Central Intelligence Agency

Also to reorganize the nation's military and national security system with the National Security Act in 1947 which unified the Army, Navy, and Air Force under a National Military Establishment lead by the Secretary of Defense. The National Security Act also created the Central Intelligence Agency, the nation’s major department of intelligence. The Act established the National Security Council to enlighten the President on issues mostly related to American foreign policy as well. Though the National Security Council had many improvements to make, it was able to grow in power and prestige through the involvement in the Korean War. And through the past decades it has become of great use to American foreign policy (“Foreign Affairs”).

“The most important innovation of the NSA, the National Security Council, was a special source of concern for President Truman, who worried that it would become a ‘‘second cabinet.’’ (Stuart 2003) The National Security Council was made up of The President of the United States, The Secretary of the State, The Secretary of Defense, The Secretary of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, and The Chairman of National Security Resources Board. The NSC responsibilities were to “advise the President with respect to the integration of domestic, foreign, and military policies relating to the national security so as to enable the military services and the other departments and agencies of the Government to cooperate more effectively in matters involving the national security.” (“National Security Act of 1947" 2009) Another important agency that came out of the National Security Act was the Central Intelligence

The CIA, the elite intelligence agency for the United States of America. Formed by President Truman on September 18, 1947 for security of the nation. Although, they were created in order to protect the nation, this agency has actually created several downfalls and incidents that were quite unneeded during times of tension. In April of 1961, the CIA launched a special operation that was a plotted coup of Cuba. In the years leading up to these three days, the CIA had been training Cuban Americans in order to fight and retake Cuba as a democratic government. Instead, the coup was a total disaster and therefore in typical CIA fashion the President was blamed for this disaster. Another disappointment by the CIA was the “containment” of communism in Southern Asia.

The Central Intelligence Agency popularly known as the CIA is an intelligence service body of the USA that was formed in 1947 after the signing of the National Security Act by Harry S. Truman who was the US president at that time. The agency is mandated with collecting, processing and analyzing information regarding national security from all over the world through the use of human intelligence. The agency has no function in the domestic law enforcement but it basically focuses on collection of information overseas. CIA is the sole agency that is allowed to carry out and oversee covert action, unless the president is convinced that there is more potential in another agency.

Intelligence deals with the process in which specific types of information has been collected, analyzed, refined and provided to the policy makers, so that it will be useful to them in decisions making about potential threats to national security and homeland security (Lowenthal, 2014, p. 10). U.S Government has been benefiting from Intelligence information since the beginning of the country, despite the fact that many people thought that U.S intelligence emanated as a result of cold war (Federation of American Scientists, 1996). For instance, the Office of Naval Intelligence was created in March 1882 followed by the formation of the Military Intelligence Division three years later, charged to collect foreign and domestic military data (Federation of American Scientists, 1996). Other intelligence units in the early republic include the first U.S. Army signals intelligence ("MI-8) formed in 1917; the Justice Department 's Bureau of Investigation created in 1908.

The History of the CIA is one that came out of war. The United States has carried out their activities since the begining of america, but only since WWII have they gathered intelligence for the government (“History of the CIA,” 2014). Roosevelt appointed William J. Donovan

The reason of the attack on Pearl Harbor was due to the reduction of negotiations regarding trading with the US and Japan. The US began to restrict trade with the Empire and the only result was Japan’s refusal to cooperate (Pearl Harbor, 2016). After the tension began to rise, Japan decided that the best way gain an advantage in the trading industry would be to deliver a blow to the biggest threat, the US Naval fleet. Although Japan was intent on performing a surprise attack, the Americans had also gained an advantage by discovering that Japan had ordered the attack by using a decoding device to decipher Japan’s radio transmissions (Pearl Harbor, 2016). Even though the US was able to make last minute preparations, it proved to not be of much help due to the bloodshed caused by the clustered Japanese airstrikes. At the end of the day, over 2,403 Americans were

Originally, Bill Donovan was in control of the OSS, which was created in the early 1940s by President Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt created the OSS because with World War II approaching the U.S., he needed information on the other countries’ plans. Later though, after Roosevelt died, Truman came to power and because he did not know Donovan and had received negative reports on the OSS, he shut it down on October 1, 1945. Two years later, however, Truman recognized the need for the organization and was willing to recreate it, just not with Donovan and his OSS leading it (Walker, 2015). In 1947 he created the CIA in order to better handle the challenges found in the Cold War. The changing from the OSS to the CIA left a huge impact on America in the future. As the CIA began standing up with its own beliefs against the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the organization was able to change America’s views on communism and the Soviet Union entirely. Due to the conflict between the FBI and the CIA, the propaganda from the CIA overemphasized its role in the Cold War to enhance its prestige and power to the United States (Walker,

