The Central Intelligence Agency is the principal foreign intelligence service of the United States, an organization that did not exist before September 18, 1947, and that within a decade had become one of the most powerful tools of American statecraft. For more on the intelligence and espionage overview; for the Soviet counterpart, see the KGB’s history and operations.
Founding: the National Security Act of 1947
American intelligence before 1947 was a sprawl. The Army’s G-2, the Navy’s ONI, the State Department’s research bureau — the remnants of the wartime OSS sat alongside the FBI, which under J. Edgar Hoover claimed jurisdiction over anything that touched “national security.” The OSS had been dissolved in October 1945, and the State Department had no good answer when, in February 1946, George Kennan sent his long telegram from Moscow.
The legislation that produced the CIA moved through Congress in 1947. President Truman signed the National Security Act on July 26, 1947; the CIA came into formal existence on September 18, 1947. The new agency was charged with coordinating the rest of the community, performing functions the others could not, and providing the President with “national intelligence.” The first Director of Central Intelligence, Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, served from 1947 to 1950. He was followed briefly by General Walter Bedell Smith, and then by Allen Dulles, who would define the modern CIA.
The Dulles era and the rise of covert action
Allen Dulles, a former OSS station chief in Bern who had personally handled the defection of a German intelligence officer in 1944, took over in February 1953. Under his direction the CIA grew from a few thousand employees to nearly fifteen thousand, Directorate of Plans became a state within the state.
The defining operation of Dulles’s tenure was the 1953 coup in Iran. Operation TPAJAX — the American portion of an Anglo-American plan — was organized by Kermit Roosevelt Jr. and used street money, propaganda, and the Iranian military to remove Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. The shah returned; the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (renamed BP) had its concession restored. The operation’s success, as Mark Gasiorowski shows in U.S. Foreign Policy and the Shah (1991), entrenched the United States in Iranian politics in ways that would blow back spectacularly after 1979.
A year later, in 1954, the CIA ran PBSUCCESS in Guatemala. Jacobo Árbenz’s land reform threatened the United Fruit Company, and the agency organized a small invasion force under Carlos Castillo Armas. The reformist regime fell. The success in Guatemala, like the success in Iran, came with a bill that took decades to mature: a generation of military rule, a civil war that killed perhaps 200,000 people, and a deep reservoir of anti-Americanism in Central America.
The failures: Bay of Pigs, Cuba, and the missile gap
The plan to use a CIA-trained exile brigade to invade Cuba had been drawn up under Eisenhower. President Kennedy, briefed in late 1960, decided to proceed, scaling back the operation to disguise American involvement. The invasion, launched on April 17, 1961, collapsed within three days. Brigade 2506 lost 114 dead and the rest were captured. As the Taylor Board later concluded in June 1961, the operation had been crippled by the cancellation of the final air strikes.
The Bay of Pigs was the CIA’s worst public defeat. Fidel Castro, convinced that the United States would not stop, turned to Moscow. Eighteen months later, the Soviets had placed nuclear missiles in Cuba. The October 1962 crisis was, in this sense, a direct result of April 1961.
A quieter failure was the missile-gap controversy. Throughout the late 1950s the CIA had estimated the Soviet ICBM force would be hundreds of missiles strong by the early 1960s. The U-2 overflights starting in 1956, and the Corona imagery after 1960, gradually corrected the picture. The actual Soviet force in 1961 numbered in the tens, not the hundreds. The overestimate had helped justify an American buildup that itself fed a smaller Soviet response.
The intelligence wars of the 1960s and 1970s
The mid-1960s were the agency’s analytical heyday. The Sino-Soviet split was tracked closely. The Soviet economy was monitored well enough that the agency’s long-term assessments of declining growth — produced by economists like Abraham S. Becker and used by the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board — turned out to be closer to the truth than the optimistic estimates of the CIA’s own Office of Strategic Research. That body of work laid the intellectual foundation for the Reagan-era defense buildup, which assumed a Soviet adversary that was, in fact, weaker than the public image suggested.
