Covert United States foreign regime change actions

The United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was created on September 18, 1947, when Harry S. Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947 into law. A major impetus that has been cited over the years for the creation of the CIA was the unforeseen attack on Pearl Harbor, but whatever Pearl Harbor's role, in the twilight of World War II it was considered clear in government circles that there was a need for a group to coordinate government intelligence efforts, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the State Department, and the War Department, and even the Post Office were all jockeying for that new power.

General William "Wild Bill" Donovan, head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt on November 18, 1944, stating the need for a peacetime "Central Intelligence Service ... which will procure intelligence both by overt and covert methods and will at the same time provide intelligence guidance, determine national intelligence objectives, and correlate the intelligence material collected by all government agencies", and have authority to conduct "subversive operations abroad", but "no police or law enforcement functions, either at home or abroad". The letter was prompted by a query from General Dwight Eisenhower's Chief of Staff about the nature of the role of the OSS in the military establishment. Following this, Roosevelt ordered his chief military aide to conduct a secret investigation of the OSS's World War II operations. Around this time, stories about the OSS began circulating in major papers including references to this OSS follow-on being an "American Gestapo". The report, heavily influenced by an FBI that saw itself as the future of American foreign intelligence, was starkly, and vividly negative, only praising a few rescues of downed airmen, sabotage operations, and its deskbound research and analysis staff; the pronouncement of the report was that any "use f the OSSas a secret intelligence agency in the postwar world ould beinconceivable", but even before the report was finished the Joint Chiefs had been ordered, presumably under pressure from the press articles, by the president to shelve their plans for a Central Intelligence Service even before the April release of the report.

On September 20, 1945, as part of Truman's dismantling of the World War II war machine, the OSS, at one time numbering almost 13,000, was eliminated over the span of ten days. A reprieve, though, was granted six days later by the Assistant Secretary of War, reducing it to a skeleton crew of roughly 15% of its peak force level, forcing it to close many of its foreign offices; at the same time the name of the service was changed from the OSS to the Strategic Services Unit.

Immediate predecessors, 1946–47

During World War II, President Roosevelt was concerned about American covert intelligence capabilities, particularly in the light of the success of Churchill's Commandos. On the suggestion of a senior British intelligence officer, he asked Colonel William "Wild Bill" Donovan to devise a combined intelligence service modeled on the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), and Special Operations Executive, centralizing, for instance, the separate cryptanalysis programs of the Army, and Navy. This resulted in the creation of the Office of Strategic Services. On September 20, 1945, shortly after the end of World War II, President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9621, dissolving the OSS by October 1, 1945. The rapid reorganizations that followed reflected not only routine bureaucratic competition for resources but also exploration of the proper relationships between clandestine intelligence collection and covert action (i.e., paramilitary and psychological operations). In October 1945, the functions of the OSS were split between the Departments of State and War:

The three-way division lasted only a few months. The first public mention of the "Central Intelligence Agency" concept and term appeared on a U.S. Army and Navy command-restructuring proposal presented by James Forrestal and Arthur Radford to the U.S. Senate Military Affairs Committee at the end of 1945. Despite opposition from the military establishment, the United States Department of State and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), President Truman established the National Intelligence Authority on January 22, 1946, by presidential directive; it was the direct predecessor to the CIA. The National Intelligence Authority and its operational extension, the Central Intelligence Group (CIG), was disestablished after twenty months. The assets of the SSU, which now constituted a streamlined "nucleus" of clandestine intelligence, were transferred to the CIG in mid-1946 and reconstituted as the Office of Special Operations (OSO).

Legislative foundation

Lawrence Houston, the first General Counsel of the CIG, and, later, the CIA, had many concerns about the lack of a congressional mandate. With the support of Director Hoyt Vandenberg he became a principle draftsman of the National Security Act of 1947 which, on September 18, established both the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1949, Lawrence Houston, along with his two assistant general counsels, helped draft the Central Intelligence Agency Act, ( Public law 81-110) which authorized the agency to use confidential fiscal and administrative procedures, and exempted it from most of the usual limitations on the use of Federal funds. It also exempted the CIA from having to disclose its "organization, functions, names, official titles, salaries, or numbers of personnel employed." It also created the program "PL-110", to handle defectors and other "essential aliens" who fall outside normal immigration procedures, as well as giving those persons cover stories and economic support.

New director

In July 1946 Vandenberg reorganized the Central Reports staff into the larger Office of Reports and Estimates. The ORE drew its reports from a daily take of State Department telegrams, military dispatches, and internal CIG reports that went to specialized analysts. The ORE's main products quickly became popular, they were the "Daily Summary", and the "Weekly Summary". The ORE also produced "Intelligence Highlights" for internal consumption, and "Intelligence Memorandums" for the DCI, who could distribute them at his discretion. These reports dominated the work of the ORE at the expense of its work on Estimates.

