Guy Nespina

Yeah, but this is pretty important because these profiles really do establish beyond doubt that Dr Bill Such was spying for the Soviet Union. We can only guess at the extent to which he passed on information. And look, there's a detailed article on the website around all this.

Yeah, it's a good read this. It's a great piece written by Sarah Gaitanos. She's a highly respected historian. She's got really detailed knowledge of the Such case because she wrote the book. She wrote an award-winning book on Dr. Such's wife, Shirley Smith. And what we can say here is that basically there are three big bits of evidence against Such. Firstly, he is observed by the SIS meeting on multiple occasions around Wellington with Dmitri Rezgovorov of the KGB.

And finally, these profiles, they're of six people, all civil servants, all of them now dead. You can read these as they were written. Obviously for a foreign reader with an interest in how the subjects feel about the Soviet Union, but also things like their vulnerabilities and their fields of expertise.

These guys were unwitting characters in a dramatic story, but characters they were. So let's just look briefly at one example. Someone at the Asian side of external affairs, which is effectively today's MFAT or Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. And it says, as a young man, he was one of the left wingers suspected by the Americans, but they didn't have enough evidence to ask for his removal.

Within these intelligence agencies, the culture of secrecy, of need to know, is deeply embedded. But the such case forced a number of SIS personnel into court under supposedly secret identities. Kit Bennett's was Mr S.

Yeah, there's a massive new building now. But of course, when Donald Trump went to CIA at Langley on day one of his first presidency back in January of 2017, he stood in front of that wall in the old building to leverage the symbolism. There is nobody that feels stronger about the intelligence community and the CIA than Donald Trump. There is nobody. APPLAUSE

And these are the NOCs, N-O-C, the officers working under non-official cover, largely posing as business people so they can travel wherever and meet a wide range of foreigners and still look legit. But the downside, and it's a big one, they are not covered by diplomatic immunity in the way that they would be if they were attached to an embassy.

Exactly. They're on their own. So if they get caught, there's no guarantee the cavalry would arrive. And while we're in CIA headquarters in Langley, we did talk about those films, about how they were perhaps misleading. But this is the site of that famous scene in, and I hate to return to this, but Mission Impossible, isn't it? Where Tom Cruise, he breaks in through the air conditioning ducts or something, and he hangs down on a wire from the ceiling.

The Agency was produced, written and hosted by John Daniel and me, Guy Nespina. Our executive producer for RNZ was John Hardervalt and our executive producer for Bird of Paradise Productions was Noel McCarthy.