You're absolutely right it's been going on for decades, but I think looking into that history is also telling. In 1953 Iran was a relatively secular and democratic nation that had generally positive, though flagging, relations with the West. Then their leader decided to reduce US/UK control over his country's oil assets. So of course we had to bring democracy to them. But since they already had a democracy, autocracy would have to do instead. [1]
We staged a coup, overthrew their democracy, and installed an extremely unpopular puppet dictator and monarch. 26 years later in 1979 there was another revolution, except this one was carried out by the people of Iran, and not the CIA. The puppet (still ruling from 1953 interestingly) was overthrown, and in his place an Islamic theocracy was created. And since then it's invariably been headed by leaders that, for some reason, haven't been especially fond of the West - and frequently imply we're up to shenanigans. That scenario continues to this day.
Ultimately I no longer really believe that we deserve the benefit of the doubt when it comes to black ops types scenarios. We've turned what should be a sort of last resort act of subterfuge into what increasingly seems to be a front-line approach to international relations. The most bizarre part is that these shenanigans never even really seem to achieve anything. Iran just being one example of going black ops to undermine one enemy, only to create one 10x more deadly, dangerous, and hostile than the former.
All we really seem to be achieving is the fast-tracking of WW3.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution