CIA for years dropped anti-communist agents into Eastern Europe where they were immediately captured and killed. The alcoholic CIA official responsible for giving the coordinates away was promoted to head of counter-intelligence.

They apparently also recklessly sent recruits in East Asia to their deaths in the exact same way. The officer responsible rose to be National Security aide to George H.W. Bush.

One time, the CIA supported some Chinese nationalists seeking to attack Mao from Burma. After some of them got killed, they stopped fighting, got married, and started an opium empire. Twenty years later, the CIA went back after them as part of the war on drugs.

This is all from Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes. US kept sending recruits to their death after the Korean War was over. President Rhee expelled the CIA after they "accidentally" almost killed him. Maybe that's why he survived while Ngo Dinh Diem did not?

The US tried to train a "Third Force" in China that would fight the communists. Echoes of Syria circa 2013. Imagine the hubris of not liking your allies and thinking that you, as an intelligence agency, can build a better armed forces from scratch on the other side of the planet.

One time, the US tried to take a bunch of lawyers and paralegals in East Germany and make them into a guerrilla fighting force. It ended up getting them all arrested. It also dropped supplies and recruits to a guerrilla movement in Poland that was a communist front.

CIA basically bought the entire leadership of Japan in the postwar era, ran candidates on a seat-by-seat basis. Given how the country turned out, has to be considered a success, although I suspect Japan would've been ok anyway.

Joseph McCarthy was the only real threat to the CIA from Congress. His allegations against the agency were true, so they ran a dirty campaign against him, which in the words of Allen Dulles "saved the republic."

CIA planned to foment unrest in the Middle East and blame Syria for it to justify an invasion, plus support Sunni extremists in region. The Syrians outsmarted the Americans, taking their money and foiling the plot. The US lied to the public about it.

In Iraq, the 1958 coup revealed the CIA was paying off the government. The US tried for five years to stage another coup, finally helping the Baathist come to power. Kim Roosevelt, the official responsible for Syria, Iraq, & Iran, then went to consult for an oil company.

The CIA was trying to overthrow the government of Indonesia for no apparent reason, ten years after supporting the country's independence. The American military attaché in the country, unaware of the plot, helped the government defeat the rebels.

We don't think of Vietnam as a regime change war, but things didn't start going really bad until we helped overthrow Diem in 1963. Killing your enemies is one thing, American Exceptionalism means killing your friends too.

Pretty crazy to think that the entire ground war in Vietnam was based on sailors firing on their own shadows and a mistranslation, a fact that the government hid for forty years.

CIA put the Dalai Lama on the payroll and armed the Tibetans against Mao's China. Nixon put an end to this, then Kissinger bonded with Zhou Enlai over how incompetent and worthless the CIA was.

Neo-cons have been cooking intelligence to justify military aggression for a lot longer than you might think.

US built a Haitian intelligence service that did nothing but destroy its enemies and sell cocaine. They then decided to overthrow their own agents.