The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan twice introduced bills to abolish the CIA before its 50th birthday on Sept. 18, 1997. Neither gained political traction. A new biography by Douglas Waller of the CIA’s heralded pioneer Frank Wisner, “The Determined Spy,” underscores Sen. Moynihan’s wisdom.

Since its establishment by the 1947 National Security Act, the agency’s intelligence collection, analysis and foresight have proven inferior to that of The New York Times at a tiny fraction of the cost.

Three examples among many: The CIA failed to foresee the Chinese intervention in the Korean War with 3 million soldiers; it failed to predict the dissolution of the Soviet empire under Mikhail Gorbachev; and it insisted with “slam dunk” certainty that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction before the 2003 invasion.

The mastermind behind covert action, Frank Wisner, never paused to consider that his cure for defeating an imaginary worldwide communist conspiracy was worse than the disease. Nothing the CIA has done since its birth has materially influenced the course of history for the better. Elon Musk’s downsizing of the agency will not be felt.

Shakespeare’s Mark Antony famously remarked in “Julius Caesar,” “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.” So it was with the CIA’s zealous, egotistical pioneer Wisner.

He captained the agency’s mindless, gratuitous covert actions from 1948 to 1958 tilting at windmills before succumbing to mental illness and eventually suicide.

Wisner planted the seeds of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini and brutal mullah successors.

Wisner was responsible for the military dictatorships and genocide in Guatemala that predictably emerged after his orchestration of the CIA’s overthrow of President Jacobo Arbenz.

Why were the United States and Wisner meddling in the affairs of Iran and Guatemala, both irrelevant to the national defense? President George Washington’s Farewell Address warned of the folly of projecting the profile of the United States beyond invincible self-defense: “The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible.” Influence abroad by example is our optimal foreign policy. As Secretary of State John Quincy Adams elaborated in his July 4, 1821, address to Congress, seeking to make the world safe for democracy at the end of bayonets would destroy liberty and the rule of law at home:

“She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.

The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force…

She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit…”

In “The Determined Spy,” the author shies from asking “why” or “to what purpose” in examining Wisner’s career, such as dispatching hundreds to their deaths in Albania to unhorse dictator Enver Hoxha who was clueless as to how to manufacture a vacuum cleaner.

In the aftermath of World War II and the rebirth of the inflated communist scare and domino theory born with the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, Wisner conceived the Soviet Union, its satellites in Eastern and Central Europe, and any country that resisted bowing to United States hegemony as existential threats. Aping the Roman Empire, the United States engaged in armageddon-like struggles everywhere. No middle ground or neutrality would be tolerated, anticipating President George W. Bush’s belligerence after 9/11: “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”

Among other things, Wisner spearheaded the 1953 overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in favor of the unpopular, brutal, corrupt, vacillating, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlevi. Replacing democracy with dictatorship was professedly justified by the absurd theory that Mossadegh was a crypto-communist since he refused to be a tool of the British Empire.

His cardinal sin was nationalizing (not expropriating) the hugely profitable Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951 which British Prime Minister Winston Churchill postulated was integral to the British Navy.

Frank Wisner is heroized by the CIA along with legendary Allan Dulles, “Beetle” Smith, and William Donovan.

The mystery is “why?” Wisner was an excitable workaholic, like a squirrel pointlessly leaping in all directions.

After perusing author Waller’s tome, the reader is left wondering, what was the overriding motivation in Wisner’s life? His wife Polly proffered the pedestrian answer in remarking to Katherine Graham, wife of Phil Graham, then-publisher of The Washington Post: Their husbands could not “have borne life as kind of doing nothing. They just could not bear not being in the center” of the country’s affairs.

Bruce Fein was associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan and is author of “American Empire Before the Fall.” His website is www.lawofficesofbrucefein.com and X feed is @brucefeinesq.