History Of The CIA Research Articles

The Sherman Kent School of Intelligence Analysis and its Role in Improving the Analytical Performance of the US Central Intelligence Agency CIA

The main goal in current research that the analytical philosophy of Sherman Kent played a major role in developing the craft of intelligence analysis at the American Intelligence Agency, and we point out here that the organized analytical techniques that captured Sherman Kent’s interest are scenarios, competing hypotheses, devil’s advocate, and teams (A, B). ), red team, and low-occurrence/ high-impact probabilities. They all share an important focal point, which is analytical alternatives in order to cover unlikely hypotheses to ensure that no strategic intelligence surprise occurs. We believe here that the period in which Kent lived, in which he witnessed the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the Korean War, and the Cuban missile crisis, which is considered one of the largest intelligence failures in The history of the CIA had left him with a fear of strategic surprise, which was reflected in his philosophy of not ignoring unexpected threats and taking them into account in all the analytical methods he adopted.

Book Discussion "The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination"

Book Discussion "The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination"

Forbidden history: CIA censorship, the Invisible Government, and the origins of the “deep state” conspiracy theory

ABSTRACT This article explores the context, legacy and influence of David Wise and Thomas Ross’ influential history of the CIA, The Invisible Government. It highlights how the book broke the silence in the American media on CIA covert operations. It documents the CIA’s attempts to censor the book upon its publication. It will also show how the book was reinterpreted by conspiracy theorists, Soviet propagandists, and leading figures within the decolonization movement. Finally, it argues that the book’s ultimate legacy, although a misreading of their original argument, can be found in the ‘deep state’ narrative so prevalent among conspiracy theorists today.

Book Review: A Question of Standing: The History of the CIA by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones

Book Review: <i>A Question of Standing: The History of the CIA</i> by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones

Errand into the Wilderness of Mirrors: Religion and the History of the CIA. By Michael Graziano. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. 251 pp. $45.00 cloth.

Errand into the Wilderness of Mirrors: Religion and the History of the CIA. By Michael Graziano. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. 251 pp. $45.00 cloth.

A question of standing: the history of the CIA

A question of standing: the history of the CIA

Errand into the Wilderness of Mirrors: Religion and the History of the CIA. By Michael Graziano

This creative study of the CIA’s “religious approach” to fighting the Cold War joins a growing body of scholarship examining the intersection of religion and foreign affairs. In seven tightly argued chapters, Michael Graziano charts the development of a “world religions paradigm” in both the academy and the United States’ intelligence services from WWII through Vietnam. This paradigm led CIA officers, State Department officials, and US presidents to view “religion” as an ally in the Cold War, even as it obscured the nuances and contexts that shaped the religious worlds of people around the globe. The Iranian revolution shattered the religious models that intelligence operatives had spent three-plus decades constructing. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), predecessor to the CIA, began developing a religious approach by forging alliances with Catholics during WWII. Catholicism “was foreign enough to be worthy of study but familiar enough to be interpretable” (p. 30). Catholic allies in Italy provided a tantalizing cache of information on the Axis Powers, even though one of the most promising sources—which purported to reveal Japanese war plans and ended up on the desk of President Roosevelt—turned out to be the fabrication of an Italian pornographer. Such a high-profile embarrassment hardly slowed the OSS’s religious approach, however. OSS chief “Wild Bill” Donovan was himself a Catholic, and he popularized the notion that religion “was everywhere, free, and individual: a natural ally in war and diplomacy” (p. 15). This idea of religion suffused American policymaking in the early Cold War era.

See it/shoot it: the secret history of the CIA's lethal drone program

See it/shoot it: the secret history of the CIA's lethal drone program

Book Review: The Central Intelligence Agency: An Encyclopedia of Covert Ops, Intelligence Gathering, and Spies

This two-volume reference set offers a well-rounded look at the CIA from its inception to the present. As is made clear in the introduction, it is intended to be much more than a straightforward history of the CIA as an organization, but rather a compendium covering the broader spectrum of related topics. It would appear to live up to this claim. It does provide a detailed timeline chronicling the historical highlights, but moves right into over two hundred individual entries comprised of important events (i.e., operations, projects, cases, etc.), key players and names, and other relevant terms (e.g., “Contras,” “Handwriting Analysis,” “Torture”).

