The CIA Turns 60

MUKHTIAR ALI · #1 Saturday, July 14, 2007

Special Feature: The CIA Turns 60

On July 26, 1947 - 60 years ago - U.S. President Harry S. Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947 while aboard the presidential aircraft, the Sacred Cow. The act, which created the National Security Council (NSC), the National Military Establishment (the predecessor of the Department of Defense), and the Air Force, also laid out the groundwork for the establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The CIA officially began operating on September 18, 1947, when the National Security Act took effect.

The Creation of the CIA
CIA Headquarters, Langley, VA

The CIA was not the first U.S. intelligence agency. The first formal, organized intelligence agencies, such as the Office of Naval Intelligence and the U.S. Army's Military Intelligence Division were established in the 1880s. In 1903, the Army created the Military Information Division (MID), which played an important role during World War I. In June 1942, U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed an order that created the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Led by New York lawyer, William J. Donovan, the OSS collected and analyzed information needed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and helped to plan special military campaigns.

Throughout World War II, Donovan had advocated the creation of a peacetime intelligence agency that would report only to the president, would "correlate the intelligence material collected by all government agencies," would have "no police or law enforcement functions, either at home or abroad," and would conduct "subversive operations abroad." Although Roosevelt had seemed willing to consider transforming the OSS into a permanent intelligence service, Truman felt there was no place for the OSS. On October 1, 1945, the OSS was disbanded and its functions put under the control of the State and War Departments. It is unclear why Truman chose to shut down the OSS - one of his aides even said that he had "prematurely, abruptly, and unwisely disbanded the OSS" - but some critics claim that he abolished it because he would have to have sought Congressional appropriation to retain it, because he was concerned that Donovan wanted to create an "American Gestapo," or simply because he disliked Donovan.

However, Truman did realize that the nation needed an intelligence service, and according to one of his aides, believed that the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor would not have occurred had intelligence been centralized. In January 1946, Truman established the Central Intelligence Group (CIG) and appointed Sidney W. Souers as the first Director of Central Intelligence (DCI). Under the direction of the National Intelligence Authority (NIA), Truman directed CIG to provide strategic warning (to guard against another Pearl Harbor) and coordinate clandestine activities abroad.

The National Security Act replaced the NIA with the NSC and the CIG with the CIA. Under the direction of the NSC, the CIA's main mission was to coordinate the collection of all information related to foreign intelligence and foreign counterintelligence. It also was responsible for correlating, evaluating, and disseminating intelligence related to national security to the executive branch. The act also gave the DCI three different roles: the president's main adviser on security issues, the leader of the U.S. intelligence system, and head of the CIA. The DCI was also given authority to protect all information sources and methods. In August 1947, Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter became director of the CIA.

A Different Type of Agency

From its creation, the CIA was a very different type of federal agency. The Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949, which amended the 1947 act, allowed the CIA to keep its administrative procedures, staffing, salaries, and employee statistics secret. The act also permitted the CIA to keep its budget secret and exempted it from most of the restrictions placed on federal funds. A 1984 law permitted the CIA to exempt its operational files from requests under the Freedom of Information Act.

President Harry Truman signs the National Security Act Amendment on August 10, 1949.

In 1997, following a lawsuit filed under the Freedom of Information Act by the Federation of American Scientists, CIA Director George Tenet released a figure for intelligence-related spending for the first time. The intelligence budget for fiscal 1997 was $26.6 billion the following year, the figure was reported to be some $26.7 billion. Since then, the intelligence budget has been classified.

At first, the CIA's main function was information gathering by secretly recruiting foreign agents. However, by the late 1940s, it had become involved in organizing covert operations, whose main purpose was to try to topple states that were considered "hostile" - namely Communist nations or those countries considered likely to turn to a Communist system of government as a way to rebuild their nations. In 1948, the CIA helped the pro-Western Christian Democratic Party win the Italian National Assembly elections by supplying the party with money. Later that year, a 1948 NSC directive would instruct the CIA to continue to "plan and conduct covert operations . . .against hostile foreign states or groups or in support of friendly foreign states or groups . . . [through the use of] propaganda; economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition, and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups."

