[jolux]

Bay of Pigs was before the Church committee, do you know the history of intelligence reform in the 1970s?

As for authoritarian governments, and their intelligence agencies, it’s not so much about “efficiency” in a technocratic sense so much as it is that I see no reason to believe that the government is in full control of them. How would we know if they weren’t? Authoritarians project an image of total control that often papers over a reality of internal disorder and dysfunction. We know, for example, that there was at least a brief coverup of the COVID-19 pandemic in China, just recently, to say nothing of the more famous examples, like Chernobyl.

[sudosysgen]

The temporary coverup of the pandemic was done by a local branch of the CCP. The coverup of Tchernobyl was done by the CPSU itself. The internal disorder was a matter of dealing with a bad situation more than antyhing else.

You would know if the CCP wasn't in control of the MSS or if the CPSU wasn't in control of the KGB if documents were leaking, if people were being assassinated, and so on. But as far as anyone can tell the opposite happened, and the Politburo got rid of Zhou Yongkang, the removal by Deng Xiaoping of Luo Qingchang, and so on, there is a clear pattern of heads of the MSS being removed and changed by the Politburo when they step out of line or don't follow the direction of the government, and so on.

This isn't unique to China, by the way. The French also keep a much tighter leach on their intelligence agencies, first by separating domestic activities from foreign activities, and then by putting them tightly in the control of the Ministry of the Interior for the first and the military for the second, affording them very little latitude.

The Church committee made a lot of things public, but as far as how things were done in the CIA there weren't much big changes. There are credible reports that the Church committee even covered up the worst of it, see the reporting by Carl Bernstein.

And we know that many things the Church committee supposedly addressed, such as direct involvement by the IC into domestic politics, did not actually stop.

[jolux]

> The internal disorder was a matter of dealing with a bad situation more than antyhing else.

This is questionable, but it’s clear at least that China’s eventual response was more successful than the US’s, so there is that. Whether we’ll ever know the true origins of the virus is a different question of course.

> You would know if the CCP wasn't in control of the MSS or if the CPSU wasn't in control of the KGB if documents were leaking, if people were being assassinated, and so on.

I asked mainly because the KGB seems to have functioned a bit like a shadow government and operated with a high degree of autonomy, another commenter mentions that Putin himself is ex-KGB.

> The Church committee made a lot of things public, but as far as how things were done in the CIA there weren't much big changes.

There was an executive order signed banning political assassinations, and all evidence suggests that there were significant changes after their accountability was made clear.

> And we know that many things the Church committee supposedly addressed, such as direct involvement by the IC into domestic politics, did not actually stop.

[citation needed]

I have no particular affinity for the CIA. I am particularly disgusted by COINTELPRO, regime change efforts, and CIA’s use of torture during the Iraq war. I think it would make a lot of sense to split the covert operations and intelligence-gathering parts of the organization, but these reforms do not interest most politicians. However, I think one is hard pressed to prove that the situation with the CIA is substantially different from that of other intelligence agencies around the world, outside of the issues I mentioned. For one thing a lot of European intelligence agencies operate with even less transparency than the US IC (among them GCHQ, famously), so raising them up as a model gives me pause.

[sudosysgen]

>I asked mainly because the KGB seems to have functioned a bit like a shadow government and operated with a high degree of autonomy, another commenter mentions that Putin himself is ex-KGB.

Putin is KGB, yes, but he was only able to get power after the KGB dissolved, did he not? The KGB attempted to influence Soviet policy, but they were largely unsuccessful, which is why both times they had to use force and failed. From all the declassified documents since the fall of the USSR I can't see any evidence of control of the rest of the CPSU from the KGB.

>There was an executive order signed banning political assassinations, and all evidence suggests that there were significant changes after their accountability was made clear.

Banning political assassinations is a good look, but we both know that's not going to do much at all.

>[citation needed]

>I have no particular affinity for the CIA. I am particularly disgusted by COINTELPRO, regime change efforts, and CIA’s use of torture during the Iraq war. I think it would make a lot of sense to split the covert operations and intelligence-gathering parts of the organization, but these reforms do not interest most politicians.

Well, we know that the IC still got involved into domestic politics. The FBI for example surveilled leadership of BLM in 2014 and later, and leaked documents from 2017 showed that the FBI targeted organizations based on ideology even if they were not engaging or planning to engage in anything remotely criminal, nowadays using the excuse of left-wing domestic terrorists to do so [https://theintercept.com/2019/10/22/terrorism-fbi-political-...] [https://theintercept.com/2018/03/19/black-lives-matter-fbi-s...]

Many European intelligence agencies are as bad or even worse than the CIA, agreed. I was talking about the specific example of France, which still is not perfect, but is much better.