Central Intelligence Agency

The Central Intelligence Agency traces its authority to the National Security Act of 1947, which President Harry Truman signed on 26 July 1947 to reorganize the United States' military and intelligence establishment for the emerging Cold War. The Act formally replaced the Central Intelligence Group, a temporary body created in January 1946 out of the disbanded wartime Office of Strategic Services, with a permanent, statutorily independent civilian agency charged with coordinating the government's intelligence activities and briefing senior officials, and most of its provisions took effect on 18 September 1947.

Unlike the military intelligence services it was meant to coordinate, the CIA was designed to sit outside the Department of Defense, reporting through the National Security Council directly to the President, a structure meant to prevent any single service branch from controlling the nation's central intelligence estimates. Over its subsequent history the Agency built an extensive apparatus for espionage, covert action and analysis, and during the Cold War its research arms periodically explored unconventional and speculative methods of intelligence collection alongside conventional human and technical programs, a pattern that eventually included funding contract research into claimed psychic abilities.

From 1972 the CIA provided funding to the Stanford Research Institute for experiments in what its researchers termed remote viewing, an attempt to describe distant or hidden locations through purported extrasensory means, motivated by concern that the Soviet Union was pursuing parallel psychic research for espionage purposes. The program passed through several code names and organizational homes over the following two decades, eventually run jointly with the Defense Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Army under the umbrella that became publicly known, after declassification, as the Stargate Project, and involved sessions targeting Soviet military installations, hostage situations and other intelligence problems using psychics working at Fort Meade, Maryland.

In June 1995 the CIA's Office of Research and Development contracted the American Institutes for Research to conduct an independent evaluation, and the resulting report, principally authored by statistician Jessica Utts and psychologist Ray Hyman, reached a split verdict: Utts argued the statistical evidence for an anomalous effect was significant, while Hyman argued any effect was too small and inconsistent to explain, but both agreed the program had never produced clearly actionable intelligence. The CIA terminated its support that same year, and declassified documents released afterward showed the Agency found no case in which the program's results had meaningfully guided an actual intelligence operation.