3. Central Intelligence Agency – CIA
Country: United States of America
The Central Intelligence Agency was founded in 1947. It inherited the task of foreign intelligence gathering from several wartime agencies established in World War II, like the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), National Intelligence Authority, and Central Intelligence Group (CIG). However, it soon outgrew that task and from simple intelligence gathering and analysis, it became a fully-fledged covert action agency. The list of paramilitary operations, assassinations, and other actions taken by the CIA may never be fully disclosed to the public, but the actions that the agency received the most flak were the ones performed on domestic soil, in opposition to its founding act. Perhaps the most infamous were Watergate and Nixon’s Plumbers.
