The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has long been the nation’s top spy agency responsible for uncovering information about threats to the United States and carrying out operations to neutralize such threats. Born at the beginning of the Cold War, the CIA came of age at a time when the U.S. was in constant fear of being taken over by the Soviet Union, which produced a legacy of dirty deeds by the agency. Critics have questioned the effectiveness of the cloak-and-dagger agency, especially in recent times when former officials were caught selling American secrets to Russia, and the CIA leadership failed to warn of the attacks that were carried out on Sept. 11, 2001. That failure caused the CIA to lose some of its standing in Washington, DC, although the agency has worked hard to rebuild its trust with the Bush administration by implementing some of the most controversial plans in the Global War on Terrorism campaign.
The predecessor to the CIA was the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), created by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1942 to help the military garner intelligence in its battles against German, Italian and Japanese forces in World War II. The OSS reported to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and never possessed the broad intelligence gathering mandate that the latter CIA enjoyed. The military branches continued to maintain their own spying operations, while the FBI maintained its jurisdiction over domestic counter-espionage.
The OSS’s creator and director, William Donovan, submitted to President Roosevelt in late 1943 a plan that would have separated the OSS from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and had it report directly to the President. Donovan’s idea also would have made the OSS a more powerful and centralized intelligence operation, instructed to “procure intelligence both by overt and covert methods,” determine national intelligence objectives and pull together all intelligence gathered by other government agencies. The heads of the military balked at turning over their espionage and counter-espionage operations to the OSS, but Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, agreed that the US needed a stronger intelligence network to combat efforts by the Soviet Union to expand its influence in strategic regions.
In October 1945, two months after the end of World War II, the OSS was abolished and its functions transferred to the State and War Departments. This move was only temporary, as Truman established the Central Intelligence Group (PDF) in January 1946 to coordinate intelligence gathered by federal departments and to compliment these efforts by acquiring its own leads and details on foreign targets. The Central Intelligence Group operated under the direction of the National Intelligence Authority composed of a Presidential representative and the Secretaries of State, War and Navy. Rear Admiral Sidney Souers, US Naval Reserve, who was the deputy chief of naval intelligence, was appointed the first Director of Central Intelligence.
Truman and his people weren’t entirely satisfied with this intelligence set up, and so in 1947 the Central Intelligence Group was replaced under the provisions of the landmark National Security Act of 1947 with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The act also created the National Security Council.
The 1947 NSA largely mirrored what Donovan called for in 1944 for the OSS. It charged the CIA with coordinating the nation’s intelligence activities and correlating, evaluating and disseminating intelligence affecting national security. In addition, the CIA performed other duties instructed by the National Security Council as long as those actions did not require it to conduct any kind of domestic spying on Americans, which was forbidden. Two years later, the Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949 established the policy of making the CIA’s budget secret from almost all government officials, making it difficult for members of Congress to maintain any kind of effective oversight of the agency’s clandestine operations. The same legislation exempted the CIA from having to disclose details about its organization, including names, titles and salaries of employees.
With these rules in place, and an ever-growing worry over the perceived threat of Soviet spies targeting American interests, the CIA wasted little time in doing its part to implement the Truman Doctrine and get involved in clandestine operations that would come to define - and leave a legacy of ashes - during the Cold War. In fact, only one year after it was created, CIA officials embarked on a domestic operation - in spite of its own originating legislation not to - known as Operation Mockingbird that sought to influence American media by recruiting highly-respected members of the press to either join the CIA or secretly help it shape the news. CIA operatives also focused on conditions inside Greece in the late 1940s to assess and thwart Communist efforts to seize control of the country’s central government.
It was the early 1950s that the CIA began to concentrate on covert operations. In 1951, Iran’s parliament decided to nationalize its oil industry which, until then, had been under the control of British petroleum companies. The seizure of the oil fields was endorsed by Iran’s newly-elected prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, whom the US and British officials decided to target for overthrow. The CIA successfully carried out a clandestine operation that toppled Mossadegh in 1953 and installed Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi in power, where he remained for the next 25 years until the Iranian revolution of 1979 forced the Shah out, leading to the seizure of the American embassy and 52 American hostages and leaving US-Iranian relations in shambles for the next 30 years.
