CIA

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is a civilian intelligence agency of the United States government. Its primary function is collecting and analyzing information about foreign governments, corporations, and persons in order to advise public policymakers. There is speculation that the organization has 100,000 employees around the world but the information is classified.
Prior to December 2004, the CIA was literally the central intelligence organization for the US government. The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 created the office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), who took over some of the government and intelligence community(IC)-wide function that had previously been under the CIA. Among those functions were the preparation of estimates reflecting the consolidated opinion of the 16 IC agencies, and preparation of briefings for the President. When discussing the CIA, it is critical to understand when one is speaking of the older IC-wide responsibilities, or its present set of responsibilities.
The CIA both collects and analyzes intelligence and is part of the U.S. Intelligence Community, led by the DNI, who manages the Community. The CIA's headquarters is in the community of Langley in the McLean CDP of Fairfax County, Virginia, a few miles west of Washington, D.C. along the Potomac River.
The role and functions of the CIA are roughly equivalent to those of the United Kingdom's Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS), the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki (SVR) and Israel's Mossad.
The CIA is sometimes referred to euphemistically in government and military parlance as Other Government Agencies (or OGA), particularly when its operations in a particular area are an open secret.[5][6] Other terms include The Company and The Agency.