Guyon Espiner

What's it like returning to a real relationship after your mind's had to do that?

Yeah.

Before that moment of silence between the three of us, Kit Bennett mentioned two names.

He's talking about Aldrich Ames of the CIA and Robert Hansen from the FBI.

These two men, it was discovered after the Cold War ended...

were both passing information to the Soviets from the mid-1980s, including names of people working for CIA.

And a number of these people were arrested and subsequently shot.

So while we don't know what happened to Vladimir, there's a good chance it was something bad.

The Agency was produced, written and hosted by John Daniel and me, Guy Nespina.

Our executive producer for RNZ was John Hartevelt and our executive producer for Bird of Paradise Productions was Noel McCarthy.

The visual director at RNZ was Cole Easton Farrelly and our camera operator was Jess Charlton.

Thanks also to Sarah Gaitanos for the article about Bill Such that appears on rnz.co.nz.

Just a heads up listeners, this episode contains some adult language.

What was the culture of the CIA like at that time?

I mean, you know, if you look back through history, they have been pretty aggressive, pretty belligerent, you know.

Oh, yes.

Several coup, you know, assists and knocking off various leaders around the world and quite sort of militaristic, at least from the popular culture lens.

How much of that was real?

Kit Bennett's began training with CIA while he was in Washington.

He was based off-site, but he occasionally had to go to HQ.