Of course they knew. Hell, they had a big hand in organizing the scattered child trafficking groups into a hundreds of billions of dollars per annum lean production process organization. Things certainly were a little difficult with the world wars in the first half of the 20th century. CIA was in the right place at the right time and awash in the new world reserve currency. While also being given cover by the Cold War, they had a lot of leeway to set up this trafficking side project without much interest occurring before it was already self sufficient.

The earnings for the CIA cut has funded their black budget projects that aren't reported to congress oversight because not a dime of government funding touches those projects. The fringe benefit for the CIA is they get to have a second income or influence stream directly from the blackmail data they are copied in on.

Also human experimentation was well tuned by the ventures, which produced a better product from their MK Ultra controlled child slaves. The returns probably appeared to be near unlimited for them as they intentionally spread death, misery, hopelessness, and permanently fractured psychi of their trafficking victims and their targets.

Remember that 1970's report I the CIA activities where congressional hearings were held over the CIA? Yeah I don't remember that either, and more importantly, Congress decided to skip continuing the investigation.... Seems the CIA even then was able to push Congress around to its whim. I wonder what they were able to hold over the heads of congress that convinced congress to drop the matter.