In the life of the modern world, since the second half of the twentieth century, the US CIA has played a huge role. Many wars, ethnic conflicts, "orange revolutions" and coups d'etat were planned and carried out with the direct participation of American foreign intelligence. Over the seventy years of its existence, the US Central Intelligence Agency has become the most powerful secret service with agents around the world.
The US Central Intelligence Agency was created after the signing and entry into force of the National Security Act. This happened on September 18, 1947. It is interesting that until that time the United States had existed for quite a long time, especially for a country of this level, without a unified and centralized system of foreign intelligence management. Prior to the outbreak of World War II, intelligence gathering, planning and execution of intelligence operations were the responsibility of authorized agencies of the United States Department of State, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the military intelligence of the army and naval forces. But the outbreak of World War II required more serious measures from the American leadership to coordinate intelligence abroad. The miscalculations in the organization of foreign intelligence have cost the United States dearly. The large number of casualties and losses of equipment during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor is one of the main evidence of this.
Already on June 13, 1942, by decision of the US leadership, the Office of Strategic Services was created, which was at that time part of the Committee of the Chiefs of Staff of the US Armed Forces. In fact, it was then, 75 years ago, that a single American intelligence agency was born. By the way, the initiator of its creation was the British resident in the United States, William Stephenson. It was he who advised Franklin Roosevelt to create a single agency to coordinate the actions of the disparate intelligence structures of the civil and military ministries. Roosevelt entrusted the direct development of the plan and strategy for the development of the new management to William Donovan, an old friend of William Stephenson.
William Joseph Donovan (1883-1959) was known in the United States as "Wild Bill". A lawyer - a graduate of Columbia University, in 1916 Donovan volunteered for the US National Guard. During the First World War, he fought on the Western Front, received the rank of lieutenant colonel and rose to the rank of commander of the 165th Infantry Regiment. Interestingly, during the Russian Civil War, Donovan served as a liaison officer at the headquarters of Admiral Kolchak in Siberia. After returning to the United States, Donovan became one of the most famous lawyers. On July 11, 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt appointed Donovan as his personal information (intelligence) coordinator, and in 1942 Donovan was officially enlisted in the military with the rank of colonel, and shortly afterwards on June 13, 1942, he became head of the US Strategic Services Directorate, at the same time receiving the rank of General. major. Thus, it is Donovan who can be considered the first head of the united American intelligence.
In the shortest possible time, Donovan managed to turn the Strategic Services Directorate into a powerful structure that included secret intelligence, analytical and research departments, subdivisions of secret operations, psychological warfare, and counterintelligence. The successes of the OSS finally turned Donovan's head, who proposed turning intelligence into a special kind of armed forces. But this project provoked strong opposition from the American military elite, as well as from the FBI leadership, who feared the emergence of a powerful new competitor. Therefore, on September 20, 1945, almost immediately after the end of the war, the Office of Strategic Services was disbanded by President Harry Truman, and its functions were divided between the military intelligence services of the branches of the armed forces and the FBI.
However, after a short time, it became obvious to Truman and his entourage that without a centralized intelligence service, the United States would not be able to exist in the new geopolitical situation. It was decided to restore the structures of a single foreign intelligence, for which Truman created a Central Intelligence Group and introduced the post of Director of Central Intelligence. Rear Admiral Sidney William Sawers (1892-1973) was appointed the first director of central intelligence. A former entrepreneur, Sawers was not a naval officer, but in 1940 he was drafted into active service, and in 1944 he became assistant director of the Office of Naval Intelligence. In 1945 he was promoted to Rear Admiral and appointed Deputy Chief of the Naval Intelligence Directorate. From this position, Sidney Sawers came to the post of Director of Central Intelligence. However, he remained in office for only six months - in June 1946 he was replaced by Lieutenant General of the Air Force Hoyt Senford Vandenberg (1899-1954), who, unlike Sawers, was a career Air Force officer, and from January 1946 he was in charge of military intelligence. Vandenberg served as director of central intelligence for almost a year, until May 1947, when a new director of central intelligence was appointed, Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillencotter. On September 18, 1947, the United States Central Intelligence Agency was created, the post of director of which was combined with the post of director of central intelligence.
Roscoe Hillencotter (1897-1982) made history as the first director of the CIA.
At the time of his appointment to this position, he was 50 years old. A career officer in the Naval Forces, Rear Admiral Hillencotter first commanded a battleship and then transferred to the military diplomatic and intelligence service. In the 1930s - 1940s. he was several times assistant to the naval attaché in France, then led the intelligence of the Pacific Fleet, receiving the rank of rear admiral in November 1946. On December 8, 1947, the Senate approved Hillencotter as Director of the CIA. Then, in December 1947, the US CIA received the official right to carry out intelligence and special operations throughout the globe. The Cold War began and the CIA was to play a very important role in it.
