The Central Intelligence Agency CIA

Pearl Harbor taught Washington that warning signs scattered across agencies were useless if no one put them together. The wartime Office of Strategic Services, created in 1942, ran spies and saboteurs but was disbanded in 1945. The National Security Act of 1947, signed July 26 and effective September 18, created the Central Intelligence Agency to correlate and evaluate intelligence for the President and to perform such other functions as the National Security Council might direct, a phrase that became the legal basis for covert action. The agency moved to its headquarters in Langley, Virginia, in 1961.

The CIA collects foreign intelligence primarily from human sources, recruiting and running agents abroad through its Directorate of Operations. Its Directorate of Analysis combines that reporting with signals intercepts, imagery, and open sources to produce assessments for policymakers, including much of the President's Daily Brief. Directorates for science and technology and for digital innovation build the tools, and a support directorate runs the logistics. The agency is also the only element of the intelligence community authorized to conduct covert action, operations meant to influence events abroad without the hand of the United States being acknowledged, which require a written presidential finding and notification to the congressional intelligence committees.

The CIA is barred by statute from police powers and internal security functions in the United States. Its Director is nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate and, since 2005, reports through the Director of National Intelligence rather than leading the whole intelligence community. Its budget and workforce are classified, though both are estimated in the tens of thousands of employees and billions of dollars. Its record includes intelligence successes from the U-2 to the location of Osama bin Laden and failures from the Bay of Pigs to the 2002 assessment of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

The agency's secret operations have repeatedly collided with law and public opinion. The Church Committee in 1975 exposed assassination plots and domestic spying and led to permanent congressional oversight. The post-9/11 detention and interrogation program, which used methods widely described as torture, was ended in 2009 and documented in a 2014 Senate report. In 2025 the agency reduced its workforce through buyouts and cuts, shifted priorities toward China, cartels, and counterterrorism, and dismissed officers working on diversity programs, steps its leadership called a refocusing on core missions and critics described as a politicization of the analytic corps.