There was a post that popped up on the askhistorians sub about the difference in Soviet and American intelligence operations, and despite the terminal liberal brainworms that you'd expect it did a good job of pointing out how the CIA was horribly incompetent in certain areas and just made up for it by functionally having limitless money to throw at problems and having unmatched access to material assets. They're terrible at actually building networks, but pretty good at waving giant piles of money around and screaming "hey fuckers whoever brings us shit we want gets set up for life" or just throwing money and guns at a conflict to escalate it.