The Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA for short, is an agency that frequently appears often in the news and in history, but not many people look into the history of how the CIA came to be. Here, I am going to give a brief article that can explain how the CIA came to be in the first place and tell you what led to this clandestine group being the infamous organization it is today.
Back in World War II, there was a need for a covert intelligence agency in order to get information on what was going on in enemy nations, so the Office of Strategic Services (or OSS) was created. A man named William J. (“Wild Bill”) Donovan spurred President Roosevelt to create the OSS since, before it was established, information on enemy movements had to be collected from the State Department, the military, and the FBI in a very complicated & messy manner.
Then on September twentieth, 1945, President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9621 that dissolved the OSS on October 1st of that year and officially began the process to replace it with another intelligence agency. The National Security Act of 1947 was passed on September eighteenth and created the National Security Council, or the NSC for short, that would be in charge of a new organization known as the CIA. The NSC was composed of the Secretary of State, the Secretary of War, the Secretary of the Navy, and the Chief of Staff to the president of the United States. All of this led to the official founding of the CIA!