Perhaps surprisingly for an organisation carapaced in secrecy, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is one of the best-known institutions around the world. Its activities since its creation in 1947 have had a global resonance; they have occasionally generated internal controversy and strife in the US; they have left a substantial mark in popular culture. Famous (or infamous) though it is, however, the CIA is a profoundly misunderstood organisation. Myths and conspiracies have surrounded the agency since its earliest days, and these have blossomed over the decades. Fact and fiction coexist and are tightly interwoven in the public imagination concerning the CIA. The facts are often more fascinating than the myths.

What are the facts; what feeds the fiction? It is a global agency with a worldwide mission, chartered to prevent strategic surprise and support American policymaking by narrowing the cone of uncertainty for the president and the executive branch, and the armed forces they command. The CIA fulfils this responsibility by collecting, analysing, assessing and disseminating intelligence gathered though all sources to its customers in government. It recruits spies in foreign countries, it manages a substantial technical intelligence capacity, it processes publicly available information to supplement classified collection efforts; it is home to enough subject matter experts in the form of linguists, area studies specialists, psychologists and technical experts to staff a university; it maintains myriad liaison relationships with partner intelligence services all over the world; it maintains a paramilitary capability and undertakes disruptive, covert actions when ordered to do so. But, primarily, it is an agency concerned with gathering and processing secret intelligence and using it to enable US political and military leaders to make more effective policy choices. Despite its fame, it is a very secretive agency.

Myths and conspiracies feed upon secrecy, certainly. But the CIA’s activities have also generated plenty of supplementary fodder. Intelligence services are more than mechanisms for intelligence collection and analysis; they also serve as foreign policy tools, undertaking deniable, yet often visible, action to influence world events on behalf of their governments.