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CIA |
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Created by the National Security Act of 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency was soon the dominant element in the American intelligence community, as it remains today. It both collects and analyses foreign intelligence obtained from all sources; it has also acquired a reputation for semimilitary covert action in foreign countries as well as for black propaganda. Perhaps its real hallmark, however, apart from its size, is the centralization of intelligence which its name suggests and its independence of any one department which is the corollary of this. (Intelligence gathering developed historically as a fringe activity of ministries of foreign affairs and the different branches of the armed services.) As noted by Michael Herman, a senior figure in British intelligence, ‘it was the first specialist, non-departmental all-source analysis organization which evolved in peacetime to study foreign targets in full and serve any part of government’. If the CIA has remained to any degree dependent on any department, however, it is probably the State Department, since it relies on it to such a great extent to provide cover for its agents in US embassies and consulates abroad. Since exposure of many of its activities (especially its covert operations) in the first half of the 1970s, the CIA has been subjected to considerably more congressional oversight. See also Director of Central Intelligence; humint. |
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