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.
Several investigations led by the Church Committee, Rockefeller Commission and Pike Committee, as well as released declassified documents, reveal that the CIA, at times, operated outside its charter. In some cases, such as during Watergate, this may have been due to inappropriate requests by White House staff. In other cases, there was a violation of Congressional intent, such as the Iran-Contra affair. In many cases, these reports provide the only official discussion of these actions available to the public.
The first major analysis, following the National Security Act of 1947, was chaired by former President Herbert Hoover, with a Task Force on National Security Organization under Ferdinand Eberstadt, one of the drafters of the National Security Act and a believer in centralized intelligence.
The task force concluded that the system of the day led to an adversarial relationship, with little effective coordination, among the CIA, the military, and the State Department. "In the opinion of the task force, this produced duplication on one hand, and, on the other, departmental intelligence estimates that "have often been subjective and biased." In large measure, the military and State Department were blamed for their failure to consult and share pertinent information with the CIA. The task force recommended "that positive efforts be made to foster relations of mutual confidence between the [CIA] and the several departments and agencies that it serves."
This report stressed that the CIA "must be the central organization of the national intelligence system." It recommended a "... top echelon [of] an evaluation board or section composed of competent and experienced personnel who would have no administrative responsibilities and whose duties would be confined solely to intelligence evaluation." It also favored a civilian DCI with a long term in office.
In the arena of covert operations and clandestine intelligence, the Eberstadt Report supported the integration of all clandestine operations into one office within CIA, under NSC supervision. To alleviate concerns expressed by the military who viewed this proposal as encroaching upon their prerogatives, the report stated that clandestine operations should be the responsibility of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) in time of war.
The report declared that the failure to appraise scientific advances (e.g., biological and chemical warfare, electronics, aerodynamics, guided missiles, atomic weapons, and nuclear energy) in hostile countries might have more immediate and catastrophic consequences than failure in any other field of intelligence. It urged the US to develop a centralized capability for tracking these developments.
The Eberstadt report was soon eclipsed by what may have been the most influential policy paper. "On January 8, 1948, the National Security Council established the Intelligence Survey Group (ISG) to "evaluate the CIA's effort and its relationship with other agencies." [1] The Jackson-Dulles-Correa report held an opposite view on clandestine collection to the Eberstadt Report, interesting in that Dulles was a clandestine collection specialist.
Like the Hoover Commission, this group was chartered at the request of President Truman, and was made up of Allen W. Dulles, who had served in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during the Second World War and would become DCI in 1953, William Jackson, a future Deputy DCI, and Matthias Correa, a former assistant to Secretary of Defense James V. Forrestal when the latter had served as Secretary of the Navy during the war. Chaired by Dulles, the ISG presented its findings, known as the Dulles-Jackson-Correa Report, to the National Security Council on January 1, 1949. Partially declassified in 1976, it "contained fifty-six recommendations, many highly critical of the CIA and DCI. In particular, the report revealed problems in the agency's execution of both its intelligence and operational missions. It also criticized the quality of national intelligence estimates by highlighting the CIA's—and, by implication, the DCI's--"failure to take charge of the production of coordinated national estimates." The report went on to argue that the CIA's current trend in clandestine intelligence activities should be reversed in favor of its mandated role as coordinator of intelligence." It was "particularly concerned about the personnel situation at CIA, including internal security, the high turnover of employees, and the excessive number of military personnel assigned to the agency." See the continuing concern about personnel in the 1954 Doolittle Report To add "continuity of service" and the "greatest assurance of independence of action," the report argued that the DCI should be a civilian and that military appointees be required to resign their commissions.
As with the Eberstadt Report, the Dulles Report also expressed concern about the inadequacies in scientific intelligence and the professionalism of the service intelligence organizations, and urged that the CIA provide greater coordination. This led to a recommendation for increased coordination between the DCI and the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the arena of counterespionage. In turn, the report recommended that the Director of FBI be elevated to membership in the committee to help the DCI coordinate intelligence and set intelligence requirements.
The report proposed a large-scale reorganization of CIA. Even though it emphasized intelligence analysis and coordination over operations, it
suggested incorporating covert operations and clandestine intelligence into one office within CIA. ... the Office of Special Operations (OSO), responsible for the clandestine collection of intelligence, and the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), responsible for covert actions, be integrated into a single division within CIA. [It] recommended replacing existing offices with four new divisions for coordination, estimates, research and reports, and operations.
