These quarrels were rooted in the deep political, social and personal animosities that split the CIA's founding generation. Riding the post-Vietnam/Watergate wave of U.S. politics, one CIA faction wrote the report to discredit and oust their bureaucratic rivals.

Because this faction succeeded, important changes took place in the CIA. Beginning in 1975, counterintelligence - which was principally quality control of operations - became the responsibility of those conducting the operations. Freed from independent scrutiny, CIA officers gullibly accepted more information than ever from "walk-in" sources and from foreign governments' intelligence services.

Since then, whenever we have had a intelligence windfall (e.g., access to the East German Stasi files after 1989) we have learned that all or nearly all CIA sources had been controlled by hostile services. In Iraq, in 2003, CIA sources reported watching as Saddam Hussein and sons entered a house with bunker; U.S. aircraft immediately demolished it. But there had never been any bunker, never mind Saddam. As usual, the CIA's agents were doubles.

It was also thanks to lack of independent counterintelligence that one Aldrich Ames was able to turn over to the KGB control of all U.S. human intelligence about the Soviet Union during during the 1980s.

Another change was that, after 1975, the CIA would never again make a serious effort radically to change a foreign situation in America's favor, as in 1953 Iran. Indeed, in the 1980s the CIA fought against congressional and White House attempts to help the Afghan resistance to the Soviet invasion and against enabling Nicaragua's Contras to depose the Communist Sandinistas.

And as CIA covert action became cheap tricks, the agency often focussed on altering U.S. policy: Recall its campaigns to convince the press that Saddam was innocent of terrorism and that Czech intelligence had never seen Mohammed Atta in Prague.

But the most consequential change of all was in personnel and attitude: In all fields and functions, the CIA became the leftmost influence on foreign policy within the executive branch.

Hence, it is ironic that among the documents to which today's CIA points with contrition are ones concerning the agreement between President Lyndon Johnson and then CIA chief Richard Helms, that the CIA would search out the links between foreign communists and Americans who were working to defeat the United States in Vietnam. Is it really improper, when foreign forces are killing Americans, to keep track of those Americans who espouse the killers' cause? After 1975, the CIA led the U.S. government in answering "Yes!"

That is why the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency together were the major lobby for the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which in practice exempted virtually anyone in the United States from intelligence wiretapping. That is why, together with the de-Hooverized FBI, the CIA built the well-known "wall" between foreign intelligence and domestic intelligence - the "wall" that shielded the 9/11 plotters on their way to mass murder.

In our time, as an all too significant percentage of persons in America sympathize with various Arab causes, what might be the argument for not seeking to find out how far those sympathies might incline them to abet murder? I'm sure that today's CIA didn't mean to raise the question of whether those it purged in 1975 might have had a point.

The main impression that the report gives, however, is not that the early CIA was largely a bunch of sorcerers' apprentices. Plots against Fidel Castro's life, involving pills in food and explosives in cigars, spilled ink not blood - because none of the bureaucrats involved felt like taking responsibility. Indeed, while some in the agency were mounting an (incompetent) invasion to oust Castro, others really liked him.

It is not sufficiently remembered that in the 1950s the CIA helped arm Castro (against the U.S. embassy's wishes) and acted to destabilize the regime he was trying to overthrow. The released report says nothing of this, for the same reason that it mentions nothing about the CIA's sponsorship of Iraq's Ba'ath party, and of its 1959 hiring of a young thug named Saddam Hussein, or of its romance with the PLO. The CIA retains illusions and affections.

In sum, as the performance of today's CIA shows its insufficiencies, the agency may have hoped that distancing itself from its ancestors once again would secure its place on a political wave that some see as like unto that of the late 1970s. But then again, the CIA's political judgments have usually been wrong.

Angelo M. Codevilla is a professor of international relations at Boston University and a fellow of the Claremont Institute.