Vandenberg quickly moved to the position as Commander of the newly formed Air Force that he had been waiting for. He was replaced by Roscoe Hillenkoetter. Under Hillenkoetter the ORE split into Global Survey, Current Intelligence, and Estimates. The sharp focus on the grind of Current Intelligence, with its popular, widely distributed products continued to dominate the ORE leaving little room for the other sections to grow, but it did lead to slow improvements, and the ORE increased the number of products it offered, adding "Situation Reports" that would be used as handbooks for individual countries, and the monthly "Review of the World Situation". Like other organs of the CIA, the ORE received a regular stream of requests from the rest of the Government, including the NSC, Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), Department of State, and branches of the military. Problems with the early ORE recognized within the CIA itself were that, of its eleven regular publications, only one of them addressed strategic, or national intelligence questions, and that most of the sources of information relied on to produce ORE products were "open source", the CIA itself had little capability to produce intelligence on which to base its own reports and estimates. "The CIA had only a few officers in Korea before the June 1950 invasion, and none reported to Agency analytical branches." Shortly after the invasion of South Korea Truman, on 21 August 1950, announced Walter Bedell Smith as the new Director of the CIA to correct what was seen as a grave failure of Intelligence.

Intelligence vs. action

In the beginning, Central Intelligence was the beast of three masters: Truman, who, from his position under a mountain of state, DOD, and FBI reports (the FBI having jurisdiction in Latin America) quickly saw the need for a centralized outlet to organize the information that would reach his desk; Defense, who wanted CI to both know everything about military adversaries, perform military sabotage, and foment partisans that would fight with the US if war came; and the State Department, that wanted CI to bring global political change positive to the ends of the US. Organizationally, this gave CI two areas of responsibility; Covert Action, and Covert Intelligence.

Office of Special Operations (Covert Intelligence)

Sidney Souers (formerly Deputy Chief of Naval Intelligence), after a little more than a hundred days in his position as the first Director of the Central Intelligence Group during which "The Pentagon and the State Department refused to talk to he CIG, and "the FBI treated he CIGwith the deepest disdain", left a top secret note simply stating "There is an urgent need to develop the highest possible quality of information on the USSR in the shortest possible time" before he completed the goal he set out in his first days of office... " oinghome".

General Hoyt Vandenberg, Eisenhower's commander of air operations in Europe, and, later, his Intelligence Chief became the CIG's second director while waiting to be appointed the first Commander of the United States Air Force. One of his first actions was creating the Office of Special Operations, and the Office of Reports and Estimates. In the beginning the OSO was tasked with spying and subversion overseas with a budget of $15 million, the largess of a small number of patrons in congress. Vandenberg's goals were much like the ones set out by his predecessor in the note he left leaving office, finding out "everything about the Soviet forces in Eastern and Central Europe – their movements, their capabilities, and their intentions" in the shortest possible time. This task fell to the 228 overseas personnel covering Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. These men were plagued by a problem that always plagued the CIA, distinguishing the accurate from the inaccurate. Richard Helms, the man in charge, would later find that at least half of the information that made it into CIA files was inaccurate. In its early years, the CIA was caught flatfooted by several world events critical to the nation, blinded by, among other things, its inability to separate truth from fiction.

Office of Policy Coordination (Covert Action)

The history of CI covert action had an ignominious start when, before the creation of the Office of Policy Coordination, ''The New York Times'' reported on CI's first covert action, noting the arrest of a CI agent in connection with his meeting with the Romanian National Peasants' Party, along with the arrest of the party's leaders on the charge of treason.

On June 18, 1948, the National Security Council issued Directive 10/2 " allingfor covert operations to attack the Soviets around the world," and giving the CIA the authority to carry out covert operations "against hostile foreign states or groups or in support of friendly foreign states or groups but which are so planned and conducted that any U.S. government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons and that if uncovered the US Government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them." To this end, the Office of Policy Coordination was created inside the new CIA. It is important to note, though, that the OPC was quite unique. Frank Wisner, the head of the OPC answered not to the DI, but to the secretaries of defense, state, and the NSC, and the OPC's actions were a secret even from the head of the CIA. Most CIA stations had two station chiefs, one working for the OSO, and one working for the OPC. Their relationship was competitive, even poaching each other's agents, a lopsided competition, the better funded OPC often claiming victory.

