There are institutions Americans are taught to trust because they exist in the name of national security. Then there is the Central Intelligence Agency—an organization created to protect the United States, credited with extraordinary intelligence successes, and responsible for work that by definition can never be fully visible to the people it serves. That secrecy is part of what makes espionage possible. It is also what has made the CIA one of the most controversial institutions in American history. Some suspicions surrounding the Agency are unsupported conspiracy theories. Others once sounded like conspiracy theories until government investigations and declassified documents proved that secret coups, assassination plots, surveillance programs, propaganda operations, and experiments on unwitting human beings had actually occurred. The difficult truth about the CIA is therefore neither that everything whispered about it is true nor that distrust of it is irrational. The documented history is disturbing enough without inventing anything.
BEFORE THE CIA
The story begins during World War II. Before the war, American intelligence was scattered among the military, State Department, FBI, and other organizations. President Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted centralized intelligence capable of understanding enemies operating across borders, so in 1941 he created the Office of the Coordinator of Information under William “Wild Bill” Donovan. In 1942 it became the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS. The OSS gathered intelligence, ran spies, conducted sabotage, supported resistance movements, spread propaganda, and carried out unconventional warfare against the Axis powers. It proved that intelligence could influence a war far beyond the battlefield. After Germany and Japan were defeated, President Harry Truman abolished the OSS, but the emerging confrontation with the Soviet Union made it clear that America still needed a permanent foreign intelligence service. The National Security Act of 1947 created the Central Intelligence Agency, which formally came into existence on September 18, 1947.
The CIA’s original purpose was legitimate and necessary: collect foreign intelligence, analyze threats, warn American leaders, and help protect the country. It was explicitly separated from ordinary domestic law enforcement. But intelligence collection was only part of what the organization became. Covert action provided presidents with something uniquely powerful—a way to influence events overseas while concealing the American hand. The CIA Act of 1949 also gave the Agency unusual secrecy surrounding money and personnel. During the Cold War, when Washington viewed Soviet communism as an existential threat, those capabilities expanded dramatically.
WHEN INTELLIGENCE BECAME INTERVENTION
One of the clearest examples came in Iran in 1953. Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh had nationalized Iran’s oil industry, creating an international confrontation and increasing American and British fears about Iran’s political future during the Cold War. The CIA and British intelligence became involved in the operation that helped overthrow Mossadegh and strengthen Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. This isn’t speculation reconstructed decades later from rumors. Declassified American records describe Operation TPAJAX, and a CIA telegram immediately after the overthrow congratulated the Tehran station and Kermit Roosevelt for the operation’s success.
Then came Guatemala in 1954. President Jacobo Árbenz pursued reforms that threatened powerful interests while Washington feared communist influence in his government. The CIA’s Operation PBSUCCESS worked toward removing him. Declassified records describe psychological warfare, political pressure, efforts to induce defections, support for opposition forces, and paramilitary activity. A later CIA memorandum explicitly described the Agency’s role in the overthrow of Árbenz.
These episodes established a pattern that would follow the CIA throughout the Cold War. The Agency was no longer simply listening to America’s enemies. It could secretly attempt to change governments, influence elections, support armed groups, conduct propaganda and manipulate political environments overseas. Defenders argued that the Soviet Union was conducting its own aggressive covert operations and that America could not fight the Cold War with one hand tied behind its back. Critics asked a darker question: Who decides when protecting America gives a secret agency the right to determine another country’s future?
THE BAY OF PIGS
That confidence eventually produced one of the CIA’s most famous disasters. After Fidel Castro took power in Cuba, the Eisenhower administration authorized plans to overthrow his government. President John F. Kennedy inherited the operation. In April 1961, CIA-trained Cuban exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs expecting to help trigger an uprising against Castro.
Instead, the invasion collapsed.
Kennedy refused to provide the level of direct American military intervention that might have rescued the operation. Many invading forces were killed or captured, Castro emerged stronger, and the United States suffered an international humiliation. Kennedy accepted public responsibility, but privately the relationship between his administration and parts of the national-security establishment became deeply strained.
And then the story became darker.
ASSASSINATION PLOTS WERE REAL
For decades, Americans heard stories that American intelligence had considered killing foreign leaders. Eventually, congressional investigations showed that this was not simply folklore. The Senate’s Church Committee, created in 1975 to investigate intelligence abuses, examined alleged assassination plots involving foreign leaders as well as covert action and domestic intelligence abuses. Its investigations exposed activities that had previously been hidden from the American public.
Among the most notorious episodes were CIA efforts directed against Fidel Castro. Plans and discussions over the years involved poison, organized-crime figures and other extraordinary schemes. The intelligence community’s history became sufficiently troubling that later executive rules expressly prohibited U.S. government personnel from engaging in or conspiring to engage in assassination.
That history matters when discussing public distrust. It does not prove that every suspicious death was a CIA operation. But it demonstrates why blanket statements that an American intelligence agency would never participate in extreme covert activity cannot survive the historical record.
MKULTRA: WHEN THE UNBELIEVABLE WAS TRUE
Perhaps nothing damaged that trust more than MKULTRA.
Beginning in the 1950s, the CIA explored methods of influencing human behavior, interrogation and mind control. Drugs—including LSD—were part of the research. Experiments were conducted through universities, hospitals and other institutions, and some people were subjected to drugs without their knowledge or informed consent.
This is not internet mythology.
In a 1977 Senate hearing, CIA Director Stansfield Turner acknowledged that the Agency had discovered additional MKULTRA records and that experiments had included testing drugs on American citizens without their knowledge. Investigators also learned something that would forever complicate attempts to reconstruct the full story: many MKULTRA records had previously been destroyed.
