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.

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.

A.

Field Officers

The CIA deploys hundreds of field officers all over the world to gather intelligence for the United States. The field officers report to CIA headquarters through the station chief in the country where they are placed. Each station chief supervises several field officers, assessing the information they have gathered and sending it to CIA headquarters. Field officers are expected to have detailed knowledge of the country where they are stationed and to be able to speak its language, although the CIA has sometimes been criticized for sending out unqualified and poorly trained personnel. Field officers must be United States citizens.

Field officers rarely break into foreign military bases, infiltrate political parties, or otherwise try to collect sensitive information themselves. Instead they usually persuade foreign citizens to provide information. Sometimes foreign citizens volunteer to give secret information to the CIA. In oppressive regimes, their motive is sometimes altruistic and even patriotic—they feel they can best serve their country by providing the CIA with information that will help bring about social and political change or diminish the possibility of war. Such a spy is known as a defector in place.

In other situations CIA field officers use money or blackmail to convince foreign citizens to betray their country. The CIA field officer’s most difficult job is figuring out who might be willing to spy for the United States, and then using the right amount of persuasion and coercion to turn the foreign citizen to the American cause. The process of identifying and turning a foreign citizen is delicate because the best sources of information are often senior government and military officials. Approaching the wrong official might lead the foreign government to arrest or even kill the field officer. Even after a subject has been turned, field officers must constantly assess the accuracy of the information that he or she provides.

Because turning a foreign citizen is difficult and the intelligence received is sometimes unreliable, the most valuable spy is often not someone who has been turned, but a defector in place. At times, such “human assets” have supplied vital information that could not have been obtained by technical means. For example, from 1953 until his execution by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) sometime in 1959 or 1960, Pyotr Semyonovich Popov, a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet army, supplied the CIA with important information about USSR missile systems. Popov’s information helped the CIA understand the Soviet military threat before the advent of satellites made it possible to spy on the USSR from space.

B.

Electronic Intelligence Gathering

The CIA Science and Technology Directorate uses a wide variety of electronic techniques to gather intelligence. These include planting bugs (microphones or other listening devices), intercepting radio transmissions, and using seismic sensors and satellites to monitor military activity around the world. The CIA relies on the National Security Agency for a large portion of its electronically gathered data, but also conducts some electronic intelligence gathering on its own. During the Cold War—the period from 1945 to the early 1990s, when the United States and the USSR vied for global dominance—the CIA operated its own “listening stations” in Norway, Iran, Australia, and other places. But since the end of the Cold War, the CIA has reduced its electronic intelligence operations and relied more heavily on the NSA. The CIA Science and Technology Directorate still contributes significant research, such as developing techniques to detect and measure dangerous gases from long distances.

C.

Information from Other Agencies

The CIA receives and analyzes information from several other elements of the U.S. intelligence community. These elements include the DIA, NSA, the intelligence branches of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the Treasury Department and its Secret Service, and the FBI. The CIA also manages some joint programs with other parts of the intelligence community. The CIA and the NSA, for example, work together to provide eavesdropping equipment to the CIA’s stations around the world. Similarly, the CIA works with the Air Force to coordinate satellite reconnaissance. The CIA also receives information from the intelligence services of friendly powers. Britain’s MI6 and Israel’s Mossad are the most notable examples. Although the CIA sometimes has disputes with MI6 and Mossad over when and how to share intelligence, the generally close cooperation between these agencies reflects the strong ties that link the United States with Britain and Israel.

D.

Analysis and Reporting

CIA analysts have the difficult task of sorting through information from open sources, field officers, electronic intelligence, and intelligence from agencies in the United States and other countries. In many instances most of the information is a jumble of irrelevant facts that analysts refer to as noise. But buried in the noise there may be a critical signal, giving an insight that can prove crucial to U.S. national security. Once the analysts have sorted and assessed the available information, they prepare secret reports that are passed on to policy makers. CIA analysts also prepare overall reports for the president and his staff on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Although the DNI is now the president’s main intelligence adviser, the CIA director may also brief the president personally when requested to do so, or in the event of a sudden crisis.

