Basically. The Soviets got a lot of double agents and moles through both ideological sympathizers and cynical opportunists they paid off to pass info to them, while the CIA pretty much just got the odd defector out for a payday (and the CIA usually set them up for life and shielded them from consequences for it) and had a functionally limitless budget to throw at high-tech engineering projects for surveillance. Apart from that, the CIA's foreign policy strategy of "find the absolute worst people in a country and throw truckloads of cash and guns at them in the hopes that it would turn the country into an exploitable or ignorable bloodbath" was fairly successful.
Didn't the Soviets also run fucking circles around the CIA or is that a leftist feel good factoid
Basically. The Soviets got a lot of double agents and moles through both ideological sympathizers and cynical opportunists they paid off to pass info to them, while the CIA pretty much just got the odd defector out for a payday (and the CIA usually set them up for life and shielded them from consequences for it) and had a functionally limitless budget to throw at high-tech engineering projects for surveillance. Apart from that, the CIA's foreign policy strategy of "find the absolute worst people in a country and throw truckloads of cash and guns at them in the hopes that it would turn the country into an exploitable or ignorable bloodbath" was fairly successful.
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