelligence branches were transferred to the War and State Departments, respectively. At virtually the same time that he ordered the termination of the OSS, Truman authorized studies of the intelligence structure required by the United States in the future, and the National Intelligence Authority (NIA) and its operational element, the Central Intelligence Group (CIG), were formed. In addition to its initial responsibility of coordinating and synthesizing the reports produced by the military service intelligence agencies and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the CIG was soon assigned the task of clandestine human intelligence (HUMINT) collection.

Cia Organization

As part of a general consideration of national security needs, the National Security Act of 1947 addressed the question of intelligence organization. The act established the Central Intelligence Agency as an independent agency within the Executive Office of the President to replace the CIG. According to the act, the CIA was to have five functions: advising the National Security Council concerning intelligence activities; making recommendations to the National Security Council for the coordination of intelligence activities; correlating, evaluating, and disseminating intelligence; performing services of common concern as determined by the National Security Council; and performing "such functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct." The provisions of the act left considerable scope for interpretation, and the fifth and final provision has been cited as authorization for covert action operations. In fact, the provision was intended only to authorize espionage. The ultimate legal basis for covert action became presidential direction and congressional approval of funds for such programs.

The CIA developed in accord with a maximalist interpretation of the act. Thus, the CIA has become the primary U.S. government agency for intelligence analysis, clandestine human intelligence collection, and covert action. It has also played a major role in the development of reconnaissance and other technical collection systems employed for gathering imagery, signals, and measurement and signature intelligence. In addition, as stipulated in the agency's founding legislation, the director of the CIA serves as director of central intelligence (DCI) and is responsible for managing the activities of the entire national intelligence community. As a result, the deputy DCI (DDCI) usually assumes the responsibility of day to-day management of the CIA.

CIA headquarters is in Langley, Virginia, just south of Washington, D.C., although the agency has a number of other offices scattered around the Washington area. In 1991, the CIA had approximately 20,000 employees, but post–Cold War reductions and the transfer of the CIA's imagery analysts to the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) probably reduced that number to about 17,000. Its budget in 2002 was in the vicinity of $3 billion. The CIA consists of three major directorates: the Directorate of Operations (known as the Directorate of Plans from 1952 to 1973), the Directorate of Intelligence, and the Directorate of Science and Technology (established in 1963). In addition, it has a number of offices with administrative functions that were part of the Directorate of Administration until 2000, when that directorate was abolished.

Directorate of Operations

The Directorate of Operations has three major functions: human intelligence collection, covert action, and counterintelligence. The directorate's intelligence officers are U.S. citizens who generally operate under cover of U.S. embassies and consulates, which provides them with secure communications within the embassy and to other locations, protected files, and diplomatic immunity. Others operate under "nonofficial cover" (NOC). Such NOCs may operate as businesspeople, sometimes under cover of working at the overseas office of a U.S. firm. The CIA officers recruit foreign nationals as agents and cultivate knowledgeable foreigners who may provide information as either "unwitting" sources or outside a formal officer-agent relationship.

During the Cold War, the primary target of the CIA was, of course, the Soviet Union. Despite the closed nature of Soviet society and the size and intensity of the KGB's counterintelligence operation, the CIA had a number of notable successes. The most significant was Colonel Oleg Penkovskiy, a Soviet military intelligence (GRU) officer. In 1961 and 1962, Penkovskiy passed great quantities of material to the CIA and the British Secret Intelligence Service, including information on Soviet strategic capabilities and nuclear targeting policy. In addition, he provided a copy of the official Soviet medium-range ballistic missile manual, which was of crucial importance at the time of the Cuban missile crisis.

In subsequent years, the CIA penetrated the Soviet Foreign Ministry, Defense Ministry and General Staff, GRU, KGB, at least one military research facility, and probably several other Soviet organizations. Individuals providing data to the CIA included some stationed in the Soviet Union, some in Soviet consulates and embassies, and some assigned to the United Nations or other international organizations. CIA HUMINT operations successfully penetrated a number of other foreign governments during the last half of the twentieth century, including India, Israel, the People's Republic of China, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Ghana.

The CIA also experienced notable failures. During 1987, Cuban television showed films of apparent CIA officers in Cuba picking up and leaving material at dead drops. It seemed a significant number of Cubans had been operating as double agents, feeding information to the CIA under the supervision of Cuban security officials. CIA operations in East Germany were also heavily penetrated by the East German Ministry for State Security. In 1995, France expelled several CIA officers for attempting to recruit French government officials. From 1984 to 1994, the CIA counterintelligence officer Aldrich Ames provided the Soviet Union and Russia with a large number of documents and the names of CIA penetrations, which resulted in the deaths of ten CIA assets.