In most cases the CIA has little role beyond providing information to the president and other policy makers. These leaders must take the responsibility for responding to threats to the country’s national security. But the CIA’s reports may sometimes prod policy makers in a certain direction, and in that way the CIA can have a large impact on the country’s policies. In 1998, for example, the CIA produced a report indicating that a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan was producing chemical weapons, leading U.S. president Bill Clinton to order the bombing of the plant. The bombing became controversial when outside experts disputed the CIA’s claim.

V.

History

A.

Early Years

When World War II broke out in Europe in 1939, the United States had some intelligence expertise but lacked a central coordinating agency. Many Americans were reluctant to see the country enter the war, but others saw war as inevitable and pushed for “preparedness”—a reorganization of government and increased military spending. General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, an adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, favored preparedness and urged the president to create a centralized intelligence agency to coordinate intelligence during the war. On July 11, 1941, the president appointed Donovan to the new position of coordinator of information. Donovan’s new intelligence organization failed to predict Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, which brought the United States into the war (see World War II: Pearl Harbor). Despite this failure, Donovan persuaded the president that the country needed a larger intelligence organization. In June 1942, Roosevelt established the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), with Donovan in charge.

During the remainder of the war, the OSS built networks of spies and informants, conducted sabotage, and ran other covert operations in western and southern Europe, North Africa, Burma (now Myanmar), and elsewhere. Donovan urged Roosevelt to accept the need for a permanent central intelligence agency that would operate in peacetime as well as during war. Donovan’s hopes for the OSS seemed doomed in 1945 when Roosevelt died and the new president, Harry S. Truman, decided to disband the organization. But in January 1946, Truman established a new organization, the Central Intelligence Group, an interim measure that prepared the way for the CIA. Congress authorized the CIA in the National Security Act of 1947, which also reorganized the armed forces and set up the NSC.

Historians disagree about why Truman decided to establish the CIA. Documents first released in the mid-1990s, however, suggest that from the earliest days of his presidency, Truman was concerned about Soviet expansionism and was determined to develop an intelligence organization that would help to counter that threat. Members of Congress debated the need for a permanent intelligence agency, with many of the debates centering on the national humiliation of the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In the end, Congress decided that it was essential to have an intelligence agency that could warn the nation of such attacks. When Congress approved legislation creating the CIA in 1947, it became the first secret intelligence service in the world to be approved by a democratically elected government.

B.

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.

C.

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.

Dulles’s term as CIA director was marked by some significant mistakes, however. The CIA failed, for example, to provide President Eisenhower with a warning of the joint British, French, and Israeli invasion of Egypt in 1956 during the Suez Crisis. But the agency performed well overall in its core mission of assessing the Soviet threat. Notably, in the early 1960s it refuted the notion that the Soviets had more nuclear-tipped missiles than the United States. This dispelled the dangerous myth of the so-called missile gap, which suggested that United States nuclear forces were inferior to Soviet forces, and that the U.S. should embark on massive defense spending.

D.

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.

E.

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.

F.

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.

About halfway through his presidency Carter realized that he needed the assistance of the CIA, but only if he could monitor its behavior. But by then there was so much bitterness between the CIA and Carter that it was too late to make amends. In the 1980 presidential election campaign, the Republican candidate Ronald Reagan condemned Carter’s intelligence policy, and promised to rebuild and “unleash” the CIA. Reagan’s stance on the CIA contributed to his victory over Carter.

G.

