John Daniel

This is Episode 2, Quiet Americans.

The CIA is born out of World War II, where its predecessor, the OSS, or Office of Strategic Services, was set up and run largely along the models of MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service, and SOE, the Special Operations Executive, the wartime unit for espionage, reconnaissance and sabotage.

And America, whose isolationist tendencies meant they were arguably two years late arriving to World War II, but who were ultimately the driving force behind the Allied victory, both economically and militarily.

The US are now viewed as the leaders of the free world.

But when it came to setting up a foreign intelligence agency, there were going to be some pretty serious misfires.

CIA had massive resources, but they were new to the game and their judgment was sometimes lacking.

Now, we'll come back to this idea of CIA being penetrated because it is going to be a bit of a theme.

It's worth noting they're also dangerously close to commercial interests, firstly with the oil of Iran, then with the bananas of Guatemala and the United Fruit Company.

Yeah, this is one of the biggest stains on CIA, and there have been a few.

Around the same time, they're even reaching out to the mafia for help to assassinate Fidel Castro, the socialist strongman of Cuba.

This is technically correct in that what the CIA has done is arm and train about 1,500 Cuban exiles and get them to attack as proxies.

Then they've basically carried out a sea landing on the Cuban coast of the inauspiciously named Bay of Pigs.

But the whole thing unravels very quickly.

Almost all the exile army is killed or captured, including some US citizens, and American fingerprints are all over it.

President John F. Kennedy is publicly humiliated.

This is President Kennedy at a press conference where he accepts responsibility for the botched operation, although he takes that responsibility in a roundabout way as president.

So it's kind of a carefully crafted, the buck stops with me line.

It's like he's trying to say, I'm just a good guy in a bad situation, rather than the person who signed off on the whole operation, which is what he did do, albeit reluctantly.

Kennedy then dies just a couple of years later.

Yes, he's assassinated.