The world is a lot more boring than films and far more complicated and difficult to pull off serious operations. The serious operations often merely being inside information about other nation states. Not saving the world from bad guys.
It's mostly just a long series of super paranoid people chasing each other in circles. And in between plenty of useful information being given to leaders, ie before big events to give them an edge or whatnot.
The cold war was the heyday of the outside-the-office spycraft stuff. Today I'm sure it's mostly just countering massive digital campaigns hitting gov agencies, critical infrastructure, and megacorps. Plus the old school agents working within each of those agencies feeding information back to their motherlands.
I would expect that people that speak up are mostly dissatisfied and frustrated people.
And for opacity, one part of the org will likely not know about what is going on on the other side.
A big selection bias.
But who knows...
If you want insight as to why heroic interventions are a sign of failure, talk to your IT department and then scale that up to nation states.
At the same time, other heroic efforts may also require hard work to keep up with the competition or to clean up someone's mess.
That seems one of the reason they monitor what is going on and are vigilant: so they are more likely successful at preventing problems before they araise or become too big. Are not those the problems that require superheroic measures?
I am not naive, there are problems in big organizations.
To keep the movies methaphor, the biggest fears I have come from movie like Star Wars in which the empire turns to the dark side.
I have no idea what systems are in place to prevent things like this to happen. I hope they are VERY good.
My experience as software engineer teaches me that as things become more and more complex in a system the risk of a bug increase. And opacity is a double edge sword.
Even if you have a buggy system, you do not say "Let get rid of it" without talking about the alternatives. Other thing to consider is: "full rewrites are generally a bad idea".
I would like to open this to constructive suggestions but I am afraid that without an inside view we are just shouting the breeze.
>"Feel free to down vote me".
Feel free to down vote me.
I can only guess but I would not be surprised if your very life was saved. Or even if we just look at money, you may have lost a significant amount of what you have in a scam that was avoided.
We do not know what we do not know. But there must be more good than bad in what they do.