The CIA Under President Reagan

President Reagan made good on his promise to rebuild the CIA and secured a major expansion in the budget and personnel of the agency. (The CIA budget was a secret until 1997, when it was officially revealed to be $26.6 billion. Rough estimates suggest that the agency’s budget was about $20 billion in 1981, and that it reached a Cold War high of about $36 billion at the end of the 1980s. In 2005 a CIA official acknowledged publicly that the agency’s annual budget that year was $44 billion.) Reagan named CIA veteran William Casey as the agency’s director, and he became a key presidential adviser. Reagan relied heavily on Casey and the CIA to lead his campaign to end what he called the “evil empire” of Soviet Communism. At Reagan’s direction, the CIA created reports that exaggerated the economic and military threat presented by the Soviet Union. The distorted estimates helped Reagan persuade Congress to approve massive funding for the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a system of space-based defenses against nuclear attack. The Soviet economy, already hobbled by chronic problems, was too weak to support a Soviet military effort to match SDI.

H.

Covert Operations in Central and South America

Reagan also put the CIA at the center of his aggressive Cold War strategy by ordering the agency to launch a new wave of covert operations against the Communist world. In El Salvador, Reagan’s CIA gave covert assistance to that country’s brutally repressive right-wing regime on the mistaken assumption that Nicaraguan Communists were operating from bases in El Salvador (see El Salvador: Civil War). In Nicaragua, the CIA supported the contras (short for “counterrevolutionaries,” in Spanish), which set out to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government. The CIA’s sometimes ruthless tactics in Nicaragua became controversial, and in one embarrassing episode, a CIA contract employee instructed the contras on how to assassinate people on their own side, and then blame the atrocity on the enemy Sandinista army. The Nicaraguan Sandinista government eventually did lose power in 1990, but in a peaceful election. See also Iran-Contra Affair.

I.

Covert Operations in Other Parts of the World

During the 1980s the CIA ran covert operations in many other parts of the world. Several African countries, for example, became the battleground for Cold War rivalries between the United States and the USSR. As part of this conflict, the CIA supported insurgencies against quasi-Marxist regimes in Angola, Chad, Ethiopia, and Mozambique. The CIA also trained anti-Communist guerrillas in Afghanistan and supplied them with sophisticated Stinger ground-to-air missiles that could shoot down Soviet-supplied helicopter gunships. In Poland—then a Communist client-state of the USSR—the CIA supported Solidarity, a large pro-democracy trade union federation. By the late 1980s some of the countries targeted by the CIA had started moving away from Communism. Rebels in Afghanistan and Chad succeeded in ousting the pro-Soviet governments, and Polish authorities were forced to legalize Solidarity and to schedule democratic elections. But in Angola, Mozambique, and some other countries, the CIA’s covert backing of rebel forces produced only stalemates that left thousands of civilians dead and wounded.

J.

Iran-Contra Scandal

Despite the CIA’s successes during the 1980s, the agency became embroiled in a serious scandal concerning Nicaragua and Iran. Relations between the United States and Iran deteriorated after the 1979 Iranian Revolution left the country in the hands of fundamentalist, anti-Western mullahs (Islamic religious leaders). Tensions grew even worse after Iran fought a bloody war against neighboring Iraq, where, for strategic reasons later shown to be ill-founded, the CIA supported the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein. As a result of its quarrel with Iran, the United States imposed an arms embargo that banned the sale of U.S. weapons to Iran. But officials in Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council ignored the embargo and in 1985 sold about $30 million worth of weapons to Iran. Members of the NSC also broke the law when they used the profits from those arms sales to fund the CIA’s support of the contra army in Nicaragua, despite a 1984 law that barred the government from providing assistance. See also Iran-Contra Affair.

The CIA’s activities in Nicaragua were already controversial, so the Reagan administration came under even more intense criticism when the news broke in 1986 about the diversion of funds to support the contras. But Reagan enjoyed so much popular support and his foreign policy seemed so successful that he escaped much of the blame. The CIA also got off lightly, partly because the NSC had initiated the questionable activity and partly because Casey died in May 1987, before the scandal broke. The scandal did, however, result in one change. In the future, the person nominated to be inspector general of the CIA had to be approved by Congress, giving the inspector the independence and stature to investigate malpractice more thoroughly.

K.

