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.