Central Intelligence Agency

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was established by the National Security Act of 1947 as the United States’ first standing, peacetime civilian intelligence service, succeeding the wartime Office of Strategic Services. Its statutory mission combined foreign intelligence collection and analysis with, in practice, a broad program of covert action authorized by successive presidents through the National Security Council.

Role in Documented Cases

The CIA appears in this archive in two distinct capacities: as the implementing agency of covert political operations against foreign governments, and as the sponsor of human-subject research conducted without the consent of its subjects.

• Covert regime change. The agency organized or supported the 1953 overthrow of Iran’s Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and the 1954 overthrow of Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz, both later acknowledged in agency and State Department historical releases.
• Human experimentation. Beginning in 1953, the agency’s MKULTRA program funded and directed behavioral and chemical experiments, in some cases on unwitting subjects, later investigated by the Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission.
• Detention and interrogation. In the years following the 11 September 2001 attacks, the agency operated a program of secret detention facilities and coercive interrogation methods later reviewed in the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee’s 2014 study.

Accountability

Congressional oversight of the agency was largely informal until the mid-1970s. The Church Committee (1975–1976) and Rockefeller Commission (1975) were the first sustained public investigations into CIA domestic and covert activity, leading to the creation of permanent congressional intelligence committees and an executive order restricting assassination as an instrument of policy. The agency has since acknowledged, through declassification programs including the 1973 “Family Jewels” report, a range of activities that exceeded or violated its legal authority.

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