John Daniel

to the point where I pitched him.

Yeah, it wouldn't take much for Cold War paranoia to link his stay in Russia to the assassination.

And this is the era of The Manchurian Candidate, the 1962 film starring Frank Sinatra about an American soldier brainwashed by the communists into assassinating a presidential candidate.

This comes out just a year before Kennedy is assassinated.

If you mix Hollywood sensationalism with CIA scepticism and thin-sounding Russian denials, it's quite a cocktail.

And telling it straight seems to have been an issue for Yuri Nisenko to begin with.

In the mid-1960s, CIA counterintelligence, led by James Jesus Angleton, the Wilderness of Mirrors guy, is at the height of its Cold War paranoia.

And Yuri Nocenko gets locked up and interrogated for years.

So a bottle of vodka was procured.

I thought, oh no.

And drink was taken and the frontiers of knowledge were pushed back.

But I liked Yuri.

He was good.

Kip Bennett says meeting these defectors would often set him thinking.

He says money would not have been a motivation.

But just a decade later, America met with the shock and awe of September the 11th.

And with the subsequent American-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it wasn't quite so clear that CIA were still the good guys.

In a fight against an enemy fueled with their own brand of idealism, CIA had gone looking for additional leverage to extract information, and that had become its own form of betrayal.

American conduct of the so-called war on terror had drawn the entire defence and security apparatus to a very dark place, away from its professed values as the good guys.

Here's President Barack Obama responding to the CIA torture report.