John Daniel

Not by CIA, for the avoidance of doubt.

There are various theories that he was, at least some of which appear to have been planted by the KGB, but we won't get into it here, because the Vietnam War, already smouldering away for some years, becomes a massive firestorm by the mid-1960s, arguably as a direct result of Kennedy not wanting to appear soft on communism after what happened in Cuba.

And the CIA's ability to get hold of intelligence and drive high-impact operations makes them useful to presidents in time of conflict.

Seymour Hersh was the New York Times journalist whose front page scoop on Operation Chaos, where the CIA collected information on the political activities of Americans, led to a massive reckoning.

This is American Senator Frank Church who headed out that committee investigating the intelligence agency.

But really the Church Committee is more about understanding what they actually do in a broader sense.

There's a series of revelations about operations carried out by CIA and the FBI and the NSA, the signals intelligence agency that most people, including some of the senators on the Church Committee, didn't even know existed at the time.

From MKUltra, where they're trying mind control through drugging, often unwitting subjects,

Family duels this programme for the covert assassination of foreign leaders and Mockingbird, where journalists and news organisations operated for and on behalf of the agency.

Yeah, Howard Hunt, who organises the Watergate break-in that is now synonymous with dumb political scandal, was also in charge of the Brigade of Cuban Exiles at the Bay of Pigs, although by the time of Watergate in 1972, he had left CIA, so he was just freelancing.

Three of the other four Watergate burglars also had previous ties to CIA, but were no longer with the agency.

The 70s, obviously, you'd have Vietnam and there'd been a lot of controversy about CIA involvement in Vietnam and that sort of stuff.

And there'd been...

This is Kit Bennett's again, the New Zealander who began working for CIA in 1979.

Tim Weiner from The New York Times agrees that the change in president makes a difference.

The private wars, the outsized personalities.

But top-down changes in culture were not unanimously welcomed inside CIA at the end of the 1970s.

Either U2 was developed for CIA in the 1950s, but even today it's in use.

It's a relic of the Cold War, but still around, despite being quite long in the tooth now.

I did set that up for you.