Cold War Activities

Following the Communist takeovers of China and several Eastern European countries in the late 1940s, the CIA's mission shifted toward containing Communism and the Soviet Union - a mission that would endure throughout the Cold War. From 1953 until 1961, the CIA was at the peak of its Cold War activities, with its agents undertaking hundreds of counterintelligence, foreign intelligence, and political missions. However, not all of the CIA's operations were successful, and a series of failed missions led to much criticism and multiple official inquiries.

On April 17, 1961, a group of 1500 Cuban exiles, aided by the CIA, landed at the Bahìa de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs) and attempted to invade Cuba and oust its leader, Fidel Castro. However, the invasion was soon stopped by Cuban forces, and by April 19, 90 of the exiles had been killed while the remainder had been taken prisoner. The CIA received widespread criticism for its role in the Bay of Pigs invasion, and, soon after, U.S. President John F. Kennedy appointed a group to analyze the CIA's actions.

The CIA had been conducting intelligence-gathering operations in Vietnam since the early 1960s. Although the agency received some criticism for failing to recognize that South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem could not manage a democratic, social revolution, and for allegedly playing too "prominent" a role in the creation of U.S. foreign policy, the CIA received the most criticism for the part it played in the Phoenix Program. Phoenix was a counter-insurgency program in which Vietnamese believed to be sympathetic to the North Vietnamese and Communist Vietcong were captured or assassinated. Often, the information supplied by South Vietnamese soldiers or village chiefs was inaccurate, and some of those assassinated had nothing to do with the war.

In 1979, Soviet military forces invaded Afghanistan. During the 1980s, the CIA helped to train, arm, and support the mujahedeen, or Afghan resistance fighters, in their war against the Soviets. The Soviet troops began to withdraw from Afghanistan in 1988, but the CIA-trained Afghan resistance fighters remained. Part of the mujahedeen would later form the core of Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda organization.

Some of the CIA's greatest allegations of misconduct took place in the U.S. In May 1973, DCI James Schlesinger, concerned by allegations that the CIA was involved in the Watergate scandal, ordered a report from all current and ex-CIA agents detailing "any activities now going on, or that have gone on in the past, which might be construed to be outside the legislative charter of this agency." (The Watergate scandal began with the 1972 arrest of five men with reported links to the CIA for breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. U.S. President Richard Nixon later tried to use the CIA to stop a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) inquiry into the Watergate break-in, by claiming that the burglary was a national security matter.)

The report Schlesinger ordered, which covered illegal operations from the 1950s to the 1970s, would become known as the "family jewels," and was long kept as classified information. In June 2007, the CIA released the "family jewels" report to the public for the first time.

In September 1973, Schlesinger gave the report to his successor William E. Colby. Details of the CIA's illegal operations remained secret until December 1974 when the New York Times published an article by Seymour Hersh which stated that the CIA had conducted domestic intelligence-gathering activities. That same month, Colby confirmed that the CIA had broken the terms of the 1947 act. In a report that he submitted to U.S. President Gerald Ford, Colby admitted that the CIA had been involved in domestic spying missions, including gathering files on about 9,000 U.S. citizens, break-ins, and wiretapping. However, in a later report to a Senate subcommittee, Colby denied that the activities had amounted to "a massive, illegal domestic intelligence operation," as the New York Times report had alleged.

In response to these reports, Ford set up the Rockefeller Commission in 1975 to investigate the CIA's domestic activities. While that commission found that a "great majority" of the CIA's domestic activities legal, it concluded that the CIA had undertaken activities that were "plainly unlawful and constituted improper invasions upon the rights of Americans." The U.S. Senate's Select Committee on Intelligence went even further in its probe. The Senate's committee, which became known as the Church Committee because it was led by Senator Frank Church (D, Idaho), was set up to investigate the workings of the CIA and the FBI, and other intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

The Church Committee, which issued its final report in April 1976, uncovered more than just domestic intelligence - gathering activities - it also discovered that the CIA had monitored and infiltrated anti-war dissident groups, plotted assassinations of Castro and Congolese Premier Patrice Lumumba, opened mail to and from the Soviet Union and China, and conducted tests of drugs on American citizens.