The 1990s

In the early 1990s, the CIA faced a great deal of criticism for its continued use of questionable covert operations and also because of its alleged analytical incompetence. Why, asked the agency’s detractors, had the CIA overestimated the economic strength and political durability of the Soviet Union? Why had it failed to predict the fall of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991? The CIA’s critics were eager to rein in the agency, and they scoured the history books for stories of past inadequacies, such as the agency’s failure to predict the fall of the shah in Iran.

The CIA also faced a crisis because of the end of the Cold War. President Truman had conceived the CIA as a weapon to be used in the Cold War, and in its first 40 years the agency’s main goal had been the destruction of the Communist threat. Many people saw the collapse of Soviet-directed Communism as a triumph for the CIA, but it also seemed to eliminate the agency’s main mission.

Against this already troubled background, the CIA faced sharp criticism in 1994 when senior counterintelligence official Aldrich Ames was arrested and charged with spying for the Soviet Union. Ames had been in charge of the Soviet section of CIA counterintelligence—the part of the CIA responsible for protecting the United States from Soviet spies. Beginning in 1985, Ames sold U.S. secrets to the KGB (the Soviet intelligence agency). His betrayal was an act of treason that led to the deaths of several U.S. secret agents. He also fed many Soviet disinformation documents to American policy makers, leading to mistakes in American decision-making. The FBI detected Ames’s misconduct and found the evidence to put him in prison. But the CIA faced severe criticism because Ames spied for so long, and because the agency security staff failed to notice that Ames had used over $2 million from the KGB to buy a luxury car, an expensive house, and other items that he could not afford on his CIA salary.

In the wake of the Cold War, many political leaders debated the CIA’s future. One group, led by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, demanded the dissolution of the CIA and the establishment of a more open government. A second group defended the CIA’s record, and recommended it be left alone or strengthened. A third group thought that the CIA should survive in a somewhat reduced and reformed mode.

Facing a crisis, the CIA accepted the need for some change. In 1993 it slashed hundreds of jobs and cut back its spy satellite program. It agreed to the gradual declassification of documents dealing with its intelligence history. CIA supporters and officials proposed new roles for the agency, including monitoring the spread of weapons around the world, fighting threats to the American economy, and stopping the flow of drugs into the country.

President Bill Clinton appointed a commission that conducted the largest-ever inquiry into secret intelligence. When the commission reported in 1996, it rejected a proposal that the CIA director should become a so-called intelligence czar, with immense powers over the whole intelligence community. But it also recommended that the CIA should continue to operate, if in a more open and accountable manner. The president endorsed the findings of the commission, and the CIA’s post-Cold War crisis subsided. The moderates had won the debate.

L.

September 11 Attacks

On September 11, 2001, the United States suffered the most devastating terrorist attack in its history. In coordinated attacks, 19 hijackers belonging to the radical Islamic group al-Qaeda seized four commercial passenger jets and turned them into, effectively, guided missiles. The hijackers crashed two of the jets into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, causing the buildings to collapse. The third hijacked jet crashed into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, the headquarters of U.S. military operations. The fourth jet crashed in an area southeast of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, after passengers tried to overcome the hijackers. Almost 3,000 people died in the attacks. The U.S. government soon identified Saudi exile Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda, as the financier of the attacks. See September 11 Attacks.

The September 11 attacks prompted intense criticism of U.S. intelligence agencies and their failure to discover the terrorist plot. In 2003 a congressional committee investigating the attacks released a report that detailed systemic problems in the U.S. government’s counterterrorism efforts prior to the attacks, including poor organization, inadequate resources and training, and a failure to appreciate the likelihood of an attack on U.S. soil. The inquiry criticized the CIA for failing to monitor suspected terrorists, including two men who turned out to be hijackers. As a result of the CIA’s failure to share key information with the FBI about the men, the FBI missed “perhaps the intelligence community’s best chance to unravel the September 11 plot.” The committee recommended that the government create a Cabinet-level director of national intelligence to oversee all agencies in the intelligence community.