However, the early years of the joint intelligence agency's existence began in trouble. So, North Korea started a war with South Korea, which American intelligence did not foresee and did not prepare for such a development of events. It cost the first CIA director Rear Admiral Hillencotter, who retired in 1950 and returned to the Navy as commander of the 1st Cruiser Division - a notable demotion after leading all of American foreign intelligence. On August 21, 1950, Army Lieutenant General Walter Bedell Smith, a veteran of the First and Second World Wars, who served as Eisenhower's chief of staff, and then the former US ambassador to the USSR, became the new director of the CIA. In the first post-war five-year plan, the anti-Soviet paradigm of American intelligence activities was established and strengthened. The USSR became the main strategic adversary of the United States, and in confronting the growing influence of the Soviet Union, the CIA was ready to resort to any means. For example, the US CIA worked closely with many former Nazi henchmen and collaborators from among the Russian, Ukrainian, Baltic, Caucasian and Central Asian nationalists. Some of them even became regular employees of the CIA, such as Ruzi Nazar, a native of Soviet Uzbekistan, who went over to the side of Nazi Germany during the Second World War, and then, after the war, began to cooperate with American intelligence.
The CIA achieved even greater influence and power under its third leader, Allen Dulles. Allen Welch Dulles (1893-1969), attorney and diplomat, took charge of American intelligence in 1953 and served as director until 1961. It was Allen Dulles who was one of the main ideologues of the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. At the same time, although Dulles is called one of the most talented leaders of American intelligence, the history of the CIA during his years of leadership is not only victories, but also failures. American intelligence has succeeded in overthrowing Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh and Guatemalan President Arbenz. A great achievement of American intelligence was the beginning of flights of U-2 aircraft over the territory of the USSR - at an altitude unattainable for air defense systems. From 1956 to 1960 U-2 planes were surveying the Soviet territory, but in 1960 the "lafa" ended. Air Defense of the USSR was shot down by a U-2 aircraft, piloted by Francis Gary Powers, a former Air Force captain, an experienced pilot, who in 1956 transferred from the army to the CIA. Powers fell into the hands of Soviet counterintelligence officers and on August 19, 1960, was sentenced to 10 years in prison. True, on February 10, 1962, he was exchanged for the Soviet intelligence officer William Fischer (aka Rudolf Abel).
The Cuban Revolution was an absolute failure of the US CIA. For the first time, an openly hostile state, oriented towards the socialist path of development and closely cooperating with the Soviet Union, appeared right at the side of the United States. In 1961, an attempt to invade Cuba, prepared directly by the US CIA, failed. This failure led to the resignation of Allen Dulles from the post of director of the special intelligence service. The work of the CIA in Southeast Asia was also full of failures. Despite numerous efforts, the unprecedented campaign in Vietnam, which entailed huge human casualties - including among the American military, the United States by the mid-1970s. lost control of all of Eastern Indochina including Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The work of the CIA in the Arab countries was also not effective enough. On the other hand, the CIA proved to be excellent in eliminating politicians disliked by Washington and organizing coups d'état, primarily in Latin America. Not without the participation of the CIA, Stroessner's authoritarian regime continued to exist in Paraguay, and General Augusto Pinochet came to power in Chile.
In 1979-1989. The US CIA took an active part in the events in Afghanistan, organizing and supplying radical organizations and individual field commanders that were operating against the DRA and came to the aid of the Soviet Union. The Afghan war is, among other things, the history of the confrontation between the Soviet and American intelligence services, and the latter, unfortunately, managed to win this confrontation.
The most important area of the CIA's activity throughout the second half of the twentieth century remained work against the Soviet Union. Colossal resources were used to destabilize the political and economic situation in the USSR. American intelligence worked with numerous enemies of the Soviet state from among the representatives of the nationalist and separatist organizations of Ukraine, the Baltic states, the Transcaucasus and the North Caucasus, Central Asia, who found themselves in exile. With their help, the spread of anti-Soviet views on Soviet territory was carried out, and personnel for illegal intelligence were trained. A special role was assigned to work with the Soviet intelligentsia, culture and art workers. Even then, in the 1960s and 1970s, the CIA was well aware of the powerful force of mass culture and its impact on mass consciousness. Therefore, the CIA paid great attention to the destruction of Soviet society with the help of literary works, cinema, and music. Now we can say with confidence that the CIA directly or indirectly worked with many anti-Soviet cultural figures.
Obviously, the US CIA was one of the most important actors involved in the collapse of the Soviet state and destabilization of the situation in the post-Soviet space. Although Allen Dulles left the post of head of the CIA thirty years before the collapse of the USSR, and died safely in 1969, his plan continues to be implemented almost half a century after his death. The collapse of the Soviet Union was a grandiose victory for both the United States in general and the United States CIA in particular, in comparison with which all the failures of American intelligence during the Cold War pale in comparison. Now, after a while, one can not only guess, but also assert that the collapse of the Union became possible thanks to the "work" of American intelligence with many prominent Soviet state and party leaders, with the leaders of the Soviet special services. Of course, it is hardly possible at present to reliably prove the facts of cooperation of specific Soviet and Russian leaders with the US CIA, but the entire late Soviet and post-Soviet history testifies to the fact that the destruction of the Soviet state was carried out methodically and subtly, and the destabilization of the post-Soviet space was already going on almost openly. without encountering much resistance from the elites of the newly emerging independent states.
The collapse of the Soviet state allowed the United States to establish control over all of Eastern Europe - the former Soviet zone of influence, which was part of the Warsaw Pact Organization. Moreover, in the 1990s. The United States began to move into the territory of the former USSR. First, all the Baltic countries came under US control, then Georgia, now the US controls the political situation in Ukraine, where the CIA also played a big role in the overthrow of Viktor Yanukovych and the establishment of the current anti-Russian regime in Kiev.
