Chapter 1: What insights does Kit Bennetts provide about CIA training?
Just a heads up listeners, this episode contains some adult language.
Previously on the Agency.
We had this little program going, and I'd just say at the beginning, you know, people saying, well, why would the NZSIS be working with CA? Well, we were a member of Five Eyes, and so the reason why the agency could use us was because of the way I spoke. I didn't have an American accent. And why would anyone be concerned about a New Zealander? We're, in that regard, politically very beige.
There's always going to be those in the community who are, if not sceptical, at least suspicious about state power and whether expressed through the police or intelligence agencies. And some of that, it is right to have sceptical voices in the community about that.
I did go to Langley quite often and it was just a matter of jumping out of my apartment, driving down onto the George Washington Parkway and heading up to the sign that said CIA next exit.
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Chapter 2: How does the CIA operate under presidential orders?
What was the culture of the CIA like at that time? I mean, you know, if you look back through history, they have been pretty aggressive, pretty belligerent, you know. Oh, yes. Several coup, you know, assists and knocking off various leaders around the world and quite sort of militaristic, at least from the popular culture lens.
Yeah.
How much of that was real?
How would you describe the culture of CIA? First of all, it's a huge organisation. And, you know, this little foot soldier's knowledge of it is pretty limited. But I worked in the Directorate of Operation.
Chapter 3: What role does New Zealand play in the Five Eyes alliance?
This is Kit Bennett, who worked for New Zealand's SIS before he was seconded to the Central Intelligence Agency as an exchange officer at the end of the 1970s.
And I worked in the EA division, the East Asia division, and the sharp end was the SE division, Soviet East European division. So I was working in the East Asia division based on my location, but what I was doing was working against the Soviet target. But that was true. People in the African division... working against the Soviet target. So I dealt with those people and they were really great.
They were highly intelligent, well-educated men and women in the 70s. Some of the women were very senior and very able intelligence officers, really, really good. I was always treated with respect and I really liked all the people, pretty much all the people I dealt with, I really liked.
Chapter 4: What was the CIA's culture like during Kit Bennetts' tenure?
Kit Bennett's began training with CIA while he was in Washington. He was based off-site, but he occasionally had to go to HQ.
And so I'd drive down onto the George Washington Parkway and head out to the agency. There's a big sign on the thing saying CIA this way, you know. So I'd head there and, of course, like all big factories and everything in the United States, there's a building and then there's about, you know...
five hectares of car parks, you know, and all the cars, and they have a little van that went around picking people up in the morning to take them in, especially in the winter. But there was a car park right in front of the headquarters that had, you know, where the director and the DDO and all the senior people parked, and that's where I parked.
Because the guard on there that everybody called the Sarge had been a Marine, and he was a retired guy, and he looked after the car park. And guess where he'd been in World War II?
At the height of the Second World War, so you're talking 1942 to 1944, soldiers from the US Marine Corps were stationed at Paikakariki on the Kapiti Coast, just north of Wellington.
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Chapter 5: What were the significant CIA operations during the Cold War?
At one stage, there were more than 20,000 American Marines in the region. Initially, they were there to train for war in the Pacific, but then some of them came back to recuperate.
And so he had the soft spot for New Zealand, and I was the Kiwi. Hey, Kiwi! park where you like. So I used to park where I like. And he was a lovely guy. And he talked to me about being here in the war and things like that.
Up until the Second World War, Britain had been New Zealand's foremost ally. But British power in the Pacific dropped away after the fall of Singapore in 1942, while American military might came into the region to push back the Japanese Imperial Army.
Chapter 6: How did the CIA's approach to political warfare evolve?
And New Zealand would tie itself increasingly closely to the US in the years after the war.
And I remember some of the guys would say, how come you get to park there?
And I said, you've got to know people. And those ties with the people we know continue to shape the way New Zealand keeps itself safe.
From Bird of Paradise Productions and RNZ, this is The Agency. I'm Guyon Espiner.
And I'm John Daniel. This is Episode 2, Quiet Americans.
The CIA is an executor of American foreign policy. It does, with the rarest exceptions, what the president tells it to do.
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Chapter 7: What challenges did the CIA face during the Vietnam War?
It's his outfit.
This is Tim Weiner. He's a former national security reporter for The New York Times, and he's one of the best-known historians of the CIA. In fact, he covered it for more than four decades. He's written multiple books about CIA, and he's won a Pulitzer Prize.
The CIA has been used for political warfare, covert operations, paramilitary operations, as kind of a third option between diplomacy and sending in the Marines. and has been that way just shortly after its creation.
So the CIA sits somewhere between the State Department, the American version of our MFAT, or Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and a flat-out war deployment. I mean, it's a pretty large field of action, covering everything from aggressively befriending influential foreigners to assassinating them, and all the other options in between, I guess.
Propaganda, covert operations, overthrow of states.
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Chapter 8: How does Kit Bennetts describe his undercover operations in Asia?
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.
Now, when the CIA was created back in 1947, the mission was espionage. It wasn't to fight the Cold War. That came later, but not much later. The following year, when the people who were at the State Department told the CIA to fight fire with fire, against the Soviet Union. The Soviets were marching west, seizing half of Europe, and war was not an option.
A Third World War was not something anybody wanted.
So you can see the attraction. I mean, the world has just suffered through, what, six years of industrial-level slaughter? culminating, of course, in the use of the atomic bomb. Millions of people have died. No one wants to go back to that. But at the same time, the liberal democracies don't want to just lie down and get eaten up by the Soviet Union.
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.
So the CIA then embarked on a barrage of paramilitary operations, which was unqualified to do. It recruited hundreds upon hundreds of foreigners all over Eastern Europe, and then after the Korean War started, all over Asia, and trained them up to parachute behind enemy lines to conduct espionage and sabotage.
Well, these were suicide missions because the other side, the Russians and the North Koreans, had completely penetrated in CIA's operation.
Now, we'll come back to this idea of CIA being penetrated because it is going to be a bit of a theme.
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