> The internal disorder was a matter of dealing with a bad situation more than antyhing else.
This is questionable, but it’s clear at least that China’s eventual response was more successful than the US’s, so there is that. Whether we’ll ever know the true origins of the virus is a different question of course.
> You would know if the CCP wasn't in control of the MSS or if the CPSU wasn't in control of the KGB if documents were leaking, if people were being assassinated, and so on.
I asked mainly because the KGB seems to have functioned a bit like a shadow government and operated with a high degree of autonomy, another commenter mentions that Putin himself is ex-KGB.
> The Church committee made a lot of things public, but as far as how things were done in the CIA there weren't much big changes.
There was an executive order signed banning political assassinations, and all evidence suggests that there were significant changes after their accountability was made clear.
> And we know that many things the Church committee supposedly addressed, such as direct involvement by the IC into domestic politics, did not actually stop.
[citation needed]
I have no particular affinity for the CIA. I am particularly disgusted by COINTELPRO, regime change efforts, and CIA’s use of torture during the Iraq war. I think it would make a lot of sense to split the covert operations and intelligence-gathering parts of the organization, but these reforms do not interest most politicians. However, I think one is hard pressed to prove that the situation with the CIA is substantially different from that of other intelligence agencies around the world, outside of the issues I mentioned. For one thing a lot of European intelligence agencies operate with even less transparency than the US IC (among them GCHQ, famously), so raising them up as a model gives me pause.