Then, of course, there’s Operation Gold. 
“Pinky, are you pondering what I’m pondering?”
“I think so, Brain, but if we covered the world in salad dressing wouldn’t the aspargus feel left out?”
Stranger
This may or may not be positive, depending on your viewpoint, but at least it was successful: The 1954 overthrow of the Guatamalan government.
Those who argue that we can’t or won’t ever hear about the successes are mostly right. That said, the failures are really obvious.
It’s useful to differentiate between successes or failures of intelligence analysis, and successes or failures of “covert” operations. We’ll never hear about the successes of intelligence analysis, but I suspect that the CIA’s work in Berlin in the 50’s and 60’s was probably pretty remarkable. As for operational successes, the only one I know that has gotten semi-public acknowledgment is the Italian elections in the early 50’s when the Italian Communist Party could have come to power. With the CIA’s funding, the non-communist parties managed to put together a coalition government. Now, it’s clear that the Italian Communist Party was never Stalinist or a lackey of Moscow, but had it won, and governed well, Europe as we know it today would not exist.
I’m pretty sure you don’t have a problem in general with Muslims having access to medicines, so would you mind expanding on why you’re not convinced that impeding their ability to obtain them was a horrible mistake?
I don’t know who leaked what, but I definitely learned that our gov’t was waterboarding before Obama was president.
An d I would suspect the USSR was giving generous donations to the Italian Communist Party so the result was/ is probably even more sweet for them.
I would add Charlie Wilson’s Warto that list as well.
Balderdash. Nearly all of the CIA operations in Germany in that era were partially or completely compromised by information shared with the Cousins at Box 850, and from there delivered to the Soviets via the Cambridge Five (mostly Philby). The discovery of Philby’s defection resulted in the CIA “cleaning house” in such an aggressive fashion as to undermine intelligence gathering operations for years; see the above reference to Jesus James Angleton (fictionalized in Robert DeNiro’s The Good Shepherd). Again, look up “Operation Gold” for an example of the kind of intelligence ‘successes’ the CIA enjoyed in Eastern and Central Europe during the Cold War
Let’s talk about some of the other ‘successes’ of the CIA in the 'Fifties and 'Sixties, like their evaluation to President Kennedy that there were no warheads on the ground preceding the Cuban Missile Crisis, which gave Kennedy a pair of pocket jacks to play on a blockade and threatened invasion. Oh, wait…there were actually tactical nuclear warheads on the ground and any invasion force would have been incinerated. Good work, fellas! Or we can talk of CIA estimates of Sino-Soviet cooperation, which were badly off the mark as any student of Russian and Chinese history and culture could have said. There were divergent opinions within the CIA on this, but the best show in terms of giving attention-grabbing SNIEs was to talk up the Communist menace, and so like any bureaucracy the CIA went with the best story for getting more funding.
On the other hand, in this time period the KGB pulled off some brilliant counterintelligence and disinformation coups, including their discovery and use of Operation Gold, their support to Lin Biao and the military purges that followed his death that helped undermine Mao, and possibly the disinformation placement of Anatoliy Golitsyn, who provided ‘chicken feed’ but increased Angleton’s paranoia about KGB infiltration of the CIA and FBI counterintelligence ranks.
Stranger
I think the overthrow of the Guatamalan government qualifies as a “success”. As opposed to the overthrow of the Iranian government in the 1950s or arming the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan to repel the Soviets, it didn’t have any long term consequences for the U.S., though it might have indirectly led to the deaths of thousands of innocent Guatamalans. Any role the CIA played in spotting Soviet missiles in Cuba also qualifies as a success as could any role they played in hastening the fall of the Berlin wall or any Communist government in Eastern Europe.
Offhand, I’ve only got one. Removing the democratic government in Iran & installing Reza Pahlavi as Shah.
A success in that it achieved its objective. I don’t agree with it, but it was a brilliant success.
The later attempt to install Lon Nol in Cambodia, otoh, did not go well.
There is that old saying that “He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind”
IMO in Iran and in many other nations it has to be changed to:
He that troubleth his neighbors house shall inherit the blow back.
Fair enough. I was mainly thinking of something we could objectively evaluate which isn’t shrouded in secrecy and classified documents. Most of the successes and failures of the CIA can’t be fairly evaluated because we don’t know what they knew, when they knew it, what they should have known, what they did, when they did it, etc.
Yes, if the Factbook were all they produced, they’d be a huge waste. Odds are they’re pretty wasteful, but on most fronts we don’t have the information to tell.
Enjoy,
Steven
Hers a few for ya:
- the “Bay of Pigs” invasion; a total disaster, resulted in solidifying the Castro regime. Planned by idiots-the landing site was a beach in front of a swamp-easy to defend, impossible to invade. of course, president Kennedy’s refusal to order US navy air support sealed these poor fool’s fate.
- Vietnam: totally misunderstood the North Vietnamese nationalists-resulted in over 60,000 US dead, hunderds of thousands of vietnamese…and cost over $200 billion. net result: a weakened USA, bankrupt moral authority.
- Bin laden/al quedah: despite over $1 trillion spent, we have not destroyed al Quedah-we are now trapped in a vietnam-style war. after 8 years, no sense of any progress.
yep, you can depend on the CIA to generate diplomatic and social disasters-nad these people are said to be “bright”?
Well, nobody’s been able to prove they offed JFK, so they won that one. 
Seriously, some mysterious successful thwarting of a few perceived grave threats isn’t enough for me to say they’re anything but a bunch of think-they-know-it-all-but-in-reality-are-just-a-bunch-of-right-wing goons. That’s why they can’t seem to recruit anyone but the usual whiteboys. Everybody knows they’re a fucking joke. They get busted doing wrong shit constantly; they’re really just not all that smart.
I can’t get behind the idea that “they have had successes, we just don’t know about them”. Yes, I’m sure there are some times when they are successful and we don’t learn about their success, but that’s not something you can simply assume.
Getting the Speaker of the House to call the CIA liars. Thereby revealing the herself to be the dumb, dishonest bitch she is.
At least it was considered a sort of success by the Thais. It’s mostly the older generation now, who remember that time, but Thailand has generally credited US involvement in Vietnam with slowing down the communist movement long enough to build up the infrastructure in our Northeast, which was into the 1980s a hotbed of communist activity. There were still areas you could not venture into safely even as recently as early that decade, because communist guerrillas ruled them. The domino theory was thought very real in the 1970s, and after seeing Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos fall – AND seeing what happened to the Lao royal family – Thailand was very fearful it could be next. The thinking goes that the government got its act together and started giving the locals up in the Northeast roads, electricity, medical centers, all those things, thus helping stem the tide. Older Thais are still thankful for the Vietnam War.