What makes you think the CIA isn’t subordinate to the rest of the government? And moreover, what does being subordinate to the government mean when that government is a dictatorship?

The CIA has literally invaded another country by lying and deceiving the entire executive branch. That's clear cut evidence they aren't practically subordinate to the rest of the government.

Dictatorships might not be elected, they still have structure and procedure. If the Chinese MSS obeys the Politburo and doesn't withhold information from them, then they are subordinate to the government.

> The CIA has literally invaded another country by lying and deceiving the entire executive branch.

When?

> Dictatorships might not be elected, they still have structure and procedure. If the Chinese MSS obeys the Politburo and doesn't withhold information from them, then they are subordinate to the government.

I think you vastly overestimate the efficiency of authoritarian bureaucracies. Much has been written about this, there is a strong taboo directly against sharing information because sharing the wrong information can have lethal consequences. Authoritarian governments are marred from top to bottom by problems caused by friction in sharing information, and subsequent Balkanization.

I'm talking about the Bay of Pigs invasion.

You can criticize the efficiency of authoritarian governments. That doesn't have much to do with their structure. Sure, the MSS may have some issues with command, though there is no evidence for them so far, but they are still subordinate to their hierarchy.

Besides, we're in 2021 now, data issues are a lot easier to audit in these situations.

Bay of Pigs was before the Church committee, do you know the history of intelligence reform in the 1970s?

As for authoritarian governments, and their intelligence agencies, it’s not so much about “efficiency” in a technocratic sense so much as it is that I see no reason to believe that the government is in full control of them. How would we know if they weren’t? Authoritarians project an image of total control that often papers over a reality of internal disorder and dysfunction. We know, for example, that there was at least a brief coverup of the COVID-19 pandemic in China, just recently, to say nothing of the more famous examples, like Chernobyl.

The temporary coverup of the pandemic was done by a local branch of the CCP. The coverup of Tchernobyl was done by the CPSU itself. The internal disorder was a matter of dealing with a bad situation more than antyhing else.

You would know if the CCP wasn't in control of the MSS or if the CPSU wasn't in control of the KGB if documents were leaking, if people were being assassinated, and so on. But as far as anyone can tell the opposite happened, and the Politburo got rid of Zhou Yongkang, the removal by Deng Xiaoping of Luo Qingchang, and so on, there is a clear pattern of heads of the MSS being removed and changed by the Politburo when they step out of line or don't follow the direction of the government, and so on.

This isn't unique to China, by the way. The French also keep a much tighter leach on their intelligence agencies, first by separating domestic activities from foreign activities, and then by putting them tightly in the control of the Ministry of the Interior for the first and the military for the second, affording them very little latitude.

The Church committee made a lot of things public, but as far as how things were done in the CIA there weren't much big changes. There are credible reports that the Church committee even covered up the worst of it, see the reporting by Carl Bernstein.

And we know that many things the Church committee supposedly addressed, such as direct involvement by the IC into domestic politics, did not actually stop.

> The internal disorder was a matter of dealing with a bad situation more than antyhing else.

This is questionable, but it’s clear at least that China’s eventual response was more successful than the US’s, so there is that. Whether we’ll ever know the true origins of the virus is a different question of course.

> You would know if the CCP wasn't in control of the MSS or if the CPSU wasn't in control of the KGB if documents were leaking, if people were being assassinated, and so on.

I asked mainly because the KGB seems to have functioned a bit like a shadow government and operated with a high degree of autonomy, another commenter mentions that Putin himself is ex-KGB.

> The Church committee made a lot of things public, but as far as how things were done in the CIA there weren't much big changes.

There was an executive order signed banning political assassinations, and all evidence suggests that there were significant changes after their accountability was made clear.

> And we know that many things the Church committee supposedly addressed, such as direct involvement by the IC into domestic politics, did not actually stop.

