With the Central Intelligence Agency’s release of the “Family Jewels” documents last week, it’s now catchy to liken the American agency to the Stasi, the East German Communist organ, which executed an untold number of those who failed in their attempt to escape the Berlin Wall, enlisted as many as 2 million citizens to spy on their friends, families, and neighbors, and kept the country in a totalitarian state.

Whatever abuses of charter and law are recorded in the 702-page collection, they are a far cry from those of the Stasi, the Soviet KGB, or any of the other secret police agencies behind the Iron Curtain. Along with the pervasive moral relativism that renders America and its enemies equals in ill-doing, there is another tendency, to see only the violation of the CIA’s engaging in work on American soil, as a former director of central intelligence, William Colby, put it, that were acts “outside our charter.”

There is a tendency to fail to grasp the broader picture, that is, the genuine threat posed by outside forces attempting to penetrate American opposition groups during the Cold War. “Far from being precious, they are dross — more disturbing evidence of a government that consciously and frequently ignored the law,” editorialized the Herald-Sun of Durham, N.C. “Paranoia ran deep in the 1960s, when the Cold War spurred fears of the march of monolithic Communism,” opined “The Berkshire Eagle.” The document release, which included details of an American plot to assassinate Fidel Castro, gave the Cuban despot an opportunity to grandstand: “The empire has created a real killing machine made up not only of the CIA and its methods.”

When President Johnson ordered his director of central intelligence, Richard Helms, to examine the links between the anti-war movement and foreign powers, there was a concern that the Soviets and their allies would attempt to take advantage of the organized critics of American policy in Vietnam and elsewhere.

In prior decades, American security agencies had seen Soviet attempts to control trade unions and other groups via the American Communist Party and like organizations. The inquests of the buffoonish and demagogic Wisconsonian, Senator McCarthy, obscure in public memory the actual threat from abroad, just as the more cartoonish aspects of the “Family Jewels” disclosures — such as inclusion of John Lennon of the Beatles in a memo titled “Foreign Support for Activities Planned to Disrupt or Harass the Republican National Convention” — overshadow the determination of American enemies to make the most of the American anti-war movement.

The same document cites “a letter from the Vietnam Committee for Solidarity with the American People” expressing “best wishes of solidarity and friendship” which cannot be seen as entirely innocent. At the same time, the Vietnamese were keenly aware of both the American anti-war movement and public opinion. Henry Kissinger writes in his memoir, “Years of Upheaval,” of obtaining an enemy document that stated that President Nixon could not launch a bombing campaign in May of 1973 “because the U.S. Congress and the American people will violently object.”

Veterans of the intelligence community during the Vietnam War that I spoke to in the wake of the publication of the documents told me that the foreign hand was present. One says it is “absurd” to assume that all these groups were operating on their own. Determining direct involvement of the Soviets, however, was made difficult by the use of numerous front and splinter groups. Often, it was suspected, the co-opted group was not the main one, which got its name in the papers, but an arcane off-shoot, and that the funds would come not directly from the Soviet Union but via an Eastern European satellite, such as Czechoslovakia and then a party-affiliated organization in western Europe.

What was the CIA supposed to do when it got wind of a prominent anti-war radical meeting with a member of the Italian Communist Party in Rome? Ignore it? Another veteran recalls an infiltrator of the American Communist Party being instructed to note pieces of crucial infrastructure in New York City during the 1950s, such as reservoirs and power plants.

The news accounts neglect another reality of the intelligence battle during the Cold War. While sympathy rightly goes to those Americans wrongly spied on during the period covered by the documents in question, few ever think of the sacrifices of those who went through a real kind of Hell on behalf of the intelligence services.

I learned from my conversations, for instance, of a young Puerto Rican man recruited out of the American military to infiltrate the American Communist Party at a time it was looking for minority recruits. This man, who ultimately joined the CIA after being used up by the FBI, lost his wife and daughter, who believed he had become a Communist, and suffered the shunning of his one-time friends for the same.

The man, whom the CIA had speak to trainees, was proud of the role he played in breaking the back of the Communist Party in America, but nonetheless couldn’t shake a visible tick he developed over the years.

The calculus of many of the same newspapers that fail to note yesterday’s foreign threat, is that the CIA was bad back then and is as bad or worse today. It’s too bad they fail to reverse the equation and note that our enemies were dangerous then and are dangerous now as well — and that they are operating not only overseas but also likely here on our own soil.

Mr. Gitell (gitell.com) is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.