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The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) is an intelligence agency of the United States federal government, specializing in defense and military intelligence.
Counterintelligence is an activity aimed at protecting an agency's intelligence program from an opposition's intelligence service. It includes gathering information and conducting activities to prevent espionage, sabotage, assassinations or other intelligence activities conducted for or on behalf of foreign powers, organizations or persons.
Project ARTICHOKE was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) project that researched interrogation methods.
The National Security Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-governmental, non-profit research and archival institution located on the campus of the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Founded in 1985 to check rising government secrecy, the National Security Archive is an investigative journalism center, open government advocate, international affairs research institute, and is the largest repository of declassified U.S. documents outside the federal government. The National Security Archive has spurred the declassification of more than 10 million pages of government documents by being the leading non-profit user of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), filing a total of more than 50,000 FOIA and declassification requests in its over 30 years of history.
The Strategic Support Branch (SSB) was a United States intelligence organization created by the Department of Defense (DoD) with support from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The SSB's mission was to provide an intelligence capability for field operation units, and U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF), in support of anti-terrorism and counter-terrorism missions in war zones and beyond. The SSB has been dissolved with many of its activities and capabilities transferred to DIA's Defense Clandestine Service.
The Cuban Project, also known as Operation Mongoose, was a covert operation of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) against Fidel Castro's government in Cuba that was officially authorized on November 30, 1961 by President Kennedy. The name Operation Mongoose had been agreed at a prior White House meeting on November 4, 1961. The operation was run out of JM/WAVE, a major secret United States covert operations and intelligence gathering station established a year earlier in Miami, Florida, and led by United States Air Force General Edward Lansdale on the military side and William King Harvey at the CIA and went into effect after the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion.
Able Archer 83 is the codename for a command post exercise carried out in November 1983 by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). As with Able Archer exercises from previous years, the purpose of the exercise was to simulate a period of conflict escalation, culminating in the US military attaining a simulated DEFCON 1 coordinated nuclear attack. Coordinated from the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) headquarters in Casteau, Belgium, it involved NATO forces throughout Western Europe, beginning on November 7, 1983, and lasting for five days.
The Directorate of Operations (DO), less formally called the Clandestine Service, is one of the smallest components 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 is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, tasked with gathering, processing, and analyzing national security information from around the world, primarily through the use of human intelligence (HUMINT). As one of the principal members 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.
The United States Army Intelligence Support Activity (USAISA), frequently shortened to Intelligence Support Activity or Mission Support Activity, and nicknamed The Activity, the Army of Northern Virginia, or Office of Military Support, is a United States Army Special Operations unit originally subordinated to the US Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) but now part of the Joint Special Operations Command. It is tasked to collect actionable intelligence in advance of missions by other US special operations forces, especially 1st SFOD-D and DEVGRU in counter-terrorist operations.
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.
This article deals with activities of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, specifically dealing with arms control, weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and weapons proliferation. It attempts to look at the process of tasking and analyzing, rather than the problem itself, other than whether the CIA's efforts match its legal mandate or assists in treaty compliance. In some cases, the details of a country's programs are introduced because they present a problem in analysis. For example, if Country X's policymakers truly believe in certain history that may not actually be factual, an analyst trying to understand Country X's policymakers needs to be able to understand their approach to an issue.
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has a rich history of intervention over many decades in Guatemala, a country in Central America that the US government has generally viewed as "its backyard." Guatemala is bordered by the North Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Honduras. The four bordering countries are Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras and Belize. Due to the proximity of Guatemala to the United States, the fear of the Soviet Union creating a beachhead in Guatemala created panic in the United States government during the Cold War. The panic was later avoided after operation PBSuccess which was completed in 1954 as a means to overthrow democratically elected Árbenz. With what has been released by the CIA we know that due to the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état and the installation of militarized leadership, more than 100,000 Guatemalan citizens have been killed. The U.S. utilized forms of physical and psychological torture to break down Guatemalans into submission.
CIA activities in Vietnam were operations conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency in Indochina and then Vietnam from the 1950s to the late 1960s, before and during the Vietnam War. Historically, Vietnam became a part of French Indochina in 1887. Although Vietnam became independent after World War II, the French continued to rule the country until 1954, and did not encourage any CIA activity. Also, the year of 1954 was when Ho Chi Minh was in power and the country started to be separated into two parts. While the north was controlled by the communist forces and under Ho Chi Minh's leadership, the south, with the assistance of the U.S., was anti-communist. The economic and military aid supplied by the U.S. to Vietnam continued until the late 1960s. The Central Intelligence Agency participated in every aspect of the wars in Indochina, political and military. In addition to paramilitary supplies, the U.S. CIA tried to block the Ho Chi Minh Trails, an important activity that strategically prevented the North Vietnamese from using the trail for combat. Further, the CIA provided suggestions for political platforms, supported candidates, used agency resources to refute electoral fraud charges, and manipulated the certification of election results by the South Vietnamese National Assembly. Ethnic minorities who allied with the anti-communist Vietnamese and the U.S. CIA included the Montagnards, Hmong, and Khmer. There are 174 National Intelligence Estimates dealing with Vietnam, issued by the CIA after coordination with the intelligence community of the U.S. government.
