Guyon Espiner

This is Adlai Stevenson, the American ambassador to the United Nations, trying to face down accusations from Cuba that they are behind this abortive attack on this tiny nation just off the coast of Florida.

Yeah, he certainly doesn't want to say too much.

In reality, Kennedy is furious with the CIA.

He takes a long, hard look at them, and the top two men at the agency are quietly pushed aside.

Kennedy tries to steer it away from these kinds of warlike operations and back to the core business of espionage.

Well, dies.

He's assassinated, right?

This is the church committee, is it?

Yeah, and this is an extraordinary piece of footage where he actually gets CIA officials to bring up this dart gun.

And there's this really striking, I shouldn't laugh because it's serious stuff, but he's holding up this dart gun and hearing about the different ways it's used to assassinate people.

It's extraordinary stuff and the context here, it all comes off the back of Watergate just a year or two earlier and the Vietnam War, both of which had led to the serious erosion of American trust in government and both of which had links to the CIA.

Ultimately, the impact of this church committee is about trying to bring the intelligence agencies back to heel, really, and bring them under wider government oversight after years of exceptionalism, where the need for secrecy meant they got away with some pretty seriously dodgy stuff.

Yeah, I mean, CIA, they are three letters that send a lot of fear.

Oh, yeah.

So how did you feel or rationalise that?

So when Carter takes over, we see somewhat of a softening of the CIA, don't we?

Now this is pretty interesting in that Tim Weiner is highly critical of CIA.

The botched operations, the snafus, the overreach.

Exactly, but he does give them a lot of credit in this space for working quietly and subtly towards winning the Cold War by patiently pushing democracy into the bloodstream of the Soviet Union.

But he wasn't popular.