In 2004 an independent commission tasked with investigating the September 11 attacks further detailed the CIA’s missteps prior to the attacks. The 9/11 Commission, known officially as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, noted that before the attacks, “no other agency did more to attack al-Qaeda than the CIA.” But it faulted the agency for relying on foreign agents, instead of U.S. personnel, in its efforts to capture bin Laden and his senior lieutenants.

The commission also concluded that the CIA director had “too many jobs”—managing the intelligence community, running the CIA, and serving as intelligence analyst-in-chief for the president—to do all of them effectively. Like the congressional committee that preceded it, the 9/11 Commission recommended the creation of a national intelligence director reporting directly to the president, managing the CIA director and other senior intelligence officials. It also urged the government to create a new National Counterterrorism Center, overseen by the national intelligence director, to analyze all terrorism-related information collected by government agencies and to plan counterterrorism operations.

In December 2004 the U.S. Congress adopted the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act. The legislation was controversial, however, because some critics said it did not give the director of national intelligence (DNI) enough authority. Under the law the DNI lacks the authority to hire or fire the heads of agencies under the DNI’s supervision, and the DNI can only monitor, rather than control, the budgets of those agencies.

M.

The CIA and Weapons of Mass Destruction

The CIA also came under criticism in 2003 and 2004 for its claims prior to the U.S.-Iraq War that the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The CIA’s National Intelligence Estimate on “Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction,” released in 2002 and partially declassified in 2003, was advanced as the official justification for President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. The report said Iraq possessed chemical weapons for use in missiles, had an active biological weapons program, and had “started reconstituting” a program to build nuclear weapons. The report also cited the claims of a “foreign government service” that Iraq had arranged to buy several tons of pure uranium, which is used to make nuclear weapons, from the African nation of Niger.

None of these claims was supported when the Iraq Survey Group, a team of U.S. weapons inspectors led by David Kay, released an interim report in October 2003, more than six months after the United States invaded and occupied Iraq. The assertion that Iraq had tried to obtain pure uranium—a claim that was featured prominently in President Bush’s State of the Union speech in January 2003—was shown to be based on forged documents. In January 2004 Kay reported to Congress that U.S. intelligence on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction was “all wrong, probably.” No weapons of mass destruction were found, and Kay said that since 1991 Iraq had no program to make chemical weapons. These findings were supported in the final report on Iraq’s weapons programs prepared by the special adviser to the CIA director in September 2004. In February 2004 President Bush appointed a special panel to investigate why the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies failed in their assessment of Iraq.

In July 2004 the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released another scathing report on the CIA’s prewar intelligence assessments. According to the report, most of the agency’s key judgments about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were “either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting.” Intelligence analysts fell victim to “groupthink,” basing their conclusions on what they expected to find while ignoring evidence that Iraq did not have banned weapons, the report concluded. The report depicted the CIA as a “risk-averse corporate culture,” finding that the agency did not have a single spy inside Iraq after 1998 to monitor the country’s weapons programs. It was later revealed, however, that the CIA had made contact with a member of Saddam Hussein’s inner circle who told the agency that Iraq had destroyed its chemical weapons and did not have a nuclear weapons program. This information was reportedly relayed to officials within the Bush administration prior to the U.S. invasion.

Many observers believed there were other shortcomings in the U.S. strategy for Iraq, notably the failure to organize an international alliance and the alienation of potential Middle Eastern allies just when their help was needed. But public debate focused on the intelligence issue, and as in the past, the CIA found itself in danger of being the scapegoat for political failures. In 2004 CIA director George Tenet resigned, citing personal reasons. Following the reelection of President George W. Bush in November 2004, more senior CIA officials resigned, reportedly under pressure from newly appointed CIA director Porter Goss and because they were suspected of leaking information to the media that was unfavorable to the Bush administration.

