History of CIA

This is the Central Intelligence Agency's own published history of its own founding and institutional development, hosted on its official website. As an institutional self-account, it is a reliable source for the agency's own account of its organizational history and how it presents its own origins. Its limit is that it is written by the institution about itself rather than by an independent historian, so a claim touching on more contested episodes of the agency's history, including its historical involvement with religious or covert programs, is better supported by independent scholarly or journalistic investigation alongside this self-account.