This highly accessible book provides new material and a fresh perspective on American National Intelligence practice, focusing on the first fifty years of the twentieth century, when the United States took on the responsibilities of a global superpower during the first years of the Cold War. Late to the art of intelligence, the United States during World War II created a new model of combining intelligence collection and analytic functions into a single organization—the OSS. At the end of the war, President Harry Truman and a small group of advisors developed a new, centralized agency directly subordinate to and responsible to the President, despite entrenched institutional resistance. Instrumental to the creation of the CIA was a group known colloquially as the “Missouri Gang,” which included not only President Truman but equally determined fellow Missourians Clark Clifford, Sidney Souers, and Roscoe Hillenkoetter.

The book is about the history of the Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) from the foundation in 1947 to the ultimate events. U.S. President Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947 establishing the CIA. The National Security Act charged the CIA with coordinating the nation's intelligence activities and correlating, evaluating and disseminating intelligence affecting national security.

The Central Intelligence Agency is essential in the fight to keep America safe from foreign attacks. This two-volume work traces through facts and documents the history of the CIA, from the people involved to the operations conducted for national security. This two-volume reference work offers both students and general-interest readers a definitive resource that examines the impact the CIA has had on world events throughout the Cold War and beyond. From its intervention in Guatemala in 1954, through the Bay of Pigs, the Vietnam War, the Iran-Contra Affair, and its key role in Afghanistan following the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, this objective, apolitical work covers all of this controversial intelligence agency's most notable successes and failures. The content focuses on describing how a U.S. government organization that is unlike any other conducts covert warfare, surreptitiously collects information, and conducts espionage. The work allows for easy reference of former CIA operations and spies, looking at the positive and negative aspects of each operation and the "why" and "how" of its execution. The second volume provides documentation that supports and amplifies more than 200 cross-referenced entries. Readers will be able to understand the reasons behind the CIA's various actions, perceive how the agency's role has evolved across its 75-year history, and intelligently consider the viability and future of the CIA.

For forty years the Central Intelligence Agency has published an in-house journal, Studies in Intelligence, for CIA eyes only. Now the agency has declassified much of this material. This engrossing book, which presents the most interesting articles from the journal, provides revealing insights into CIA strategies and into events in which the organization was involved. The articles were selected by H. Bradford Westerfield, who teaches courses on intelligence operations but has never been affiliated with CIA. Westerfield's comprehensive introduction sketches the history and structure of CIA, sets the articles in context, and explains his criteria for selecting them. The articles cover a wide range of intelligence activities, including the gathering of intelligence data inside the United States; analysis of data; interaction between analysts and policymakers; the development of economic intelligence targeted at friendly countries as well as at foes; use of double agents (the personal memoir of a CIA officer who pretended to the Russians to be their agent); evaluation of defectors (the Nosenko case); and coercive interrogation techniques and how agents can resist them.