Despite its faulty intelligence on Iraq, the CIA could claim success in 2004 in helping uncover a black market in nuclear weapons technology created by Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan. Findings by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the CIA, and other intelligence agencies were presented to Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf, who placed Khan under house arrest. The investigation revealed a widespread network that furnished technology and designs for making nuclear weapons to Iran, Libya, and North Korea. In 2003 CIA intelligence had helped lead to the seizure of a ship loaded with material for use in making nuclear weapons. The ship was bound for Libya, and the discovery of its cargo was a factor in causing Libya openly to renounce its nuclear weapons program in 2004. See also Arms Control; Nuclear Weapons Proliferation; Pakistan.

N.

Secret Prisons, Torture, and Renditions

In 2005 the CIA was accused of operating secret prisons in Europe, kidnapping and rendering terrorist suspects to other countries (a practice known as rendition) despite knowing that such countries used torture in interrogations, and using torture or other harsh interrogation practices that may have violated U.S. and international law. The seriousness of the accusations was underscored by the actions of an Italian court, which issued arrest warrants for 22 CIA agents and asked the Italian government to seek their extradition for trial. An Italian prosecutor accused the agents of kidnapping a radical Muslim cleric, Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, in Milan in February 2003 and flying him to Egypt, where Nasr claimed he was tortured by Egyptian authorities. An Italian judge subsequently indicted 25 CIA agents in February 2007, although none were expected to be extradited. In Italy, however, defendants in a criminal trial can be tried in absentia.

In November 2005 the Washington Post reported the existence of a secret CIA prison network in Europe that held as many as 100 terrorist suspects. The Post refrained from identifying the countries at the request of the Bush administration. The Bush administration initially refused to confirm or deny the existence of the prison network, which was reportedly dismantled and moved elsewhere after the Post report appeared. But in September 2006 President Bush acknowledged the existence of the secret prison network. Bush said the prison network was being closed down and that 14 “high value” prisoners were being transferred to the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for trial. In all about 100 terrorist suspects had been detained in the prison network, according to administration officials. Officials of the European Union (EU) condemned the secret prisons, saying they violated international humanitarian law and international criminal law.

In June 2007 a report by the Council of Europe confirmed that the CIA operated secret prisons from 2003 to 2005 in Poland and Romania where prisoners were denied access to the Red Cross as required by the Geneva Conventions. The report concluded that “the CIA committed a whole series of illegal acts in Europe by abducting individuals, detaining them in secret locations, and subjecting them to interrogation techniques tantamount to torture.” The same month that the report was released six human rights organizations charged that the CIA continued to hold 39 terrorist suspects in secret prisons. In October 2007 an official within the Bush administration conceded that the CIA continued to operate detention facilities.

Several newspaper reports, citing current and former intelligence sources, charged that interrogation techniques in the secret prison network included waterboarding (controlled drowning), stress positions, sleep deprivation, and exposure to cold and to loud noise, practices that most human rights organizations recognize as torture. The Bush administration denied that it practiced torture, but in October 2007 the New York Times disclosed the existence of a classified Justice Department memo that allowed U.S. interrogators to use head-slapping, waterboarding, and exposure to cold.

A German citizen, Khaled el Masri, filed a lawsuit in U.S. courts in 2005, charging that he was kidnapped, imprisoned in a U.S.-run facility in Afghanistan, and tortured. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the United States had acknowledged that it made a “mistake” in imprisoning the man. But U.S. courts denied el Masri’s right to sue, and in October 2007 the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal. Thirteen CIA agents still faced arrest in Germany in connection with the kidnapping of el Masri, but in September 2007 Germany discontinued its efforts to have the agents extradited.

United States and international law forbid rendering a prisoner to a country known to practice torture. Several former prisoners came forward to charge that they had been rendered to countries such as Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, which the U.S. Department of State has listed for years as nations known to practice torture. In September 2006 the Canadian government exonerated a Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, who had been taken into custody by U.S. authorities as a suspected terrorist and rendered to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured. In January 2007 Canada’s prime minister offered Arar a formal apology and 10.5 million Canadian dollars in compensation.

