The Central Intelligence Agency

By intelligence officials for intelligent people

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is one of the most fascinating yet least understood intelligence gathering organizations in the world

Explores the Central Intelligence Agency, including operation, history, and functions.

The book is about the history of the Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) from the foundation in 1947 to the ultimate events. U.S. President Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947 establishing the CIA. The National Security Act charged the CIA with coordinating the nation’s intelligence activities and correlating, evaluating and disseminating intelligence affecting national security.

Created in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency plays an important part in the nation's intelligence activities, and is currently playing a vital role in the war on terrorism. While the agency is often in the news and portrayed in television shows and films, it remains one of the most secretive and misunderstood organizations in the United States. This work provides an in-depth look into the Central Intelligence Agency and how its responsibilities affect American life. After a brief history of the agency, chapters describe its organization, intelligence/counterintelligence, covert operations, controversies, key events, and notable people.

Discusses the history of the CIA from its origin during World War I through years of peacetime, and examines its intentions, goals and purpose during that time

This unique history offers the most detailed and best documented account of the early years of the CIA currently available. It reveals the political and bureaucratic struggles that accompanied the creation of the modern U. S. intelligence community. In addition, it proposes a theory of effective intelligence organization, applied both to the movement to create the CIA and to the form it eventually took. The period covered by this study was crucially important because it was during this time that the main battles over the establishment, responsibilities, and turf of the agency were fought. Many of these disputes framed the forty years, such as the relationship of the CIA to other government agency intelligence operations, the role of covert action, and Congressional oversight of the intelligence community. The sources upon which Darling drew for this study include the files of the National Security Council, the wartime files of the OSS, and interviews and correspondence with many of the principal players.

President Harry Truman created the job of director of central intelligence (DCI) in 1946 so that he and other senior administration officials could turn to one person for foreign intelligence briefings. The DCI was the head of the Central Intelligence Group until 1947, when he became the director of the newly created Central Intelligence Agency. This book profiles each DCI and explains how they performed in their community role, that of enhancing cooperation among the many parts of the nation's intelligence community and reporting foreign intelligence to the president. The book also discusses the evolving expectations that U.S. presidents through George W. Bush placed on their foreign intelligence chiefs. Although head of the CIA, the DCI was never a true national intelligence chief with control over the government's many arms that collect and analyze foreign intelligence. This limitation conformed to President Truman's wishes because he was wary of creating a powerful and all-knowing intelligence chief in a democratic society. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Congress and President Bush decided to alter the position of DCI by creating a new director of national intelligence position with more oversight and coordination of the government's myriad programs. Thus this book ends with Porter Goss in 2005, the last DCI. Douglas Garthoff's book is a unique and important study of the nation's top intelligence official over a roughly fifty-year period. His work provides the detailed historical framework that is essential for all future studies of how the U.S. intelligence community has been and will be managed.