Central Intelligence Agency

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is an independent agency of the U.S. government responsible for amassing and assessing foreign intelligence to aid the president, the National Security Council (NSC), and other officials in making national security decisions. Such information is considered to be the first line of defense against terrorism.

In 1947, as a direct result of the intelligence failure that allowed Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, U.S. president Harry S. Truman signed the National [Page 89]Security Act, which established the NSC and the CIA. The CIA grew out of the World War II Office of Strategic Services (OSS), run by General William “Wild Bill” Donavan, who recruited from Wall Street and Ivy League schools to form an elite intelligence group based on the East Coast, with an emphasis on covert action abroad. Originally, the CIA operated only outside the United States and was prohibited from collecting intelligence about domestic activities of its citizens. Domestic intelligence was the responsibility of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

The damaged U.S. embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, after a truck bombing that killed 63. The attack, on April 18, 1983, wiped out the entire Central Intelligence Agency Middle East contingent, including station chief Kenneth Haas.

Defense Visual Information Center.

Most CIA operations during its early years involved supporting anticommunist forces in foreign countries. By the 1970s, however, the CIA was working inside the United States. Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, the CIA, through Operation CHAOS, assembled mountains of intelligence, domestically, on war protestors and black nationalists. The CIA justified its actions by maintaining that such antigovernment activities must be sponsored by a foreign state. Revelations about brutal CIA activities in Vietnam and assassination plots against several leaders, including Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba, also marred the agency's reputation and indicated a need for reform.

In the post-Watergate 1970s, the U.S. Congress authorized the Church and Pike Committee to investigate the CIA; its findings led to a series of directives. In 1976, President Gerald Ford prohibited CIA assassinations of political leaders. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter signed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which curtailed the CIA's ability to gather foreign intelligence within the United States. Some restrictions were lifted, however, by Executive Order No. 12333, signed by President Ronald Reagan in December 1981. This order allowed domestic electronic surveillance and physical searches in response to a growing threat of Soviet spies within U.S. borders.

[Page 90]Concurrently, terrorism in the Middle East was becoming a top concern. The early 1980s saw a great number of bombings, hijackings, and kidnappings. War-torn Lebanon became a center of terrorist activity. In 1983, the entire staff of a CIA station—six operatives in total—was killed, along with 57 others, when a suicide bomber targeted the U.S. embassy in Beirut. The Beirut station chief was replaced by William Buckley, who was kidnapped by Islamic militants in 1984 and died in captivity.

These terrorist incidents led CIA director William Casey to develop the Counterterrorism Center (CTC) in 1986, with the mission to “preempt, disrupt and defeat” terrorists and to coordinate the intelligence community's counterterrorist activities. Although staffed with approximately 200 officers, the CTC was considered by many to be a paper-pushing outfit. The CIA's clandestine operations wing, the Directorate of Operations (DO), still controlled espionage activities overseas.