Early successes and failures

In the early days of the cold war, successes for the CIA were few and far between. The gradual Soviet takeover of Romania, the Soviet takeover of Czechoslovakia, the Soviet blockade of Berlin, CIA assessments of the Soviet atomic bomb project, the Korean War, and then, when the 300,000 Chinese troops waiting at the Korean border entered the war, all, arguably, failures of Central intelligence of the highest profile imaginable. The famous double agent Kim Philby was the British liaison to American Central Intelligence. Through him the CIA coordinated hundreds of airdrop operations inside the iron curtain, all compromised by Philby. American intelligence suffered from almost countless compromises of the networks it tried to set up. There were spies in the Manhattan project, and even Arlington Hall, the nerve center of CIA cryptanalysis was compromised by William Weisband, a Russian translator and Soviet spy. The CIA reused the tactic of dropping plant agents behind enemy lines by parachute again on China, and North Korea. This too was fruitless.

Cryptanalysis was not the CIA's sole success story. In the 1948 Italian election the CIA quietly backed the Christian Democrats. James Forrestal and Allen Dulles passed a hat around Wall Street and Washington, D.C., then Forrestal went to the Secretary of the Treasury, John W. Snyder, a Truman stalwart. He allowed them to tap the $200 million Exchange Stabilization Fund which had been designed during the Depression to shore up the value of the dollar overseas, but was used during World War II as a depository for captured Axis Loot, and was, at that time, earmarked for the reconstruction of Europe. Funds moved from the fund into the bank accounts of wealthy Americans, many of whom had Italian heritage. Hard cash was then distributed to Catholic Action, the Vatican's political arm, and directly to Italian politicians. "A long romance between the party and the agency began. The CIA's practice of purchasing elections and politicians with bags of cash was repeated in Italy – and in many other nations – for the next twenty-five years."

Korean War

During the Korean War, on Yong-Do island in Busan, Hans Tofte had turned over a thousand North Korean expatriates into what the National Security Council hoped would become a fifth column. They were divided into three tasking groups. Intelligence gathering through infiltration, guerrilla warfare, and pilot rescue. Tofte would be filing reports indicating success in operations long after any hope for the infiltration teams was cold in the ground.

In 1952, CIA covert action sent 1,500 more expatriate agents north. Seoul station chief, and Army Colonel Albert Haney openly celebrated the capabilities of those agents, and the information they sent. Some Seoul State Department intelligence officers were skeptical, but the party lasted until Haney was replaced, in September 1952, by John Limond Hart, a Europe veteran with a vivid memory for bitter experiences of misinformation. Hart was immediately suspicious of the parade of successes reported by Tofte and Haney.

After a three month investigation, Hart determined that the entirety of the station's product from Korean sources was either an opportunist's lie, or the misinformation from the enemy, including reports hailed, by American military commanders, as "one of the outstanding intelligence reports of the war." Another part of the problem was the isolation of the Hermit Kingdom, and its relative lack of importance compared to China, and Japan, which led to a deficiency in Korean language skills. After the war, internal reviews by the CIA corroborated Hart's findings. The CIA's Seoul station had 200 officers, but not a single speaker of Korean. The NSC's $152 million a year covert war was one part meat grinder, and one part delivery system for enemy misinformation.

Hart reported to Washington that Seoul station was hopeless, and could not be salvaged. Loftus Becker, Deputy Director of Intelligence, was sent personally to tell Hart that the CIA, to save face, had to keep the station open. Becker returned to Washington, pronounced the situation to be "hopeless", and that, after touring the CIA's Far East operations, the CIA's ability to gather intelligence in the far east was "almost negligible". He then resigned. While Allen Dulles was extolling the success of the CIA's guerrillas in Korea, AF Colonel James Kellis says Dulles had been informed that those guerrillas were under the control of the enemy. Frank Wisner put the Korean failures down to a need "to develop the quantity and kind of people we must have if we are to successfully carry out the heavy burdens which have been placed on us." A compounding factor was that, even at the height of the Korean war, the CIA kept its primary focus on Europe, and the Soviet Union, through the entire war, the Korean War was always seen as a diversion from Europe.

China

With the Chinese push, the eyes of the NSC turned north. With no end to the avalanche of money, the CIA explored every option in China. From Chiang Kai-shek's promise of a million Kuomintang, to the western Chinese Muslim Horsemen of the Hui clans who had ties to Chinese Nationalists. The CIA ran operations from White Dog island with the nationalists for months until it was discovered that the nationalist commander's Chief of Staff was a spy for Mao. $50 million went to Okinawa based Chinese refugees who wove tales of sizable support on the mainland. In July 1952, the CIA sent a team of expatriates in. Four months later they radioed for help. It was an ambush. Two CIA officers, Jack Downey and Dick Fecteau, fresh out of Ivy League colleges, spent more than 19 years in captivity.

