However, clandestine intelligence services also play an invaluable role in national security, and we only occasionally find out what they did right and what they did wrong. In 1975 the Church Committee investigated and published a report on improper activity which had a powerful effect on the intelligence agencies, and resulted in establishing new guidelines and regulations within them. As time goes by, such re-adjustments often lapse, or are gradually loosened internally, so it is necessary to constantly keep an eye on actions that are by definition very hard to scrutinize except by employees within the organizations that are willing to sacrifice their careers to alert the nation and Congress that they need to be reigned in.
That said, my point in the post above is that vague suggestions that something was "planned" should be taken with a grain of salt considering that numerous operations are discussed, and most of them never reach the planning stage for logistical, ethical, moral, or pragmatic reasons. One of the strengths of the American military and intelligence services is that people are encouraged to discuss their suggestions frankly in-house, no matter how out of the box they might be, but the vast majority of ideas or suggestions are very quickly dismissed once managers and agency legal services have had a chance to review them (if such a suggestion ever reaches the point where actual planning would begin).
In the interests of full disclosure, my father was a CIA officer, and my family lived in various countries (Cyprus, El Salvador, Venezuela, and Colombia) where he worked within the local embassy to monitor communications and local media for useful information about local politics. When I turned 18 as a high school student in Bogota, he sat me down and for the first time revealed his real occupation. His cover, as is often the case for an officer who not under deep cover, was that he was a foreign service officer.
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