The charges of torture, inhumane and degrading treatment, and illegal rendition raised concerns within the agency because they involved breaches of the Geneva Conventions, and such breaches can be prosecuted under the U.S. War Crimes Act. The Bush administration, however, contended that there were no illegalities because a congressional resolution in September 2001 authorizing the use of force in the war on terror gave the president the power to carry out any actions necessary to protect national security. The administration further argued that the Geneva Conventions did not apply in a war involving “illegal combatants.” The legal basis of this argument, however, was undermined in 2006 by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. The ruling rejected similar administration arguments that had been used to justify the creation of special military commissions to try terrorist suspects. In response to the Court’s ruling, the U.S. Congress passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which included a provision granting immunity to CIA and other government employees for their handling of terrorist suspects during the period from September 11, 2001, to the passage of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005.

O.

Valerie Plame Wilson Scandal

Agency morale was at a low point in the buildup to and in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Revelations regarding CIA conduct were leaked by former and current intelligence officials concerned about the legality of certain practices and angry that internal CIA assessments casting doubt on Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction were, in their view, ignored or manipulated. There was fury over the revelation that a covert agent, Valerie Plame Wilson, was publicly exposed, apparently in political retribution for the actions of her husband, former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson. The deliberate exposure of a covert or clandestine CIA agent by a government official is a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.

Wilson had traveled to Niger in 2002 at the request of the CIA to investigate the allegation that Iraq had attempted to obtain uranium from that country in an effort to build up a secret nuclear weapons capability. Wilson returned with the finding that it would have been “exceedingly difficult” for Iraq to have obtained uranium because the ore was controlled by foreign-run consortiums that were strictly monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Wilson leaked this finding to a New York Times columnist and in July 2003 wrote an op-ed piece for the Times identifying himself, his mission, and his findings. About a week later the newspaper columnist Robert D. Novak identified Wilson’s wife by her maiden name, Valerie Plame, and revealed that she was a CIA agent.

The CIA requested that the Justice Department investigate whether a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act had occurred, and the Justice Department appointed a special counsel to carry out the inquiry. In October 2005 special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, after a two-year-long investigation, indicted I. Lewis Libby, Jr., the chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, charging him with obstruction of justice, false statement, and perjury.

In May 2006, with Libby’s case still pending, Porter Goss resigned suddenly as director of the CIA, and was replaced by former head of the NSA, Michael Hayden. Although the move came as a surprise to many, media reports painted a picture of low morale at the agency with ongoing internal investigations into leaks and corruption. Reports also suggested that President Bush had lost confidence in Goss, and that Goss had resigned after disagreements with Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte over the future of the agency. The appointment of Hayden, a U.S. Air Force general, generated some controversy as critics questioned how a military man would keep the agency independent of the Department of Defense. Also, as head of the NSA, Hayden had been responsible for a program of electronic surveillance from 1999 to 2005 that had eavesdropped on Americans without first having obtained legal warrants. Hayden cited his most pressing task as director of the CIA as keeping the agency in the shadows and not in the newspapers, while rebuilding confidence in its ability to gather accurate intelligence.

As 2007 began Negroponte resigned as director of national intelligence, and the trial of Libby got under way in Washington, D.C. Retired Navy Admiral Mike McConnell, head of the NSA from 1992 to 1996, replaced Negroponte. In March a jury found Libby guilty of two counts of perjury and two counts of obstruction of justice. He was sentenced to 30 months in prison, a fine of $250,000, and a period of probation of two years, but in July, President Bush commuted Libby’s prison sentence and said he would not rule out the possibility of a pardon.

P.

CIA Inspector General Under Fire

In August 2007 the CIA released the results of an internal investigation by its inspector general into the agency’s handling of counterterrorism efforts, specifically in relation to the September 11 terrorist attacks. Only the executive summary of the inspector general’s report was made public and then only at the insistence of Congress, but it largely corroborated the findings of the September 11 commission. The report by Inspector General John L. Helgerson allegedly angered top CIA officials, who disagreed with its findings.

