John Daniel

The Philippines has been a lynchpin of American military power in the Pacific for decades.

By the end of the Cold War, Clark Air Force Base has a permanent population of 15,000 people.

The deporter port at Subic Bay was also vital, and these are just two of a number of American bases.

Filipino strongman Ferdinand Marcos had leveraged his links with the US to stay in power for 20 years.

General Fabian Viet was Marcos' chief of staff and widely assumed to have masterminded the assassination of Ninoy Aquino as he'd arrived at Manila Airport.

I was going to say you were flogging sheepskins.

And the Soviets, with generations of experience of secret police and foreign intelligence work built on a culture of brutally patriotic collectivism, were the hardest of hard targets.

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

I'm John Daniel.

Now, we're going to take a bit of a detour here.

We'll come back to Manila.

But for the moment, we're going to meet someone whose career with CIA started in the mid-1980s.

Yeah, Susan Miller is going to give us some great insights about how things work at the highest levels of CIA.

But that strong CV started from quite humble beginnings.

Anyway, long story short, a few months later, Susan Miller's moved on from her career in journalism.

When she began in the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union was the number one priority.

Susan Miller says at that time, every American embassy, even here in New Zealand, had a Soviet branch.

But CIA wasn't just playing defeats.

For now, there's a more recent aspect of her story that brings us right up close to America's return to using targeted strikes on powerful people.

Susan Miller spoke with us before the US and Israel attacked Iran in February 2026, but she has a story that tells us a lot about how that will have played out.