From what he says, it sounds like he intended the CIA simply to be an intelligence gathering and analysis agency, not an agency that engaged in espionage operations and tried to shape government policy.
I read an interesting book somewhere that pretty much debunked the universal myth of the omnipotent CIA with their devilish cunning manipulating the world with their evil trickery and instead pointed out that the CIA hardly achieved one damn thing that helped American interests anywhere on the planet.
They propped up the wrong governments, funneled billions of dollars to crooks and incompetents, utterly misread the situation on the ground, took at face value whatever BS their “allies” in their theater of action told them and never foresaw any of the world-changing events that occurred in the decades after their formation.
They assumed the Soviet Union would last indefinitely, indeed they described East Germany as the world’s ninth largest economy right up until the Wall fell, they didn’t anticipate the rise of Islamism, missed out on the warning signs prior to the Korean War, the Yom Kippur War and the first Gulf War, had no idea about what was going on in the Arab Spring, screwed up the Vietnam War magisterially, etc etc.
I guess if you think of them less as super-spies with James Bond like powers and think of them more as paper shufflers who have a nice cosy berth in the government it all becomes clearer.