Guy Nespina

Because he's got a source telling him about, and I guess I would like to emphasise this, fictional CIA secrets. You found something. You talked to someone inside Treadstone. Someone who was there at the beginning. Who is it? You know I can't tell you that. You have no idea what you're into here. These people will kill you if they have to. It doesn't end well for the guy from the Guardian. Block all the exits. Give the asset a green light. Take them both out. Because he doesn't listen.

Now, it's not as if we're expecting to be taken out, but we are dealing here with tightly held secrets. And that ability for US intelligence agencies, working hand in glove with our own people through the Five Eyes network to intercept communications, monitor people they're suspicious about, that is very much a reality. And so it's going to be interesting to see how they react when they become aware of the story we're all about to hear.

It hasn't changed since they were wheeling horses into Troy. Intelligence work goes on and on. This is a story about New Zealand's place in the Five Eyes, the international intelligence alliance with the UK, the US, Australia and Canada. And your team there, it's a very small group that works in your intelligence service. They are righteous.

How useful did you think Five Eyes was as a relationship, as an alliance, as an intelligence sharing agreement when you became minister? Because you did six years as minister, didn't you? Yep. As an intelligence sharing arrangement, it was very good. And we got benefits out of it and we contributed to it.

I don't think I'm going to get that, am I? No. But there were specific examples. I mean, were they related to China? Can you give us any information about what those examples were? No, I won't, except that they were, and they were of value to those partners. And they expressed that to you? Yes.

And while you can see why up to a point, it is also incredibly frustrating because it limits our understanding of what is really happening, which means we struggle to evaluate the stakes involved. Yeah, and at a time when there's rising geopolitical tension, keeping the public informed goes to the heart of our democracy.

Yeah, it just goes to show the tension of being in that position, doesn't it? And at the time he was minister for the intelligence agencies and defence too, you get the impression that he himself is frustrated to be making decisions based on what he hears inside the corridors of power without having buy-in from the public because a lot of the time we are not having those conversations.

How close is the relationship? I mean, would people who worked for the SIS be able to go and work for CIA? Do CIA people come here? I mean, do you have those sort of exchanges? There are. Look, there are. I'm not sure how I would characterise it. Look, there are exchanges, I suppose, is probably for want of a better word. And...

The story we're about to hear about this Kiwi working at the sharp end of the CIA took place more than 40 years ago now. But it sounds like that arrangement is still going on today. Yes, and I know that there have been other more recent examples with other Five Eyes partners as well. Right, because you actually know these people through your family background, right? I mean, your parents both worked for SIS back in the day.

pretty much saved the world back in 1983, and then, what, came and hung out at your place in Wellington later in the 80s? Yeah, hung out is probably a stretch. And look, I didn't meet him. It was only Mum and Jim.

And we'll come back to this throughout the series. Counter-terrorism, I guess, is more on people's minds these days. You had 9-11, obviously, the Christchurch mosque attacks. But that political aspect, the alliances, the conflicts with other state actors, that is the fundamental reason for being for these agencies. OK, so Kit Bennett, aged just 19, approaches his superiors to find out how he might get to work in intelligence.

As it happens, Kit Bennett's is just 23 years old when he becomes a central figure in what initially looks like a big win, but will become something of a disaster for the SIS and potentially career ending for him. Yeah, so I'd been in the job for about a year and we had a reorganisation in the service and we set up this new branch and 18 days after it was set up, I was on the surveillance that caught Dr Sarch. Right.

All right, so this is a big deal because it looks like the SIS have caught a big fish. Bill Such, he's been a really high-flying public servant and he was still highly influential. He was a public intellectual, a writer, economist, historian. And very much a man of the left, a man who had been close to the Labour Prime Minister, Norman Kirk, who had to be told what had happened because the PM had to sign off on what would happen next.

And Bill Such hands off an envelope to the KGB. The envelope is given to a driver who takes off, goes straight back to the embassy and can't be touched. So Bill Such is not caught red-handed because he's already passed on this envelope. But he is arrested all the same.

And he is held overnight. Now, he doesn't deny that he was meeting the Russian and had met him previously because Razgovorov had approached him. But he says it was something to do with Zionism and China, just an innocent conversation. It's all a bit confused, but this is because he says the Russian was hard to understand. And Dr Such refuses to talk to the SIS.

which raises a pretty interesting counterfactual. If he had taught, we'd not have known about it for decades, if at all.

But when all the attempts to coerce him run out, he is ultimately charged by police under the Official Secrets Act, which brings the whole thing into the court system and the public arena. Now, that is not what the SIS had planned for. The whole operation has been about getting such to talk to them. The SIS are an intelligence agency. They want information. They're not there to do law enforcement.

Labour Prime Minister Norman Kirk has been convinced by the SIS, but the intelligence agency wouldn't release all the information they had on Dr Such.

pēn pōtraits of people who were essentially his friends who he was lining up to take over from. Now, these pēn pōtraits, we're going to refer to them as profiles, if you like. They're basically potted biographies, aren't they, John? Yeah, they're just short bios, a long paragraph or two on each person. Yeah, I mean, these profiles, they were found in Dr Such's office, but they were not used in evidence at trial.

They didn't want to know about it, did they? It was basically, the message from MI6 was basically clean up your own mess. So while an analysis of these profiles has been released, it's less convincing without the files themselves. But we've obtained these files and we're going to publish them because we think it's important to establish facts wherever possible, especially in this rather murky world of espionage.