Nicola Tallent

I mean, you're talking to CIA personnel who were in there from the 80s.

So Fidel Castro obviously makes the Americans pretty paranoid, brings in some communism, sort of is in bed, they believe, with the Soviet Union and is using all these dirty tricks really because he doesn't want the Americans there.

I wanted to ask, how are those CIA agents coming in as what?

As diplomats.

Yeah, so they were really spies.

Well, you can move about and you can mix and mingle and...

But you need some cover because especially, I suppose, in the 80s, Americans couldn't just sort of land there and, hey, I'm living here now.

Yeah, yeah.

You need something to...

But the Americans here in Dublin aren't, you know, suffering the same kind of surveillance, I suppose, back in the 80s and onwards that these spies did in Cuba, because they talk about they were followed everywhere.

People sat outside their homes.

They broke into their homes at night and did weird things just to show them that, you know, this isn't really like we're here, wasn't it?

Yeah, and being followed all the time.

But it must have taken a huge amount of work to do that and a huge amount of Cuban operatives to do that in that discreet fashion, but really messing with people's heads.

The psychology of that is coming from where?

You end up living in a complete state of paranoia.

Where you can't function.

There's no privacy.

As well as you can function without that.

So what they're sending back, the way they work it is the intelligence they're sending back is skewed?