Black Budget | The Entire History of the CIA

Every intelligence service keeps secrets. What sets the Central Intelligence Agency apart is that Congress wrote it a legal exemption from having to account for its own money. That exemption is the subject at the heart of this Black Budget CIA documentary, a long form history that runs from the agency’s creation in the aftermath of the Second World War through the covert operations, the human experimentation, the congressional reckonings and the modern controversies that followed. The film’s organizing insight is that unaccountable funding is not a side detail of the agency’s story. It is the enabling condition for everything else in it.

What the film sets out to cover

This is a chronological history rather than a single case study, and it is ambitious in scope. It begins with the wartime Office of Strategic Services, moves through the National Security Act of 1947 that formally created the CIA, and then works decade by decade through the operations that defined each era. Coups, proxy wars, domestic programs, congressional investigations, and the post 2001 expansion all get treatment.

What holds it together is the money. The film keeps returning to the mechanism that allows covert activity to happen at all, which is the ability to spend without the normal appropriations trail and without explaining the result to anyone outside a very small circle.

1947 and the money that answers to no one

The National Security Act of 1947 created the agency, but the more consequential legislation came two years later. The Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949 permitted the CIA to spend funds without regard to the provisions of law and regulation that govern the expenditure of government money, and to keep its personnel numbers and organizational details confidential. In practical terms it established that the agency could pay for things without documenting what it had bought.

The scale of this stayed hidden for a very long time. The aggregate United States intelligence budget was classified outright until 2007, when annual disclosure of the National Intelligence Program top line figure began. For roughly six decades, the public had no official figure at all for what it was spending on intelligence.

Covert action: Iran, Guatemala and Cuba

The early covert action record is now substantially declassified, which means the film is on solid documentary ground here. In 1953 the CIA worked with British intelligence to remove Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in the operation known as TPAJAX, following his nationalization of the country’s oil industry. The agency’s own role was formally acknowledged in documents released in 2013. The following year, in Guatemala, the operation known as PBSUCCESS removed President Jacobo Arbenz after his land reform program affected holdings of the United Fruit Company.

In April 1961 came the Bay of Pigs, the failed invasion of Cuba by a CIA trained exile force, which remains the agency’s most public operational disaster. Later, in Vietnam, the Phoenix Program conducted a campaign against the Viet Cong political infrastructure that generated lasting controversy over detention, interrogation and the treatment of suspects.

The pattern the film draws from these is consistent. Each operation was justified by an immediate Cold War necessity. Each produced consequences that outlasted the necessity by decades, and in several cases produced precisely the outcomes the operation was meant to prevent.

MKUltra, the Family Jewels and the reckoning

The domestic material is harder to watch and is thoroughly documented. MKUltra, beginning in 1953, was a program of research into behavioral modification that included administering LSD and other substances to subjects, in a number of cases without their knowledge or consent. In 1973 the agency’s director ordered the program’s records destroyed. The program only became publicly known because a cache of financial records had been filed separately, survived the destruction order, and surfaced in 1977, leading to Senate hearings.

That same period produced the Family Jewels, an internal compilation of activities the agency itself considered legally questionable, assembled in 1973 and declassified in full in 2007. The Church Committee and the Pike Committee investigations of 1975 and 1976 examined assassination plots against foreign leaders, domestic mail opening, surveillance of American citizens and the agency’s relationships with journalists and media organizations. The result was the permanent congressional intelligence oversight committees and the legal architecture that governs the agency today.

Why it is worth watching

The film’s final stretch deals with the modern agency, including the Iran Contra affair of the 1980s and the post 2001 program of rendition, secret detention sites and interrogation methods examined at length in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report whose executive summary was released in December 2014. This is where argument is most active. Defenders hold that the agency operates today under oversight that genuinely constrains it, that the worst documented abuses belong to an earlier era, and that a nation facing real adversaries requires clandestine capability. Critics respond that oversight of secret programs by a small number of briefed legislators is structurally weak, and that the pattern of disclosure arriving decades late is itself the evidence.

Watch this Black Budget CIA documentary for the breadth, and watch it with one question in mind throughout. Almost everything in the first half of this history became public only because of an accident, a leak, a burglary, a misfiled box of receipts or a committee that briefly had the will to look. That raises an obvious and uncomfortable question about the present, which is what is currently in the category of things not yet accidentally discovered.

This film was featured in the April 2026 Monthly Report and is part of the MUST WATCH Documentary Library, a curated collection of long form films and investigative media assembled to add depth, context and historical perspective to the themes explored throughout the Great Awakening Report.