Actually, based on some unpleasant personal experiences of a few years ago, I would say that if anything the CIA is now more right wing than the FBI. The old idea that the CIA was full of liberal comsymps, or whatever, and J. Edgar Hoover's FBI was the home of the super anti-communists blah blah is long out of date. Of course there is a lot of variation within both agencies and this may partly reflect which section one is talking about.
Most of the old CIA comsymps, however many there were, have just about all retired by now. I have little doubt that there are still some corners of the CIA where one finds liberals, if not actual lefist radicals. But there has been a tremendous increase in the numbers of really right wing jerk types. I suspect a major period of this was the early Reagan years and the hiring binge under William Casey, much of it oriented to the Contra War and similar escapades in Central America. Many of these folks were pretty right wing and, uh, terrorist oriented.
OTOH, with Hoover gone the FBI has been under pressure to become more "mainstream" and has hired a lot of African-Americans and women. This does not make it some hotbed of liberalism and certainly not of leftism. But these newer hires have been less of the old Hoover type and have generally not been involved in the kinds of assassinations and other kinds of crap that the CIA has been, unless you count Ruby Ridge.
Indeed, ironically, an indicator of this was the fact that one of the last things that old Hoover did before he died was to resist Nixon's request that the FBI participate in his dirty tricks operations, a request that the CIA did not turn down. This may have reflected a political canniness on Hoover's part rather than adherence to principle, foreseeing that Nixon would get in trouble and out to preserve the independence of the FBI which did not go through the kinds of critical Senate hearings the CIA did after Watergate.
BTW, I have read that it used to be a joke that OSS stood for "Oh So Social." All those Yalies, my my. Barkley Rosser On Mon, 23 Nov 1998 15:51:15 -0800 (PST) michael at ecst.csuchico.edu wrote:
> Actually, the CIA [or at least the OSS] had to be full of comsymps,
> because they had to work with the underground during WW II and the commies
> were the most effective fighters.
>
> I don't think that commie sympathies are still a prerequisite of
> employment.
> --
> Michael Perelman
> Economics Department
> California State University
> Chico, CA 95929
>
> Tel. 530-898-5321
> E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
-- Rosser Jr, John Barkley rosserjb at jmu.edu