CIA covert action operations have included (1) political advice and counsel, (2) subsidies to individuals, (3) financial support and technical assistance to political parties or groups, (4) support to private organizations, including labor unions and business firms, (5) covert propaganda, (6) training of individuals, (7) economic operations, (8) paramilitary or political action operations designed to overthrow or to support a regime, and (9) until the mid-1960s, attempted assassinations. Successes in the covert action area included monetary support to anticommunist parties in France and Italy in the late 1940s that helped prevent communist electoral victories. The CIA successfully engineered a coup that overthrew Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in 1954. In contrast, repeated attempts to eliminate Fidel Castro's regime and Castro himself failed. CIA covert action in cooperation with Britain's Secret Intelligence Service was crucial in restoring the shah of Iran to the throne in 1953, and, by providing Stinger missiles to the Afghan resistance, in defeating the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Such operations subsequently had significant detrimental consequences. The CIA also orchestrated a propaganda campaign against Soviet SS-20 missile deployments in Europe in the 1980s.

Counterintelligence operations conducted by the Directorate of Operations include collection of information on foreign intelligence and security services and their activities through open and clandestine sources; evaluation of defectors; research and analysis concerning the structure, personnel, and operations of foreign intelligence and security services; and operations disrupting and neutralizing intelligence and security services engaging in activities hostile to the United States. Successful counterintelligence efforts have included penetration of a number of foreign intelligence services, including those of the Soviet Union and Russia, the People's Republic of China, and Poland.

Directorate of Intelligence

The Directorate of Intelligence, established in 1952 by consolidating different intelligence production offices in the CIA, is responsible for converting the data produced through examination of open sources, such as foreign journals and Newspapers, and collection of imagery, signals intelligence, and human intelligence into finished intelligence. The finished intelligence produced by the Directorate of Intelligence comes in several varieties whose names are self-explanatory: biographical sketches, current intelligence, warning intelligence, analytical intelligence, and estimative intelligence. A directorate component is responsible for producing the "President's Daily Brief," a document restricted to the president and a small number of key advisers that contains the most sensitive intelligence obtained by the U.S. intelligence community. In addition to producing intelligence on its own, the directorate also plays a major role in the national estimates and studies produced by the National Intelligence Council (NIC), which is outside the CIA structure and reports directly to the director of central intelligence. The NIC consists of national intelligence officers responsible for specific topics or areas of the world.

During the Cold War, a key part of the directorate's work was producing national intelligence estimates on Soviet strategic capabilities, the annual NIE 11-3/8 estimate. Its estimates on the prospects of foreign regimes included both notable successes and failures. The directorate provided no significant warning that the shah of Iran would be forced to flee his country in early 1979. In contrast, from the time Mikhail Gorbachev assumed power in the Soviet Union, CIA analysts noted the difficult path he faced. By 1987, their pessimism had grown, and by 1989, they raised the possibility that he would be toppled in a coup. In April 1991, the head of the Office of Soviet Analysis noted that forces were building for a coup and accurately identified the likely participants, the justification they would give, and the significant chance that such a coup would fail.

Directorate of Science and Technology

The Directorate of Science and Technology (DS&T) was established in August 1963 to replace the Directorate of Research, which had been created in 1962 in an attempt to bring together CIA activities in the area of science and technology. By 1962, those activities included development and operation of reconnaissance aircraft and satellites, including the U-2 spy plane and the Corona satellite; the operation and funding of ground stations to intercept Soviet missile telemetry; and the analysis of foreign nuclear and space programs.

The directorate went on to manage the successful development of a number of advanced reconnaissance systems. The A-12 (Oxcart) spy plane, which operated from 1967 to 1968, became the basis for the U.S. Air Force's SR-71 fleet, which conducted reconnaissance operations from 1968 to 1990. More importantly, the directorate, along with private contractors, was responsible for the development of the Rhyolite signals intelligence satellite, which provided a space-based ability to intercept Soviet and Chinese missile telemetry, and two imagery satellites, the KH-9 and the KH-11. The latter gave the United States the ability to monitor events in real time, that is, to receive imagery of an activity or facility as the satellite was passing over the target area. The successors to the KH-11 and the Rhyolite remained in operation at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

The DS&T has undergone several reorganizations and has gained and lost responsibilities. Both the Directorate of Intelligence and the Directorate of Operations have at times disputed actual or planned DS&T control of various offices and divisions. In 1963, the directorate assumed control of the Office of Scientific Intelligence, which had been in the Directorate of Intelligence. In 1976, all scientific and technical intelligence analysis functions were transferred back to the Directorate of Intelligence. A 1993 reorganization of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) eliminated the semiautonomous role of the directorate in the development and operation of reconnaissance satellites. In 1996, the National Photo-graphic Intelligence Center (NPIC), which had been transferred to the DS&T in 1973, was merged into the Newly created NIMA.

