John Daniel

But the way it was supposed to work was that no matter what he wanted to hear, they told him the truth.

Yeah, you can actually see examples of this online.

CIA have put up versions going up to the 1960s, although back then it was called the Central Intelligence Bulletin.

Copies also go out to people listed inside.

So the head of the FBI, the vice president, secretary of state and so on.

These are incredibly densely written.

Just as an example, I randomly pulled up the one from January the 18th, 1961.

It's got notes on the situation in Berlin, maps and explainers about what's happening in Laos, Soviet aircraft movements there, what the Soviet newspaper Pravda has been saying, then in the Congo, a bit of intel, but a lot of redacted stuff.

Patrice Lumumba, formerly the elected leader of the Congo, has been assassinated the day before.

Yeah, if you remember, back to the second episode, when Kit Bennett arrived at CIA, Jimmy Carter was the president and Stansfield Turner was the director of the agency.

But he wasn't popular.

By 1981, there was a new president and a new director.

And he came out to New Zealand and sat down with Kit Bennett and the chief of station here.

Reagan was in the White House.

Iran-Contra was yet another CIA overreach that we won't get into too deeply.

It all blew up in 1986, 1987.

When the Iran-Contra affair came to light, it nearly brought down the Reagan administration.

As Kit Bennett says, Bill Casey died just before he would probably have gone to jail.

So the subtext seems to be that democracy is great, provided you end up with the government that we want.

It's worth underlining that this conversation was taking place in the New Zealand of the early 1980s under Prime Minister Robert Muldoon, a national government firmly in favour of a close relationship with the US.