Dismayed by what he had learned, Church would later describe the CIA as a "rogue elephant rampaging out of control." As a result of the investigations, the U.S. Congress set up special panels, including the permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, to oversee the CIA's activities. Three months earlier, Ford issued an executive order, forbidding intelligence agents to spy on U.S. citizens, infiltrate domestic groups, or tamper with the mail for any reason except counterintelligence activities. The order also said that federal employees should not "engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination." Later intelligence measures such as the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which restricted wiretapping, and the subsequent creation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which ruled solely on electronic surveillance requests by FBI and National Security Agency (NSA) employees, were also inspired by the findings of the Church Committee.

The CIA Today

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the CIA changed its mission once again. This time, it began to concentrate on the fight against international terrorism. In trying to establish a new mission, the agency would again face criticism - this time for failing to gather and analyze information correctly. In 1998, the CIA failed to discover India's plans to test nuclear weapons. The following year, because of a failure to update its database, the CIA mistakenly informed North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces who were attacking Belgrade, then capital of Yugoslavia, that the Chinese embassy in that city was a building used for storing military supplies.

However, the September 2001 terrorist attacks against the U.S. placed the CIA under some of its toughest scrutiny. The CIA and other intelligence agencies drew criticism for failing to foresee or prevent the attacks. Poor communication between intelligence agencies was seen as a major problem. In 2002, Congress passed a bill that created the Department of Homeland Security. The new department was devoted to preventing or responding to terrorism and would also allow the CIA and FBI to share information on terrorist threats.

President George W. Bush meets with, from left, CIA Director George Tenet, Secretary Andy Card (not pictured), Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice in the Oval Office Oct. 7, 2001.

The intelligence that preceded the 2003 invasion of Iraq has also stirred controversy. The administration of U.S. President George W. Bush had cited Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction as the main rationale for invading the country. However, no such weapons have been found in the country. In 2004, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence issued a report on the CIA's role in the Iraq conflict. Although it praised the CIA for its accurate evaluation that there was no link between Al Qaeda and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, it criticized the CIA for its part in the war stating that "what the president and the Congress used to send the country to war was information that was provided by the intelligence community, and that information was flawed."

Later that year, reports of illegal CIA transfers of detainees from Iraq to undisclosed locations began to emerge. A year later, suspects who had been held under the CIA's program reported that they had allegedly been tortured while in custody. Controversy erupted again for the CIA when The Washington Post published an article claiming that the agency was maintaining secret prisons in other countries for the purpose of detaining and interrogating terrorism suspects. Human rights groups, the United Nations (UN), and members of the European Union (EU) criticized the CIA's practices, fearing that the existence of secret prisons could lead to the mistreatment of prisoners or break the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. In September 2006, Bush acknowledged that the CIA was operating secret overseas prisons for terrorism suspects.

In December 2004, Congress approved an extensive restructuring of the intelligence community designed to "better protect the American people and defend against ongoing threats." Under the terms of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, the CIA, along with 14 other intelligence agencies, reports to the director of national intelligence (DNI). The DNI, instead of the CIA director, now acts as the president's main adviser on security issues and as head of the U.S. intelligence community. The creation of new DNI position and many other elements of the landmark intelligence community restructuring stemmed from the recommendations of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. The 9/11 Commission in July 2004 had issued a final report that also called for improved congressional oversight of intelligence and counterterrorism.

Today, the CIA continues to work to prevent or respond to terrorism. Because so many of the CIA's activities are not in the public eye, the public usually only hears of the agency's failed operations and rarely knows anything about its "important contributions to the nation's security." However, as the agency approaches its 60th anniversary, the American public can be certain that the country would be much less secure today if it were not for the CIA.

BEST REGARDS
MUKHTIAR ALI SHAR

Irfi · #2 Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Good work, in fact.............keep up ............looking for ur other contributions.......God bless u

MUKHTIAR ALI · #3 Thursday, July 19, 2007

thank u very much IRFAN ......

U R ALSO MOST WELCOME TO SHARE YOUT VALUABLE CONTRIBUTIONS...

THANKS

REGARDS

MUKHTIAR ALI SHAR

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