> did they act in your interest?

To address this, we have to reintroduce the complexity that I had omitted in my comment: there are other people besides me and the (figurative) person I was addressing.

I think the honest answer here is that yes, the CIA staff did what people wanted, likely in violation of what the law actually was, because they saw it as their duty to undertake such tasks when the public clamored that they needed safety from a dangerous world, everything else be damned.

One of the hardest and most interesting questions about government is how do we stop ourselves from making collective bad decisions on effectively a whim in a moment of weakness/fear/etc?