Since when does the CIA care about ethics?

Though the majority of the cold war.

On both sides of the Iron Curtain, field agents played nice with each other, even if the folks they recruited from the locals might be expendable. But disposing of a problematic VIP by diverting them into other interests, or spooking them / bribing them to get lost or whatever was much preferred to killing them. Not just because it was a moral matter, but also because the blowback would be significantly reduced.

Actual James Bond deaths were reserved for moles (that is, double agents, plants in one agency that secretly worked for the other side). Notoriously, a CIA mole in KGB was discovered and the entire floor was invited to watch him fed feet first into a blast furnace. (CIA even then preferred a trick from WWII, namely stuffing the agent in a remote prison surrounded by snow and cliffs where they are instructed to keep sending information to their handler… as long as they want to keep living.)

That all changed after 2001, specifically the 9/11 attacks and the PATRIOT act. The first sign things went foul was the burning of Valerie Plame for political reasons. The kind of true-believer American patriots would never burn an asset for a cheap political retaliation. That’s the sort of thing that gets political loved ones disappeared.

But then CIA started the extrajudicial detention and enhanced interrogation program. (We have far, far better ways to debrief enemy agents, even those who are trained to resist. Sometimes cookies are involved.. Then CIA was burning villages with PMCs. Then CIA was burning them with Predator Drones.

So yeah, CIA lost the plot in the 21st century, though I can’t speak to the ground crew, the analysts and OG field personnel. And to be perfectly fair, CIA had to develop ethics by trial and error, which is to say making a lot of mistakes resulting in blowback, and they still tried to kill Castro, only securing his position running Cuba until he died. But with that history, it hurts being ordered to do black work after we’d long learned not to do black work and learned alternatives.

And then, it was recently revealed that the reign of J. Edgar Hoover is regarded by FBI as a shameful period, since Hoover used the bureau to serve political interests of the administrations rather than to serve justice, something FBI has yet to live down.

since people got smartphones and recorded every moment of their lives.