Finally the CIA turned to nationalist General Li Mi in Burma. When Li Mi's troops crossed the border into China an ambush awaited them too. The CIA later discovered that Li Mi's Bangkok radioman worked for Mao. CIA supplies still flowed, but Li Mi's men retreated to Burma, and set up a global heroin empire in Burma's Golden Triangle.

Iran

In 1951, Mohammad Mosaddegh, a member of the National Front rose to power campaigning for khal'-e yad(Law of repossession, ie oil nationalization). This was against the Gass-Golsha`iyan (supplemental oil agreement), which Prime Minister Razmara supported. The supplemental oil agreement with Anglo-Iranian Oil Company got several concessions from the AIOC, including a 50/50 profit split, as well as other concessions for better Iranian representation within the company. Razmara is assassinated in March 1951. Khalil Tahmassebi, a member of a terrorist group that follows the teachings of Ayatollah Khomeini is arrested, the next day over 8,000 members of the National Front, and the Marxist Tudeh party protest his arrest. The protesters threaten to kill the Shah, any Iranian legislator that opposes oil nationalization, and anyone responsible for the imprisonment of Tahmassebi. Mosaddeq is elected to replace the slain PM, but conditions his acceptance on the nationalization of oil, which went through unanimously.

Nationalization of the British funded Iranian oil industry, including the largest oil refinery in the world, is disastrous. A British naval embargo successfully shutters the British oil facilities. Iran has no skilled workers to operate the British facilities, and no way of exporting the product anyway. In 1952 Mosaddeq bucked against royal refusal to approve his Minister of War, aiming to take control of the military from the Shah. Mosaddeq resigned in protest, and the Shah installed Ahmad Qavam as PM. Again the National Front, and Tudeh took to the streets, again threatening assassinations (four Iran Prime Ministers had been assassinated in the last few years). Five days later the military feared losing control and pulled their troops back and the Shah gave in to Mosaddeq's demands. Mosaddeq quickly replaced military leaders loyal to the Shah with those loyal to him, giving him personal control over the military. Mosaddeq took six months of emergency powers, giving him the power to unilaterally pass legislation. When that expired, his powers were extended for another year.

A bitter irony was that Ayatollah Kashani, who once decried the unforgivable abuses of the British, and Mozzafar Baghai, Mosaddeq's closest political ally, and a man who personally took part in the physical takeover of the largest oil refinery in the world, now found that which they once saw in Mosaddeq in the British. Mosaddeq began manipulating the Iranian Parliament, but his supporters left quickly. To prevent the loss of his control of parliament, Mosaddeq dismissed parliament, and, at the same time, took dictatorial powers. This power grab triggered the Shah to exercise his constitutional right to dismiss Mosaddeq. Mosaddeq then started a military coup as the Shah fled the country. As was typical of CIA operations, CIA interventions were preceded by radio announcements on July 7, 1953 made by the CIA's intended victim by way of operational leaks. On August 19 a CIA paid mob led by Ayatollahs Khomeini, and Kashani sparked what the deputy chief of mission of the U.S. Tehran Embassy called "an almost spontaneous revolution."... But Mosaddeq was protected by his new inner military circle, and the CIA had been unable to get any sway within the Iranian military. Their chosen man, former general Zahedi had no troops to call on. General McClure, commander of the American military assistance advisory group would get his second star buying the loyalty of the Iranian officers he was training. An attack on Mosaddeq's house forced him to flee. He surrendered the next day, and his military coup came to an end. The end result was a 60/40 oil profit split in favor of Iran (possibly similar to agreements with Saudi Arabia and Venezuela).

Guatemala

The return of the Shah to power, and the impression, cultivated by Allen Dulles that an effective CIA had been able to guide the nation to friendly and stable relations with the west triggered planning for Operation Success, a plan to replace Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz with Carlos Armas. As was typical of CIA operations, the plan was exposed in major newspapers even before they started planning it in detail when the CIA agent liaison to Armas left plans for the coup in his Guatemala City hotel room. Operation Success was buoyed by two great strokes of luck. When Guatemalan state radio went down for scheduled antenna replacement, the CIA's "Voice of Liberation" radio broadcast moved to replace it. Speaker of the House John McCormack called a Czech shipment of weapons bypassing the U.S. arms embargo on Guatemala an "atomic bomb planted in America's backyard." Contrary to contemporary claims of the CIA, the shipment would reach Guatemala undetected, but the second stroke of luck would be that the shipment was mostly rusted junk from World War 2.