In the early twenty-first century, the directorate responsibilities included the application of information technology in support of intelligence analysts; technical support for clandestine operations; development of emplaced sensor systems, such as seismic or chemical sensors placed near an airbase or chemical weapons facility; the collection of signals intelligence in cooperation with the National Security Agency; and provision of personnel to the NRO to work on satellite reconnaissance development. The directorate also operated the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), which monitors and analyzes foreign radio, television, Newspapers, and magazines.

Bibliography

Mangold, Tom. Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton: The CIA's Master Spy Hunter. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991.

Prados, John. Presidents' Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon Covert Operations from World War II through the Persian Gulf. Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1996.

Ranelagh, John. The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986.

Richelson, Jeffrey T. The Wizards of Langley: Inside the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 2001.

Rudgers, David F. Creating the Secret State: The Origins of the Central Intelligence Agency, 1943–1947. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000.

Thomas, Evan. The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.

Woodward, Bob. Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981–1987. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.

—Jeffrey Richelson

Principal U.S. agency responsible for collection and assessment of worldwide intelligence data.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was established in 1947. It is responsible directly to the president of the United States and carries out functions ordered by the president and the president's staff. The agency and its director (called the director of central intelligence, or DCI) are charged not only with collecting and analyzing intelligence data but also with coordinating the activities of other U.S. intelligence agencies, including those attached to the military services and those of the state and defense departments. The agency is divided into three principal directorates: for clandestine collection of foreign intelligence and the conduct of covert actions; for analysis of political, military, and economic developments outside the United States; and for collection and analysis of technical and scientific intelligence. It also maintains the DCI Counterterrorist Center. The CIA is headquartered just outside Washington, D.C., in Langley, Virginia.

In the Middle East, the CIA is best known for having organized the 1953 overthrow of Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh and having returned Reza Shah Pahlavi to Iran's Peacock Throne in a covert operation. Mossadegh, although widely seen in the Middle East as a nationalist, was viewed by the Eisenhower administration as a tool of the Soviet Union who threatened U.S. interests. The CIA has also been implicated in General Husni alZaʿim's 1949 coup in Syria, and the Free Officers' 1952 coup in Egypt. Other CIA covert actions in the Middle East have included providing arms and covert support to rebel groups, including the Iraqi Kurds in the early 1970s; the Afghan guerrillas following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979; and Chad's forces opposing a Libyan invasion in 1980.

Lebanon was for some time the center of much CIA activity. According to newspaper accounts, during the 1970s and the early 1980s, the CIA and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) had a cooperative arrangement, centered in Beirut, to ensure security against terrorist attacks to Americans. This occurred despite the U.S. government's official, public refusal to deal with the PLO. Apparently in the hope of gaining diplomatic advantage, the PLO warned of any impending attack on U.S. citizens and provided physical protection to U.S. diplomats and installations. The principal PLO contact person in this arrangement, Ali Hasan alSalama (1940 - 1979), was killed in a 1979 car bombing believed to have been engineered by Israel, but the security cooperation continued until the PLO left Beirut in the aftermath of Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon. The following year saw a marked upsurge in attacks on U.S. installations and large numbers of American deaths. According to one account, following bombings of the American embassy and a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 and 1984 - all believed to be the work of the Shiʿite group Hizbullah, whose spiritual leader was Shaykh Husayn Fadlallah - the CIA arranged to have Fadlallah stopped. A car bomb was detonated in March 1985 at his apartment building; Fadlallah, however, was not harmed. The CIA denied involvement, and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, following an investigation, concluded that no direct or indirect CIA involvement could be shown.

Although not responsible for maintaining diplomatic relationships with other countries, the CIA often provides a vehicle by which the U.S. government can solidify a relationship through unofficial contacts or cooperate with another country covertly on operations of joint interest. This often occurs through regular meetings between a CIA official and a foreign leader. Liaison between the CIA and the intelligence services of friendly nations provides another means of cooperation. This type of liaison - involving cooperation on counterterrorist operations, coordination on other specific operations, and the exchange of intelligence data - has been conducted with many Middle East countries, most particularly Israel. The CIA has also been involved as a diplomatic intermediary between nations, as was the case when senior CIA officials Kermit Roosevelt, James Jesus Angleton, and Miles Copeland provided a secret channel of communication between Egypt and Israel in 1954 and 1955. The CIA helped coordinate security arrangements made by Israel and the Palestinian Authority in the late 1990s, and DCI George Tenet even offered his own plan for resolving the Israel - Palestinian conflict in June 2001.