You Can't Yell Loud Enough: Intelligence and Warning

Intelligence and Surprise Attack: Failure and Success from Pearl Harbor to 9/11 and Beyond. By Erik J. Dahl Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013. 277 pp., paperback (ISBN-13: 978-1-58901-998-0). The history of US intelligence is, in many ways, a history of intelligence failures. The attack on Pearl Harbor shocked the nation's embryonic intelligence structures into life. The failure to predict the Chinese intervention in the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Tet Offensive, among many more, was formative in the history of the CIA and American Intelligence Community (IC) in general. The disaster of 9/11 is but the most recent in a long line of intelligence failures which—with their inevitable inquests, investigations, and congressionally imposed reforms—have shaped the US IC into its current form and driven the growth of the formal academic study of intelligence. From the 1940s onwards, books by authors such as Sherman Kent, Roberta Wohlstetter, Amy Zegart, and David Betts have pushed a series of conflicting arguments about the causes of intelligence failure (Kent 1949; Wohlstetter 1962; Zegart 1999; Betts 2007). Some, such as the “father” of intelligence studies, Kent, argued early on that by good social science methodology intelligence failure could be avoided. Wohlstetter argued that intelligence failure is ultimately inevitable because of the intrinsically impossible task of predicting an opponent's behavior. Zegart has argued that the inflexibility of the US government bureaucracy renders intelligence failure almost certain—intelligence failure is not natural, it occurs because of bad government, and only that renders it …

Evaluating CIA's Analytic Performance: Reflections of a Former Analyst

Many people point to high profile failures like 9/11 and Iraq as indicators that CIA's analytic performance is inadequate or flawed. Flawed by design.11Amy B. Zegart, Flawed By Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). A legacy of ashes.22Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York: Doubleday, 2007). A culture of failure.33John M. Diamond, The CIA and the Culture of Failure: U.S. Intelligence from the End of the Cold War (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). Or so goes the conventional wisdom. Fortunately this conventional wisdom is wrong. These so-called failures more accurately represent the perennial dilemmas and tradeoffs associated with the analytic function and, most importantly, the inappropriate expectation that these observers hold of CIA's ability to prevent surprises. As a matter of fact, there is much that people do not fully understand about the CIA.

Caught in the Muddle: America's Pakistan Strategy

President Obama has placed Pakistan at the center of his administration's foreign policy agenda. Islamabad is a pivotal player in Afghanistan and its decisions will have much to do with whether and...

The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy. By David Kaiser. Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the cia. By Jefferson Morley

The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy. By David Kaiser. Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the cia. By Jefferson Morley