Because of its success in Iran, the CIA was emboldened to carry out another coup two years later in Guatemala. After the country’s president began to implement land reforms that threatened the holdings of the United Fruit Company, corporate officials went to the Eisenhower administration for help. The CIA’s Operation PBSuccess eliminated President Jacobo Arbenz and installed a US-friendly government that not only restored United Fruit’s interests, but also left a legacy of bitter fruit and death squads for Guatemalans.
Being two-for-two, CIA officials weren’t at all reluctant to take on another, even larger leftist target in Cuba once the Kennedy administration gave the go-ahead for the Bay of Pigs operation in 1961. That operation - aimed at removing from power the Communist government of Fidel Castro - was an unmitigated disaster for President Kennedy. But the failure didn’t slow down the CIA from trying to reshape other governments around the world. In the same year of the Bay of Pigs failure, the CIA played a role in the assassination of President Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, and in 1965, operatives in Indonesia helped replace the leftist Sukarno with the rightist Suharto, whose oppressive regime led to the massacre of an estimated one million Indonesians.
The CIA’s involvement in Vietnam from the early 1960s until the mid 1970s was another opportunity for the agency to conduct activities of a “questionable” nature. When the Kennedy administration grew weary of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, the CIA offered intelligence assessments on the prospects of a coup to remove Diem, which subsequently came about at the hands of the Vietnamese military. Even worse, the CIA implemented one of its most controversial operations with the Phoenix Program, in which supporters of the Communist insurgency in South Vietnam were targeted, tortured and in some cases assassinated.
CIA spies also worked in neighboring Laos, Cambodia and Thailand. In Laos, CIA agents helped arm and train the Hmong people to fight a secret war against the country’s leftist government. That operation failed to destabilize the Communists in power and left many Hmong either dead or forced to flee the country for the United States.
In the 1970s, the CIA’s nefarious conduct finally was exposed as a result of several investigations, including the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, otherwise known as the Church Committee, after its chairman, Senator Frank Church (D-ID). Church’s committee reports uncovered a dark treasure trove of illegal and unethical conduct by CIA agents that ranged from spying on Americans to assassinating foreign leaders. In the wake of the agency’s public exposure, Democratic President Jimmy Carter cut funding for the CIA, leaving the future of the spy office in doubt.
For the CIA’s Cold Warriors, the best thing that could have happened was the election of Ronald Reagan to the White House in 1980. An ardent anti-Communist, Reagan had no qualms about unleashing the CIA to carry out espionage and other secret missions to support US foreign policy. He entrusted the leadership of the much-maligned agency to his campaign manager, William Casey, who had worked for the OSS as a young man during the Second World War. Casey expanded the agency’s spy operations and reinstituted covert operations in strategic countries, such as Afghanistan (helping the mujahedeen battle the Soviet army), Poland (encouraging the Solidarity movement) and Nicaragua (undermining the leftist Sandinista government). The CIA’s activities in Nicaragua led to accusations that agents allowed Contra rebels fighting the Sandinistas to run narcotics that wound up on American streets, and that Casey was involved in the illegal diversion of monies from secret arms sales to Iran to help finance the Contras. Casey, however, died in 1987 from a brain tumor before the Iran-Contra independent prosecutor, Lawrence Walsh, could interview him about his role in the scandal.
Because of the turmoil of Iran-Contra, CIA leadership after Casey failed to address speculation that the agency had a Russian spy, or “mole,” working inside it. During the 1980s, several important American spies operating in Soviet-bloc countries disappeared, and some intelligence officials worried that a turncoat had given the spies’ identity to the USSR. It wasn’t until 1994 that the FBI finally seized Aldrich Ames, one of the CIA’s top men and head of the agency’s counter-espionage division, who had been paid $2 million to deliver a huge cache of sensitive information about CIA operations to the Russians.
