Was any intelligence agency of the era not incompetent? The GP's assertion of:

> I don't know if that makes him a trustworthy authority on intelligence analysis.

...only really applies if there is someone who is a "trustworthy authority on intelligence analysis."

If everyone is just flailing around, then we may as well listen to the experiences of a person who's been flailing around for the longest time. At least they've made a lot of mistakes you can learn from.

> The fact is that the CIA in that period was absolutely inept. It failed to build any significant intelligence networks in either the Soviet Union or China, mispredicted critical events such as China's entrance into the Korean War

I think that’s mostly because the CIA is focusing on analyzing what I believe is mostly meaningless information about its “adversaries” instead of doing their best to try and get the best information there is, even from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.

More to the point, I’m thinking about medieval Venice which I see as the “master of them all” when it comes to collecting meaningful intelligence. When they wanted to know if some other medieval entity was about to enter war against the Turks or not (the Turks had become their greatest foe) they were actually sending some Venice merchant (or at least that was his official guise) to actually live at the ruler’s court of that medieval entity and hear directly from that ruler’s mouth what his intentions were. Venice even had people in Istanbul itself which were often seen at the Sultan’s or the Grand Vizier’s court in order to try and understand what the Turks’ intentions were. Back to the CIA and China, they should have had their men at Mao’s “court” if they really had wanted to know his intentions. They didn’t because they probably couldn’t so that they tried instead to guess his intentions by over-analyzing what Mao and his people decided to publish through Chinese propaganda channels.

> any major operations have entered the public record by now.

Not even close to true. There are still Tibetan, Cuban, Southeast Asian, and South American ops that are still highly classified. A considerable number of nuclear-related operations are also unknown to the public.

As far as “Democratically elected leaders,” that is subject to debate given the breadth and depth of Soviet operations at the time, especially Department A of the First Chief Directorate. Even the Palestinian “situation” was primarily created with Soviet sponsorship to destabilize America’s chief ally in the region.

The history of CIA goes far beyond the sophomoric understanding of many of its detractors. Definitely not angels, but it’s a far more nuanced history, much of it untold.

Just to add, the US government didn’t trust Truman about Verona.

> mispredicted critical events such as China's entrance into the Korean War

That one may have been MacArthur's misunderstanding rather than the CIA.