Founding of the CIA (1947)
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The founding of the CIA (1947) is John Kiriakou's account of how the agency came to be. From 1945 to early 1947, he says, the U.S. was "just winging it," with MI6 the preeminent Western service; Truman's advisers, fearing a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, had British MI6 officers come to New York to help Americans design a "central intelligence agency." It was created under the National Security Act of 1947, which also created the National Security Council. J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI since the Coolidge administration, and no friend of Bill Donovan, founder of the CIA's OSS predecessor, believed the FBI could do the job itself and lobbied Capitol Hill against the bill. Truman summoned Hoover to the Oval Office and falsely promised the CIA would be a component of the FBI, so Hoover would head both; Hoover dropped his objection and "never forgave Truman for lying to him." Once the bill passed, Hoover, realizing he'd been duped, ordered that there be no cooperation between the FBI and CIA, a rift Kiriakou says persisted throughout his own career. The MI6 officers were met by Bill Donovan, Prescott Bush and "a handful of other swells" from Wall Street and the OSS. Truman himself later soured on his creation, publishing an op-ed, see Truman's CIA op-ed, calling the agency a "damn fool mistake" that should be disbanded.

There was no congressional committee overseeing CIA activities until 1975, Kiriakou says that from 1947 until then "the CIA did literally anything it wanted to do," citing the CIA's covert manipulation of the 1948 Italian elections within months of its creation as an early example. Before the 1993 Equal Employment Opportunity Act, CIA recruitment could be done informally and secretly, a professor could simply tell a promising student "CIA, you want in"; afterward, prospective officers had to apply openly through the agency's website, until the CIA's recent creation of a Scholar-in-Residence program. The agency that grew from that founding has itself grown enormously: the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, created decades later to sit above the CIA, started with 15 employees and has since grown to about 12,000. Kiriakou has also been planning a book with a friend, a former U.S. deputy attorney general, on a history of CIA analytic failures, arguing that from the agency's 1947 founding through the 9/11 attacks, the CIA missed every major world event, from the Berlin Airlift and the Iranian coup to the Suez Crisis and the Bay of Pigs.

Kiriakou also recalls the agency's response to September 11, 2001, when CIA police ordered headquarters evacuated and threatened arrests for employees who didn't move; it took him four hours just to get out of the parking lot.

See also

- Operation Gladio
- Abolish the CIA
