What qualifies as a “success” is highly subjective; some of the operations that came off as planned at the time had some serious repercussions in terms of both the reputation and strategic goals of the United States. If I were going to cite three programs that were successful and positive bore fruit, I would point at the Big Bird" and “Key Hole” surveillance satellite programs, the U-2 and A-12 reconnaissance aircraft programs (the latter of which spawned the USAF’s SR-71 ‘Blackbird’), and the three cornered deal that delivered weapons via Operation Cycloneto the Afghan Mujaheddin which permitted effective resistance to the Soviet Army, dragging the Soviets into a strategic and political morass. (Of course, the latter has to be qualified by recent events, although that had more to do with the abandonment of Afghanistan once it served Western purposes.)
While it is a popular claim that the CIA wouldn’t publish their successes and emphasizes failures to make them appear ineffectual as subterfuge is not supported by the evidence. In fact, always a political agency, the CIA has been often all too willing to present information on successful operations to leaktastical Congressmembers and their staffs, often later to their regret. The CIA’s humint efforts and assessment of foreign governments or parties has often been an unqualified disaster. The notoriously paranoid counterintelligence operations chief Jesus James Angleton widely shared information with Kim Philby, and in the decade following Philby’s defection and the reveal of the Cambridge Five he nearly ripped the Operations Directorate of the CIA completely apart in apparently baseless molehunts. In regard to the three major military/strategic conflicts during the Cold War (Korea, Indochina, and the Soviet Union) CIA analysis, intelligence, and interpretation was consistently wrong, misleading, or indeterminate.
This is, of course, the standard problem for all intelligence organizations, but the CIA has a particularly bad record in this regard, and their failures in understanding the situation on the ground in Iran preceding and during the fall of the Shah puts the final nail in the coffin of any reputation for competence the CIA might have; while major foreign news organizations were predicting a fall of the Shah and rise of an Islamic fundamentalist government (the BBC called this almost to the day) the CIA was continuing to insist to Carter that all was well. The same occurred with Grenada.
The CIA is the typical American bureaucracy; bloated, politically motivated, full of stomachs and short on brains. The tailored intelligence about WMDs provided to the W. Bush Administration justifying the invasion of Iraq wasn’t an anomaly, but standard business. SecDef Robert McNamara actually recommended restructuring the CIA to place the intelligence gathering aspects under the Justice and State Departments, and the analysis and interpretation back to the military services, akin to the far more effective Defense Intelligence Agency clearinghouse. Johnson wouldn’t buy into this, however, and as a result we had the pointless “Secret Wars” in Laos and Cambodia that did nothing but further degrade America’s reputation and increase support for Communist insurgency.
The movie I’ve seen that best portrays the CIA is Burn After Reading, although The Good Shepherd probably comes close.
[indent]CIA Superior: What did we learn, Palmer?
CIA Officer: I don’t know, sir.
CIA Superior: I don’t fuckin’ know either. I guess we learned not to do it again.
CIA Officer: Yes, sir.
CIA Superior: I’m fucked if I know what we did.
CIA Officer: Yes, sir, it’s, uh, hard to say
CIA Superior: Jesus Fucking Christ. [/indent]
Stranger