I know the US Intelligence Community is more than the CIA, but it's been fascinating to read in CIA-veteran Douglas London's "The Recruiter" about how the CIA m

I know the US Intelligence Community is more than the CIA, but it's been fascinating to read in CIA-veteran Douglas London's "The Recruiter" about how the CIA marketed its "seductive" covert action capabilities after 9/11 and became less about intelligence collection: "[after the debacle of 9/11's intelligence failures], the CIA fundamentally changed its core mission, values, and culture: a metamorphosis designed to earn White House approval and guard itself from the encroachments of the Department of Defense and the FBI, agencies seen as threats that might steal its turf and authorities, and perhaps swallow the CIA whole. A slippery slope of compromises, facelifts, and revised narratives justifying a unique set of capabilities and authorities undertaken to preserve the Agency would instead leave it barely recognizable for the institution it was meant to be. Established in 1947 as a small, elite, independent, civilian, and nonpartisan foreign intelligence service, the CIA's charter was intelligence collection, analysis, and covert action. Freeing the CIA from association with defense, law enforcement, and diplomacy theoretically protected it from grading its own homework as a policy maker, as was the case for the Pentagon, the Department of Justice, and the Department of State. Small, under the radar, and relatively chaste from the political pressures of its larger counterparts, the CIA was intended to speak truth to power.... That was the mindset of the CIA I joined in 1984. Today, the CIA must choose whether to be the elite spy service it was intended, or continue the Agency's post-9/11 leadership's ill-fated path of compromise." (emphasis mine) ---- > an intelligence branch whose remit is just to gather info and do analysis on issues of geopolitical and security importance -- and _not_ to execute on any particular administration goals ... I think this is what the CIA was meant to be and started out as. But in its struggle for survival after 9/11, it reinvented itself as a far more political entity.