CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

(CIA) principal intelligence and counterintelligence agency of the U.S. government. Formally created in 1947, the agency grew out of the World War II Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Previous U.S. intelligence and counterintelligence efforts had been conducted by the army and navy and by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and suffered from duplication, competition, and lack of coordination. U.S. allies had criticized the lack of any central intelligence function. In June 1942 President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the OSS so that the fragmented and uncoordinated strands of U.S. intelligence-gathering would be brought together under a single organization. A similar office set up for this purpose in July 1941, the Office of the Coordinator of Information, had basically foundered, but its head, Coordinator of Information William J. (Wild Bill) Donovan, became head of the OSS upon its founding and was largely responsible for building that organization. During World War II the OSS was responsible for collecting and analyzing foreign intelligence concerning areas where U.S. military forces operated. The OSS obtained intelligence through secret agents in enemy territory, it carried out counterpropaganda and disinformation activities, and it staged special operations behind enemy lines involving sabotage, demolition, and the supplying and direction of resistance fighters. Under Donovan's capable if unorthodox direction, the OSS was remarkably effective despite the initial inexperience of most of its personnel. At its height it amounted to about 12,000 members. The OSS was dismantled in October 1945, but the administration of President Harry S. Truman recognized the need for a coordinated postwar intelligence establishment. In 1946 the president established by executive order a Central Intelligence Group and a National Intelligence Authority. These bodies selected key personnel from the motley group assembled under wartime pressures by the OSS and tried to impose some central direction on postwar intelligence operations, although the armed forces maintained their own independent intelligence services. In 1947 Congress created the National Security Council (NSC) and, under its direction, the Central Intelligence Agency, which was to advise the NSC on intelligence matters bearing on national security, make recommendations on coordinating intelligence activities of government agencies generally, correlate and evaluate intelligence and see to its proper communication within government, and carry out such other national-security intelligence functions as the NSC might direct. CIA directors have been a varied lot, including military men (such as Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the first, and Eisenhower's wartime staff head, General Walter B. Smith), a diplomat and intelligence expert (Allen W. Dulles), a business executive (John A. McCone), a veteran of the CIA itself (William E. Colby), and a political-party leader (George Bush), among others. The CIA is organized into four major directorates. The Intelligence Directorate analyzes intelligence that is gathered overtly from available sources and that which is obtained covertly through espionage, aerial and satellite photography, and interception of radio, telephone, and other forms of communication. Its analyses are distributed variously as bulletins, reports, and exhaustive surveys. It also monitors foreign radio broadcasts. The Directorate of Operations is responsible for covert operations, including clandestine collection of intelligence (i.e., espionage) and special covert activities. The Directorate of Science and Technology is charged with keeping the agency abreast of scientific and technological advances, and it develops technical devices useful to the agency and supplies technical and scientific support to agency operations. The Directorate of Administration not only administers but also contains the Office of Security, which is responsible for the security of personnel, facilities, information, and such information sources as defectors from other governments. Clandestine activities are carried on under various guisesincluding the diplomatic cloak used by virtually every intelligence service, as well as such fronts as corporations that the CIA creates or acquires. The agency also debriefs business travelers, journalists willing to be so interviewed, and others returning to the United States from a sensitive or professionally interesting place. Among the CIA's major covert operations were the expulsion of Mohammad Mosaddeq as premier and the restoration of the shah of Iran in 1953, and the following year the toppling of an unfriendly leftist government in Guatemala. The attempted Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba (1961) by CIA-supported Cuban dissidents was a fiasco. In 1973 and 1974 the agency was damaged by the revelation that former CIA operatives had repeatedly played illegal roles in the Watergate affair. Although it was popularly thought to have been a U.S. counterpart of the former Soviet agency known as the KGB (q.v.), the CIA is limited by the legislation that created it to intelligence and counterintelligence activities on foreign soil, whereas the KGB had numerous and major domestic intelligence-gathering and police functions. Nevertheless, the cloak of secrecy necessary to any espionage and counterespionage operation has permitted the CIA occasional excursions beyond its legal mandate. Such lapses do not long escape public notice in the United States, where the constitutional guarantee of freedom of the press may collide with the effect of the CIA's secrecy and the silence required of former operatives. Moreover, in the United States the press can have an adversarial relationship with governmentunlike, for example, the United Kingdom and certain other representative democracies, where official-secrets acts inhibit press freedom. Moreover, the two-party system and three-branch form of the U.S. government frequently give rise to antagonism between the legislative and executive arms. As a consequence, public debate over certain CIA activities or over its role in general is not rare.