History Of The CIA

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History of the CIA The United States has carried out intelligence activities since the days of George Washington, but only since World War II have they been coordinated on a government-wide basis. President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed New York lawyer and war hero, William J. Donovan, to become first the Coordinator of Information, and then, after the US entered World War II, head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in 1942. The OSS – the forerunner to the CIA – had a mandate to collect and analyze strategic information. After World War II, however, the OSS was abolished along with many other war agencies and its functions were transferred to the State and War Departments. It did not take long before President Truman recognized…show more content…
Embassy in Tehran, taking more than 60 Americans hostage. "From the moment the hostages were seized until they were released minutes after Ronald Reagan took the oath of office as president 444 days later," wrote historian Gaddis Smith, "the crisis absorbed more concentrated effort by American officials and had more extensive coverage on television and in the press than any other event since World War II." The United States and Iran The hostage crisis was the most dramatic in a series of problems facing Americans at home and abroad in the last year of the Carter presidency. Was Carter to blame for allowing it to happen? It's hard to say, since the hostage crisis was merely the latest event in the long and complex relationship between the United States and Iran. Jimmy Carter Library Carter's diplomacy Ever since oil was discovered there in 1908, Iran had attracted great interest from the West. The British played a dominant role there until World War II, when the Soviet Union joined them in fighting to keep the Germans out. Until 1953, the United States mostly stayed on the sidelines, advocating for an independent Iran under the leadership of the young king, Reza Shah Pahlavi. But that year, fearing that charismatic prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh might be moving Iran closer to Moscow, the CIA directed an operation to oust him and consolidate power under the…show more content…
The top US Democrat in the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Representative Eliot Engel, is set to introduce legislation to train, arm, and support the Syrian opposition Monday — which would constitute a major escalation in US involvement in the civil war. The brutal two-year conflict has taken the lives of approximately 70,000 Syrians and displaced over 1 million refugees, according to UN estimates. A different report this week claimed that the US had trained between 200 and 300 Syrian rebels at a camp in Jordan. The US declined to comment on the ostensible training. The US had previously refused to provide the rebels with arms. It recently approved an aid package that would supply opposition fighters with nonlethal aid, such as medical equipment. US Secretary of State John Kerry announced at a conference in Rome last month a $60 million package of nonlethal assistance, the first direct help to the opposition forces trying to overthrow Assad. NATO has taken command of the war in Libya as the US deploys covert CIA operatives to the field to work the ground and coordinate with the
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