Armas struck on June 18th. While Armas' offensive was ineffectual, Arbenz was apprehensive about the possibility of future successful attacks, and about being betrayed by his military. On June 22 Allen Dulles walked into the Oval Office certain that only drastic measures could unseat Arbenz and salvage the situation. In the meeting they said that a filibuster by the chairman of Democrats for Eisenhower, one of Ike's richest, and most generous contributors was their last ditch hope, with a 20% chance of success. A withdrawal of $150,000 from Riggs Bank purchased three fully armed P-47 Thunderbolts. On June 27, after days of the miniature bombing campaign, Arbenz, thinking his forces outmatched, and thinking that his grasp on the military was failing ceded power to Colonel Carlos Diaz. The CIA orchestrated several transfers of power, ending when the CIA finally placed Castillo Armas in the office of President.

Syria

In 1949 Colonel Adib Shishakli rose to power in Syria in a CIA backed coup. Four years later he was overthrown by the military, Ba'athists, and communists. The CIA and MI6 started funding right wing members of the military, but suffered a large setback in the aftermath of the Suez Crisis. CIA Agent Rocky Stone who had played a minor role in the 1953 Iranian coup d'état was working at the Damascus embassy as a diplomat, but was actually the station chief. Syrian officers on the CIA dole quickly appeared on television stating that they had received money from the "corrupt and sinister Americans" "in an attempt to overthrow the legitimate government of Syria" Syrian forces surrounded the embassy and rousted Agent Stone, who confessed and subsequently made history as the first American diplomat expelled from an Arab nation. This strengthened ties between Syria and Egypt, helping establish the United Arab Republic, and poisoning the well for the US for the foreseeable future. The inability to deny the complicity of the US government put this operation outside the charter of the CIA.

Indonesia

The charismatic leader of Indonesia was President Sukarno. His declaration of neutrality in the cold war put the suspicions of the CIA on him. After Sukarno hosted Bandung Conference, promoting the Non-Aligned Movement. The Eisenhower White House responded with NSC 5518 authorizing "all feasible covert means" to move Indonesia into the Western sphere. The CIA started funding the Masyumi Party. Sukarno confounded the CIA's Jakarta station, which had few speakers of native languages, and Al Ulmer, the new head of the CIA's Far East division, knew little about the country. Spooked by the communist PKI party moving into the third spot, the CIA's alarmed response was in contrast to that of the Ambassador, who maintained that Sukarno maintained an open door to the West.

The U.S. had no clear policy on Indonesia. President Dwight Eisenhower sent his special assistant for security operations F.M. Dearborn Jr. to Jakarta. His report that there was great instability, and that the U.S. lacked strong, stable allies, reinforced the domino theory. Indonesia suffered from what he described as "subversion by democracy". The CIA decided to back the Permesta rebel movement in Indonesia, where the Indonesian military was trained by the U.S., had a strong professional relationship with the US Military, had a pro-American officer corps, which had strong support for the government, and a strong belief in civilian control of the military, instilled partly by its close association with the US Military. Demonstrating an intolerance for dissent, the CIA instigated the transfer of the well respected Ambassador Allison, who had a strong background in Asia, to Czechoslovakia.

On September 25, 1957, Eisenhower ordered the CIA to start a revolution in Indonesia with the goal of regime change. Three days later, Blitz, a Soviet controlled weekly in India reported that the U.S. was plotting to overthrow Sukarno. The story was picked up by the media in Indonesia. One of the first parts of the operation was an 11,500 ton US navy ship landing at Sumatra, delivering weapons for as many as 8,000 potential revolutionaries. The delivery drew a crowd of spectators, and, again, little thought was given to plausible deniability. Counter to CIA predictions, the Indonesian military, with some planning assistance from their colleagues in the US Military, the only people the CIA had successfully kept their involvement a secret from, reacted swiftly and effectively.

CIA Agent Al Pope's bombing and strafing Indonesia in a CIA B-26 was described by the CIA to the President as attacks by "dissident planes". Al Pope's B-26 was shot down over Indonesia on May 18, and he bailed out. When he was captured, the Indonesian military found his personnel records, after action reports, and his membership card for the officer's club at Clark Field. On March 9, Foster Dulles, the secretary of state, and the brother of DI Allen Dulles, made a public statement calling for a revolt against communist despotism under Sukarno. Three days later the CIA reported to the White House that the Indonesian Army's actions against CIA backed Permesta revolution was suppressing communism.

After Indonesia, Eisenhower displayed mistrust of the CIA and its Director, Allen Dulles. Allen Dulles too displayed mistrust of the CIA itself. Abbot Smith, a CIA analyst who would rise to the position of chief of the Office of National Estimates, said "We had constructed for ourselves a picture of the USSR, and whatever happened had to be made to fit into this picture. Intelligence estimators can hardly commit a more abominable sin." Something reflected in the intelligence failure in Indonesia. On December 16, Eisenhower received a report from his intelligence board of consultants that said that the agency was "incapable of making objective appraisals of its own intelligence information as well as its own operations."