The CIA was actively involved in stepped-up counterterrorist activities in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington that were engineered by the al-Qaʿida network. CIA operatives were active in Afghanistan during the American invasion of that country beginning in October 2001, and one became the first American to die there as a result of hostile activity. They were also present in Iraq during and after the U.S. invasion in the spring of 2003. The inability of the American forces to find the chemical and biological weapons the United States had claimed the Iraqi regime was stockpiling led to criticism of the CIA's and other U.S. intelligence agencies' prewar intelligence. In February 2004, President George W. Bush called for an investigation into U.S. intelligence failures prior to the invasion.

Bibliography

Colby, William, and Forbath, Peter. Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA. New York: Bookthrift, 1978.

Marchetti, Victor, and Marks, John D. The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. New York: Dell, 1989.

Turner, Stansfield. Secrecy and Democracy: The CIA in Transition. Boston: HarperCollins, 1986.

Woodward, Bob. Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981 - 1987. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.

— KATHLEEN M. CHRISTISON UPDATED BY MICHAEL R. FISCHBACH

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is an independent government organization, founded under the National Security Act of 1947. The agency is a leader among the 14 agencies and organizations in the United States Intelligence Community. The mission of CIA is to support the president, the National Security Council (NSC), and other officials involved in national security policy by providing accurate, comprehensive, and timely foreign intelligence on national security topics. CIA also supports the chief executive and the national security policy leadership by conducting counterintelligence operations, special activities, and other duties relating to foreign intelligence and national security as directed by the president. The CIA in the 1990s increased its openness with the American public, and provides relatively detailed information about its organizational structure, through which the director of Central Intelligence (DCI) oversees the four directorates (Administration, Intelligence, Science and Technology, and Operations), as well as numerous other offices.

Background

CIA's headquarters is in Langley, a neighborhood in McLean, Virginia; hence the term "Langley" is used as a metonym for the entire organization, or its leadership. (The terms "CIA" and "the CIA" are used interchangeably, while "the Company" is a term by which some employees refer to the agency.) Information on its budget is classified, but the entire U.S. intelligence budget, of which CIA comprises but a portion, was $26.6 billion in 1997, the first year in which such figures were reported. (The 1998 budget figures, the only other ones released as of early 2003, showed an increase of $100 million, to $26.7 billion.)

Also classified is the number of persons employed by CIA, but the agency is more open concerning the variety of personnel it hires. There is no one single type of CIA employee, and the popular image of CIA operatives as cutthroats and assassins is a bankrupt cliché. As of 2003, the agency had a particular interest in hiring scientists, engineers, economists, linguists, mathematicians, secretaries, accountants, and computer specialists, although the scope of employment opportunities exceeded even this wide range.

In order to be considered for employment with CIA, an applicant must have a college degree, with a minimum grade point average of 3.0. The applicant must submit to a polygraph and medical examination, as well as background checks. Once hired, the new employee must be willing to relocate to Washington, D.C., or to CIA stations in various locales throughout the world. Many CIA officers work under some form of cover, either as employees of other government organizations (for example, some CIA operatives serve under diplomatic cover in the State Department), or under nonofficial cover, whereby an intelligence officer lives as a private citizen who ostensibly has no ties to the U.S. government.

In accordance with the CIA's mission, the majority of activity by its operatives is directed toward the gathering, production, and analysis of political, economic, and military intelligence on foreign governments, terrorist groups, and criminal organizations. This information originates from documents obtained either openly or illegally, from human sources (human intelligence or HUMINT), from electronic eavesdropping (signals intelligence, or SIGINT), or from images collected by spy cameras or satellites in space (imagery intelligence, or IMINT). Once gathered, intelligence must be processed and analyzed, after which the CIA passes information on to its clients, which include the president and major cabinet-level departments, including State, Defense, and the Treasury.

CIA officers may also be involved in counterintelligence, which is designed to preserve U.S. national security by protecting American assets from foreign spying. Additionally, operatives of the CIA may at times engage in actions such as the spreading of propaganda or disinformation; the use of blackmail or other means to put pressure on enemy operatives; and give support to overseas political or military groups whose objectives align with U.S. interests.

