As the CIA celebrates its 50th birthday this week with a secret party, the agency faces an uncertain future. With no Cold War to fight, there is a search for new enemies. Old ones, such as President Fidel Castro of Cuba and Col Moammar Gadafy of Libya, are still going strong in spite of CIA efforts to "terminate them with extreme prejudice", the euphemism for assassination. For the CIA's 50th anniversary celebrations at its Langley headquarters across the river from Washington, President Clinton unveiled an exhibition of Cold War nostalgia - including a Soviet lipstick pistol, a tobacco pipe that shoots bullets and a tie with a map in the lining.
The latest CIA agents will include computer nerds trying to disrupt money transfers between suspected Arab terrorists and business executives arranging for oil exports from Iraq and Libya to be "watered" to provoke customer dissatisfaction.
The new head of the CIA, Mr George J. Tenet, has ordered that intelligence gathering and not the covert action beloved of the thriller writers is to be the agency's main task. He has told Congress that thanks to his agents infiltrating terrorist groups, two planned attacks in the past seven months against unnamed US embassies have been prevented.
Mr Tenet, incidentally, was not Mr Clinton's first choice to head the CIA. The President favoured Mr Anthony Lake, Director of the National Security Council. However, Mr Lake withdrew his name with some bitterness following hostile questioning from the Congressional committee which had to approve his nomination.
The CIA has not been getting a good press in recent times and its role has been questioned in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. As David Wise, a historian of the CIA, wrote this week: "The agency is struggling with a mid-life crisis. Our James Bonds have developed paunches and like a lot of older folks, they tend to dwell on the good old days and glide around the irksome question of whether the agency has much to do now that its main adversary has left the stage."
Mr Tenet, who had been the energetic number two in the CIA until his promotion following the Lake experience, believes that there is plenty of work to be done in the areas of nuclear proliferation, terrorism, drug trafficking and international organised crime.
The agency claims that eight times in the past four years it helped in the capture of foreign terrorists to be tried in the US. One operation which has been of special pride was the seizure last June in Pakistan of Mr Mir Aimal Kansai, now on trial in Virginia for the shooting at the entrance of CIA headquarters in January 1993 which killed two officers and wounded three.
With a budget of $3 billion and 17,000 employees, the CIA is refocusing its activities. Fewer analysts and agents speak Russian and more know Arabic.
A series of reports on CIA activities in Central America is expected to be released later this year which may attract criticism. But one report will probably clear the CIA of the charges that it helped introduce crack cocaine into African-American ghettoes in Los Angeles in the 1980s by funding Nicaraguan Contras who were also drug traffickers.
The CIA was set up by President Truman in 1947 to co-ordinate the intelligence activities of numerous branches of the armed services. It replaced the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS) which operated behind enemy lines during the second World War.
Among the CIA's "successes" in its early period were the overthrow of governments in Iran and Guatemala. But the Bay of Pigs debacle in 1961, when the CIA backed an attempted invasion of Cuba by exiles, did great damage to the agency's reputation and led to the resignation of its director, Allen Dulles.
Under President Reagan's anticommunist policy, the CIA had an enhanced role but was again in trouble over the Iran-Contra scandal. It was later revealed that in 1985 a senior CIA counter-intelligence expert, Aldrich Ames, had been selling secrets to the Soviets for nine years. He is said to have undermined more than 100 CIA operations.
The CIA says it helped precipitate the communist collapse in Europe by its efforts in Afghanistan. These led to the withdrawal of the Soviet army and thus exposed its vulnerability. President Clinton praised the CIA for its intelligence gathering in relation to Bosnia and the North Korean nuclear programme and for helping in the rounding up of "every top drug lord of the Colombian Cali cartel".
The new CIA is polishing its 50year-old image by a World Wide Web site and is ready to follow the example of the FBI and start "co-operating with Hollywood producers".