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.