CIA excesses in the past have prompted a number of countermeasures against it on the part of the federal government. In 1975, President Gerald R. Ford issued an executive order forbidding acts of assassination by the CIA, and Executive Order 12333, signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, extended this prohibition to forbidding indirect involvement in assassination. This order also expressly prohibited CIA collection of foreign intelligence on the domestic activities of American citizens. Today, the Executive Office of the president monitors and investigates CIA activities through the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.

In the mid-1970s, the Church Committee hearings in the Senate and the Pike Committee hearings in the House led to the formation of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Congressional oversight of CIA through these and other committees is an ongoing activity.

Some critics argue that the agency can find ways around the executive and legislative authorities charged with oversight of CIA activities. However, those authorities are privy to information on the CIA far beyond the reach of ordinary citizens lacking an appropriate security clearance and need-to-know, and it is likely that in many cases presidents or legislators have put a stop to activities about which the general public never learned. In light of the increased atmosphere of scrutiny that has attended CIA activities since the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s, the idea that the CIA maintains a government within the government, whereby it exerts its will independent of executive or legislative oversight, is tantamount to conspiracy theory.

The Structure of Cia

Although both Congress and the president exert oversight of CIA activities, it is the president who holds ultimately authority. Only the president, acting usually through the NSC, can direct the CIA to participate in covert actions. By the same token, DCI reports either directly to the president, or indirectly through the NSC.

Under DCI is the deputy director of Central Intelligence (DDCI), who assists DCI as head of the CIA and of the Intelligence Community. DDCI also exercises the powers of the DCI when the holder of that position is absent or disabled. Within the CIA and the Intelligence Community as a whole, the offices of the DCI and the DDCI are intended to function virtually as a single unit.

Three lines of authority. Under the leadership of the DCI/DDCI office are a number of functions within the intelligence community but outside the CIA. These include the DDCI for Community Management and the Assistant DCI for Administration, both of which are statutory positions for which presidential appointment and Senate confirmation is required; the Associate DCI for Military Support; the DCI for Foreign Intelligence Relations; and the National Intelligence Council.

Reporting to the DCI and DDCI are a number of independent offices within the CIA, including the Inspector General, General Counsel (these two are also statutory positions nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate), Public Affairs, Congressional Affairs, Protocol, and Diversity Plans and Programs. By far the largest chain of command within the CIA, however is the one that runs through the offices of the Executive Director (EXDIR) and Deputy Executive Director (D/EXDIR).

The EXDIR oversees five centers that collectively enable the CIA to carry out its mission: the Chief Financial Officer, Chief Information Officer, Global Support, Human Resources, and Security, each of which have numerous subordinate offices and bureaus. Also under the EXDIR aegis are several independent functions, including the Center for the Study of Intelligence, Office of Equal Employment Opportunity, Ombudsman/Alternative Dispute Resolution, and the Executive Secretary. Finally, the Executive Director's office is in the line of authority between DCI/DDCI and the four directorates.

The directorates. The work of the directorates of Operations and Intelligence are at the heart of what most people think of when they hear the initials "CIA". Operations is responsible for collecting foreign intelligence, including HUMINT, and for overseeing the overt collection of intelligence domestically through persons or organizations that volunteer that information. Within Operations are the Counterintelligence and Counterterrorism centers, the National HUMINT Requirements Tasking Center, and various regional and transnational issues divisions.

The Directorate of Intelligence is responsible for producing the bulk of CIA's finished intelligence, processed from raw data collected in the field. Within this directorate are the offices of Asian, Pacific, and Latin American Analysis; Near Eastern, South Asian, and African Analysis; Russian and European Analysis; Transnational Issues; and Policy Support. Other groups within this directorate include the Collection Requirements and Evaluation Staff, the DCI Crime and Narcotics Center, and the DCI Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control Center.

The Directorate of Administration provides support to CIA activities through a number of administrative and technical offices such as Communications, Facilities and Security Services, Information Technology, and Medical Services. The Directorate of Science and Technology also provides support through research, development, acquisition, and operations of technical capabilities and systems. It directs the Foreign Broadcast Information Service and the National Photographic Interpretation Center.

A Brief History of the Cia

The CIA began operation on September 18, 1947, with Rear Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter as its first DCI. In its first covert operation, begun late that year, it influenced the general elections in Italy so as to prevent a Communist victory. Despite this success, President Harry S. Truman blamed Hillenkoetter for failing to predict the coming of the Korean War, and replaced him with General Walter Bedell Smith in October 1950. Under Smith's leadership, the CIA helped bring about the overthrow of Iran's Premier Mohammed Mossadegh after the latter nationalized oil fields in his country.