The heads of the new offices would be included in the immediate staff of the DCI so that he would have "intimate contact with the day-to-day operations of his agency and be able to give policy guidance to them." These recommendations would become the start of the model for the future organization and operation of the present-day CIA. Until the DNI creation, estimates were in a separate office reporting to the DCI, coordination was a job of the DDCI (later assisted by the Intelligence Community Staff), research and reports became the Directorate of Intelligence, and operations was first, euphemistically, called the Directorate of Plans. Directorates for Support (originally called Administration), and Science & Technology, were also created.
Gen. James Doolittle did an extensive report on covert actions, specifically for President Dwight D. Eisenhower. [2]
The report's first recommendation dealt with personnel. It recommended releasing a large number of current staff that could never be more than mediocre, aggressively recruit new staff with an overall goal of increasing the workforce, and intensify training, with 10% of the covert staff time spent in training. The Director should be nonpolitical.
Security was the next concern, starting with a drive to reduce interim and provisional security clearances. The report strongly endorsed use of the polygraph both for initial recruits and existing staff. Counterespionage needed to be strengthened, and field stations needed both to report on their staff and periodically be inspected. Consolidating the Washington workforce, which was scattered among buildings, into one or a few main buildings was seen as a way of improving the security of classified information.
Coordination in the intelligence community was seen as a problem, especially agreeing on clear understandings between CIA and military intelligence organizations. The overall IC program for eliciting information from defectors needed improvement, with contributions from multiple agencies.
As far as organization and management, the report described the structure of the Directorate of Plans (i.e., the clandestine service) as too complex and in need of simplification. The Inspector General needed an agency-wide mandate. The role of the Operations Coordinating Board, the covert and clandestine oversight staff of the National Security Council needed to be strengthened, with operations clearly approved and guided from the highest levels of government.
The report addressed the classic problem of increasing performance while reducing costs. This meant better review of the budgets of covert and clandestine activities by a Review Board, except for the most sensitive operations. It meant providing the Comptroller with enough information, even if sanitized, to do a thorough job.
Soon after President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the President's Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Actitivites, that Board requested that Robert A. Lovett and David K.E. Bruce examine CIA's covert operations. [3] This information comes from Arthur Schlesinger's book about Robert F. Kennedy.
"Bruce was very much disturbed," Lovett told the Cuba board of inquiry in 1961. "He approached it from the standpoint of 'what right have we to go barging into other countries buying newspapers and handing money to opposition parties or supporting a candidate for this, that or the other office?' He felt this was an outrageous interference with friendly countries ... He got me alarmed, so instead of completing the report in thirty days we took two months or more."
The 1956 report, written in Bruce's spirited style, condemned
the increased mingling in the internal affairs of other nations of bright, highly graded young men who must be doing something all the time to justify their reason for being. ... Busy, moneyed, and privileged [the CIA] likes its "King Making" responsibility (the intrigue is fascinating – considerable self-satisfaction, sometimes with applause, derives from "successes" – no charge is made for "failures" – and the whole business is very much simpler than collecting covert intelligence on the USSR through the usual CIA methods!). Bruce and Lovett could discover no reliable system of control. "there are always, of course, on record the twin, well-born purpose of 'frustrating the Soviets' and keeping others 'pro-western' oriented. Under these almost any [covert] action can be and is being justified. ... Once having been conceived, the final approval given to any project (at informal lunch meetins of the OCB [Operations Coordinating Board] inner group) can, at best, be described as pro forma." One consequence was that "no one, other than those in the CIA immediately concerned with their day to day operation, has any detailed knowledge of what is going on." With "a horde of CIA representatives" swarming around the planet, CIA covert action was exerting "significant, almost unilateral influences ... on the actual formulation of our foreign policies ... sometimes completely unknown" to the local American ambassador.Bruce and Lovett concluded with a plea about taking control of covert operations and their consequences:
Should not someone, somewhere in an authoritative position in our government, on a continuing basis, be ... calculating ... the long-range wisdom of activities which have entailed a virtual abandonment of the international "golden rule," and which, if successful to the degree claimed for them, are responsible in a great measure for stirring up the turmoitl and raising the doubts about us that exist in many countries of the world today? ... Where will we be tomorrow? "Bruce was very much disturbed," Lovett told the Cuba board of inquiry in 1961. "He approached it from the standpoint of 'what right have we to go barging into other countries buying newspapers and handing money to opposition parties or supporting a candidate for this, that or the other office?' He felt this was an outrageous interference with friendly countries. ...
