Painting a Picture?
Enemies Closer?
The Directorate of Operations (DO), less formally called the Clandestine Service,[1] is one of the smallest components of the US Central Intelligence Agency.[1]
It was known as the Directorate of Plans from 1951 to 1973; as the Directorate of Operations from 1973 to 2005; and as the National Clandestine Service (NCS) from 2005 to 2015.[2]
The DO "serves as the clandestine arm of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the national authority for the coordination, de-confliction, and evaluation of clandestine operations
across the Intelligence Community of the United States".[3]
Under previous policy (beginning as early as 2012),
the Deputy Director for Operations' identity was not officially disclosed.
Predecessors
The Directorate of Plans was originally conceived to solve organizational rivalry between the Office of Special Operations (OSO) and the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC).
There was operational overlap between the two CIA departments, even though OSO was focused on intelligence collection whereas OPC was more focused on covert action.[4]
DCI Walter Bedell Smith attempted to ameliorate the situation by appointing Allen Dulles on January 4, 1951, to the new position of Deputy Director for Plans (DDP)
where he would supervise the two entities. According to Anne Karalekas, a staffer of the Church Committee who wrote a history of the CIA, that was merely a cosmetic change,
and it was only in August 1, 1952 that OPC and OSO were properly merged to form the Directorate of Plans (DDP).[4] The Directorate of Plans used the abbreviation of its chief.[5]
According to John Prados, the name was intended to disguise the true function of the Directorate.[5]
The Directorate was the CIA branch that conducted covert operations and recruited foreign agents. DDP consisted of, among other subdivisions, a unit for political and economic
covert action (the Covert Action Staff), for paramilitary covert action (the Special Operations unit), for counterintelligence, and for several geographic desks responsible for
the collection of foreign intelligence. On March 1, 1973, DDP became the Directorate of Operations[6] and the director became known as the Deputy Director for Operations (DDO).
The Directorate also housed special groups for conducting counter-narcotics and counter-terrorism, for tracking nuclear proliferation, and other tasks.
Approval of clandestine and covert operations
Approval of clandestine and covert operations came from a variety of committees, although in the early days of quasi-autonomous offices and the early DDP,
there was more internal authority to approve operations.[7] After its creation in the Truman administration, the CIA was, initially, the financial manager for OPC and OSO,
authorized to handle "unvouchered funds" by National Security Council document 4-A of December 1947, the launching of peacetime covert action operations.
NSC 4-A made the Director of Central Intelligence responsible for psychological warfare, establishing at the same time the principle that covert action was an exclusively Executive Branch function.
So much moar at links discernment:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directorate_of_Operations_(CIA)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gina_Haspel