Congo

In the election of Patrice Lumumba, and his acceptance of Soviet support the CIA saw another possible Cuba. This view swayed the White House. Eisenhower ordered that Lumumba be "eliminated". The CIA delivered a quarter of a million dollars to Joseph Mobutu, their favorite horse in the race. Mobutu delivered Lumumba to the Belgians, the former colonial masters of Congo, who executed him in short order.

Gary Powers U-2 Shootdown

After the Bomber gap came the Missile gap. Eisenhower wanted to use the U-2 to disprove the missile gap, but he had banned U-2 overflights of the USSR after the successful meeting at Camp David with Nikita Khrushchev. Another reason Eisenhower objected to the use of the U-2 was that, in the nuclear age, the intelligence he needed most was on their intentions, without which, the U.S. would face a paralysis of intelligence. Eisenhower was particularly worried that U-2 flights could be seen as the preparation for first strike attacks as he had high hopes for an upcoming meeting with Khrushchev in Paris. Conflicted, Eisenhower finally gave into CIA pressure to authorize a 16-day window for flights, which, because of poor weather, was later extended for another six days. On May 1, 1960 the USSR shot down a U-2 flying over the USSR. To Ike, the ensuing coverup destroyed one of his biggest assets, his perceived honesty, and the biggest hope he had, leaving a legacy of thawing relations with Khrushchev. It also marked the beginning of a long downward slide in the credibility of the Office of the President of the United States. Eisenhower later said that the U-2 coverup was the greatest regret of his Presidency.

Dominican Republic

The human rights abuses of Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo had a history of more than three decades, but in August 1960 the United States severed diplomatic relations. The CIA's Special Group had decided to arm Dominicans in hopes of an assassination. The CIA had dispersed three rifles, and three .38 revolvers, but things paused as President John F. Kennedy assumed office. An order approved by Kennedy resulted in the dispersal of four machine guns. Trujillo died from gunshot wounds two weeks later. In the aftermath Robert Kennedy wrote that the CIA had succeeded where it had failed many times in the past, but in the face of that success, it was caught flatfooted, having failed to plan what to do next.

Cuba

The CIA welcomed Fidel Castro on his visit to DC, and gave him a face to face briefing. The CIA hoped that Castro would bring about a friendly democratic government, and planned to curry his favor with money and guns. On December 11, 1959, a memo reached the DI's desk recommending Castro's "elimination". Dulles replaced the word "elimination" with "removal", and set the wheels in motion. By mid August 1960, Richard Bissell (then CIA's Deputy Director for Plans) sought, with the blessing of the CIA, to hire the Mafia to assassinate Castro. At the same time, his men were working on a parallel plan, recruiting a Cuban exile to assassinate him. A little while later, the FBI advised the CIA that it would be impossible to overthrow Castro with these chatty Cuban exiles. In the days before the Bay of Pigs, and during the invasion Richard Bissell lied to everyone. He lied to Adlai Stevenson, he lied to the people commanding the mission, guaranteeing them air support while he lied to the President, promising success, and minimal air support.

The Taylor Board was commissioned to determine what went wrong in Cuba. The Board came to the same conclusion that the January 1961 President's Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities had concluded, and many other reviews prior, and to come, that Covert Action had to be completely isolated from intelligence and analysis. The Inspector General of the CIA investigated the Bay of Pigs. His conclusion was that there was a need to drastically improve the organization and management of the CIA. The Special Group (later renamed the 303 committee) was convened in an oversight role.

Cuban Missile Crisis

Subsequent to the shoot-downs of the may day U-2 reconnaissance plane, and a later shoot down in China, Kennedy ordered a 45-day cessation of U-2 flights, including flights over Cuba that had recently discovered the first Soviet high altitude Surface to Air Missile launcher site. There were fears of antagonism, and an election was around the corner. During this "photo gap" the CIA received a report from a source from Operation Mongoose, a road watcher describing covered tractor trailers moving that were shaped like large telephone poles. Control of U-2 flights was moved to the Air Force, and October 14 U-2 flights resumed. The Cuban Missile Crisis formally started the next day when American photo analysts identified R-12 1 Megaton MRBMs which could target parts of the east coast with its 2,000 km range. R-14s which could target most of the continental US, as well as 9M21 tactical nukes had also been deployed.

Early Cold War, 1953–1966

Concern regarding the Soviet Union and the difficulty of getting information from its closed society, which few agents could penetrate, led to solutions based on advanced technology. Among the first successes was the Lockheed U-2 aircraft, which could take pictures and collect electronic signals from an altitude thought to be above Soviet air defenses' reach. The CIA, working with the military, formed the joint National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) to operate reconnaissance aircraft such as the SR-71 and later satellites. "The fact of" the United States operating reconnaissance satellites, like "the fact of" the existence of NRO, was highly classified for many years.