The report recommended that accountability boards be established to discipline CIA agents for the agency’s failures in regard to the September 11 attacks. The inspector general found that from 50 to 60 CIA officials knew as early as 2000 that two of the men who became September 11 hijackers were associated with al-Qaeda. Nevertheless, they failed to have the men placed on a terrorist watch-list maintained by the State Department and monitored by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Both men subsequently gained entry into the United States. The report specifically recommended that former CIA director George Tenet and the former director of its Counterterrorist Center, J. Cofer Black, be held accountable.

The inspector general came under fire again in October 2007 for his ongoing investigation of CIA detention and interrogation policies. Helgerson had already angered top CIA officials with his 2004 finding that CIA interrogation practices violated the Convention Against Torture and Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment. Now, CIA director Hayden took the unusual step of opening an internal inquiry into the inspector general’s office after receiving complaints that Helgerson was conducting an unfair and biased investigation. The move raised questions about the ability of the inspector general to act independently of the CIA director, as required by law.

Q.

Criminal Investigation into Possible CIA Obstruction

Helgerson’s 2004 finding was based in part on his review of videotaped CIA interrogations of terrorist suspects held in a secret CIA prison in 2002. The existence of those videotapes was unknown outside of the agency until December 6, 2007, when the New York Times reported that videotapes showing the waterboarding of two al-Qaeda suspects had been destroyed. In January 2008 the U.S. Justice Department announced the beginning of a criminal investigation into the CIA’s destruction of those videotapes. The investigation was expected to focus on whether CIA officials gave false statements and obstructed justice by destroying the videotapes.

The head of the CIA’s clandestine operations, José Rodriguez, was said to have ordered the destruction of the tapes in November 2005, allegedly with the permission of CIA lawyers. What to do with the tapes was discussed among Bush administration lawyers at the highest levels, including then White House counsel Alberto Gonzales.

Initially, CIA spokesmen said the tapes were destroyed because they feared terrorist retaliation against CIA interrogators in the event the tapes ever became public. This explanation was largely dismissed by most observers, however, because videotapes are easily and routinely edited to obscure facial features. Journalists noted that the November 2005 destruction of the tapes coincided with the first public disclosure of the CIA’s secret prison network and congressional consideration of legislation banning ill treatment of prisoners.

The disclosure of the videotapes led to charges by the two men who headed the bipartisan September 11 commission that the CIA obstructed their investigation. Both men said they had requested all information held by the CIA regarding al-Qaeda and that the deliberate withholding of the videotapes may have violated federal law. Since the commission’s findings about the September 11 plot were based to a great extent on information obtained from the interrogations, some political observers said many of the commission’s findings were placed in doubt if they were based on information obtained under torture.

The videotape disclosure confirmed that the CIA used waterboarding, which is generally regarded as a form of torture. In a televised interview a former CIA officer said he witnessed videotapes of the waterboarding.

The CIA officer said the use of waterboarding with one of the suspects, Abu Zubaydah, yielded information that “probably saved lives” by disrupting other terrorist plots. In his memoir, former CIA director Tenet also maintained that Zubaydah was a significant figure. However, a retired FBI agent who examined Zubaydah’s diary and other evidence disputed this account. He concluded that Zubaydah was a mentally disturbed split-personality who made statements of doubtful authenticity under the harsh interrogations. The agent also stated that Zubaydah was of relatively little importance in the al-Qaeda operation. Zubaydah himself in legal papers maintained that he was not truthful and told his interrogators what he thought they wanted to hear to stop the torture. The FBI subsequently withdrew from Zubaydah’s interrogation because of the techniques used by the CIA, which also included exposure to extreme cold and extremely loud music.

By early 2008 numerous investigations were under way into the decision to destroy the videotapes. In addition to the Justice Department and internal CIA inquiries, the House and Senate intelligence committees in the U.S. Congress were also planning hearings. Motions filed in several U.S. district courts sought to determine if the CIA had violated court orders requiring the agency to disclose records relating to the treatment of suspected terrorist detainees.