Lawmakers in Congress were outraged by the CIA’s incompetence in not discovering Ames sooner. Three years later, an even higher-ranking CIA official, Harold James Nicholson, was caught selling US intelligence to Russia.
In addition to the exposure of Soviet moles, the agency suffered other embarrassing intelligence lapses as it struggled to reorient itself after the end of the Cold War and warn US officials of the new threat: Islamic terrorists. Again and again, the CIA failed to uncover attacks against US targets, from the 1993 World Trade Center truck bombing to the 1998 twin attacks against US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya to the 2000 attack on the USS Cole.
Two of the aforementioned attacks happened on the watch of Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, who served under both President Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, one of the few CIA directors to serve under two presidents from different parties. Tenet’s shop came under even more criticism following the attack on Sept. 11, 2001, as officials in Washington, DC, were astonished that such a large and complicated undertaking could be carried out without the CIA hearing about it beforehand. After the 9/11 commission released its findings about the attack and the failure of US security agencies, including the CIA, to thwart it, President Bush and Congress adopted reforms that dramatically altered the agency’s role in national intelligence. The post of director of central intelligence was eliminated, with the CIA now led by a director who reported to the newly-created Director of National Intelligence instead of to the President.
But the CIA did not cease from playing a vital role in the Bush administration’s effort to go after Islamic terrorists. Shortly after 9/11, the CIA established secret prisons in foreign countries to house and interrogate suspected terrorists (see Controversies), and agents played a role in torturing detainees at Guantanamo Bay.
CIA Traitor Aldrich Ames
(by Pete Earley, TruTV)
Once America’s premier spy agency, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) continues to play a key role in the country’s pursuit of information that warns of threats to the United States, its citizens and vital interests. The CIA is responsible for collecting intelligence through human sources (spies) as well as various forms of technology. The agency passes on the information it gathers to members of the Intelligence Community and to the Director of National Intelligence.
Although most of its work is classified, the CIA does provide some information about itself on the Internet. The agency performs most of its duties through one of four divisions:
- The Directorate of Intelligence (DI) maintains a large staff of analysts who examine a wide variety of information that is collected by the CIA and other sources to keep watch on key countries, events and people around the world. DI produces, among other things, the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) and the World Intelligence Review (WIRe). The directorate is structured in 12 regional or topical offices. Four concentrate on regional political and economic issues, six offices examine broad transnational issues and two focus on policy and collection support. The DI also supports a selection of other analytic programs. DI offices consist of:
- The CIA Crime and Narcotics Center, which collects and analyzes information on international narcotics trafficking and organized crime for policymakers and the law enforcement community.
- The CIA Weapons, Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control Center, which provides intelligence support on strategic threats involving foreign weapons.
- The Counterintelligence Center Analysis Group, which identifies, monitors and analyzes foreign intelligence operations that try to spy on US persons, activities and interests.
- The Office of Terrorism Analysis, which serves as the analytic component of the CIA Counterterrorism Center. The office tracks terrorists, assesses their vulnerabilities by analyzing their ideology and goals, capabilities, associates and locations, analyses worldwide terrorist threat information and patterns to provide warnings aimed at preventing terrorist attacks, monitors worldwide terrorism trends and patterns, including emerging and nontraditional terrorist groups, evolving terrorist threats and possible collusion between terrorist groups and identifies, disrupts and prevents international financial transactions that support terrorist networks and operations.
- The Office of Asian Pacific, Latin American, and African Analysis, which studies the political, economic, leadership, societal and military developments in Asia, Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa.
- The Office of Collection Strategies and Analysis, which provides comprehensive intelligence collection expertise to the DI, a wide range of senior CIA and Intelligence Community officials and key national policymakers.
- The Office of Iraq Analysis, which provides multidisciplinary intelligence analysis on Iraq to the President and his top advisors.
