Before I start I'm just going to say that this paragraph is a totally muddied up version of what I understand, feel free to correct any bullshit you see. I was just thinking about how Project MKULTRA, MKDELTA, MKNAOMI, etc. were all programs designed with intentions to combat the Russian spy program. These programs produced truth serums, biological weapons, and unprecedented leaps in the understanding of mind control. All these programs were occurring domestically (in North America at least) to combat what I assume what was the huge paranoia of moles within the CIA at that time. I know that Project Manhattan was infiltrated by Russian moles at very high levels, and then promptly after the second red scare erupted. Did these events, along with many others, make our government greatly overestimate Russian spy capabilities? If so why was Russia's foreign intelligence program so effective? If not, what other contributors led the US to believing they were everywhere?
Soviet intelligence was indeed very good at technical espionage, you made few hints already like the Manhattan project, similar thing happened in the UK with a number of scientists and the famous Cambridge five. Soviet intelligence, at least HUMINT, may have been far better than the Western ones by the simple fact that they manage to enlist (either with money, blackmailing or both) a significant number of Westerners and also infiltrate their own agents since Western societies were far more open. Doing the opposite in the Soviet Union was rather difficult and the West was often limited to Embassy walk-ins by defectors and intelligence collection by technical methods (satellites, SIGINT, ELINT, etc). It seems to me that they did more damage than we did to them at least looking at the declassified material on both side. An interesting book is "The Sword and the Shield" worth reading to understand Soviet Intelligence modus operandi. https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/a/andrew-sword.html