Guyon Espiner

At the height of the Second World War, so you're talking 1942 to 1944, soldiers from the US Marine Corps were stationed at Paikakariki on the Kapiti Coast, just north of Wellington.

And New Zealand would tie itself increasingly closely to the US in the years after the war.

From Bird of Paradise Productions and RNZ, this is The Agency.

I'm Guyon Espiner.

This is Tim Weiner.

He's a former national security reporter for The New York Times, and he's one of the best-known historians of the CIA.

In fact, he covered it for more than four decades.

He's written multiple books about CIA, and he's won a Pulitzer Prize.

So the CIA sits somewhere between the State Department, the American version of our MFAT, or Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and a flat-out war deployment.

I mean, it's a pretty large field of action, covering everything from aggressively befriending influential foreigners to assassinating them, and all the other options in between, I guess.

Propaganda, covert operations, overthrow of states.

So you can see the attraction.

I mean, the world has just suffered through, what, six years of industrial-level slaughter?

culminating, of course, in the use of the atomic bomb.

Millions of people have died.

No one wants to go back to that.

But at the same time, the liberal democracies don't want to just lie down and get eaten up by the Soviet Union.

But again, you can see the attraction, the idea that a relatively small number of people can find whatever leverage they need to take power in a country and bring in the right kind of government.

Although it does invite overreach.

And the Bay of Pigs turns into an absolute fiasco for CIA, an incredibly embarrassing moment for the US.