Compare those items with candidates for success. For instance, the CIA failed to discover Sept 11th. Have they ever foiled, has anyone in the US who might work with the CIA every foiled such a large attack? No.
The same for other areas: Maybe the CIA predicted North Korea would have nukes when they did. That would give them a one in 3 (the others being Iran and Iraq) success rate at WMD intelligence.
Even with the "assume they got everything right that we don't KNOW they got wrong" level of credulity, they're not as good as flipping a coin...
There were idiots on YouTube already predicting the russian invasion back in autumn last year. You didn't have to be the CIA to see that it was going to happen as soon and the roads dried.
Yea, this one didn't take a genius. Anyone who mildly kept track of eastern European affairs and Russia knew something was about to happen as soon as Russia started moving large numbers of troops. I guess if we want to give the CIA a victory here, maybe we knew about the movements earlier because of the CIA, but the conclusion those movements came to didn't need a CIA agency to predict.
1. Knowing Russia would invade Ukraine - Success
2. Knowing Iraq had no WMD - Fail
3. Correctly predicting Iranian Nuclear progress/ambitions - Repeated fails
4. Knowing the USSR would collapse - Fail
5. Sept 11th - Mega fail
Compare those items with candidates for success. For instance, the CIA failed to discover Sept 11th. Have they ever foiled, has anyone in the US who might work with the CIA every foiled such a large attack? No.
The same for other areas: Maybe the CIA predicted North Korea would have nukes when they did. That would give them a one in 3 (the others being Iran and Iraq) success rate at WMD intelligence.
Even with the "assume they got everything right that we don't KNOW they got wrong" level of credulity, they're not as good as flipping a coin...