What will become of the CIA?

CIA’s power and place in the intelligence community

• Some argue the CIA effectively “gates” much of the U.S. intelligence community (IC): controlling infrastructure, HUMINT, parts of SIGINT flow, and influencing NSA, NRO, and DIA via embedded leadership and networks.
• Others push back hard: NSA is a military org under DoD, NRO was created by the White House/Congress, and legally/organizationally the CIA does not fund or direct NSA/FBI/NRO.
• Post‑9/11 reforms and the creation of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) are cited as a major shift; some say ODNI now structurally leads the IC, others claim CIA and ODNI are effectively interchangeable “highside” and CIA still dominates in practice.

Oversight, secrecy, and “state within a state”

• Multiple comments frame CIA (and other services) as a quasi‑sovereign “state within a state” with its own agenda, black budgets, and the ability to spin off new secret entities when scrutiny grows.
• Others stress legal constraints, domestic jurisdiction of FBI/Homeland Security, and congressional authority to create/abolish agencies—but note Congress today rarely exercises robust oversight.
• Schumer’s remark about the IC having “six ways from Sunday to get back at you” is repeatedly cited as evidence of dangerous autonomy.

Foreign interventions and moral legitimacy

• Long subthreads recount U.S. involvement in coups and repression, especially in Latin America (Chile/Pinochet, Brazil, Bolivia, Operation Condor, Venezuela), and in Afghanistan; CIA is portrayed as a primary engine of global destabilization and blowback.
• Counterarguments: CIA often “rode along” with coups that had strong domestic and other foreign drivers; in the Cold War the choice was framed as “U.S.-aligned authoritarian vs USSR‑aligned authoritarian.”
• Intense disagreements over Eastern Europe and Ukraine: some see “color revolutions” as CIA operations; others call this an insult to genuine local demands for freedom and highlight CIA’s poor track record understanding the region.

Domestic politics, Trump, and constitutional questions

• The article’s framing of Trump as an “adversary” of the CIA alarms several commenters: if the agency opposes the elected Commander in Chief, whom is it serving?
• Replies split:
  • One camp fears an unaccountable security apparatus opposing elected authority.
  • Another insists officials swear to the Constitution, not a person; if a president undermines law or democracy, agencies should resist.
• Supreme Court decisions expanding presidential immunity and weakening some checks (e.g., nationwide injunctions) are cited as shifting power toward the presidency, complicating the “who stops an authoritarian president?” question.

Effectiveness, necessity, and abolition vs reform

• Critics list torture, black sites, lying to Congress, drug‑trade complicity, MK‑style programs, and 9/11 failure as reasons the agency is irredeemable; some argue abolishing it (and even all secret services) would improve the world.
• Others view intelligence services as a Nash equilibrium: you may hate them, but disarming while adversaries retain theirs is seen as suicidal. CIA is described as unusually capable, not uniquely evil.
• One thread distinguishes “pure intelligence” (e.g., accurately forecasting Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine) from covert action; some would keep the former but strip the latter.

Weiner’s books and the New Yorker review

• Readers of Tim Weiner’s earlier work say it powerfully catalogues CIA’s catastrophic failures but lacks sympathy and underplays structural context.
• A detailed CIA‑insider critique of “Legacy of Ashes” is linked; it accuses Weiner of selective quotation and distortion. Others dismiss this rebuttal as self‑interested since it’s by a CIA historian.
• Several commenters find the New Yorker review subtly pro‑CIA or timed to shape the narrative around current political fights (e.g., Trump–Russia, recent DNI document releases), though this is contested and largely speculative within the thread.