John Daniel

So anyway, Stansfield Turner sees these incredible pieces of surveillance hardware as good ways of collecting intelligence, whereas the spies like to think that tech is useful, but you can't just rely on that.

A bit like drones today.

But even though the culture has changed and the agency has had its wings clipped, Kit Bennett says the CIA that he went into in 1979 still had plenty of appetite for getting things done.

We all like to think we're the good guys, but the central grouping, the one that has stood the test of time, is the Five Eyes Alliance.

It grew out of the collaboration on signals intelligence and code-breaking between the US and the UK during the Second World War.

That was expanded to bring in Canada, Australia and New Zealand by the mid-1950s, so it's held now for 70 years.

But back in the 1970s, Kit Bennett says it was called something different.

Yeah, this is a really important question, and I'm not trying to chin-stroke it away when I say that.

It kind of depends, because I really do think it depends on who they're going up against.

what the rules of engagement are, and why this is happening at all.

Look, each one of these is highly complex, but just to look back on the ones we've touched on with some broad strokes, even the supposedly successful operations where CIA brought about regime change in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s were not great outcomes for locals.

Yeah, Bay of Pigs, you can argue that Castro has imposed himself as a military dictator in Cuba, but the guy he was replacing was not particularly legitimate.

There's no moral high ground there.

It's just that the Americans have a brain explosion because suddenly there are communists 90 miles from Miami.

And of course, in any case, the whole operation was a disaster.

I think that's true, but let's hold off on this.

In a later episode, we'll get more insights around that from

someone who actually came to New Zealand representing the Soviet Union and then Russia.

I think we have to keep telling the story to understand the answer to that.

But I think it is important to acknowledge that it is very hard, if not impossible, to be not just the leader of the free world, but also the defender of the free world.