Download Greendale High School Eric Hackbarth The CIA`s role in the 1980s

Greendale High School
Eric Hackbarth
The CIA’s role in the 1980s was a non-military commissioned civilian
intelligence agents, many of whom are trained to avoid tactical situations, perform
Intelligence gathering. The CIA also oversees and sometimes engages in tactical and
covert activities at the request of the president. Often, when such field operations
are organized, the military or other warfare tacticians carry these tactical
operations out on behalf of the agency while the CIA oversees them. Although
intelligence gathering is the agency's main agenda, tactical divisions were
established in the agency to carry out emergency field operations that require
immediate suppression or dismantling of a threat or weapon. The CIA is often used
for intelligence gathering instead of the U.S military to avoid a war. Also the CIA
tracked the illegal narcotics trade and trained and supplied local militias with
weapons to fight soviet influences or more American friendly governments.
The attitudes of the CIA towards the KGB is one of any rival organization
towards the one that posses it the most threat. The CIA viewed the KGB as threat to
America, the CIA, and every country in the world. KGB employed many of the same
tactics that the CIA did just for the Soviet Union, which made them a dangerous
enemy. The CIA feared the KGB and for good reasons the KGB where sometimes able
to get moles into high levels of the American national government but in the end
they were always ousted and the Soviet’s plans to gain American technology and
secrets were foiled.
The CIA’s history up to this point involves its founding in 1947 with the
National Security Act of 1947 signed by President Truman. Early founding for the
CIA was solicited from James Forrestal and Allen Dulles along with some of the
money from the Marshall plan to influence elections in Europe. The National
Security Council Directive on Office of Special Projects, June 18, 1948 further gave
the CIA the authority to carry out covert operations "against hostile foreign states or
groups or in support of friendly foreign states or groups but which are so planned
and conducted that any US Government responsibility for them is not evident to
unauthorized persons." In 1949, the CIA Act authorized the agency to use
confidential fiscal and administrative procedures, and exempting it from most of the
usual limitations on the use of Federal funds. It also exempted the CIA from having
to disclose its "organization, functions, officials, titles, salaries, or numbers of
personnel employed." It also created the program "PL-110", to handle defectors and
other "essential aliens" who fall outside normal immigration procedures, as well as
giving those persons cover stories and economic support. During the Cold War is
when the CIA became the most useful and famous for fighting Soviet influence.
Concern regarding the Soviet Union and the difficulty of getting information from its
closed society, which few agents could penetrate, led to solutions based on
advanced technology. Among the first success was with the Lockheed U-2 aircraft,
which could take pictures and collect electronic signals from an altitude thought to
be above Soviet air defenses' reach. The CIA would play an important role in
Indochina and Vietnam relations with the United States during the Vietnam War.
Through the Seventies and Eighties the CIA were discovered to have misused their
power in a number of scandals some of which were assignation attempts mostly on
Fidel Castro and their aid in the Bay of Pigs invasion and spying on U.S. citizens.