When one has infinite funding and no ethical oversight, the pit really is bottomless.
Combine that with amoral thinking about the cold war and "greater good" and it's understandable, yet reprehensible, that they dosed prisoners and johns in brothels.
And then they went to work every morning and played their part in monstrous endeavors that—on coming to light—make the rest of us question our faith in humanity.
I don't doubt that some people who wind up doing these things are legitimately sociopathic. But I also have a disturbing suspicion that many of them were probably normal, and bought into the idea that drugging and blackmailing some random person played a role in defending America. What matters more—some lowlife from the streets, or national security? Sacrifices have to be made, etc.
Pretty much every atrocity I know of—while spearheaded by evil people—relied heavily on the ability of normal, decent people to rationalize what they were doing.
If someone has a slightly more rigorous justification for the notion I would be happy to hear it.
While CIA certainly uses disinformation for a variety of reasons, this doesn’t obviate the fact that the agency has been — largely if not quite entirely in the past — a very, very amoral actor.