17, 2007). With these approaches, the intelligence system of the government did things appoint an undersecretary for intelligence in the Defense Department, create The Terrorist Threat Integration Center, which integrates foreign and domestic counterterrorist intelligence analysis, and also create the Department of Homeland Security (Countering Terrorism, pg. 17-18, 2007). More importantly, in 2004, Congress implemented the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, as stated before (Countering Terrorism, pg. 18, 2007). The act split the job of the Director of Central Intelligence Agency into two jobs which created a new position known as the Director of Central Intelligence, which would be later called the Director of National Intelligence (Countering Terrorism, pg. 18, 2007). The DNI was system coordinator as well as the nation’s senior intelligence adviser (Countering Terrorism, pg. 18, 2007). Posner says that Congress created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence mainly to cover up the performance problems for the design faults within the FBI, Department of Defense and the splitting of the DCI and DNI (Countering Terrorism, pg. 21, 2007). Mainly, efforts were made in creating many things to try and reform or make a better intelligence system, but rather than improve the intelligence

This historical analysis will define the unintended consequences of the formation of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) through the military motivations of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the creation of The Office of Strategic Services (OSS). President Roosevelt’s initial motives for gathering wartime intelligence took place in WWII, which defined a new era of interdepartmental intelligence gathering services that did not involve the separate branches of the U.S. military. In 1942, Roosevelt formed the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) to provide a “central intelligence” cooperative between the differing military branches to unite information that was being transmitted for strategic purposes in the differing theaters of combat that involved Japan, Germany, and Italy. This aspect of intelligence gathering was only

The evolution of competing secret intelligence agencies only began to occur during world war one when developing technologies meant gathering information on the enemy was entering new phases of complexity. The need for information became an increasingly more desperate pursuit as new devastating weapons were created which could inflict widespread and catastrophic damage, escalating from chemical weapons, to nuclear warheads. But as the 20th century proved conflicts became increasingly focused on the clash of political ideologies, while the two world wars managed to quash right wing fascism, a new perceived threat came from the opposite side of the political spectrum, communism. Here was an ideology to threaten and challenge the sacred ideals of American capitalist democracy, and those in the US who had climbed to power through this system saw the possible undoing of this in communism. As the US-soviet Union cold war developed, the national security council advised the president for the creation of a central intelligence agency whose task would be to ‘correlate and evaluate intelligence relating to the national security, but not to have any police, subpoena, law enforcing powers or internal security functions’. Its duties mainly involved to advise the NSC, to make recommendations, to correlate and evaluate intelligence, in effect it was a tool of the NSC. However two years later it was further empowered its secrecy allowing it to hide names, spending and allow it to have

The origins of covert action in America’s intelligence activities go far beyond WWI. The Founding Fathers were the first ones in introducing intelligence concepts and intelligence activities during America’s revolution.

In 2004, Congress passed the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act which created the Office of the Director for National Intelligence (DNI) to oversee and coordinate all intelligence collection in order to advise Congress and the White House. The result of this reorganization, the director of the CIA no longer reports directly to the president.

Gathering of intelligence and espionage has been a fundamental part of American security since the earliest days of the United States. Shortly after President George Washington took office in 1789, he petitioned Congress to allocate a "secret fund" in the State Department budget for the purpose of gathering foreign intelligence. By George Washington's third year in office, the "secret fund" was 12 percent of the federal budget. The first permanent intelligence organization the United States established was the Office of Naval Intelligence in 1882. This organization's task was to gather information about the military forces of foreign countries. Two years after World War II ended (1945) congress passed the National Security Act. This gave birth to the modern intelligence apparatus. After being signed into law by President Harry Truman, the U.S. Department of Defense (made up of all the U.S. Armed Forces) and the CIA was created. This was created to inform the president on issues of national security. Over the years, information gathering has become more and more common. Recently, Edward Snowden showed the world how frequently it was actually happening. Although many people consider Edward Snowden to be a hero, he is one of the biggest traitors in American history.

When the 2004 IRTPA was being developed it called for centralization as its main fix to the issues it was meant to handle. However, this was not the first time this sort of push was attempted. In 1947 the National Security Act provided many new centralized aspects for intelligence, this included the National Security Council (NSC), the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), as well as the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The CIA after World War II became the premier in civilian intelligence gathering and analysis and was run by its own director of the CIA who was also the DCI. The DCI in this case acted as the principal intelligence advisor to the President as well as the newly formed NSC while also maintaining their