Review: Legacy of Ashes

LEGACY OF ASHES History of the CIA Tim Weiner Toronto: Doubleday, 2007. 702pp, $35.95 cloth (ISBN 978-0385514453)Writing about national intelligence systems can be tricky work. Writing about American national intelligence is doubly so, and the decisive politicisation of the study of intelligence has become clear over the last decade. CIA, rightly or wrongly, has come to represent all that people feel is either or right about America's intelligence community and indeed America's foreign policy.No better example of the very wrong school can be found than Legacy of Ashes, an attempt at a definitive history of the CIA, written by Pulitzerprize winning journalist Tim Weiner, who covered the CIA for more than 20 years as the New York Times's national security correspondent. Aware of the personalities and fights in the capital, having interviewed 10 former directors of central intelligence, dozens of other senior intelligence officers, and enjoying access to many government officials, he would seem an ideal candidate to write a balanced account of the CIA's first 50 years. He has not done so.In the second sentence of his introduction, Wiener states his argument clearly: The most powerful country in the history of western civilisation has failed to create a first-rate spy service. 500 pages of text that follow attempt, through a breathtaking post hoc ergo propter hoc argument, to prove that CIA's putative failures surrounding 9/11 were the direct result of its preceding 50 years of botched operations. polemical style of the prose-which I must add is impeccable and pleasant to read-does not let up. If the CIA got it wrong, Weiner tells you about it in episodic, anecdotal, and high-impact style.On the surface this might suit most people. CIA has indeed made a big mess of a lot of big operations. North Korea's invasion of the south caught it by surprise, and the agency failed to predict the first Soviet, Chinese, and even Indian nuclear tests. Whether they succeeded or not, CIA covert actions in places such as Guatemala, Iran, Indonesia, and Cuba deserve much criticism.But a litany of failures does not a definitive history of the CIA make. Through the first third or so of the book, Weiner concentrates heavily on covert action but says little about the CIA's efforts to build up a picture of the world-the intelligence function which is its core, if not sole, mission. Worse, he discusses these covert actions in isolation from the global context of the Cold War. This myopia leads to an image of the agency as an unprovoked bully in cases when it was-at least in part-responding to aggressive opponents on the basis of explicit instructions from legitimate policymakers. While this does not excuse every action of the US government, it does put them in proper perspective. Weiner accuses the CIA of not understanding the wider world, but he seems to suffer the same deficit himself. …

Safe for democracy: the secret wars of the CIA

Safe for Democracy for the first time places the story of the CIA's covert operations squarely in the context of America's global quest for democratic values and institutions. National security historian John Prados offers a comprehensive history of the CIA's secret wars that is as close to a definitive account as is possible today.

STEVE COLL, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 11, 2001, Updated with New Documents from the 9/11 Commission (New York: Penguin, 2004). Pp. 712. $16.00 paper

S<scp>TEVE</scp> C<scp>OLL</scp>, <i>Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 11, 2001, Updated with New Documents from the 9/11 Commission</i> (New York: Penguin, 2004). Pp. 712. $16.00 paper

State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration

James Risen has broken story after story on the abuses of power of the Bush administration. From warrantless wiretapping to financial data mining to the CIA's rogue operations, he has shown again and again that the executive branch has dangerously overreached, repudiated checks and balances on its power, and maintained secrecy even with its allies in Congress. In no small part thanks to Risen and State of War, the secret of the Bush years has now come partially into view. In a new epilogue for the paperback edition, Risen describes the two-front war that President Bush is now fighting: at home against Congress and the Supreme Court, as his administration is increasingly reined in from its abuses; and in the Middle East, where George W. Bush's great gamble to bring a democratic revolution is failing radically. We must learn the lessons of Risen's history now, before it is too late.

Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001

Ghost Wars provides an historical review of and perspective on the the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and the resulting resistance The author discusses how a favorable environment was created conducive to the rise of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban and how the U.S. handled the rising threat of terrorism.

Ghost wars: the secret history of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet invasion to September 10, 2001

Ghost wars: the secret history of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet invasion to September 10, 2001

Cracks in the conspiracy: the CIA and the cocaine trade in South Central Los Angeles

This paper explores some of the issues surrounding the 1996 San Jose Mercury News “Dark Alliance” series; a story responsible for triggering heated debate on the idea that a US government agency conspired to use illicit drugs to undermine inner city African–American neighbourhoods during the 1980s. Beginning with an outline of Gary Webb's series and a discussion of the reaction it provoked, the paper looks at the issues behind the widespread sentiment that there is some form of federally controlled and racially inspired conspiracy. The paper examines the history of the CIA and its links with the illegal drug trade in an attempt to explain the prevalence of such a belief. Having identified some of the causes of what is often simplistically dismissed as baseless “black paranoia,” the paper concludes that the idea that the CIA deliberately connived to target Afro–Americans grossly oversimplifies the complexities of the inner city drug issue. Evidence suggests that during the cold war the CIA did indeed cultivate many dubious drug related alliances in the name of national security. It is argued here, however, that the notion of conspiracy based on skin colour merely detracts from the systemic failings of Washington's approach to drug control and ignores the Agency's indiscriminate pursuit of its anti-Communist agenda.