Don't get me wrong... I'm sure the operations side has done many heroic things, very few of which we can ever know about.
But the analysis side has been a one-way street since the early '60's. Their analytical take on everything has been "the west is doomed, collectivist economies are going to bury us."
It was CIA advice that led to the "escalation" in Vietnam. The right thing to do (hindsight, sure, but still true) would have been to let them go. You want to turn your country into a communist paradise? Knock yourself out! In a few years the whole excrement-pile collapses, and we come in and pick up the pieces.
But Nooooo.... The Ivy-Leaguers at CIA saw the tide of history turning against us. The White House said "not on our watch," and it was off-to-the-races time.
They undermined Nixon. They undermined Reagan. I don't know about Bush '41 (he was one of them, after all). But they undermined Bush 43 relentlessly, Wilson/Plame being only the most open example.
They've been wrong so many times about so many things it's not even funny.
There was a line in one of William F. Buckley's "Blackford Oakes" novels, in which one of the characters said "you could tell it was a CIA operation; everyone in the room was killed except the intended target."
This sounds like empty, mean-spirited rhetoric, until you remember that Buckley was a CIA undercover agent in Mexico in the early 1950's.
The effete nancy-boys on CIA's analytical side have been helping the left since Kennedy's time.
Whoever it was who said "organizations tend to become more liberal over time, unless they are explicitly conservative" was probably thinking of the CIA.
From what I have heard, the operatives are apolitical, they know what lies out there and they truly work to keep us safe. The bureaucrats on the other hand, it’s like 2 separate entities.