What does the CIA stand for?

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is a principal foreign intelligence and counterintelligence service of the US government. The main task of the agency is to gather and analyze different security information from across the globe. The main tool used by the agency is human intelligence (HUMINT), which is the intelligence gathered by means of interpersonal contact.

The intelligence has been always gathered by the national government, but the CIA as a standalone organization was created only in 1947. Nowadays it is one of the most important members of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC). Before the CIA establishment, all the national intelligence efforts had been carried out by the FBI and the military forces of the country. The establishment of the agency brought a lot of changes and optimizations, as the previous process of gathering intelligence was suffering from incompleteness and inaccuracy.