Think about the significance of that. An American government agency secretly experimented on human beings, some without their knowledge, and much of the documentary history disappeared before Congress could reconstruct everything that happened. That does not justify believing every theory about mind control. It does explain why the phrase “the government would never do that” carries far less weight after reading the government’s own records.
THE CHURCH COMMITTEE OPENS THE DOOR
By the 1970s, Watergate, Vietnam and revelations about intelligence activities had shattered much of America’s automatic trust in government. In 1975, Senator Frank Church led a historic Senate investigation into intelligence agencies. Investigators gained access to extraordinary amounts of secret material, including the CIA’s infamous collection of internal documents known as the “Family Jewels.”
The committee found serious abuses across the intelligence community. The investigation wasn’t limited to the CIA; the FBI, NSA, IRS and other agencies also came under scrutiny. But the CIA emerged from the period permanently changed. Congress strengthened intelligence oversight, and Americans received documentary proof that secret government programs had sometimes crossed legal, constitutional and ethical boundaries.
That history leads inevitably to the question that has haunted the Agency for more than sixty years.
WHAT ABOUT JFK?
President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested. Two days later, before Oswald could stand trial, nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot and killed him on live television.
The Warren Commission concluded that Oswald acted alone in killing Kennedy and that Ruby also acted alone. But the assassination never stopped generating questions. Later investigations, witnesses, intelligence records, Cold War operations against Cuba, Oswald’s activities before the assassination, and decades of withheld or redacted government documents ensured that suspicion survived.
The CIA appears throughout the documentary universe surrounding the assassination because Oswald had traveled to Mexico City shortly before Kennedy’s death and contacted Soviet and Cuban diplomatic facilities that were under intelligence surveillance. The National Archives’ assassination collection contains extensive CIA material involving Oswald, Mexico City, anti-Castro activities, CIA personnel and other assassination-related subjects.
There is also a historical circumstance impossible to ignore: at roughly the same period Kennedy was assassinated, the American government was conducting secret operations against Castro’s Cuba, and the CIA had been involved in genuine plots against Castro. That creates an extraordinary background for suspicion—but background is not proof of responsibility for Kennedy’s murder.
That distinction matters.
There is currently no established documentary evidence proving that the CIA ordered, planned or carried out JFK’s assassination. Suspicion is not evidence, and unanswered questions are not automatically proof of conspiracy. At the same time, Americans who question whether the complete story was immediately disclosed have legitimate historical reasons to examine the record closely. The government continued releasing assassination records decades afterward, including another major release in 2025. The National Archives maintains those records today.
That may be the most responsible way to approach JFK: do not pretend the unanswered questions are answers, but do not pretend the questions never existed.
THE GOOD SIDE PEOPLE FORGET
A truthful history cannot describe only scandals.
Thousands of CIA employees have spent their careers gathering intelligence intended to prevent wars, identify terrorist threats, understand hostile governments, stop weapons proliferation, protect American personnel and give presidents information before making decisions that could affect millions of lives. Some intelligence officers have died doing that work. Much of the Agency’s most successful work will never become famous precisely because successful intelligence operations often remain secret.
The CIA has also provided presidents with information they desperately needed during nuclear confrontations, wars and international crises. Intelligence helped America understand Soviet capabilities during the Cold War and has contributed to counterterrorism operations and efforts against hostile states and organizations. The Agency describes its fundamental mission as collecting, analyzing and disseminating foreign intelligence so American policymakers can make national-security decisions.
The problem is that the same secrecy that allows intelligence officers to protect legitimate sources and operations can also conceal mistakes and misconduct.
That is the paradox at the center of the CIA.
THE REAL DARK SIDE
The darkest lesson of CIA history isn’t that every conspiracy theory is true.
It is that some things once dismissed as almost unbelievable actually happened.
The CIA participated in covert efforts to overthrow foreign governments.
That happened.
It explored assassination plots against foreign leaders.
That happened.
It secretly administered drugs to people who didn’t know they were being experimented on.
That happened.
Records from controversial programs were destroyed.
That happened.
Congress eventually investigated intelligence activities and documented serious abuses.
That happened too.
And once a government institution has secretly crossed those lines, trust becomes harder to demand. It has to be earned.
But history requires discipline. Documented wrongdoing does not prove undocumented accusations. The fact that the CIA conducted MKULTRA doesn’t prove every mind-control theory. The fact that it helped overthrow governments doesn’t prove it controls every government. The fact that it plotted against Castro doesn’t prove it killed Kennedy.
The strongest case against blind trust in powerful institutions doesn’t require exaggeration.
The documents themselves are powerful enough.
THE SHADOW THAT NEVER COMPLETELY DISAPPEARS
The CIA was born from a reasonable fear: America never again wanted to be strategically blind while enemies prepared to strike. World War II demonstrated the enormous value of intelligence. The Cold War demonstrated the enormous temptation of covert power.
Somewhere between those two realities, an agency created to discover secrets became extraordinarily skilled at keeping its own.
Perhaps that is why the CIA continues to fascinate and disturb people nearly eighty years after its creation. Its history contains genuine courage and genuine wrongdoing, intelligence victories and catastrophic failures, patriots who served their country and operations that violated the values that country claimed to defend.
When it comes to the CIA—and especially mysteries such as JFK—the responsible position isn’t to believe everything.
And it isn’t to dismiss everything.
Read the documents.
Separate what is proven from what is suspected.
Question extraordinary claims.
But question powerful institutions too.
Because history has already taught us something important:
Sometimes the truth was classified.