The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States.
The CIA's founding cadres were drawn from a specific faction of the OSS around William J. Donovan who built up America's intelligence networks since his time working for J.P. Morgan. It started out as business espionage, which is how the OSS's most fundamental institutional experience was gathered. The standard modus operandi was something akin to sitting down in fancy bistros frequented by international businessmen and simply engaging in gossip.
This served as a novel method of collecting and centralising publically circulating information to brief businessmen and politicians on current developments relevant to their domains of responsibility in the Socialist mode of production that was emerging in the wake of the Great Depression. There is no abrupt discontinuity between the J.P. Morgan network and the OSS, the state and military dimension of it was simply a constructive elaboration that carried this intelligence further upwards to the President's desk.
During World War 2 the OSS served as somewhat of a testbed to figure out how the business of intelligence agencies worked, which involved consultation with the British through an office in Rockefeller Center and the creation of various branches with specific responsibilities. After World War 2 these experimental institutions were reorganised within the hierarchy of the american state to better perform the functions they developed into. The CIA can be considered the pruned "stem" of the OSS from which RAND Corp, the NED, the CCF, the US Army Special Operations units and various mafias like the burmese heroin warlords originated. Herbert Marcuse, the "father of the New Left", worked for the OSS Research and Analysis Division where he worked out the theoretical and technological foundations of psychological warfare as a scientifically applied facet of statecraft and was re-recruited into the CIA during post-war reorganisation.
Further reading[edit | edit source]
- List of CIA Operations
- CIA on English Wikipedia
- List of CIA controversies on English Wikipedia