Friday, March 2, 2012

We unveil the secret services agencies every day


The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is arguably one of the most fascinating, yet least understood, intelligence gathering and covert-action organizations in the world.  The mere mention of “CIA” evokes images of foreign based spies maneuvering in a shadowy “cloak and dagger” world, or, perhaps, small teams of parachuting commandos operating in some remote region of Latin America, Africa, or Southeast Asia.
In its brief history, the CIA has been all of that. But it is much more. As the federal government’s incarnation of the world’s second-oldest profession, the CIA employs tens of thousands of workers, with only a fraction serving at the agency’s clandestine “tip of the spear.” Those numbers, like much of the CIA’s inner workings, remain classified.  But the Agency’s reputation, stemming from its direct involvement in some of history’s most important events, has earned those men and women who serve at the tip a place among the pantheon of great American heroes and heroines.


Born of a series of federal organizations that sought to bring all of America’s foreign intelligence gathering efforts under one roof, the CIA has existed as the senior member of the U.S. intelligence community for over fifty years.  The Agency’s responsibilities run the gamut from the collection and analysis of information from a variety of sources to producing finished intelligence, conducting worldwide covert operations, and overseeing the myriad federal agencies tasked with the collection of both foreign and domestic intelligence.
But it has not been without its detractors. John “J.” Edgar Hoover, the infamous director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, fought tooth and nail for FBI control of all foreign intelligence-gathering activities before, during, and after World War II. During the highly publicized congressional investigations into CIA misdeeds during the mid-1970s, Senator Frank Church referred to the Agency as a “rogue elephant on a rampage.” In his best-selling expose Inside the Company: CIA Diary, former CIA operative turned Agency backbiter Philip Agee would proclaim to his readers that it is “difficult for people to understand what a huge and sinister organization the CIA is.”
CIA critics from all corners, in fact, have attempted to put teeth into such statements by pointing to the disastrous Agency-led invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, the unrestricted mail-intercept operation from 1952 to 1973, a series of mind-control drug experiments conducted on unwitting human beings, and numerous allegations of CIA-backed assassinations and assassination attempts. “The CIA should be shut down because its banner has too many Cold War stains,” said Lt. General William Odom, a former chief of the National Security Agency, the U.S. government’s super-secret eavesdropping and code-cracking entity.
But “shutting down” the largest, most important arm of secret defense in and for the United States would be nothing less than catastrophic for the free world. The CIA, according to an article in U.S. News & World Report, is an agency with a multibillion-dollar annual budget, “satellites that can see through clouds, more secret compartments than a Tudor castle, and an army of analysts who can dissect everything from the Ukrainian military to Hindu fundamentalism.” Even so, the CIA has been unable to eliminate completely the rash of highly sophisticated terror attacks that—though international in scope—have often directly targeted America and her allies.
Failures will always be held up to the cruel glare of scrutiny, though the successes of the men and women who work for the CIA’s directorates, offices, and centers are often unknown. Still, those same men and women have and will continue to put their often-anonymous lives in peril all for the sake of freedom and the great experiment of democracy.
Since the Agency’s inception in 1947, countless books have been written in an attempt to shed light on this little-known U.S. government entity. But until now, there has been no single, comprehensive reference work detailing the particulars of the CIA from its pre–World War II beginnings as the Office of the Coordinator of Information to the wartime Office of Strategic Services through the dark years of the Cold War to its current role in America’s uncertain war on terrorism.  Here the Agency comes to life through nearly 550 historical, biographical, and general entries followed by an extensive list of CIA-related acronyms, abbreviations, and code names. But the encyclopedia can never be complete.
As the writing of this encyclopedia came to a close and I realized that there was always going to be just one more entry, I concluded that such a book is always a work in progress. The Encyclopedia of the Central Intelligence Agency is even more so, as the surface information and the secrets of America’s most colorful but shadowy arm grudgingly reveal themselves.
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