Operationally, the CIA ran two long, costly programs. The first was the secret war in Laos, where the agency’s Air America airline and its Hmong allies, under Vang Pao, fought the Pathet Lao from 1962 to 1975. The second was the Phoenix program in Vietnam, run by the CIA station in Saigon from 1968 to 1972, which targeted the Viet Cong infrastructure and killed a substantial number of civilians.
MKULTRA, family jewels, and the Church Committee
The agency’s reputation hit bottom in 1975. The New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh broke the story of CIA domestic spying in December 1974. President Ford appointed a commission under Vice President Nelson Rockefeller in January 1975. The Senate created the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, chaired by Senator Frank Church of Idaho. The Church Committee’s hearings ran from September 1975 to November 1975 and produced fourteen reports.
The most damaging revelations concerned assassination plots against foreign leaders (Castro, Patrice Lumumba, Rafael Trujillo, Chile’s Salvador Allende); the MKULTRA program, which had drugged unwitting subjects with LSD and other compounds from 1953 to 1973; Operation CHAOS, the agency’s illegal surveillance of American dissidents; and the “family jewels,” a compendium of illegal acts the agency had compiled at the instruction of Director James Schlesinger in 1973.
The legislative response reshaped oversight. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was created in May 1976. The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence followed in 1977. Executive Order 11905, issued by Ford in February 1976, prohibited political assassination. Carter’s executive order 12036 in 1978 tightened the rules further; Reagan’s 1981 order 12333 became the standing framework.
The late Cold War and the cost of betrayal
The 1980s were a period of operational humiliation. The CIA’s Moscow station was destroyed. The first blow was the defection of Vitaly Yurchenko in 1985 — re-defecting after a brief, contested period in the West, in a move that discredited the agency’s most recent source. The second and worse blow was Aldrich Ames, a CIA counterintelligence officer who had been turned by the KGB in 1985 and who, for $2.7 million, gave up at least ten of the agency’s sources inside the Soviet Union. Most of them were executed. The full extent of the damage was not understood until 1994, when the FBI arrested Ames. Robert Hanssen was running for the KGB from 1979 to 2001 and gave up the names of CIA and FBI assets for cash and diamonds. Together, Ames and Hanssen are the most expensive penetrations of any American intelligence service in history.
The CIA’s principal late-Cold War operational contributions were harder to see. The agency’s support for the Polish trade union Solidarity, including the smuggling of printing presses and money, helped keep the movement alive in the 1980s; the policy was directed by the CMEA specialist and CIA Deputy Director for Operations, Robert Gates, among others.
The post-Cold War
The collapse of the Soviet adversary left the CIA without its organizing mission. The agency suffered sharp budget cuts in the 1990s and absorbed a wave of public criticism for failures on terrorism. The September 11, 2001 attacks exposed its limits most severely. The 2004 Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After September 11 documented the familiar pattern: too many agencies, too many databases, and a culture that did not reward dissent. The agency’s return to prominence came with the drone and targeted-killing programs, the rapid expansion of its Counterterrorism Center after 2001, and the long, contested war of attribution against Russian active measures in the 2016 election. The 21st-century CIA looks more like an analytic and targeting organization than the paramilitary shop of 1961, but the institutional reflexes built during the Cold War — the reliance on secret action, the difficulty of admitting error, the tendency to overestimate adversaries — remain.
Key sources
- Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (2007). The most ambitious single-volume history; openly hostile to the agency but based on extensive interviews and declassified material.
- Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, The CIA and American Democracy (4th ed., 2021). A more even-handed account of the agency’s domestic political context.
- John Prados, Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA (2006). The best overview of covert action from Iran to Chile.
- Mark Gasiorowski, “The 1953 Coup d’État in Iran,” International Journal of Middle East Studies (1987), and his later monograph U.S. Foreign Policy and the Shah (1991). The standard account of Operation Ajax.