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The Central Intelligence Agency is an organization which appears in the television series Leverage.
Background[]
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is a civilian intelligence agency of the United States government responsible for providing national security intelligence to senior United States policymakers. The CIA also engages in covert activities at the request of the President of the United States of America.
It is the successor of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) formed during World War II to coordinate espionage activities behind enemy lines for the branches of the United States military. The National Security Act of 1947 established the CIA, affording it "no police or law enforcement functions, either at home or abroad". One year later, this mandate was expanded to include "sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures...subversion [and] assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation movements, and support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world".
The CIA's primary function is to collect information about foreign governments, corporations, and individuals, and to advise public policymakers. The agency conducts covert operations and paramilitary actions, and exerts foreign political influence through its Special Activities Division. The CIA and its responsibilities changed markedly in 2004. Before December 2004, the CIA was the main intelligence organization of the US government; it coordinated and oversaw not only its own activities but also the activities of the US Intelligence Community (IC) as a whole. The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 created the office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), which took over some of the government and IC-wide functions. The DNI manages the IC and therefore the intelligence cycle. The functions that moved to the DNI included the preparation of estimates of the consolidated opinion of the 16 IC agencies, and the preparation of briefings for the President of the United States.