There have been many claims of repeated U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) intervention in the internal affairs of the Islamic Republic of Iran (Persia), from the 1953 Mosaddeq coup to present. The CIA collaborated with the last Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, to overthrow Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq and install General Fazlollah Zahedi. Later, the 1979 hostage crisis at the American embassy in Tehran, lasting 444 days until January 21, 1981, stemmed from past CIA affairs in Iran, and involvement and collaboration between the two countries requires further analysis to understand the 1979 hostage crisis. CIA personnel proved instrumental in the Iran-Contra affair of the mid-1980s involving a triangulation of arms-dealing and arms-smuggling between the United States military, Iran, and right-wing Contra groups waging a civil war in Nicaragua. More recently in 2007–08, the CIA claimed to be supporting the Sunni terrorist group Jundallah against Iran, but these claims were refuted by a later investigation. It is widely believed the CIA was directly involved with the Mosaddeq coup as declassified documents from 2011 have revealed. The declassified documents explicitly state the CIA objective to replace the Iranian government in the early 1950s with a "pro-western government under the Shah's leadership." The U.S. and Iran have maintained a strained relationship for a long time as claims of CIA involvement kept surfacing. These claims included such that the U.S. Officials were committing acts of violence and rape against the eastern locals. However, these accusations were never brought to justice despite United States validation on the acts. In response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in 2013, the CIA confirmed its role in the coup as various documents outlining its involvement have been released to the public, most of which were previously unknown. The evidence followed by violent protests and strikes. Ultimately, the United States promised to refrain from interfering with Iranian internal affairs. The U.S. government coup was eventually discovered as the United States was providing services to both Iran and Iraq.
Since the 1970s, the CIA has engaged in multiple operations in Afghanistan. The first major operation, code named Operation Cyclone, began in 1979. It was a program to arm and finance the mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan prior to and during the military intervention by the USSR. President Reagan had seen an expansion of the Reagan doctrine, which aided anti-Soviet resistance movements. The program also supported militant Islamic groups that were favored by the regime of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in neighboring Pakistan, at the expense of other resistance groups that had also been fighting the Marxist-oriented Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. Operation Cyclone was one of the longest and most expensive covert CIA operations ever undertaken; costing over $20–$30 million per year in 1980, and rising to $630 million per year in 1987. Funding continued after 1989 as the mujahideen battled the forces of Mohammad Najibullah's PDPA during the civil war in Afghanistan (1989–1992). After the withdrawal of Soviet troops, the CIA's objective was to topple the government of Mohammad Najibullah, which had been formed under the Soviet occupation. The three main factions that the CIA supported were: Ahmed Shah Massoud, Gulbadin Hekmatyar, and Jalaluddin Haqqani. Another civil war developed in 1990, as the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and CIA-supported Gulbadin Hekmatyar sought to violently eliminate all rivals, including the CIA-supported Ahmed Shah Massoud. In spite of this internecine warfare, ISI and CIA formulated a plan to topple the Najibullah government in a winter offensive on Kabul. As part of this offensive, the CIA paid Massoud $500,000, over and above his monthly stipend of $200,000, to close the Salang Highway, which Massoud failed to do. During this period, the U.S. became increasingly concerned with the relationship between Pakistan and the Taliban. Their support of the Taliban escalated tensions between the U.S. and Pakistan. It was concerning for the U.S. as the Taliban grew to be a more extreme and direct threat to the United States, its citizens, and its foreign dignitaries.
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.
The CIA publishes organizational charts of its agency. Here are a few examples.
A human intelligence exploitation team is a tactical collection asset usually at the battalion or higher level that uses HUMINT techniques such as interrogations and source operations to collect information to fulfill intelligence requirements.
Colonel Kurush Bharucha-Reid or "KB" gained prominence as an intelligence and special operations expert in the United States Army from 1973 to 2010 who garnered respect across the US Special Operations and United States Intelligence Community for his significant impacts on Defense HUMINT.
References
- 1 2 "The Pentagon's Spies". Nsarchive.gwu.edu. Retrieved 2 May 2017.
- ↑ Woodward, Bob; Weiser, Ben (18 May 1977). "Pentagon to Abolish Secret Spy Unit" – via washingtonpost.com.
- 1 2 3 4 "History of Navy Humint" (PDF). Nsarchive.gwu.edu. 1973. Retrieved 2 May 2017.
- ↑ "Memorandum for Deputy Secretary of Defense Ellsworth" (PDF). Nsarchive.gwu.edu. 1976. Retrieved 2 May 2017.
- 1 2 3 "History of Navy Humint" (PDF). Nsarchive.gwu.edu. 1974. Retrieved 2 May 2017.
- 1 2 Nielsen, Don (31 December 1975). "Attached Memo" (PDF). Retrieved 15 May 2017.