By outed, I mean the few good field agents were outed by the media while they were in country.
This put them and their family members in extreme danger and of course was the death sentence of anybody who worked with them in the country they were in.
Too true with regard to the outings by the press and by rogue authors.
But the Carter administration was also responsible for the gutting of the Ops Directorate - a lot of very experienced agents were cashiered at that time, apparently due to the Carter Administration’s distaste for covert ops. It was a genuine tragedy for America.