Central Intelligence Agency

I

Introduction

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), United States government agency created in 1947 to gather information and conduct secret operations to protect the country’s national security. The information that the CIA gathers is known as intelligence.

Until 2004 the director of the CIA also held the position of director of central intelligence. The director of central intelligence had responsibility for coordinating the activities of the United States intelligence community, which includes agencies such as the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA). The CIA also took overall responsibility for gathering information from other U.S. intelligence agencies, analyzing the separate pieces of information from each source, and providing intelligence estimates to the president of the United States and the president’s advisers.

Those roles ended in 2004, however, with the passage of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act. Heralded as the most radical overhaul of the intelligence community since the enactment of the National Security Act of 1947, the new law created the office of director of national intelligence (DNI), which was given the responsibility of coordinating and overseeing the activities of 15 intelligence agencies, including the CIA. John Negroponte became the first director of national intelligence. Porter Goss became the director of the CIA and under the new law reported to the director of national intelligence. The legislation was prompted by the findings of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, which investigated the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and found that the CIA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) failed to share information that might have prevented the attacks.

II

Responsibilities

The president with help from the DNI dictates the CIA’s general tasks and assignments, a process known as tasking. The nature of the tasks has changed over the years. Today, for example, the CIA’s responsibilities include identifying terrorists and halting terrorist attacks, anticipating threats to international oil supplies, and preventing the theft of trade secrets from U.S. businesses. These problems were less acute in the agency’s early years. The CIA also has the important and relatively new responsibility of monitoring the spread of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and keeping the president informed of its findings. Nuclear weapons and in some cases chemical weapons have been developed by undemocratic countries such as Pakistan and North Korea, and there is fear that these countries will use these weapons or that they will fall into the hands of terrorists or criminals. See Terrorism; Nuclear Weapons; Chemical and Biological Warfare; Nuclear Weapons Proliferation.

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Some responsibilities have remained constant, however, throughout the lifetime of the agency. The foremost of the CIA’s jobs is assessing the long-term potential threat to the United States by other countries. The CIA must ask basic questions, such as “What is China’s military strength, and how do the Chinese intend to use it?” The CIA also has to predict short-term military threats, so it operates a warning system to protect the United States and its allies from surprise attack. In addition, the CIA works in cooperation with the FBI to forestall terrorist attacks and to conduct counterespionage—the process of preventing spies from finding out U.S. national security secrets.

Several presidents have also ordered the CIA to conduct covert operations—the use of secret means to achieve foreign policy objectives. Under the National Security Act, a covert action can only ensue from a presidential finding signed by the president. A covert action may not violate the Constitution or any U.S. law. Covert operations might include providing weapons to a rebel army, kidnapping an individual leader who is seen as hostile to U.S. interests, or organizing the removal of a government through a coup d’état, the seizure of an existing government by a small group. President Gerald Ford banned assassination as an instrument of U.S. policy following a congressional investigation of the CIA’s malpractices in 1975, but President George W. Bush restored the policy in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks. The CIA’s covert operations are controversial for this reason and because they so often involve conducting violent actions in other countries without a congressional declaration of war. In other instances the operations are uncontroversial and are covert in name only, and may become the subject of debate in open sessions of Congress and in the news media.

The CIA’s staff also has the responsibility of collating information from other U.S. intelligence agencies and producing joint reports known as national intelligence estimates (NIEs). The NSA, for example, often breaks secret codes used by other countries and then intercepts the countries’ secret communications. The NSA passes the important messages to the CIA, which then integrates this information with the intelligence provided by other U.S. government intelligence agencies and with intelligence from the CIA’s own sources. The CIA sends these estimates to the president and other members of the National Security Council (NSC), which includes the chairperson of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (representing the armed forces), the secretaries of defense and state, and certain other members of the government’s executive branch.

III

Structure

The CIA is part of the Executive Office of the President of the United States, which means that the president has direct control of the agency. The president appoints the CIA director and deputy director with the consent of the United States Senate, and the two directors are responsible for ensuring that the CIA follows the president’s instructions. The president’s appointees sometimes come into conflict with career (permanent) CIA officials if the president tries to push the CIA in a direction that career officials view as unwise. The CIA also has to work to coordinate its efforts with the strategy established by the NSC. In practice, however, because the CIA’s day-to-day operations and its budget are usually secret, the agency has more discretion to act than nearly all other parts of the U.S. government.

Within the CIA, the director and the deputy director supervise four additional deputy directors. Each of these four deputy directors leads a directorate (branch) of the agency. The Operations Directorate is the best known because it conducts covert action and counterintelligence around the world. The Operations Directorate has specialized divisions for each region of the world. The Science and Technology Directorate interprets data gathered from code-breaking activities; from telephone, radio, and other electronic transmissions; and from detailed photographs taken by spy satellites. The Intelligence Directorate takes the information provided by other parts of the CIA, other agencies in the intelligence community, and from publicly available sources, and produces analyses and estimates for policy makers. The Administration Directorate arranges the agency’s finances, personnel matters, computer facilities, and medical services. It also assumes the critical task of internal security—including detecting spies and potential spies within the agency.

Besides all this work concentrated in the CIA’s headquarters building in Langley, Virginia, the agency undertakes fieldwork in foreign countries. The CIA has an office, or station, in almost every nation, whether friend or potential foe. Each office is headed by a station chief, whose real job is hidden by a fictitious job known as a cover. A station chief’s cover is often as an official within the U.S. Embassy. The station chief must find out what is happening in the host country that may have a bearing on U.S. national security. Station chiefs are officers of the CIA and do not usually conduct actual spying, but they often hire spies to achieve their goals.

To ensure that the CIA meets these various responsibilities in a proper manner, the agency has an inspector general, who audits its secret accounts and investigates malpractice. In an attempt to limit the responsibilities and therefore the power of the director of central intelligence, Congress provided in 1947 that the CIA should not collect intelligence in the United States. The CIA only monitors the domestic activities of U.S. citizens when it believes they may be involved in espionage or international terrorist activities. Since then, Congress has periodically investigated the agency. In the mid-1970s, both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate set up permanent committees to oversee the CIA, and these committees have established procedures for the monitoring of covert operations.

IV

How the CIA Gathers and Analyzes Intelligence

The excitement of spying and secret operations sometimes leads people to assume that a piece of information is important just because it is secret. In reality, CIA analysts spend much of their time gathering and analyzing information from newspapers, television and radio broadcasts, speeches by foreign leaders, and other public sources. CIA analysts call these open sources, and they are sometimes adequate to predict how a country is likely to act in the future. This enables the president, Congress, and other important officials to formulate effective U.S. policy. In many cases, however, open sources provide only an incomplete picture of how a country will act. In some instances, in fact, governments may deliberately disseminate false information in order to fool the United States and other countries.

In many cases open sources do not provide enough information to enable analysts to draw firm conclusions. A piece of the picture will often be missing or unclear. Analysts must find the missing piece of the picture, which is often deliberately concealed by potential enemies of the United States. Once the analysts have found the piece, they must rely on their training and judgment to recognize where it fits into the overall picture. To help CIA analysts develop a complete understanding of world events, the CIA supplements open sources with three clandestine (secret) sources. The clandestine sources include human intelligence provided by CIA field officers, electronic intelligence gathering, and intelligence provided by other agencies. Analysts sift through and evaluate all the open and clandestine sources to develop a general assessment of how a country will act. The analysts pass these assessments to their superiors, who forward important reports to the director of central intelligence, who takes responsibility for keeping the president informed.

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