- The Office of Near Eastern and South Asian Analysis, which provides policymakers with comprehensive analytic support on Middle Eastern and North African countries as well as on the South Asian nations of India, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
- The Office of Russian and European Analysis, which provides intelligence support on Russia and Europe.
- The Information Operations Center Analysis Group, which evaluates foreign threats to US computer systems, particularly those that support critical infrastructures.
- The Office of Policy Support, which customizes DI analysis and presents it to a wide variety of policy, law enforcement, military and foreign liaison recipients.
- The Office of Transnational Issues, which utilizes a broad range of experts to address threats to US energy and economic security, illicit financial activities, societal conflicts, humanitarian crises, global health and the strategic military and global information environment.
Other Analytic Programs run by DI:
- The Sherman Kent School for Intelligence Analysis, which serves as the DI’s component of CIA University and provides basic analytic training and more advanced courses in specialized skills. The Career Analyst Program is the DI’s basic training program and introduces all new employees to the basic thinking, writing and briefing skills. Segments include analytic tools, counterintelligence issues, denial and deception analysis and warning skills. The Kent School also offers a wide range of intermediate- and advanced-level training for analysts and managers on analytic methodologies, substantive issues and leadership skills.
- The Global Futures Partnership, which functions as the CIA’s think tank, or as the agency puts it, a strategic “think and do tank.” It conceptualizes and implements interdisciplinary and multi-organizational projects on key intelligence issues with leading thinkers from academia, business, strategy and intelligence consultants.
- The Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program, which examines those movements and organizations that use religion for political purposes and use religious ideology to attempt to change the existing political, social or economic order. The CIA claims that the program “does not focus on Islam as a religion or on the worldwide Muslim community.”
- National Clandestine Service operates the CIA covert operations and conducts counterintelligence and special activities as authorized by the President. Once known as the Directorate of Operations, the clandestine service houses the CIA’s elite spies and coordinates the human intelligence (HUMINT) services which involve working with other agencies including the FBI, the Diplomatic Security Service, Defense Intelligence Agency, Air Intelligence Agency, Army Intelligence and Security Command, Marine Corps Intelligence Activity and Office of Naval Intelligence.
- Directorate of Science & Technology is where “the magic happens” in the CIA. Composed of scientists, engineers and other specialists, this division works on new technology to help the agency better collect information. According to the National Security Archive at George Washington University, S&T has helped design and operate the nation’s spy satellites as well as spy planes like the U-2 and A-12. The division was also responsible for failed efforts like using experimental drugs to extract information from human sources, designing poison pens and exploding seashells to assassinate Fidel Castro and employing psychics to report on activities at Soviet military facilities by using “remote viewing.”
- Directorate of Support is, as its name implies, the CIA’s support wing that performs various duties to help the agency carry out its missions. It builds and operates facilities and communications networks and secures CIA buildings, people, data and networks from threats. The directorate also hires, trains and assigns CIA officers for every directorate in the agency and manages the CIA’s business contracts and acquisitions, financial services, administrative support and phone company.
Because the CIA budget is classified, there are no public records of how the agency spends its money. Even the Government Accountability Office, the federal government’s top watchdog agency, has not audited the CIA since the 1960s due to restrictions on the agency’s financial data.
It has been reported that the CIA has paid for contractors - who make up one third of the agency’s workforce - to help conduct its missions. According to one published account, some contractors have worked with detainees held in Afghanistan, and in one instance, a contractor was convicted of murdering an individual held in custody on a US military base (see Controversies). CIA Director Michael Hayden testified before Congress in 2008 that some contractors have participated in “ enhanced interrogation techniques” (aka torture).
It also has been reported that Booz Allen Hamilton, a private firm that specializes in intelligence-related services for the US government, has provided extensive services to the CIA. The company claims to provide war-gaming, data-mining, analysis of imagery and intelligence picked up by US spy satellites and design of code-breaking systems.
Another company that has performed work for the CIA is Tepper Aviation, whose fleet of transport planes have been used to fly detainees to secret prisons run by the CIA. The agency has also used Aero Contractors Ltd. for such operations.
