The Evolution of C.I.A. Domestic Influence Campaigns from 1947 to 2023

Abstract

Congress established the Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) in 1947 to serve the President in an advisory capacity. Tasked with providing foreign threat assessments to assist the executive in decision-making, the C.I.A. initially collected intelligence on adversaries with no authority to conduct operations on American soil. Today, however, the Agency has hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers, a monthly podcast, and a virtual history museum. It is a publishing house for academic journals, books, and news organizations. Understanding how the clandestine Agency developed public-facing operations over the past seventy-five years requires analyzing the C.I.A.'s evolution. As such, the paper begins by examining the C.I.A. from its creation to its public exposure in the late 1960s. It then considers the congressional hearings that forced the Agency to change its operations. The third section highlights how the Agency worked to produce its own historical content and worked to influence American movies, Television, and the Internet. At the same time, the conclusion considers the transition of a clandestine intelligence service to a Congressionally approved propaganda machine actively shaping its image for the world to see.