The accession of Allen W. Dulles to the position of DCI in 1953 marked the beginning of a new era. Under his direction, the CIA became highly energetic and enterprising, building both the Berlin Tunnel and the U-2 spy plane, and undertaking covert operations in Guatemala, Egypt, Indonesia, Chile, and the Congo. Despite a number of successes, the CIA under Dulles also experienced several disasters, most notably the shootdown of U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers over the Soviet Union in 1960, and the abortive invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961.

The 1960s and 1970s. Under John A. McCone, who replaced Dulles, the CIA regained favor with Kennedy when it furnished spy plane photos showing Soviet missile emplacements in Cuba, evidence Kennedy used during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Following Kennedy's assassination, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed fellow Texan William F. Raborn, Jr., who had little background in intelligence. In June 1966, Raborn's DDCI, Richard McGarrah Helms, took the leadership position.

Helms vigorously prosecuted the CIA's secret wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, yet struggled with Johnson and President Richard M. Nixon over their demands to conduct domestic intelligence campaigns. Nixon fired him in February, 1973, and after a six-month period in which James R. Schlesinger led the agency, William E. Colby became DCI. Colby's was a difficult tenure, as the CIA came under intense scrutiny from journalists and committees in Congress.

Colby retired in January 1976, and was replaced by future President George H. W. Bush, who put his support behind improvements in satellite technology. When James E. Carter became president, he replaced Bush with Admiral Stansfield Turner, who continued Bush's emphasis on intelligence collection via satellite. Turner sought to distance the agency from its old practices, and covert operations declined dramatically under his leadership.

From the 1980s to the present. The inauguration of a new president, Ronald Reagan, in January 1981 brought with it a new DCI, William J. Casey. Under Casey, a veteran of U.S. intelligence in World War II, the CIA's budget, size, and influence grew enormously. Casey directed funds and arms to rebels fighting Communist regimes in both Afghanistan and Nicaragua, and became heavily involved in the Iran-Contra affair. How great that involvement was may never be known, in part because Casey died on January 29, 1987, during the congressional investigation.

William H. Webster, who served as FBI director from 1978 to 1987, succeeded Casey as DCI and served for four years. Under Robert M. Gates, a former DDCI of long standing, the CIA redirected its efforts from a Cold War orientation and toward a focus on issues such as nonproliferation, terrorism, and drug trafficking. During the tenure of R. James Woolsey, appointed in 1993, the CIA came under criticism with the exposure of Aldrich Ames, a mole for the Soviet Union and later Russia, who had operated within of the agency for many years.

Woolsey resigned in January 1995, and John M. Deutch replaced him. Deutch, who held the position for less than two years, was the first DCI to serve on the president's cabinet. In July 1997, George J. Tenet became the fifth DCI in just six years. Though Tenet's leadership style has won praise from observers of the Intelligence Community, the CIA as a whole came under criticism for perceived intelligence failures prior to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In the wake of those events, the agency has placed a renewed emphasis on human intelligence, or the gathering of intelligence from human sources.

Further Reading

Books

Andrew, Christopher M. For the president's Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush. New York: Harper Collins, 1995.

Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri. The CIA and American Democracy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.

Kessler, Ronald. Inside the CIA: Revealing the Secrets of the World's Most Powerful Spy Agency. New York: Pocket Books, 1992.

Prados, John. President's Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon Covert Operations Since World War II. New York: W. Morrow, 1986.

Richelson, Jeffrey T. The U.S. Intelligence Community, fourth edition. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999. ——. The Wizards of Langley: Inside the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001.

Electronic

Central Intelligence Agency. <http://www.cia.gov/> (April 24, 2003).

Central Intelligence Agency. Federation of American Scientists. <http://www.fas.org/irp/cia/index.html> (April 24,2003).

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was established following World War II from which the United States and the Soviet Union emerged as superpowers with vast military might and sharply conflicting world views. To protect the nation's security in all international matters and to ensure continued democracy and freedom for the United States, Congress created the CIA with the National Security Act of 1947 (ch. 343, 61 Stat. 495 [1947]). Gathering information from other countries relevant to national security is a sensitive task requiring considerable secrecy and covert activity. Unlike most other organizations, the CIA is not heard about when it is doing its job well. For this reason most of the information that reaches the media concerning the CIA is negative.

All intelligence information collected by the CIA and the CIA's recommendations are reported to the National Security Council under whose direction the CIA acts. The CIA is headed by the director of central intelligence, who is a member of the president's cabinet and the presidential spokesperson for the agency and the intelligence community. The director and deputy director of the CIA are appointed by the president with the advice and consent of the Senate.