[citation needed]

I have no particular affinity for the CIA. I am particularly disgusted by COINTELPRO, regime change efforts, and CIA’s use of torture during the Iraq war. I think it would make a lot of sense to split the covert operations and intelligence-gathering parts of the organization, but these reforms do not interest most politicians. However, I think one is hard pressed to prove that the situation with the CIA is substantially different from that of other intelligence agencies around the world, outside of the issues I mentioned. For one thing a lot of European intelligence agencies operate with even less transparency than the US IC (among them GCHQ, famously), so raising them up as a model gives me pause.

>I asked mainly because the KGB seems to have functioned a bit like a shadow government and operated with a high degree of autonomy, another commenter mentions that Putin himself is ex-KGB.

Putin is KGB, yes, but he was only able to get power after the KGB dissolved, did he not? The KGB attempted to influence Soviet policy, but they were largely unsuccessful, which is why both times they had to use force and failed. From all the declassified documents since the fall of the USSR I can't see any evidence of control of the rest of the CPSU from the KGB.

>There was an executive order signed banning political assassinations, and all evidence suggests that there were significant changes after their accountability was made clear.

Banning political assassinations is a good look, but we both know that's not going to do much at all.

>[citation needed]

>I have no particular affinity for the CIA. I am particularly disgusted by COINTELPRO, regime change efforts, and CIA’s use of torture during the Iraq war. I think it would make a lot of sense to split the covert operations and intelligence-gathering parts of the organization, but these reforms do not interest most politicians.

Well, we know that the IC still got involved into domestic politics. The FBI for example surveilled leadership of BLM in 2014 and later, and leaked documents from 2017 showed that the FBI targeted organizations based on ideology even if they were not engaging or planning to engage in anything remotely criminal, nowadays using the excuse of left-wing domestic terrorists to do so [https://theintercept.com/2019/10/22/terrorism-fbi-political-...] [https://theintercept.com/2018/03/19/black-lives-matter-fbi-s...]

Many European intelligence agencies are as bad or even worse than the CIA, agreed. I was talking about the specific example of France, which still is not perfect, but is much better.

> FSB are pretty solidly subordinate to the rest of their government.

A strange statement. Putin was put in power by it.

If I were Yelzin, I would've ordered firing squads for every KGB officer above a major.

>"If I were Yelzin, I would've ordered firing squads for every KGB officer above a major.

And if you were Biden would you for example order the same for any government employee who puts/keeps/prevents release of an innocent person in jail?

Putin wasn't put in power by the FSB. He was put in power by the oligarchs. Certainly during the unstable period between 1991 and 2006 more or less the FSB had considerable influence however, but that has since been resolved. Beforethen the KGB was not afforded much lattitude. The only time I can think of where the KGB attempted to go against the wishes of the government above them was in 1964, but even then they needed support from within the Politburo and still failed miserably.

Yeltsin had no choice but to collaborate with the KGB if he wanted them to execute his machinations. The rogue elements from the KGB were the reason why Yeltsin was in power to begin with. Without the KGB he would never have been able to illegally arrest Gorbachev and execute a coup.

> Without the KGB he would never have been able to illegally arrest Gorbachev and execute a coup.

I read many books on events 1990-1993. Even the two soldiers who were guarding the door when Yelzin was arresting his cabinet were hand picked through a very tight network of loyalists in the most extreme secrecy.

They had an order "see anybody resembling KGB? Fire at will"

It's a grandiose conspiracy theory of CPSU holdouts that "KGB subverted the Union!" I will believe more that Trump Donald was a communist spy, than KGB nibbling at hand that fed, and protected it from decimation at the hands everybody wanting to return the favour.

By 1991 a good portion of the CPSU had become ideologically aligned with Yeltsin. KGB officials saw the writing on the wall, and saved his ass.

He knew this very well. If he directly went against the part of the KGB that supported him he would die.

And yes, the KGB subverted the Soviet Union by removing Gorbachev. This is obvious to anyone that has any understanding of history. Removing Gorbachev could not have been anything less.

So yes, I will persist, the only reason why Yeltsin was able to gain power is because a significant faction of the KGB supported him - though not at the very highest level - while the leadership was against Gorbachev. That is to say, thanks to the KGB.