The CIA was credited with assisting in anti-Communist efforts in Burma, Guatemala, and Laos. There have been suggestions that the Soviet attempt to put missiles into Cuba came, indirectly, when they realized how badly they had been compromised by a U.S.-UK defector in place, Oleg Penkovsky.
One of the biggest operations ever undertaken by the CIA was directed at Zaïre in support of Mobutu Sese Seko.

Indochina, Tibet and the Vietnam War (1954–1975)

The OSS Patti mission arrived in Vietnam near the end of World War II, and had significant interaction with the leaders of many Vietnamese factions, including Ho Chi Minh. While the Patti mission forwarded Ho's proposals for phased independence, with the French or even the United States as the transition partner, the US policy of containment opposed forming any government that was communist in nature.

The first CIA mission to Indochina, under the code name "Saigon Military Mission" arrived in 1954, under Edward Lansdale. U.S.-based analysts were simultaneously trying to project the evolution of political power, both if the scheduled referendum chose merger of the North and South, or if the South, the U.S. client, stayed independent. Initially, the US focus in Southeast Asia was on Laos, not Vietnam.

The CIA Tibetan program consists of political plots, propaganda distribution, as well as paramilitary and intelligence gathering based on U.S. commitments made to the Dalai Lama in 1951 and 1956.

During the period of U.S. combat involvement in the Vietnam War, there was considerable argument about progress among the Department of Defense under Robert McNamara, the CIA, and, to some extent, the intelligence staff of Military Assistance Command Vietnam. In general, the military was consistently more optimistic than the CIA. Sam Adams, a junior CIA analyst with responsibilities for estimating the actual damage to the enemy, eventually resigned from the CIA, after expressing concern to Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms with estimates that were changed for inter-agency and White House political reasons. Adams afterward wrote the book '' War of Numbers''.

Sometime between 1959 and 1961 the CIA started Project Tiger, a program of dropping South Vietnamese agents into North Vietnam to gather intelligence. These were a tragic failure; the Deputy Chief for Project Tiger, Captain Do Van Tien, admitted that he was an agent for Hanoi.

President Ngo Dinh Diem's Government, however, continued its unofficial policy of violently repressing the Buddhist majority. On August 23, 1963, after being approached by a South Vietnamese General, John F. Kennedy ordered the newly appointed 5th U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam to make detailed plans for Diem's replacement. The CIA's 4th DI John McCone compared Diem to a bad pitcher, saying that it would be unwise to get rid of him unless you could replace him with a better one. Kennedy's Cabinet was dubious about the coup, and JFK would come to regret it. This 5th U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., a longtime political opponent of JFK, was jealous that the CIA station had more money, power, and people than his own staff. The CIA Chief of Station Vietnam, John H. Richardson Sr, for his part, shared his director's skepticism, was still opposed to a coup. Thus developed the 'Lodge-Richardson Feud'. That feud came to a climax when Lodge revealed the name of his rival, John H. Richardson (CIA), to a reporter, Richard Starnes, branding him – and also 'outing' him – as an agent of the CIA; after the 'outed' Richardson is recalled to Langley, Virginia, Lodge completed the feud by later moving into Richardson's Saigon house, which was larger than the one Lodge had been in.

The coup occurred on 1 November 1963.

Johnson

The assassination of Diem sparked a cascade of coups in Saigon, and at the same time the city was wracked with assassinations. Lyndon B. Johnson, the new President, wanted to refocus the CIA on intelligence, rather than covert action, while the Kennedys were seen as relentless in their hounding of the CIA to produce results, Johnson soon gave them only the most minimal attention.

In the face of the failure of Project Tiger, the Pentagon wanted CIA paramilitary forces to participate in their Op Plan 64A, this resulted in the CIA's foreign paramilitaries being put under the command of the DOD, a move seen as a slippery slope inside the CIA, a slide from covert action towards militarization. After touring Vietnam in 1964, DI McCone and Secretary of Defense McNamara had different views of the U.S. position. McCone believed that as long as the Ho Chi Minh trail was active the U.S. would struggle.

DI McCone had statutory control over all intelligence committees, but in reality, but the military had near total control of the DIA, the NRO, the NSA, and many other aspects. Importantly, President Johnson almost completely ignored the CIA. In effect, the military controlled the two-thirds of the CIA budget laid out for covert action. McCone, the unspoken hero of the Cuban Missile Crisis, submitted his resignation in the summer, but Johnson would not accept it until after the election.

