I read an interesting book somewhere that pretty much debunked the universal myth of the omnipotent CIA with their devilish cunning manipulating the world with their evil trickery and instead pointed out that the CIA hardly achieved one damn thing that helped American interests anywhere on the planet.
They propped up the wrong governments, funneled billions of dollars to crooks and incompetents, utterly misread the situation on the ground, took at face value whatever BS their “allies” in their theater of action told them and never foresaw any of the world-changing events that occurred in the decades after their formation.
They assumed the Soviet Union would last indefinitely, indeed they described East Germany as the world’s ninth largest economy right up until the Wall fell, they didn’t anticipate the rise of Islamism, missed out on the warning signs prior to the Korean War, the Yom Kippur War and the first Gulf War, had no idea about what was going on in the Arab Spring, screwed up the Vietnam War magisterially, etc etc.
I guess if you think of them less as super-spies with James Bond like powers and think of them more as paper shufflers who have a nice cosy berth in the government it all becomes clearer.
We won the Cold War.
Yeah, they had some systemic weaknesses that really contributed to some major screw-ups. Like you say, they were a bureaucracy, so they were subject to the same problems as all bureaucracies, like middle managers pushing their own agendas without much restraint, and groupthink getting in the way of better ideas.
And their “allies” that you talk about, well a lot of them were the same types who turn out to be habitual police informants. Drug dealers, thieves, drug addicts, etc. At least the police know to take everything the informants say with a grain of salt, but I don’t think the CIA had that wariness built up.