CIA

The Central Intelligence Agency is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the United States federal government, tasked with gathering, processing, and analyzing national security information from around the world, primarily through the use of human intelligence. Its primary mission is to collect, analyze, evaluate, and disseminate foreign intelligence to assist the President and senior US government policymakers in making decisions relating to national security. This is a very complex process and involves a variety of steps.

Lawrence Houston, head counsel of the SSU, CIG, and, later CIA, was principal draftsman of the National Security Act of 1947, which dissolved the NIA and the CIG, and established both the National Security Counciland the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1949 Houston helped to draft the Central Intelligence Agency Act (Public law 81-110), which authorized the agency to use confidential fiscal and administrative procedures, and exempted it from most limitations on the use of Federal funds. It also exempted the CIA from having to disclose its "organization, functions, officials, titles, salaries, or numbers of personnel employed." It created the program "PL-110" to handle defectors and other "essential aliens" who fell outside normal immigration procedures. "'And you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free...'"""
 * Thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, the CIA released nearly 12 million documents. One set of documents revealed research on the possibility that "insane" people may be experiencing multiple "levels of reality" and their brains can't process this information, leading to mental instability.
 * The CIA secretly pumped funds into abstract-expressionists, such as Jackson Pollack and Mark Rothko, in an attempt to make American freedom and expression art popular in contrast to rigid Soviet art.
 * In a CIA program called "Operation Midnight Climax", prostitutes were enlisted by the CIA to lure men to 'safe houses' in San Francisco where they were administered LSD without their consent. CIA Agents would then watch them have sex with the prostitutes through 1-way mirrors.
 * Operation Northwoods is a plan that called for CIA to commit genuine acts of terrorism in U.S. cities and elsewhere. These acts of terrorism were to be blamed on Cuba in order to create public support for a war against that nation, which had recently become communist under Fidel Castro.