Hayden has publicly stated that he intends to hire fewer contractors in response to pressure from Congress to cuts costs within the agency. The initiative seeks to reduce the contractor workforce by 1 0% by the end of Fiscal Year 2008 and end the practice of “bidding back,” in which employment agencies hire retired CIA employees and sell their services back to the agency while they collect their government pensions.
CIA Plans Cutbacks, Limits on Contractor Staffing
(by Walter Pincus and Stephen Barr, Washington Post)
CIA Destroys Tapes Showing Torture
In late 2007, revelations surfaced that the CIA had destroyed tapes of overseas interrogations of terrorism suspects that showed agents using a simulated form of drowning known as waterboarding. The destruction was ordered by the agency’s then-head of its National Clandestine Service, Jose Rodriguez, after receiving a request from the CIA’s station chief in Bangkok in 2005 if to destroy recordings that had been made in 2002. The station chief was insistent because he was retiring and wanted to resolve the matter before he left.
Rodriguez’s decision to order the tapes destroyed came in spite of advice from other senior CIA and White House officials who claimed they had told the clandestine chief to preserve all records. Rodriguez said CIA lawyers and other officials told him that he had the legal right to order the destruction.
CIA Blogger Canned Over Torture Remarks
Until 2006, Christine Axsmith was a software contractor for the CIA who wrote a blog that was only accessible to other CIA workers. A self-described Erma Bombeck of the intelligence world, Axsmith wrote about everything from the economy to the quality of food in the CIA cafeteria. Then one day she posted her feelings about waterboarding - namely, how wrong it was - and her blog was taken down. Furthermore, she was fired by her employer, BAE Systems.
CIA Spies Live It Up During Kidnapping Mission
When details of the CIA’s capture of an Islamic cleric in Milan surfaced, Italian authorities were outraged by the kidnapping. Prosecutors began collecting evidence to build a case that the 19 operatives should be brought back to Italy and tried on charges of kidnapping. Among the details that the Italians discovered was that the CIA agents spent lavishly while they posed as businessmen and secretly planned their seizure of Hussan Mustafa Omar Nasr.
The Americans stayed at some of the finest hotels in Milan, sometimes for as long as six weeks, ringing up tabs of as much as $500 a day on Diners Club accounts created to match their forged identities. Then, after abducting Nasr and flying him to Cairo, some agents spent long weekends in Venice and Florence before leaving the country.
Italian prosecutors had no trouble retracing the steps of the agents because they left a long trail of paper and electronic records, including making phones calls from unsecure phones in their hotel rooms.
Cold Warrior Brought Back to CIA
The CIA in 2007 brought back a longtime intelligence officer who left after then-Director Porter Goss tried to break up what he called the “old boys network” dominating the agency. Michael Sulick was placed in charge of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, the office that runs covert operations.
When Goss took over the agency, he sought to revitalize the clandestine service and weed out “dead wood” operators. But he ran into fierce opposition from the likes of Sulick and others who had cut their teeth spying on the Soviet Union.
Sulick was associate deputy director for operations when he resigned in November 2004 along with his boss, Stephen R. Kappes. One news account at the time said that Sulick and Kappes characterized Goss’ reforms as “an insurgency.” A former top CIA official praised Sulick’s return to the agency. “He is open to new ideas, but espionage in the classic sense has been around since biblical times and - while novelty is always welcome - there's a lot to be said for the proven experience that Mike Sulick brings to the table.”
Convicted CIA Spy Sues Agency
In the early 1980s, retired CIA agent Edwin Wilson was convicted of selling arms to Libya and spent the next 20 years in prison. All along, Wilson maintained that his actions were not only known by CIA officials, but encouraged as a way for the US to build bridges with Libyan intelligence officers. In 2003, Wilson won a major victory when a federal judge in Texas threw out Wilson’s conviction that he had conspired to ship 20 tons of a powerful plastic explosive known as C-4 to Libya in 1977. Since being released from prison, Wilson has filed a civil suit to clear his name and prove that CIA officials lied when they denied knowing about Wilson’s arms dealings.