On August 4, Secretary of Defense McNamara gave President Johnson the raw translation of intercepted Korean transmissions directly from the NSA which, ostensibly, reported to DI McCone, rather than to McNamara. It was later determined that the transmission took place before the weapon discharges that night which leads to the conclusion that the transmission refers to the events of the attack the day before, and that, although Destroyers Maddox, and Turner Joy fired hundreds of shells at intermittent radar contacts, they were firing at false returns.

A CIA analyst's assessment of Vietnam was that the U.S. was "becoming progressively divorced from reality... ndproceeding with far more courage than wisdom". The CIA had created an exhaustive report, "The Vietnamese Communist's Will to Persist". This created a key flashpoint in the US government, PAVN troop levels,. Was it 500k or more as the CIA believed, or 300k or less as the commanders of US forces in Vietnam believed. The argument went on for months, but Helms finally OK'd a report saying that PAVN troop levels were 299,000 or less. The DOD argument was that whatever the facts on the ground, to publicly admit any higher number could be the last nail in the coffin of the war for vietnam in the press.

Nixon

In 1971 the NSA and CIA were engaged in domestic spying. The Department of Defense was eavesdropping on Henry Kissinger. The White House, and Camp David were wired for sound. Nixon and Kissenger were eavesdropping on their aides and on reporters. Nixon's "plumbers" included former CIA officials Howard Hunt and Jim McCord. On July 7, 1971, John Ehrlichman, Nixon's domestic policy chief, told DCI Cushman, Nixon's hatchet-man in the CIA, to let Cushman "know that untwas in fact doing some things for the President... you should consider he has pretty much carte blanche" Importantly, this included a camera, disguises, a voice altering device, and ID papers furnished by the CIA, as well as the CIA's participation developing film from the burglary Hunt staged on the office of Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg's psychologist.

On June 17, Nixon's Plumbers were caught burglarizing the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate. On June 23, DI Helms was ordered by the White House to wave the FBI off using national security as a pretext. The new DCI, Walters, another Nixon hack, told the acting director of the FBI and told him to drop the investigation as ordered. On June 26, Nixon's counsel John Dean ordered DCI Walters to pay the plumbers untraceable hush money. The CIA was the only part of the government that had the power to make off the book payments, but it could only be done on the orders of the CI, or, if he was out of the country, the DCI. The Acting Director of the FBI started breaking ranks. He demanded the CIA produce a signed document attesting to the national security threat of the investigation. Jim McCord's lawyer contacted the CIA informing them that McCord had been offered a Presidential pardon if he fingered the CIA, testifying that the break-in had been an operation of the CIA. Nixon had long been frustrated by what he saw as a liberal infection inside the CIA, and had been trying for years to tear the CIA out by its roots. McCord wrote "If IHelms goes (takes the fall) and the Watergate operation is laid at the CIA's feet, where it does not belong, every tree in the forest will fall. It will be a scorched desert."

On November 13, after Nixon's landslide re-election, Nixon told Kissinger " intendto ruin the Foreign Service. I mean ruin it – the old Foreign Service – and to build a new one." He had similar designs for the CIA, and intended to replace Helms with James Schlesinger. Nixon had told Helms that he was on the way out, and promised that Helms could stay on until his 60th birthday, the mandatory retirement age. On February 2, Nixon broke that promise, carrying through with his intention to "remove the deadwood" from the CIA. "Get rid of the clowns" was his order to the incoming CI. Kissinger had been running the CIA since the beginning of Nixon's presidency, but Nixon impressed on Schlesinger that he must appear to congress to be in charge, averting their suspicion of Kissinger's involvement. Nixon also hoped that Schlesinger could push through broader changes in the intelligence community that he had been working towards for years, the creation of a Director of National Intelligence, and spinning off the covert action part of the CIA into a separate organ. Before Helms left office, he destroyed every tape he had secretly made of meetings in his office, and many of the papers on Project MKUltra. In Schlesinger's 17-week tenure, he fired more than 1,500 employees. As Watergate threw the spotlight on the CIA, Schlesinger, who had been kept in the dark about the CIA's involvement, decided he needed to know what skeletons were in the closet. He issued a memo to every CIA employee directing them to disclose to him any CIA activity they knew of past or present that could fall outside the scope of the CIA's charter.

This became the Family Jewels. It included information linking the CIA to the assassination of foreign leaders, the illegal surveillance of some 7,000 U.S. citizens involved in the antiwar movement (Operation CHAOS), the CIA had also experimented on U.S. and Canadian citizens without their knowledge, secretly giving them LSD (among other things) and observing the results. This prompted Congress to create the Church Committee in the Senate, and the Pike Committee in the House. President Gerald Ford created the Rockefeller Commission
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