The CIA

The book that I finished reading, The Lost Symbol, talked about a man in a quest to find a treasure that had been hidden for ages. Along the way, he encounters many problems, and one of them is the CIA intervening. That is why I have decided to expand upon the CIA.

The CIA is a very secret agency that works on protecting our country by providing information to the President, National Security Council, and other government officials that carry out the National Security Policy. Pretty much, the CIA gives intelligence to leaders so that they can make good decisions. Therefore, the CIA doesn't make decisions, and it is left to the Executive Branch. In order to do this, the CIA achieves this by doing two things. First, they give "accurate and timely intelligence on foreign threats to our security (www.CIA.gov)." The second thing they do is provide counterintelligence related to foreign intelligence when the president asks for it.

To make sure the CIA does everything right when assigned a project, they have to follow a certain set of rules that is overseen by Congress. This is called the Intelligence Cycle, and there are five different steps. The first one is called Planning and Direction. In this step, you make a plan about what you will do and what information you already know. The next step, collection, is when they look for information about the subject, either openly or secretly. The third step, processing, is where they gather information, and put it into a intelligence report. The fourth step, analysis and production, is when they take a further look at the information gathered, and they try to find how it goes together. Finally, the last step is dissemination. In this step the CIA gives the policy maker the final written analysis with the answer to the question. If the policy maker reads over the analysis and still has a question, they have to repeat the whole process.

Foreign intelligence has been around since the time of George Washington, but only since World War 2 has it been on a government-wide level. The CIA was started right before Pearl Harbor because president Roosevelt was concerned about "America's deficient intelligence efforts." While in office, Roosevelt created a Coordinator of Information (COI) which later turned into the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Then when Truman succeeded him, he abolished the OSS and made it a lot smaller. He realized his error as the threat of the Soviet Union and the Cold War, so he finally reestablished it and made a new group. It was called the Central Intelligence Group, and it was in charge of doing 2 things: provide strategic warning and conduct important clandestine activities. Unlike the OSS, the CIO had access to all-source intelligence. Two months later, the CIA was created, along with the National Security Council, due to the disbantion of the CIO. And since then, the CIA has been growing and growing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QYZBMIBOck

http://trcs.wikispaces.com/file/view/cia_night_ops_photos_001.jpg/43378231/cia_night_ops_photos_001.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/CIA_seal.jpg
http://cryptome.org/eyeball/cia-dc/cia-dc-cia-hq-south.jpg


www.CIA.gov

I thought that this was a good source to use because it is accurate. It is the official CIA website and all the information is correct. I got most of my information from here, since it had a ton of

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cia

I used very little from this site, but it did give some good information.