Central Intelligence Agency
U.S. civilian foreign intelligence agency, founded 1947
Also known as: CIA, Central Intelligence Agency, the Agency, Langley
The Central Intelligence Agency was created by the National Security Act of 1947, signed by President Truman on 26 July 1947, as the institutional successor to the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS) which had been dissolved in October 1945. Quigley treats the CIA in Tragedy and Hope (chiefly chs. 18 and 19) as the institutional spine of the post-1947 American national-security state — alongside the National Security Council, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and a unified Department of Defense — and as the operational arm through which the United States conducted the covert side of its Cold War.
Founding: From OSS to Langley
The CIA's institutional ancestry runs through William Donovan's Office of Strategic Services (1942–1945), the brief Central Intelligence Group (1946–1947), and the unified National Security Act apparatus of July 1947 (T&H 897–898). The Act created the Department of Defense, the Air Force as a separate service, the National Security Council, and the CIA in a single statutory package — the institutional reorganization that, in Quigley's reading, finally adjusted the United States's executive apparatus to the demands of a permanent peacetime great-Power role. The CIA's statutory mandate was double: to coordinate the intelligence activities of the other departments and to perform "such other functions and duties related to intelligence as the National Security Council may from time to time direct" — the elastic clause from which covert action would develop.
The Quigley Framing: Covert Action as Routine
Quigley's treatment of the CIA in Tragedy and Hope is unusual for a contemporary academic account in that it treats the agency's covert operations as routine and substantial rather than exceptional. The 1953 overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran (T&H 1058, 1023), the 1954 overthrow of Árbenz in Guatemala, the U-2 program (T&H 1099), the 1961 Bay of Pigs operation (T&H 1135–1136), and the agency's role in Indochina from the late 1950s are discussed as the operational expression of the broader Anglo-American Cold War strategy. Quigley reads the CIA as an institutional descendant of British SIS / SOE techniques — a continuity of method consistent with the broader Quigley argument that Anglo-American institutional architecture was a single working system.
The Dulles Brothers and the Agency in the 1950s
The CIA's first decade was shaped by the Dulles brothers' joint tenure: John Foster Dulles as Secretary of State (1953–1959) and Allen Dulles as Director of Central Intelligence (1953–1961). Quigley treats this configuration as the operative formalization of the Establishment's Cold War apparatus: a Wall Street law firm (Sullivan & Cromwell) whose senior partners had occupied the State Department in the 1920s and 1940s now ran both the diplomatic and the covert arms of American foreign policy simultaneously. The Bay of Pigs disaster in April 1961 and Allen Dulles's subsequent retirement (replaced by John McCone) marked the close of this configuration; the Kennedy administration's National Security Council under McGeorge Bundy began the long centralization of foreign-policy direction in the White House staff.
Intelligence, Counter-Intelligence, and the Soviet Side
Tragedy and Hope treats the CIA's analytic functions — the National Intelligence Estimates, the daily intelligence brief, the technical-collection apparatus that grew out of the U-2 and later the SR-71 and the early reconnaissance satellites — as the institutional infrastructure of strategic decision-making. The atomic-weapons assessments (T&H 893–900, 919–928), the missile-gap controversy of 1958–1961, and the Cuban Missile Crisis intelligence chain are recurrent themes. Quigley's parallel discussion of Soviet penetration cases — Klaus Fuchs (T&H 922), Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, the Cambridge Five whose existence had only partially surfaced by Tragedy and Hope's 1966 publication — treats the institutional history of the CIA as inseparable from the institutional history of the KGB and from the documented record of cross-penetration on both sides.
Long-Term Significance in the Quigley Argument
Quigley's broader argument is that the creation of a permanent, large-scale civilian intelligence apparatus represented a structural shift in the American constitutional order. The CIA's covert-action authority, the National Security Act's elastic clause, and the routine classification of foreign-policy decision-making transferred substantial authority from Congress and the public press to the executive branch and a narrow inner cabinet. Quigley registers this shift with measured concern — not as a conspiracy claim but as a documented institutional development whose long-term constitutional consequences would only become clear after his death. The CIA is therefore, in Quigley's account, both an indispensable institution of a great-Power state in a bipolar nuclear world and a structural modification of the American republic of which the founders did not contemplate.
Cited in
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 898 Quigley
The 1947 National Security Act created the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, and the CIA in a single statutory package.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 1058 Quigley
Deterding, Sir Henri, 514, 1058 [in context of Iranian oil and the 1953 intervention].
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 1099 Quigley
U-2 incident and Berlin crisis, 1958, 1097-8, 1099.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 1132 Quigley
Cuba, 75 (1898), 1111, 1131-9; Castro, 1108, 1132-4, 1142, 1181.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 1135 Quigley
Cuba, Bay of Pigs, 1135-6.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 1138 Quigley
'Establishment,' Eastern, 956, 980 (weakening), 1138, 1244-6, 1247, 1271-2.