The CIA itself would like more detail on this report, a copy of which could not be found, in 1995, by the Agency's History Staff. [4] Referring to reports such as the Dulles-Jackson-Correa, Doolittle, Pike, Church, and Rockefeller reports, the Staff "recently ran across a reference to another item, the so-called "Bruce-Lovett" report, that it would very much like to read—if we could find it! The report is mentioned in Peter Grose's recent biography Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles. According to Grose, [Bruce and Lovett] prepared a report for President Dwight Eisenhower in the fall of 1956 that criticized CIA's alleged fascination with "kingmaking" in the Third World and complained that a "horde of CIA representatives" was mounting foreign political intrigues at the expense of gathering hard intelligence on the Soviet Union.
The History Staff checked the CIA files on the President's Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities (PBCFIA). They checked with the Eisenhower Library. They checked with the National Archives, which holds the PBCFIA records. They checked with the Virginia Historical Society, the custodian of David Bruce's papers. None had a copy.
Having reached a dead end, we consulted the author of the Dulles biography, Peter Grose. Grose told us that he had not seen the report itself but had used notes made from it by historian Arthur M. Schlesinger for Robert F. Kennedy and His Times (1978). Professor Schlesinger informed us that he had seen the report in Robert Kennedy's papers before they were deposited at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. He had loaned Grose his notes and does not have a copy of these notes or of the report itself.
This raises an interesting question: how did a report on the CIA written for President Eisenhower in 1956 end up in the RFK papers? We think we have the answer. Robert Lovett was asked to testify before Gen. Maxwell Taylor's board of inquiry on the 1961 Bay of Pigs operation. Robert Kennedy was on that board and may have asked Lovett for a copy of the report. But we do not have the answer to another question: where is the "Bruce-Lovett" report? The JFK Presidential Library has searched the RFK papers without success. Surely the report will turn up some day, even if one government agency and four separate archives so far haven't been able to find it. But this episode helps to prove one of the few Iron Laws of History: the official who keeps the best records gets to tell the story.
In his book, Legacy of Ashes, Tim Weiner published a "declassified version of the document" in the book's footnotes. [5]
The 1975 United States President's Commission on CIA activities within the United States, better known as the Rockefeller Commission investigated questionable practices including assassination attempts and inappropriate domestic operations. Larger Congressional investigations followed in 1975, first the Church Committee of the United States Senate, followed by the Pike Committee of the United States House of Representatives. Eventually, these interim committees were replaced by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. [6]
Congress merged divergent proposals from studies of the Aspin–Brown Commission (successively chaired by former Secretaries of Defense Les Aspin and Harold Brown, and whose members were mostly appointed by President Bill Clinton) and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (chaired by Republican Larry Combest of Texas) in crafting the Intelligence and Defense Authorization Acts for fiscal year 1997, enacting them as amendments to the National Security Act of 1947. The revised Act now gave the DCI a new DDCI for Community Management, along with three “Assistant Directors of Central Intelligence” to coordinate collection, administration, and analysis and production. The community’s imagery interpretation offices were merged in a National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) under the Secretary of Defense. The DCI also received more clout over defense intelligence budgets as well as influence in the appointments of directors of the NSA, NRO, and DIA. [7] [8]
On 27 June 2007 the CIA released two collections of previously classified documents which outlined various activities of doubtful legality. The first collection, the "Family Jewels," consists of almost 700 pages of responses from CIA employees to a 1973 directive from Director of Central Intelligence James Schlesinger requesting information about activities inconsistent with the Agency's charter. [9]
The second collection, the CAESAR-POLO-ESAU papers, consists of 147 documents and 11,000 pages of research from 1953 to 1973 relating to Soviet and Chinese leadership hierarchies, and Sino-Soviet relations. [10]
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.
Allen Welsh Dulles was an American lawyer who was the first civilian director of central intelligence (DCI), and its longest serving director to date. As head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the early Cold War, he oversaw the 1953 Iranian coup d'état, the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état, the Lockheed U-2 aircraft program, the Project MKUltra mind control program and the Bay of Pigs Invasion. He was fired by John F. Kennedy over the latter fiasco.
The director of central intelligence (DCI) was the head of the American Central Intelligence Agency from 1946 to 2004, acting as the principal intelligence advisor to the president of the United States and the United States National Security Council, as well as the coordinator of intelligence activities among and between the various US intelligence agencies.
