The biggest problem with the CIA (and other intelligence agencies) is that you need agents in place. Technical information gathering brings in lots of raw data, then you need to hire analysts to massage the data to gain what you're looking for, then you have people analyse the analyses to ensure that what is found is real, and not just an artifact of the analyst's obsession with finding patterns (which is a step that was missed in the past). And in all this, you have administrators who want to be hands-on, to feel like they control what's happening.
The big problem is that while you can control technical means, you can't control human intelligence gathering. That delivers results when they occur, not to a schedule. So administrators start off biased toward technical means. Budgets for human intel are a lot less cut and dried than technical. That's another negative for administrators. Human intel specialists tend to follow the rules of where they are (or else they tend to stick out) rather than the rules of the country paying the bills. Accountants and administrators usually react to budget lines such as bribery and other, less savory details the way vampires react to crosses. End result: human intel gets cut back, technical means picks up the slack.
And then something goes wrong, and the people on the ground are too thinly spread to get the information that is demanded. And the technical means specialists are incapable of knowing what a group of guys they've never heard of are saying to each other in places where they have no way of picking up their voices. All the intelligence gathering focus is on areas where there is nothing to pick up. Sure, given a few days and a 24-hour emergency tasking, they might be able to analyse all of the data take from an area and have some ideas of who said what to who via telephone or messaging system - but that's too late to prevent it.
The problem is systemic. There are too many chiefs who want too much control, too many technical specialists bringing in too much information for the analysts to process in a timely manner, and too few field operatives to do all that needs to be done out in the real world. The KGB could do it because they didn't have as much oversight or anywhere near the level of administrative control and demands for proper procedures as the CIA, and nowhere near as much focus on technical means. They had oversight, but looked more at the results, not the means used to achieve them.