Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The History of the CIA

Starting point is 00:00:00 The United States Federal Agency charged with gathering foreign intelligence is the Central Intelligence Agency, or the CIA. The CIA is tasked with gathering, processing, and analyzing national security information, as well as conducting covert action and clandestine operations. It was created in the shadow of the Second World War and became one of the most important organizations during the Cold War, as well as the most powerful intelligence organization in the entire world. Learn more about the Central Intelligence Agency, how it was founded. and how it operates on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed.

Starting point is 00:00:58 It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. I'm certain that everybody listening to this is familiar. with the Central Intelligence Agency, or the CIA. Much of what people know, however, comes from movies and television, which often portrays CIA agents as having superhuman powers and the agency having some sort of omnipotent abilities.

Starting point is 00:01:30 Of course, the CIA doesn't do anything to dissuade this notion because it benefits them to have people believe that they can do these things. But in reality, the vast majority of people who work for the CIA sit at desks and aren't gallivanting around the world on spy missions. So while the CIA is very different from most federal agencies, there is also a bureaucratic element to it which makes it very similar to others. As with other federal agencies, the CIA was created for a particular reason under a unique set of circumstances.

Starting point is 00:02:02 To understand why and how the CIA was created, we have to go back to the beginnings of the United States and how it handled intelligence. If you remember back, I did an episode on the Culper Ring, which was a spy network during the Revolutionary War. The Culper Ring gathered information on the British and managed to feed that information to George Washington and the Continental Army. It was actually quite successful, but it was highly informal. During the Civil War, both sides engaged in intelligence gathering activities, but the gathering

Starting point is 00:02:32 was limited to the war. When the war was over, the need for military intelligence ended. Intelligence collecting sprang back into existence with the start of the First World War. In May of 1917, the Department of War created the Military Intelligence Section, which was then changed to the Military Intelligence Branch in February of 1918 and then was changed again to the Military Intelligence Division in June of 1918. The Military Intelligence Division was the first organized attempt at gathering and analyzing intelligence by the United States.

Starting point is 00:03:07 Unlike the Revolutionary or Civil Wars, the intelligence gathering didn't end with the the conclusion of World War I. The military intelligence division continued after the war and throughout the entire interwar period. They weren't the only intelligence organizations, however. The Federal Bureau of Investigation began doing counterintelligence on operations, and the Office of Naval Intelligence was working on their own intelligence gathering efforts. When the Second World War began, however, needs changed, and the intelligence service had to change with it. In particular, the uncoordinated efforts of multiple organizations needed to be consolidated in a single organization where information could be centralized and shared. In that spirit, on June 13, 1942,

Starting point is 00:03:53 the Office of Strategic Services, or the OSS, was established. The OSS put the intelligence activities of every branch of the military under one roof. The OSS was largely created as a response to the deficiencies of American intelligence operations. The Americans wanted to be more like the British who had created a successful intelligence organization in MI6 back in 1909. Also, in no small part, the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor exposed the weakness in American intelligence efforts. The OSS conducted espionage, sabotage, command of operations, and guerrilla warfare operations

Starting point is 00:04:31 against the Axis powers during the war. However, before the war ended, General William Wild Bill Donovan, the head of OSS, had written to President Franklin Roosevelt about the need for a peacetime central intelligence agency. This was in large part spurred by stories in the press about the OSS and their tactics. Many newspapers called them the American Gestapo. It turned out that these reports were encouraged by the FBI, which, under the leadership of Jay Edgar Hoover, wanted the focal point of American intelligence in the post-war world to be the FBI. About a month after the end of the Second World War, on September 20th, 1945,

Starting point is 00:05:13 President Harry Truman issued a decree dismantling the OSS and 13,000 of its employees. By October, its functions had been split between the Department of State and the Department of War. Truman had to fight a political battle with various branches of the military, the FBI and the State Department about the future of American intelligence operations. Despite their objections, Truman established the National Intelligence Authority in January of 1946 to oversee the National Intelligence Group. This, however, was a temporary stopgap measure. The entire United States Defense and Intelligence Framework was in the process of being overhauled. The end result of this process was the National Security Act of 1947.

Starting point is 00:05:59 The National Security Act of 1947 was one of the most important laws passed in the 20th century. The Act established the National Security Council, created the Central Intelligence Agency, and merged the Department of War and the Department of the Navy into the Department of Defense. The CIA was unique because it was explicitly not a military organization. Prior to this point, the military controlled all American intelligence efforts in one form or another. This was to be a civilian agency that would serve as an independent source of intelligence analysis for the president and the National Security Council. In 1948, the National Security Council issued Directive 10-2, which encouraged covert activities to be taken against the Soviet Union and, quote, hostile foreign states or groups. The laws under which the CIA would operate were later established in the Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949.