The CIA is headquartered at a 258-acre compound in McLean, Virginia, and maintains twenty-two other offices in the Washington, D.C., area. The main compound includes a printing plant that produces phony documents — birth certificates, passports, driver's licenses, and so forth — for use by its agents. The plant also produces the President's Daily Brief, an eight-page CIA document that is presented to the president every morning. Another facility is used exclusively for recruiting spies to work for the CIA; another houses the Foreign Broadcast Information Service which monitors and translates broadcasts from forty-seven countries. Several other facilities recruit officers of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti (KGB) (the State Security Committee for countries in the former Soviet Union) to spy on their own countries. The agency also maintains facilities in 130 countries throughout the world. Of the $28 billion that is budgeted annually to the U.S. Intelligence Committee, $3 billion goes to the CIA. The official number of individuals employed by the CIA is sixteen thousand but many believe the actual number to be closer to twenty-two thousand.

Although all aspects of the CIA revolve around gathering intelligence and maintaining the security of the nation, the actual responsibilities of the agency are many and varied; they include [bl]Advising the National Security Council in matters concerning national security

Gathering and disseminating foreign intelligence (The CIA coordinates with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to gather intelligence within the United States.)

Conducting counterintelligence activities outside of the United States (The CIA coordinates with the FBI to conduct intelligence and counterintelligence activities within the United States.)

Gathering and disseminating intelligence on the foreign aspects of narcotics production and trafficking

Conducting other special activities approved by the president

In its earliest days the CIA operated in a shroud of secrecy. In recent years, however, increased media attention has made the country more aware of CIA activities. Since the mid-1970s the CIA has received more attention for breaking the law than it has for upholding national security. Four items in particular have given the CIA unwanted attention: the Church committee hearings, the Iran-Contra Affair, the Ames scandal, and the end of the cold war.

The Church Committee Hearings

In 1974, the New York Times broke a story that the CIA had violated its charter by spying on U.S. citizens who openly opposed the Vietnam War. An investigation followed, headed by Senator Frank Church, a Democrat from Idaho. Church and his committee uncovered a wealth of damaging information about the agency that went far beyond the issue of the Vietnam War. The Church committee hearings changed the way the public looked at the agency responsible for the security of its country.

The Church committee found that the CIA had been intercepting and reading mail being exchanged between the United States and the Soviet bloc. The CIA had records on more than three hundred thousand U.S. citizens who had no ties with espionage or intelligence. The CIA had also conducted LSD tests on unknowing participants, one of whom was driven to suicide. Through the CIA the United States had tried to assassinate at least five foreign leaders, including Cuban premier Fidel Castro. The CIA had first decided to embarrass the Cuban leader and thereby damage his popularity. To accomplish this, the agency plotted to make Castro's beard fall off by placing thallium salts in his shoes. The agency had a second plot, to give Castro a personality disorder by contaminating his cigars. The CIA had even enlisted the help of the Mafia in its attempt to assassinate Castro. These shocking disclosures brought demands for closer scrutiny of CIA activities.

Following the Church committee hearings Congress amended the National Security Act of 1947 in 1980 to require the CIA to inform the House and Senate Intelligence Committees of "significant anticipated intelligence activity." Within six years, however, the CIA found itself in trouble once more for failing to inform Congress of its activities.

The Iran-Contra Affair

On November 3, 1986, the Lebanese magazine Shiraa reported that Robert McFarland, U.S. national security adviser, had come to Iran with a shipment of arms from the United States. This revelation spurred what was ultimately termed the Iran-Contra Affair and spoiled an otherwise secret operation.

The CIA had involved itself in a covert action in which arms were shipped to Iran in exchange for the release of hostages. The payments that were received from the Iranians were, in turn, diverted to Nicaraguan Contra rebels who were fighting the Sandanista regime. All of this was done without the knowledge of Congress; the CIA informed neither the House Intelligence Committee nor the Senate Intelligence Committee of its actions. The CIA had broken the law that had been established to prevent it from breaking the law. Worse, President Ronald Reagan had not approved the agency's covert activity.

One year after the arms had been sold, William J. Casey, director of central intelligence and a cabinet member, asked the president to approve the transaction retroactively. Reagan signed an agreement to that effect, which specified that Congress was not to be told of the approval. John Poindexter, the national security adviser at the time, later testified that he destroyed the only copy of the agreement in order to save President Reagan from political embarrassment.

Despite great media attention and congressional finger-pointing, actual punishments for the Iran-Contra Affair were few and lenient. Casey was never indicted in the scandal. McFarland and Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger were brought up on criminal charges but both were pardoned on Christmas Eve 1992 by exiting president George Bush. All other persons linked to the scandal either were also pardoned by Bush or got off with small fines or probation or both.

