HTY/POL 301 Career Prep and HTY 339: Historiographical Essays and HTY 499/POL 499 Senior Seminar: History of the CIA (Schlesinger)

Admiral Stansfield Turner, the CIA director under Jimmy Carter, takes the reader inside the Beltway to examine the complicated, often strained relationships between presidents and their CIA chiefs. Throughout, Turner offers a fascinating look into the machinery of intelligence gathering, revealing how personal and political issues often interfere with government business - and America's safety.

President Harry Truman created the job of director of central intelligence (DCI) in 1946 so that he and other senior administration officials could turn to one person for foreign intelligence briefings. The DCI was the head of the Central Intelligence Group until 1947, when he became the director of the newly created Central Intelligence Agency. This book profiles each DCI and explains how they performed in their community role, that of enhancing cooperation among the many parts of the nation’s intelligence community and reporting foreign intelligence to the president. The book also discusses the evolving expectations that U.S. presidents through George W. Bush placed on their foreign intelligence chiefs. Although head of the CIA, the DCI was never a true national intelligence chief with control over the government’s many arms that collect and analyze foreign intelligence. This limitation conformed to President Truman’s wishes because he was wary of creating a powerful and all-knowing intelligence chief in a democratic society. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Congress and President Bush decided to alter the position of DCI by creating a new director of national intelligence position with more oversight and coordination of the government’s myriad programs. Thus this book ends with Porter Goss in 2005, the last DCI. Douglas Garthoff’s book is a unique and important study of the nation’s top intelligence official over a roughly fifty-year period. His work provides the detailed historical framework that is essential for all future studies of how the U.S. intelligence community has been and will be managed.

With shocking revelations that made headlines in papers across the country, Pulitzer-Prize-winner Tim Weiner gets at the truth behind the CIA and uncovers here why nearly every CIA Director has left the agency in worse shape than when he found it; and how these profound failures jeopardize our national security.

Examines the history, scope, structure, and function of the Central Intelligence Agency as well as its relationship to the Federal Government.