The United States National Security Council (NSC) is the principal forum used by the President of the United States for consideration of national security, military, and foreign policy matters. Based in the White House, it is part of the Executive Office of the President of the United States, and composed of senior national security advisors and Cabinet officials.
An intelligence agency is a government agency responsible for the collection, analysis, and exploitation of information in support of law enforcement, national security, military, public safety, and foreign policy objectives.
Richard McGarrah Helms was an American government official and diplomat who served as Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) from 1966 to 1973. Helms began intelligence work with the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. Following the 1947 creation of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), he rose in its ranks during the presidencies of Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy. Helms then was DCI under Presidents Johnson and Nixon, yielding to James R. Schlesinger in early 1973.
John Mark Deutch is an American physical chemist and civil servant. He was the United States Deputy Secretary of Defense from 1994 to 1995 and Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) from May 10, 1995 until December 15, 1996. He is an emeritus Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and serves on the boards of directors of Citigroup, Cummins, Raytheon, and Schlumberger Ltd. Deutch is also a member of the Trilateral Commission.
In political science, rollback is the strategy of forcing a change in the major policies of a state, usually by replacing its ruling regime. It contrasts with containment, which means preventing the expansion of that state; and with détente, which means a working relationship with that state. Most of the discussions of rollback in the scholarly literature deal with United States foreign policy toward communist countries during the Cold War. The rollback strategy was tried and was not successful in Korea in 1950 and in Cuba in 1961, but it was successful in Grenada in 1983. The political leadership of the United States discussed the use of rollback during the East German uprising of 1953 and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, but decided against it to avoid the risk of Soviet intervention or a major war.
The Directorate of Operations (DO), less formally called the Clandestine Service, is a component of the US Central Intelligence Agency. It was known as the Directorate of Plans from 1951 to 1973; as the Directorate of Operations from 1973 to 2005; and as the National Clandestine Service (NCS) from 2005 to 2015.
The Central Intelligence Agency, known informally as theAgency and historically as thecompany, is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gathering, processing, and analyzing national security information from around the world, primarily through the use of human intelligence (HUMINT) and conducting covert action. As a principal member of the United States Intelligence Community (IC), the CIA reports to the Director of National Intelligence and is primarily focused on providing intelligence for the President and Cabinet of the United States. Following the dissolution of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) at the end of World War II, President Harry S. Truman created the Central Intelligence Group under the direction of a Director of Central Intelligence by presidential directive on January 22, 1946, and this group was transformed into the Central Intelligence Agency by implementation of the National Security Act of 1947.
Executive oversight of United States covert operations has been carried out by a series of sub-committees of the National Security Council (NSC).
The Dulles–Jackson–Correa Report was one of the most influential evaluations of the functioning of the United States Intelligence Community, and in particular, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The report focused primarily on the coordination and organization of the CIA and offered suggestions that refined the US intelligence effort in the early stages of the Cold War.
CIA involvement in Hungary from 1950-1957 and again in 1989 consisted of clandestine intelligence collection, gray psychological operations, and counterintelligence activities. As noted in the book Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, an organization called Radio Free Europe (RFE), was funded at the time by the CIA to broadcast Hungary from at least from 1950 to 1956. However, RFE operated on no directives to foment revolution.
Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones is professor of American history emeritus and an honorary fellow in History at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. He is an authority on American intelligence history, having written two American intelligence history surveys and studies of the CIA and FBI. He has also written books on women and American foreign policy, America and the Vietnam War, and American labor history.
At various times since the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal government of the United States has produced comprehensive reports on CIA actions that marked historical watersheds in how CIA went about trying to fulfill its vague charter purposes from 1947. These reports were the result of internal or presidential studies, external investigations by congressional committees or other arms of the Federal government of the United States, or even the simple releases and declassification of large quantities of documents by the CIA.
Tim Weiner is an American reporter and author. He is the author of five books and co-author of a sixth, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award.
The Report on the Covert Activities of the Central Intelligence Agency is a 69-page formerly classified comprehensive study on the personnel, security, adequacy, and efficacy of the Central Intelligence Agency written by Lieutenant General James H. Doolittle. United States President Dwight Eisenhower requested the report in July 1954 at the height of the Cold War and following coups in Iran and Guatemala. The report compares with other contemporary Cold War documents such as George Kennan's "X" article in Foreign Affairs, which recommended a policy of "containment" rather than direct confrontation with the Soviet Union, and NSC 68, the secret policy document produced in 1950, which recommended a similarly restrained policy of “gradual coercion.” Doolittle wrote with an abandon-all-principles approach that conveyed the national fear that the United States faced the prospect of annihilation at the hands of the Soviet Union: “It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost,” Doolittle wrote. “There are no rules in such a game… If the United States is to survive, long standing concepts of ‘fair play’ must be reconsidered.” Doolittle’s forceful policy and language reflected the fear that motivated American citizens and policymakers in the wake of Soviet Communism.
The Pinochet File is a National Security Archive book written by Peter Kornbluh covering over approximately two decades of declassified documents, from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), White House, and United States Department of State, regarding American covert activities in Chile. It is based on more than 24,000 previously classified documents that were released as part of the Chilean Declassification Project during the Clinton administration, between June 1999 and June 2000.
Rufus Lackland Taylor Jr. was an officer in the United States Navy. Eventually he became Director of the Office of Naval Intelligence and held the rank of Vice Admiral. In 1966 he was appointed as Deputy Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), then shortly thereafter as Deputy Director of the CIA, where he served from 1966 to 1969.
The United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) dates from September 18, 1947, when President Harry S. Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947 into law. A major impetus that has been cited over the years for the creation of the CIA was the unforeseen attack on Pearl Harbor, but whatever Pearl Harbor's role, at the close of World War II government circles identified a need for a group to coordinate government intelligence efforts, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the State Department, the War Department, and even the Post Office were all jockeying for that new power.
CIA activities in Myanmar were operations by the Central Intelligence Agency and before that the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) from World War II onward in the nation formerly known as Burma. There appears to be somewhat limited information concerning CIA operations in Myanmar, as compared to other nations, such as Vietnam.
The Overseas Internal Security Program was a United States Central Intelligence Agency program led by CIA Counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton to train military and police officers for secret police work in more than 25 countries. First revealed in a 2007 CIA history, the program trained 771,217 officers and helped create the secret police in Cambodia, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Iran, Iraq, Laos, Peru, the Philippines, South Korea, South Vietnam, and Thailand. Many of these officers were trained in the School of the Americas in the Panama Canal Zone, including officers who went on to lead "death squads" in their home countries of Honduras and El Salvador.
