LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Central Intelligence Agency
built 644 days ago
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is an intelligence gathering agency located in the United States of America. The CIA is the first source for a variety of American intelligence. Agents of the organization work all over the world to monitor situations of interest to the United States Government, from political unrest to environmental hazards. The CIA is an independent agency, not affiliated with any other American intelligence agency, with a Director who reports directly to the President.
Source:
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is an independent government organization, founded under the National Security Act of 1947. The agency is a leader among the 14 agencies and organizations in the United States Intelligence Community. The mission of CIA is to support the president, the National Security Council (NSC), and other officials involved in national security policy by providing accurate, comprehensive, and timely foreign intelligence on national security topics. CIA ... supports the chief executive and the national security policy leadership by conducting counterintelligence operations, special activities, and other duties relating to foreign intelligence and national security as directed by the president. The CIA in the 1990s increased its openness with the American public, and provides relatively detailed information about its organizational structure, through which the director of Central Intelligence (DCI) oversees the four directorates (Administration, Intelligence, Science and Technology, and Operations), as well as numerous other offices.
Source:
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has repeatedly, and illegally, spied on US citizens for years, reveals investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in a landmark report for the New York Times. Such operations are direct violations of the CIA’s charter and the law, both of which prohibit the CIA from operating inside the United States. Apparently operating under orders from Nixon officials, the CIA has conducted electronic and personal surveillance on over 10,000 US citizens, as part of an operation reporting directly to then-CIA Director Richard Helms. In an internal review in 1973, Helms’s successor, James Schlesinger... found dozens of instances of illegal CIA surveillance operations against US citizens both past and present (see 1973). Many Washington insiders wonder if the revelation of the CIA surveillance operations tie in to the June 17, 1972 break-in of Democratic headquarters at Washington’s Watergate Hotel by five burglars with CIA ties. Those speculations were given credence by Helms’s protests during the Congressional Watergate hearings that the CIA had been “duped” into taking part in the Watergate break-in by White House officials.
Source:
The Central Intelligence Agency continues to resist an accounting of interrogation methods it employs and its role in detention and abuse of prisoners held in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and other secret locations. CIA Director Porter Goss and Vice Adm. Lowell Jacoby, Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 17, 2005 on a range of issues including a still unreleased CIA Inspector General report on detainee abuses and renditions. Senator Pat Roberts (R-KS), who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, which has oversight over the CIA, has deflected calls for a formal Committee inquiry into allegations of abuse. A number of investigations have examined the roles of various military units and the armed forces in general in the growing scandal of detainee abuses but no report on the role of the CIA has yet been completed. Several military investigators have complained of the lack of CIA cooperation.
Source:
The Central Intelligence Agency was created by Congress with National Security Act of 1947, signed into law by President Harry S. Truman. It is the descendant of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) of World War II, which was dissolved in October 1945 and its functions transferred to the State and War Departments. Eleven months earlier, in 1944, William J. Donovan, the OSS's creator, proposed to President Franklin D. Roosevelt creating a new organization directly supervised by the President: "which will procure intelligence both by overt and covert methods and will at the same time provide intelligence guidance, determine national intelligence objectives, and correlate the intelligence material collected by all government agencies." Under his plan, a powerful, centralized civilian agency would have coordinated all the intelligence services. He ... proposed that this agency have authority to conduct "subversive operations abroad," but "no police or law enforcement functions, either at home or abroad.
Source:
The Central Intelligence Agency was created in 1947 with the signing of the National Security Act by President Truman. The National Security Act charged the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) with coordinating the nation's intelligence activities and correlating, evaluating, and disseminating intelligence which affects national security.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Central Intelligence Agency