Take a Peek Inside CIA's Directorate of Operations

From glittering capitals to dangerous locations, CIA operations officers are at work right now, across the globe, uncovering the information needed to keep Americans safe.

While many fictional films, TV shows, and books have been written about the history of spies and spying, most are wildly fantastical and bear little resemblance to the actual work of gathering human intelligence.

That’s why we are pulling back the curtain to let you take a peek at what is probably the most well-known, but often misunderstood, directorate at CIA: the Directorate of Operations.

The World’s Second Oldest Profession

Spying, some say, is the world’s second oldest profession. At CIA, we’ve been perfecting the art and craft of intelligence gathering since our founding in 1947.

At our core, the Agency is first and foremost an espionage organization engaged in the collection and analysis of foreign intelligence. We always have been. Key to that mission is the collection of human intelligence—or HUMINT, in intel lingo.

In the simplest terms, HUMINT is intelligence collected by human beings—by spies operating on the ground—as opposed to intelligence gathered through technical means, like a satellite or a microphone.

Collecting human intelligence demands courage, discipline, guile, and wit. It is and always will be a very risky yet essential business. Often, it is the only way to get the information and insight our government needs to safeguard our country.

Technical forms of intelligence, such as overhead imagery, can tell you a lot about things that are large or hard to hide, such as the size of a nation’s army or whether a country is testing a new missile system. But they are not always well-suited to telling you what a government plans to do with those things.

Likewise, communications can reveal what someone has said or written, but the topics may be irrelevant, or the communications impossibly difficult to comprehend, without knowing the context.

Paraphrasing former CIA Director Richard Helms, gadgets cannot divine a person’s intentions.

On a recent episode of our podcast, The Langley Files, CIA’s Chief Spymaster, the Deputy Director for Operations, explained the importance of HUMINT this way: “The secrets often lie in plans and intentions, the mood, and the context. When we talk about human intelligence, it really is the collection of everything that goes into how our adversaries are thinking, acting, and the context in which those decisions are being made.”

Even with all the technological advances of the 21st century, there are still some secrets that exist only in people's minds.

To successfully collect HUMINT, you need a collection of operations officers with diverse backgrounds and skillsets. In any mission you may have: case officers who recruit foreign assets; targeting officers who are experts at pulling key information from vast pools of data; language officers with deep cultural and linguistic expertise; collection management officers who figure out what information we should be seeking, what questions we need to ask, and what to do with the intelligence once we collect it; and staff operations officers who provide strategic guidance and operational case and program management.

Espionage, in other words, is a team sport.

The Evolution of the Directorate of Operations

Collecting the secrets only HUMINT can reveal is the purview of CIA’s Directorate of Operations. The DO, which reports to the Director of CIA, is responsible for the Agency’s human source collection, covert action, and counterintelligence activities and for coordinating and deconflicting HUMINT operations across the U.S. Intelligence Community.

Interestingly, the DO wasn’t always known as the DO. Throughout CIA’s history, the DO has any many names and iterations:

The DO’s lineage, however, goes back before CIA’s creation, tracing its ancestry to the Agency’s World War II predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). As part of its mission, the OSS included espionage, counterintelligence, and covert action elements known as Secret Intelligence, X-2, Secret Operations, and Morale Operations. (To learn more about OSS’s history, including Secret Operations, X-2, and Morale Operations, see CSI’s publication: The Office of Strategic Services: America's First Intelligence Agency).

After the OSS was dismantled in 1945, according to our Historians, paramilitary and propaganda capabilities were abolished, and the espionage and counterintelligence branches merged into what was known as the Strategic Services Unit (SSU) under the War Department. In 1946, President Harry Truman created the Central Intelligence Group (CIG) as a civilian intelligence entity. It soon acquired the SSU’s clandestine responsibilities and placed them in the Office of Special Operations (OSO).

When the National Security Act of 1947 created CIA in September of that year, OSO continued under the new Agency. Within weeks of CIA’s establishment, a secret annex to National Security Council Directive No. 4 (NSC-4) gave the Agency authority to conduct covert action. The Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) was established as the executive agent for covert action programs planned and authorized by the National Security Council.

OPC drew on Agency resources but functioned under the direction of the Secretaries of State and Defense, and acted independent of, and often in competition with, OSO. The Korean War showed how irregular that relationship had become, so the Director of Central Intelligence, Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, ordered that they be placed in one organization. Between June 1951 and August 1952, OSO and the OPC merged and became the Deputy Directorate of Plans (DDP).

In 1973, DCI James Schlesinger renamed the DDP the Directorate of Operations (DO) and streamlined a top-heavy staff structure that increased compartmentation and competition over the years.

The DO was known as the DO for over 30 years, until 2005, when it was renamed the National Clandestine Service (NCS) to coincide with the creation of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004.

In 2015, DCIA John Brennan announced an Agency-wide “Modernization Initiative” to help CIA better meet the challenges of the 21^st century through increased agility and capabilities. Included in the modernization effort was rebranding the NCS back to the Directorate of Operations. This effort also saw the creation of new Mission Centers, which focus on regional and high-priority, cross-cutting issues and incorporate elements from all the directorates.

Looking Forward: The Role of HUMINT in a Technologically Driven World

Looking to the future, there is little doubt that HUMINT will continue to play a critical role in revealing the plans, motivations, intentions, and capabilities of an increasingly diverse array of state and non-state adversaries. Indeed, the importance of HUMINT in our overall intelligence collection efforts is only likely to grow—as are the challenges.

CIA’s Deputy Director for Operations, during his interview on The Langley Files, outlined some of the challenges already facing DO officers and missions today in an era of rapidly developing technologies. “The challenges of ubiquitous technical surveillance—our adversaries having the capability to track the activities of their citizens—have made it increasingly difficult to conduct espionage in the manner in which it used to be done.” Things like facial recognition, artificial intelligence, and digital dust—the artifacts everyone leaves whenever they’re browsing the internet or using their mobile phones—also make conducting clandestine operations even more difficult.

Does this mean we’re about to see the end of the world's second oldest profession? Not likely. Just as the DO continues to evolve, so too will the tradecraft that allows our officers to collect human intelligence.

New efforts like our Telegram channel and CIA.gov on the Dark Web allows individuals in countries who have no access to other social media or independent media to reach out to CIA safely and securely. CIA's inaugural post on Telegram, for example, included a video in Russian to encourage courageous Russians to share information safely with the Agency. As the world evolves, so do CIA’s tactics, tradecraft, and talent.

“I would say with incredible confidence that the skill, expertise, innovation, and creativity of our officers is breathtaking,” said CIA’s Chief Spymaster. “And the young officers that are joining the CIA are blessed with incredible intellectual curiosity and the technical acumen that's going to allow us to prevail into the future.”