Guyon Espiner

Susan Miller says there's a wider message here for anyone looking to challenge President Trump or even just understand what's behind his thinking.

Do you feel that there has been a politicisation of the agency by the Trump administration in this regard?

It is no accident that the President of the United States, this one exempted, receives the Presidential Daily Briefing that everybody knows about.

This is Kit Bennett again, talking about the PDB, the Presidential Daily Briefing.

President Trump apparently doesn't read it, but you can.

Not, apparently, by CIA, although it's understood they did have a plan to do it if necessary.

Basically, this is an incredibly well-informed, personalised news service.

In my day, it was prepared by 40-odd people in the agency, and they would gather together the information that would appear on the president's desk in hard copy then about the most important things, or the important things that the most powerful man in the world needed to know.

Now, it would be naive to think that politics and personality had never entered into that relationship between CIA leaders and the president.

And I remember the guy saying, you don't want to meet him, he's an asshole.

And a new director, a man named Bill Casey.

And Bill Casey was a man I greatly admired because he had been in the wartime OSS.

Now the OSS, as he's talking about there, is the Office of Strategic Services.

It was set up during World War II and was, loosely speaking, the predecessor to CIA, running special operations, sabotage and so on.

So he was, you know, he was the real deal.

Although he probably went a bit far, and had he not died when he did, he probably would have ended up in jail over the Iran-Contra scandal.

Yeah, I mean, in a nutshell, the CIA director had been overseeing a scheme where US weapons were sold to Iran's Revolutionary Guard for a massive markup and the profits were then skimmed off the top and fed to the Contras.

They were a guerrilla outfit trying to bring down Nicaragua's socialist government.

In principle, this was supposed to be in aid of some American hostages held by Hezbollah in Lebanon.

But underneath it all was a desire for regime change in Nicaragua.