The Ames Scandal

It did not take the CIA long to make its way back into the spotlight. This time it was not the agency that broke the law, but an individual. On February 21, 1994, Agent Aldrich Ames became the highest-ranking CIA official ever arrested. Ames had been selling U.S. secrets to the Soviet Union.

Ames's responsibilities as a CIA agent included directing the analysis of Soviet intelligence operations and recruiting Soviet agents who would betray those operations. This position put Ames in frequent contact with Soviet officials at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C. Ultimately, Ames began selling U.S. security secrets to the Soviets, a venture that earned him more than $2.5 million before his arrest. Some of this information involved betraying double agents, disclosures that led to the death of at least twelve Soviet and Eastern European spies.

The CIA began to search for a mole (a double agent) in 1986 after two intelligence officers at the Soviet Embassy who had been recruited as double agents by the FBI were recalled to Moscow, arrested, tried, and executed. The CIA was jolted again in 1989 when three more of its most valued Soviet double agents met their death by firing squad.

In 1991 the CIA began to work with the FBI in investigating East Germany and other former Warsaw Pact countries for leads to possible moles in the U.S. government. Ames became one of the suspects and was quietly transferred to the CIA's counternarcotics center. Since the FBI was in charge of counterintelligence domestically, Ames fell under its jurisdiction of investigation. CIA officials played down the possibility of one of its key employees being a spy and blocked independent scrutiny by the FBI. Ames continued to betray the CIA and the country.

The CIA was sharply criticized for its unwillingness to consider one of its own a double agent and for its refusal to allow the FBI to investigate the situation. For years, the agency failed to monitor Ames's overseas travel, question his personal finances, or detect unauthorized contacts between Ames and Soviet officials. As early as 1989 the CIA had been warned that Ames appeared to colleagues and neighbors to have accumulated sudden wealth. Ames was questioned about the source of the money during a routine 1991 background check. He said he had inherited money from his father-in-law.

From 1985 on, Ames and his wife bought a $540,000 home for cash, put $99,000 of improvements into the house, purchased a Jaguar, bought a farm and condominium in Colombia, and invested $165,000 in stock. And in one year they charged more than $100,000 on their credit cards. According to court documents, the Ameses spent nearly $1.4 million from April 1985 to November 1993. All of this took place while Ames's annual CIA salary never exceeded $70,000. According to CIA officials, indications of wrongdoing by CIA employees were often overlooked because supervisors were far too trusting of employees, whom they treated as family.

When Ames got a call to go to his CIA office the morning of February 21, 1994, he had no inkling that after almost nine years his career of selling secrets to Moscow was about to end. With Ames planning to travel to Russia the next day on CIA business, the FBI believed that it had to act. A block and a half from Ames's house his Jaguar was forced to the curb and he was arrested by FBI agents.

On April 28, 1994, Ames pleaded guilty to the criminal charges of espionage and tax evasion. He received a sentence of life imprisonment without parole, the maximum sentence he could have expected if convicted after trial.

The End of the Cold War

The importance of the threat imposed by Ames's dealings with the Soviet Union was seemingly diminished with that country's dissolution. But despite the apparent end of the cold war and the division of the former Soviet Union, the United States continues to spy on the Russian Republic. The former Soviet Union also continues its own covert activities within the United States.

Some question the continued need for the CIA in the post-cold war era. But supporters need point no further than the war with Iraq to justify continued backing for the agency. The CIA was responsible for supplying intelligence reports that allowed the United States to cripple the Iraqi efforts in the Gulf War with an initial air strike. Without the assistance of the CIA the war might not have reached such a swift end. Supporters also argue that it is unfair to criticize a covert organization for its failures when so little attention is given to its successes. When the CIA is functioning efficiently and effectively its operation is invisible to the country's citizens; it is only in failure that the secrecy of the agency is betrayed to scrutinizing eyes.

Since the end of the cold war some members of Congress have called for severe cuts in the CIA's budget or dissolution of the agency. President Bill Clinton said that such ideas are "profoundly wrong," and that the United States still faces many threats and challenges, including terrorism, drug trafficking, and nuclear proliferation. "I believe making deep cuts in intelligence during peacetime is comparable to canceling your health insurance when you're feeling fine," he said. Nonetheless, a federal commission has been organized to discuss and study the uncertain future of the CIA.

An agency of the United States government, responsible for coordinating information-gathering activities outside the United States in the interest of national security. The CIA works with the Department of State and a variety of civilian and military organizations to protect American interests abroad and recommend directions for American foreign policy.