Legally, the CIA is a product of the National Security Act of
1947. Historically, it grew out of a previous intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). President Franklin
Roosevelt established the OSS in 1942 as part of the U.S. effort in World War II.
Before then, the United States had no centralized intelligence
service. The FBI collected information it thought relevant. So did the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy. But there was no systematic
intelligence oversight, and the existing agencies often refused to share information (they still do).
After the war, President Harry Truman disbanded the OSS, but he
hired many of its key members to staff what became the CIA. According to Truman, "the CIA was set up by me for the sole purpose
of getting all the available information to the president. It was not intended to operate as an international agency engaged
in strange activities."
Despite Truman's professed intentions, the CIA soon became involved
in covert operations, helping produce anti-communist coups and assassination attempts as surely as it produced intelligence
estimates. In the early years of the Cold War, it grew quickly and without much oversight. Citizens and politicians alike
viewed the CIA as the counterpart to the Soviet KGB--though, unlike the KGB, it wasn't supposed to spy on its own citizens.
Congressional hearings in 1975 determined that the CIA actually
had been spying on U.S. citizens--and had helped to overthrow democratically elected governments in Iran, Chile, and elsewhere.
That led to the creation of permanent oversight committees in both houses of Congress.
President Reagan ramped up the CIA's budget in the 1980s, and
The Company enjoyed another boom. Yet the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought a new bust, as the agency lost one of its
main reasons for being. Soon a series of commissions began calling for reforms to the intelligence community. Those calls
grew louder after September 11, 2001, and louder still when U.S. investigators failed to find weapons of mass destruction
in Iraq.
In 2004, Congress passed the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism
Prevention Act, hailed as the biggest reform of the U.S. intelligence community since the act that created the CIA. Before
2004, the CIA director was responsible for coordinating the activities of the entire intelligence community. Now he and the
other intelligence chiefs report to the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). That change makes the Central Intelligence
Agency far less central.
Another recent change involves one of the CIA's four traditional
directorates. What was once the CIA's Directorate of Operations--responsible for conducting covert ops and counterintelligence
worldwide--was recently absorbed by the National Clandestine Service (NCS). The NCS still reports to the CIA director, but
it also coordinates human intelligence work between the CIA and other intelligence agencies and "works with the Office of
the Director of National Intelligence to implement the DNI's statutory authorities."
The three other traditional CIA directorates remain. The Directorate
of Science and Technology keeps an eye on spy tech and an ear on intercepted communications (though the NSA handles most of
America's electronic surveillance work). The Directorate of Support handles bookkeeping, personnel, and internal security,
including snooping out spies within the CIA. And the Directorate of Intelligence tries to do what Truman wanted--gather information
from all sources and produce intelligence estimates for the president.
Steve Sampson
KnowledgeNews
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