Central Intelligence: Series 2: Episode 1
Limelight
BBC
4.4 • 604 Ratings
🗓️ 20 June 2025
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Cold War intensifies with US involvement in South Vietnam. It’s 1954. Colonel Ed Lansdale, former advertising executive and the CIA’s maverick agent in South-East Asia, a pioneer in clandestine operations and psychological warfare, is given the task of creating dissension in the North to stop the advance of the communists.
Return of the award-winning series about America’s Central Intelligence Agency - told from the inside out by long-serving CIA agent Eloise Page.
Starring Kim Cattrall, Ed Harris, Johnny Flynn, Stephen Kunken and Kelly Marie Tran.
In Episode 2.1 Jungles vampires, the CIA’s lone-wolf super-hero, psychological warfare…
Cast: Eloise Page..........Kim Cattrall Allen Dulles..........Ed Harris Virginia Spence ..........Kelly Marie Tran Richard Helms..........Johnny Flynn Colonel Ed Lansdale..........Stephen Kunken Frank Wisner..........Geoffrey Arend Young Eloise Page..........Elena Delia Prime Minister Diem..........Jon Jon Briones General Mike O’Daniel..........Ian Porter "Lightening" Joe Collins..........Rob Benedict Pat Kelly & Madam Nhu..........Lourdes Faberes Ngô Đình Nhu..........Yung General Hinh..........Thaiger Nguyen Lou Conein.......... Philip Desmeules Steve Arundel......... Greg Lockett
All other parts played by the cast
Original music by Sacha Puttnam
Written by Greg Haddrick, who created the series with Jeremy Fox Sound Designers & Editors: John Scott Dryden, Adam Woodhams, Martha Littlehailes & Andreina Gomez Casanova Script Consultant: Misha Kawnel Script Supervisor: Alex Lynch Trails: Jack Soper Sonica Studio Sound Engineers: Paul Clark & Paul Clark Sonica Runner: Flynn Hallman Marc Graue Sound Engineers, LA: Juan Martin del Campo & Tony Diaz
Director: John Scott Dryden Producer & Casting Director: Emma Hearn Executive Producers: Howard Stringer, Jeremy Fox, Greg Haddrick and John Scott Dryden
A Goldhawk production for BBC Radio 4
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Limelight. |
| 0:02.6 | Episodes are released weekly, wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 0:05.8 | But if you're in the UK, you can listen first on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:14.6 | BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:18.8 | This episode contains very strong language. |
| 0:23.8 | Well, you are here to honor your loved ones. |
| 0:27.8 | On a hot spring morning in 2012, President Obama addressed an assembly of retired servicemen |
| 0:34.2 | to commemorate the heaviest military defeat in American history. |
| 0:38.3 | You know, it speaks to the complexity of America's time in Vietnam that even now, |
| 0:45.3 | historians cannot agree on precisely when the war began. |
| 0:51.3 | American advisors had served there and died there |
| 0:55.2 | as early as the mid-50s. |
| 0:58.3 | Which is true, |
| 0:59.7 | although what Obama calls |
| 1:01.4 | advisors were really more like |
| 1:03.9 | meddlers. |
| 1:05.7 | And it's even debatable |
| 1:07.2 | where the Vietnam War started. |
| 1:09.6 | Because in one sense, it began in the Philippines. |
| 1:15.9 | Which was the first Southeast Asian country where we defeated communism using one of the most bizarre plans ever conceived. |
| 1:25.0 | Are they getting the story? |
| 1:26.4 | Yes, Ed, they are. It's spreading like wildfire. |
... |
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