Liberals: “Stalin was a brutal dictator!”

Depends on the meaning they are using in the last line; it may not be contradictory. In the communist meaning, it's not out of line to say a socialist state is a kind of dictatorship, as long as you are saying it's one that is collectively exercised by the working class (e.g. "dictatorship of the proletariat", meaning that the capitalist class is suppressed and not allowed to hold political power). It's when people say communist efforts are a sole individual being dictator for their own benefit that they're wrong and it makes sense that internally, the CIA would want to be clear on this distinction because their goal is to be effective, not lie to themselves about the nature of who they're trying to seize power from. At this point in history, they may have eaten the onion more so, I don't know, but in that time at least, they had to have had some clarity going on to be as effective as they were with all the coups and everything.