Central Intelligence Agency

Article Outline

Introduction; Responsibilities; Structure; How the CIA Gathers and Analyzes Intelligence; History

Iran, Guatemala, and the Bay of Pigs

After its creation by Truman, the CIA quickly became a key foreign policy tool for the White House. With President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s approval, the CIA conspired in the 1950s to overthrow two democratically elected governments. The motivation in each case was a desire to frustrate the expansion of Soviet political and military influence into new regions and to protect the interests of American corporations. In Iran, Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq tried to secure greater government control of oil production and policy. British oil interests and the British secret service began to undermine Mosaddeq, and the CIA joined in because they saw Mosaddeq’s government as sympathetic to the Soviet Union. In a coup in 1953, Mosaddeq’s government was replaced by an undemocratic monarchist regime under Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. American investors then acquired a major slice of Iranian oil production.

In Guatemala, the government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán planned to take over some land owned by a U.S. corporation, the United Fruit Company. With Eisenhower’s strong backing, the CIA plotted Arbenz’s overthrow in 1954 and helped install a right-wing dictatorship. Supporters of the plot portrayed Arbenz as a puppet of the Soviet Union, although many historians have challenged this view. The CIA was jubilant about its apparent triumphs in Iran and Guatemala, though a more sober assessment suggests that many Iranians and Guatemalans were already fed up with their governments and that the CIA played a marginal role.

But the CIA’s record in Iran and Guatemala led to overconfidence, and this was a factor in the decision to attempt the overthrow of the government of Cuba in 1961. Once again, the motive was to stop Communist expansion. In Cuba, unlike in Iran and Guatemala, the government really was Communist. However, Cuban leader Fidel Castro enjoyed widespread popular approval in Cuba. In April 1961 a CIA-trained force of about 1,500 Cuban exiles landed at the Bahía de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs) on the south coast of Cuba. CIA planners anticipated an easy victory in Cuba, but when the small army did not receive support from their fellow Cubans, Castro’s forces defeated them handily (see Bay of Pigs Invasion). This was a great shock to the administration of President John F. Kennedy, and to the CIA. Allen Dulles, the CIA director, resigned following the failed invasion. Although the CIA continued to use covert operations, top agency officials often took a more skeptical view of their usefulness.

Early Intelligence Gathering

Covert operations tend to grab the headlines, but most of the people and the money in the early CIA were devoted to more orthodox intelligence work. Although Dulles retired under a cloud, in the years from 1953 to 1961 when he served as director of central intelligence, he built up intelligence resources in important areas. He and his colleagues led the development of the U-2—a high-altitude spy plane with powerful reconnaissance cameras to take detailed photographs from a safe distance. Under Dulles’s leadership, the CIA also began work on spy satellites, and in 1960 the U.S. launched Corona, the world’s first reconnaissance satellite. Under Dulles’s leadership, the CIA also developed techniques to estimate the economic strength of the USSR—a vital element in assessing Soviet military potential.

The Mid-1960s Through the 1970s

From 1964 to 1975, during America’s involvement in the Vietnam War (1959-1975), the CIA produced estimates on enemy strength and provided other intelligence that was generally accurate. However, the agency also participated in a counterinsurgency effort that became notorious and revived doubts about the usefulness of certain types of covert operation. In Vietnam, the United States supported South Vietnam, which it considered anti-Communist, against North Vietnam a Communist state influenced by the Soviet Union. United States military forces in Vietnam encountered unexpectedly strong resistance. Among the most serious problems was that in South Vietnam many Vietnamese civilians offered support to Communist guerrilla forces, called the Viet Cong by South Vietnamese leaders and American soldiers. With this broad base of popular support, the Viet Cong, more accurately known as the Peoples’ Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF), proved a formidable enemy.

In 1965 the CIA launched an effort to identify and kill civilians who actively supported the Communist cause. In June 1968 the effort was named the Phoenix Program. Financed by the CIA, the Phoenix Program led to the deaths of at least 20,000 PLAF supporters or suspected supporters. Vietnamese mercenaries in the pay of the CIA assassinated many of these civilians. News of the killings led some Americans to worry that their country had committed a crime against humanity.

Controversies of the Early and Mid-1970s

The CIA faced a series of controversies beginning in the early 1970s. A former CIA agent, James W. McCord, Jr., was part of the Watergate scandal, in which President Richard Nixon and senior White House staff members were implicated in obstruction of justice and other serious crimes. The CIA’s troubles became far more serious in late 1974 and 1975, when the New York Times reported that the agency had violated U.S. law by spying on American citizens. Subsequent hearings in the House of Representatives and the Senate confirmed that the CIA violated its legal charter when it used wiretaps to spy on American citizens, opened U.S. mail, secretly placed agents in American political and religious groups, and burglarized the offices of political opponents.

The 1975 congressional hearings also revealed that the CIA had a significant role in coups, assassinations, and attempted assassinations of political leaders in several countries. The targeted leaders came from countries including the Congo (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), Chile, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Indonesia, and South Vietnam (now part of Vietnam). The CIA, for example, played a role in the military coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of Chilean president Salvador Allende. Not all of the plots were successful, and the CIA did not directly organize all that were successful. But many Americans recoiled at the idea of a secretive agency spying on American citizens at home while orchestrating assassinations abroad. Suspicion of the CIA became so intense that many speculated that the agency might have played a role in the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy, but no one has produced credible evidence to support this allegation. Fear that the CIA was out of control led to the creation of permanent oversight (supervision) committees in both the House and the Senate, and the strengthening of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.

In June 2007 the CIA released 702 pages of documents, known internally as the “family jewels,” regarding its illegal domestic surveillance activities during the 1960s and 1970s. The documents were released in response to a Freedom of Information request filed by the National Security Archive in 1992. Heavily censored, the newly released documents contained little information that had not been previously reported, but provided historians and the public with detailed primary source material. The documents confirmed that much of the CIA’s domestic surveillance was authorized by U.S. presidents, including Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Nixon. A CIA operation code-named Chaos, for example, began under Johnson and compiled the names of 300,000 Americans and U.S. organizations active in the anti-Vietnam War movement and the New Left. The CIA created extensive files on about 7,200 U.S. citizens and worked secretly with police departments around the country in violation of its charter, which banned the agency from domestic spying. Under Project Mockingbird, the documents show that CIA wiretapping of American journalists was approved at the highest levels of the Kennedy administration.

Attempted Reform Under President Carter

When Jimmy Carter became president in 1977, he supported the principle of open government and regarded the CIA’s secrecy with suspicion. During Carter’s presidency hundreds of CIA employees were laid off, many of them from the Operations Directorate. Morale sank within the CIA, especially when it was accused of failing to predict the fall of Iranian Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in January 1979. The CIA failure was one of the agency’s most infamous because the fall of the shah deprived the United States of one of its main suppliers of crude oil and forced the closure of United States surveillance stations in Iran that tracked Soviet military activity. The CIA’s failure to predict the demise of the shah also left the U.S. Embassy in Tehrān vulnerable and, soon after the shah fell, Iranian militants seized the embassy and took dozens of Americans hostage. The standing of the CIA was so low that the Senate did not trust the agency’s ability to monitor a strategic arms limitation agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union, and this contributed to the refusal by Congress to ratify the treaty.