This research paper addresses the question: Should there be reform in the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)? Since the time of the Watergate scandals, the CIA, the nation's premiere foreign intelligence agency, has been the subject of intense Congressional and public scrutiny and criticism concerning whether it has abused its powers and otherwise failed in its duties. Reforms are needed at the CIA, not to protect the nation against its abuses but rather to strengthen the agency's ability to protect itself against penetration by hostile foreign intelligence agencies, to strengthen its intelligence-gathering and analytical capabilities and to prepare the CIA to meet the new challenges of the post-Cold War era.
in a recent article, Bruce Berkowitz says that "most experts agree that U.S. intelligence needs reform. Indeed, at times it seems that everyone wants to have a hand in reforming the intelligence community." Since the CIA was first established under the National Security Act in 1947 to coordinate the collection of foreign intelligence, some critics have been opposed to the basic concept of a secret intelligence service on the grounds that it is incompatible with a democratic form of government in the United States. Nevertheless, such criticisms were muted during the first 15 years of the agency's existence, when a broad consensus prevailed that intelligence gathering from overt and covert sources and on occasion clandestine operations abroad were necessary to cope with the Soviet threat during the Cold War.
Clandestine operations were conducted through the Directorate of Operations (DO), the "black side of the house." Very few objections were raised inside and outside of government when the CIA successfully toppled the left-leaning government of Jakob Arbenz of Guatemala and the ultranationalist government of Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran in 1954, helped the Indonesian military destroy the communist party there in the 1960s...