Tim Weiner

You want to spy on Americans, call on the FBI and get a judge's warrant to do it.

And when the American press ferreted this out at the end of 1974... Yes, that was Seymour Versch, really, was it, at that point, who wrote the seminal piece, yeah.

It led to long and deep hearings and investigations in the United States Senate.

That's correct.

At the outset of those hearings, Senator Frank Church, who was running the investigation, wondered aloud whether the CIA were not, quoting him, a rogue elephant trampling peoples and nations.

But at the end of the investigation, he concluded correctly that when the elephant trampled peoples and nations, it wasn't the elephant's fault.

It was the fault of the mahout, the elephant driver.

And the elephant driver was the president of the United States.

Well, again, it carries out the foreign policy of the United States and Carter's foreign policy.

was human rights.

And his particular target was the Soviet Union.

Jimmy Carter wanted to overthrow the Soviet Union, but he wanted to do it with political warfare.

And he got the CIA smuggling books and literature into the Soviet Union.

The CIA became quite a debtor.

about getting ideas and literature behind the Iron Curtain.

Its greatest triumph of this was secret support for the Solidarity Movement in Poland in the 1980s, where it enabled Solidarity not just to get books and magazines out through an underground press.

It literally smuggled printing presses piece by piece into Poland, but also to set up clandestine radio and television broadcasts.

And the upshot of this was that Solidarity won the first free election in Poland at the end of the 1980s, and that was the beginning and the end of the Soviet empire.

Yeah, NOC stands for Non-Official Cover.

Traditionally, over the years, CIA officers working overseas posed as diplomats, and they had diplomatic cover.