General Walter Bedell "Beetle" Smith was a senior officer of the United States Army who served as General Dwight D. Eisenhower's chief of staff at Allied Forces Headquarters (AFHQ) during the Tunisia Campaign and the Allied invasion of Italy in 1943, during World War II. He was Eisenhower's chief of staff at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) in the campaign in Western Europe from 1944 to 1945.
William Harding Jackson was a U.S. civilian administrator, New York lawyer, and investment banker who served as Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Jackson also served briefly under President Dwight D. Eisenhower as Acting United States National Security Advisor from 1956 to 1957.
The Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) was the covert operation wing of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Created as a department of the CIA in 1948, it actually operated independently until October 1950. OPC existed until 1 August 1952, when it was merged with the Office of Special Operations (OSO) to form the Directorate of Plans (DDP).
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 the Agency and historically as the Company, 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 through its Directorate of Operations. 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.
There have been several Doolittle Reports:
Executive oversight of United States covert operations has been carried out by a series of sub-committees of the National Security Council (NSC).
National governments deal in both intelligence and military special operations functions that either should be completely secret, or simply cannot be linked to the sponsor. It is a continuing and unsolved question for governments whether clandestine intelligence collection and covert action should be under the same agency. The arguments for doing so include having centralized functions for monitoring covert action and clandestine HUMINT and making sure they do not conflict, as well as avoiding duplication in common services such as cover identity support, counterespionage, and secret communications. The arguments against doing so suggest that the management of the two activities takes a quite different mindset and skills, in part because clandestine collection almost always is on a slower timeline than covert action.
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.
The Eberstadt Report, officially known as the Task Force Report on National Security Organization, was a study conducted by the United States government which evaluated the structure and operations of the United States Department of Defense and United States Intelligence Community. The report was created by the Task Force on National Security Organization, chaired by Ferdinand Eberstadt, from 1948–49 under the Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government, also known as the First Hoover Commission. The most important findings of the report include recommendations for better cooperation within the US Intelligence Community, improvement in the internal structure and operations of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the growing need for the development of scientific intelligence in the background of the Cold War. Despite its submission to US Congress, the report was not widely read due to being overshadowed by the Intelligence Survey Group and its report, the Dulles Report.
The Congo, short for the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is an equatorial country located in central Africa. As of July 2018, the CIA World Factbook lists the Congo containing over 85 million inhabitants representing over 200 African ethnic groups. French is the country's official language, and Catholics comprise the largest religious group at fifty percent. The Congo was colonized by King Leopold II of Belgium in 1885, and known as Belgian Congo until independence in 1960. In recent decades, the CIA has been involved in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, especially in relation to the CIA's considerations and plans to assassinate former Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. Patrice Lumumba was the legally elected first prime minister of the independent country. Lumumba was killed on January 17, 1961, at the age of thirty-five near Élisabethville, Katanga. Even before the independence of the Congo, the U.S. government attempted to facilitate the election of a pro-western government by identifying and supporting individual pro-U.S. leaders. The CIA was also notably involved in a campaign against Lumumba's successor, which led to his eventual imprisonment and long exile from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The CIA was also a vital part of the United States' efforts to aid Joseph Mobutu, who took control of the Congo in 1965 and renamed the country Zaire and himself Mobutu Sese Seko. The CIA would work heavily with Mobutu, particularly in relation to American support for the National Liberation Front of Angola and Jonas Savimbi's National Union for the Total Independence of Angola.
The Schlesinger Report, originally titled A Review of the Intelligence Community, was the product of a survey authorized by U.S. President Richard Nixon late in 1970. The objective of the survey was to identify and alleviate factors of ineffectiveness within the United States Intelligence Community (IC) organization, planning, and preparedness for future growth. The report, prepared by James Schlesinger, Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), was submitted to Nixon on 10 March 1971.
With Europe stabilizing along the Iron Curtain, the CIA attempted to limit the spread of Soviet influence elsewhere around the world. Much of the basic model came from George Kennan's "containment" strategy from 1947, a foundation of US policy for decades.
The CIA publishes organizational charts of its agency. Here are a few examples.
The Boren-McCurdy intelligence reform proposals were two legislative proposals from Senator David Boren and Representative Dave McCurdy in 1992. Both pieces of legislation proposed the creation of a National Intelligence Director. Neither bill passed into law.
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 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.