| >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. |