The Central Intelligence Agency The Central Intelligence Agency has always interested me. It is always in the news, so I decided to do my term paper on it. I my research, I found many interesting things about the agency. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is an agency of the Executive Branch of the United States government. It was created by the National Security Act of 1947, which also unified the three military departments (the Army, Navy and Marines) under a secretary of defense (Enc. Americana). It replaced the National Intelligence Authority and the Central Intelligence Group (Key Events 1). Its purpose is to k