Starting point is 00:06:55 The Central Intelligence Agency Act provided the legal framework for the CIA to function with a significant degree of secrecy and operational autonomy compared to other government agencies. Some of the legal exemptions that were laid out in the 1949 Act include exemption from making individual line items and its budget available to the public. It was exempt from having to disclose the organization, functions, titles, officials, salaries, or number of personnel employed. They could directly transfer money to other government agencies for classified contracts without disclosure. Additionally, the Act authorized the CIA to admit a limited number of its personnel into the United States for intelligence purposes under special immigration exemptions, a.k.a. they could bring in defectors. Because of the different demands placed on the CIA by other government agencies, the CIA initially had two main missions. the amassing of covert intelligence and organizing covert actions against foreign countries. They were also given very broad latitude over what they could do, including, quote,

Starting point is 00:08:02 such are their functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council made from time to time direct. The CIA was explicitly prevented from spying on Americans domestically and was chartered only with gathering intelligence outside U.S. borders. The CIA was established at the same time as the start of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and this gave them a very clear mission and target for their intelligence efforts. The first few years of the CIA were not good. They had a relatively small staff and had failed to anticipate most of the biggest events of the period.

Starting point is 00:08:40 They had failed to predict the invasions of Romania and Czechoslovakia, as well as the entire Soviet atomic bomb program. However, given the importance of the Cold War and a war, of the Soviet Union in American foreign policy, the CIA was expanded, both in terms of manpower and its mission scope. One of the things it quickly adopted was counter espionage, particularly against Soviet bloc countries. A turning point in the organization came in 1953, when Alan Dulles was appointed director of the CIA. Dulles was the brother of John Foster Dulles, who was the Secretary of State under President Eisenhower, and assumed his position just a week before his brother

Starting point is 00:09:19 Allen did. Under Dallas, the CIA greatly expanded its activities to include direct interference in other countries with the intent of thwarting the Soviets. Actions taken by the CIA under Dallas were many, and they included the 1953 coup attempt against the democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister. The coup was conducted to strengthen the monarchy of the Shah of Iran and to ensure Western control over Iran's oil resources. In 1954, the CIA orchestrated a coup to overthrow the democratically elected government of Yakob Arbenz in Guatemala, codename Operation P.B. Success. The operation was motivated by fears of communist influence in Central America. Dulles approved the U2 spy plane program, which took high-altitude spy photos of Soviet and

Starting point is 00:10:06 communist bloc countries. His tenure saw the start of Project M.K. Ultra, a CIA attempt at developing mind control, which I had covered in a previous episode. In addition to these operations, the CIA also interfered in Indonesia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Dominican Republic. He also saw what was perhaps the biggest failure of the CIA, the Bay of Pigs operation in 1961, which was an attempted invasion of Cuba by Cuban exiles. The failure of the Bay of Pigs resulted in Dulles' firing by President John Kennedy. The 1960s saw the CIA focus its attention on Southeast Asia. During the Vietnam War, the CIA conducted covert operations to support South Vietnam.

Starting point is 00:10:48 including the Phoenix program aimed at disrupting the Viet Cong. In 1963, the CIA backed a military coup against the South Vietnamese president. In Laos, the CIA ran a covert war in support of the Royal Lao government against the Pathet Lao and their North Vietnamese allies. They also never gave up on trying to get rid of Fidel Castro and Cuba, having developed dozens of assassination plots against him. In the 1970s, this extended into supporting a coup in Chile, and in the 1980s, they were involved in the Iran-Contra affair, where weapons were sold to Iran to fund a resistance movement in Nicaragua. This is hardly a comprehensive list of CIA activities during the Cold War, and many of the topics I've just mentioned are certainly worthy of their own future episodes.

Starting point is 00:11:35 The end of the Cold War also raised many questions about the effectiveness of the CIA, as they had largely missed the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Data gathered from former communist bloc countries after the Cold War showed that the CIA had been, been way off on their assessments of both Soviet military and economic power. The Cold War also resulted in many people questioning the mission and purpose of the Central Intelligence Agency, but those concerns largely went away after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. As a result, much of the focus of the organization shifted to counter terrorism in the 21st century. It should be noted that, despite all of their covert activities

Starting point is 00:12:15 on the ground. At the end of the day, most of the staff and the CIA work in office jobs, analyzing intelligence that comes in from the field. The CIA is unquestionably the largest and most influential intelligence agency in the world. Because of their secrecy and the laws that protect them, we really don't know the full scope of what the CIA does or has done in the past, and it's quite possible that there are some things that we may never know. The executive producer of Everything Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Peter Bennett and Cameron Kiefer. Today's review comes from listener J. Rad over on Spotify. They write, Five stars from a new member of the Completionist Club in Maryland. As a molecular biologist,

Starting point is 00:13:02 this episode was great, but it seems that there's a lack of biology in a show about everything. Any reason for that? Well, thanks, J. Rad. The point you bring up is a fair one, but there isn't any particular reason for it beyond my personal interests and background. I do have some biology-related episodes in the works, and I would expect to see more of them in the near future. Remember that if you leave a review or send me a boostagram, you two can have it read on the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The History of the CIA

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