CIA Using Universities to Train Spies
In 2004 Congress quietly added language and funding to the Intelligence Authorization Act to create a pilot program known as the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program (PRISP). Named after Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, PRISP was designed to train intelligence operatives and analysts in American university classrooms for careers in the CIA and other agencies. PRISP operates on an undisclosed number of American college and university campuses. If the pilot program proves to be a useful means of recruiting and training members of the intelligence community, then lawmakers may expand it to more campuses across the country.
CIA Contractor Convicted in Detainee Death
David Passaro, a contract employee for the CIA, made headlines in 2004 when a North Carolina grand jury accused him of beating an Afghan prisoner to death at a US military base. Passaro was the first American civilian to be charged with mistreating a detainee during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He was accused of beating Abdul Wali while the man was being questioned in 2003 about rocket attacks on a remote base where Passaro was stationed with US and Afghan troops.
Two years later, Passaro went to trial, but he was not convicted of murder. Instead, he was found guilty of three counts of simple assault and one count of assault resulting in serious bodily injury. He was sentenced to eight years in prison.
CIA Director Michael Hayden called Passaro’s actions “unlawful, reprehensible, and neither authorized nor condoned by the agency.”
Passaro will serve 8 years for beating
(by Andrea Weigl, News & Observer)
Detainee Torture and Secret Prisons
The CIA has played important, and controversial, roles in President Bush’s attempts to combat terrorist threats against the United States since the 9/11 attacks. Early in the administration’s first term, decisions were made to avoid the restrictions of 1996 U.S. War Crimes Act by keeping terrorist suspects out of U.S. territory and instead house them either at US military bases, such as Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, or secret facilities in Afghanistan, Thailand and Eastern Europe. CIA officers were charged with ensuring the transport of these detainees and interrogating them at hidden locations. As news broke of the existence of the secret prisons and uses of torture, a fierce public discourse erupted between the administration and its Republican supporters and Democrats and civil libertarians over these activities.
Pro
According to the Bush administration, which includes the CIA and the Justice Department, the United States has been in a state of war since the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001. Using the rationale “desperate times call for desperate measures,” Bush supporters set out to do whatever was required to make sure terrorists were stopped before they could launch more attacks and spill more American blood. In some respects, the arguments were not unlike those put forth during the Cold War with the Soviet Union, when CIA officers secretly employed questionable means to stop Communist advances on US security and interests. With regard to maintaining secret prisons to jail terrorist detainees, the CIA was right to do so in order to make sure these dangerous individuals were prevented from carrying out their plans and forced to divulge all they knew.
As for the types of interrogation used by CIA officers and contractors, nothing illegal was done, according to the Justice Department, which issued legal opinions that justified waterboarding and other means. The CIA was also right to destroy tapes of interrogations, according to Director Michael Hayden, because were they ever to leak, they would reveal the identities of CIA agents who would then be subject to retaliation by terrorists.
Con
Regardless of how terrible the 9/11 attacks were, the CIA has no business carrying out acts that are not only illegal under US law but international covenant as well, including the Geneva Conventions to which the US is a signatory. Opponents of the administration and groups like Amnesty International have expressed outrage at the clandestine behavior of CIA officers, arguing that these actions undermine the reputation of the American people and the sanctity of the American democratic and legal process. What will there be left to defend, opponents argue, if, in the name of defending democracy, there is no standard of law that has not been compromised for the sake of ensuring safety and security?
Furthermore, opponents wonder just how effective secret imprisonment or interrogations are in protecting America from terrorists if only a select few officials know what really goes on behind closed doors. In such situations, opportunities for mistakes and subsequent cover ups are ripe for the taking.
Background
Report: CIA Pushed Torture Envelope: Justice Department Says FBI Warned Spy Agency, Military, That Their Tactics Were "Borderline Torture"
(Associated Press)
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