Central Intelligence Agency

Article Outline

Introduction; Responsibilities; Structure; Intelligence Gathering and Analysis; History

Iran, Guatemala, and the Bay of Pigs

After its creation by Truman, the CIA quickly became a key foreign policy tool. With the approval of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the CIA conspired in the 1950s to overthrow two democratically elected governments. The motivation in each case was a desire to frustrate the expansion of Soviet political and military influence into new regions and to protect the interests of US business corporations. In Iran, Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadegh tried to secure greater government control of oil production and policy. British oil interests and the British secret service began to undermine Mossadegh, and the CIA joined in because they saw Mossadegh’s government as sympathetic to the USSR. In a coup d'état in 1953, Mossadegh’s government was replaced by an undemocratic monarchist regime under Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. US investors then acquired a major slice of Iranian oil production.

In Guatemala, the government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán planned to take over some land owned by a US corporation, the United Fruit Company. With Eisenhower’s strong backing, the CIA plotted Arbenz’s overthrow in 1954 and helped install a right-wing dictatorship. Supporters of the plot portrayed Arbenz as a puppet of the USSR, although many historians have challenged this view. The CIA was jubilant about its apparent triumphs in Iran and Guatemala, though a more sober assessment suggests that many Iranians and Guatemalans were already opposed to their governments and that the CIA played a marginal role.

But the CIA’s record in Iran and Guatemala led to overconfidence, and this was a factor in the decision to attempt the overthrow of the government of Cuba in 1961. Once again, the motive was to stop communist expansion, although unlike in Iran and Guatemala, the government of Cuba actually was communist. However, its leader Fidel Castro enjoyed widespread popular approval within Cuba. In April 1961 a CIA-trained force of about 1,500 Cuban exiles landed at the Bahía de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs) on the south coast of Cuba. CIA planners anticipated an easy victory in Cuba, but when the small army did not receive support from their fellow Cubans, Castro’s forces defeated them easily (see Bay of Pigs Invasion). This was a great shock to the administration of President John F. Kennedy, and to the CIA. Allan Welsh Dulles, the DCI, resigned following the failed invasion. Although the CIA continued to use covert operations, top agency officials often took a more sceptical view of their usefulness.

Early Intelligence Gathering

Covert operations tend to grab the headlines, but most of the people and the money in the early CIA were devoted to more orthodox intelligence work. Although Dulles retired under a cloud, in the years from 1953 to 1961 when he served as DCI he built up intelligence resources in important areas. He and his colleagues led the development of the U2 high-altitude spy plane whose powerful reconnaissance cameras could take detailed photographs from a safe distance. Under Dulles’s leadership, the CIA also began work on spy satellites, and in 1960 the US launched Corona, the world’s first reconnaissance satellite. The CIA also developed techniques to estimate the economic strength of the USSR, a vital element in assessing Soviet military potential.

Dulles’s term as DCI was marked by some significant mistakes, however. The CIA failed, for example, to provide President Eisenhower with a warning of the joint British, French, and Israeli invasion of Egypt in 1956 during the Suez Crisis. But the agency performed well overall in its core mission of assessing the Soviet threat. Notably, in the early 1960s it refuted the notion that the Soviet Union had more nuclear-tipped missiles than the United States. This dispelled the dangerous myth of the so-called missile gap, which suggested that United States nuclear forces were inferior to Soviet forces, and that the US should embark on massive defence spending.

The Mid-1960s to Early 1970s

From 1964 to 1975, during US involvement in the Vietnam War, the CIA produced estimates on enemy strength and provided other intelligence that was generally accurate. However, the agency also participated in a counter-insurgency effort against the communist guerrillas (the Peoples’ Liberation Armed Forces/PLAF), which became notorious and revived doubts about the usefulness of certain types of covert operation. While US military forces encountered unexpectedly strong resistance from the PLAF, many South Vietnamese civilians offered the guerrillas their support. In 1965 the CIA launched an effort to identify and kill civilians who actively supported the communist cause. In June 1968 the effort was named the Phoenix Program. The Phoenix Program led to the deaths of at least 20,000 PLAF supporters or suspected supporters. Vietnamese mercenaries in the pay of the CIA assassinated many of these civilians. News of the killings led many US citizens to believe that their country had committed a crime against humanity.

Controversies of the Early and Mid-1970s

The CIA faced a series of controversies beginning in the early 1970s. A former CIA agent, James W. McCord, Jr., was part of the Watergate scandal, in which President Richard Nixon and senior White House staff members were implicated in the obstruction of justice and other serious crimes. The CIA’s troubles became far more serious in late 1974 and 1975, when the New York Times reported that the agency had violated US law by spying on US citizens. Subsequent hearings in the House of Representatives and the Senate confirmed that the CIA violated its legal charter when it used wire-taps to spy on US citizens, opened private letters, secretly placed agents in US political and religious groups, and burgled the offices of political opponents.

The 1975 congressional hearings also revealed that the CIA had a significant role in coup d'états, assassinations, and attempted assassinations of political leaders in several countries. The targeted leaders came from countries including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chile, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Indonesia, and South Vietnam (now part of Vietnam). Not all of the plots were successful, and the CIA did not directly organize all that were successful. But many recoiled at the idea of a secretive agency spying on US citizens at home while orchestrating assassinations abroad. Suspicion of the CIA became so intense that many speculated that the agency might have played a role in the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy, but no one has produced credible evidence to support this allegation. Fear that the CIA was out of control led to the creation of permanent oversight (supervision) committees in both the House and the Senate, and the strengthening of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.

Attempted Reform under President Carter

When Jimmy Carter became US president in 1977, he supported the principle of open government and regarded the CIA’s secrecy with suspicion. During Carter’s presidency hundreds of CIA employees were laid off, many of them from the Operations Directorate. Morale sank within the CIA, especially when it was accused of failing to predict the fall of the Iranian shah Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi in January 1979. The CIA failure was one of the agency’s most infamous because the fall of the shah deprived the United States of one of its main suppliers of crude oil and forced the closure of US surveillance stations in Iran that tracked Soviet military activity. The CIA’s failure to predict the demise of the shah also left the US embassy in Tehran vulnerable and, soon after the shah fell, Iranian militants seized the embassy and took dozens of US citizens hostage (see Islamic Revolution in Iran). The standing of the CIA was so low that the Senate did not trust the agency’s ability to monitor the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks between the United States and the USSR, and this contributed to the refusal by Congress to ratify the treaty.