Guyon Espiner

He said, and this guy said, hey kid, pick a number and get in line.

Okay, so this is being told as something of a funny story, but emotions run pretty deep here.

And Ames also betrayed people run by other Western intelligence agencies, including the KGB colonel and Daniel family friend, Oleg Gordievsky, who was an MI6 asset.

We'll come back to him.

But Gordievsky's intelligence is good.

It's so good and so important.

I mean, he's credited with turning the world back from the brink of nuclear war.

In 1983, this was during the NATO Able Arch exercises, CIA are briefing President Ronald Reagan using this intelligence, and they find it embarrassing that they don't know who the source actually is.

And they're probably also a bit nervous that the Brits have been sucked in by the KGB.

It's happened before.

Yeah.

Yeah, he tried to bring over the KGB resident, the Soviet equivalent of the CIA chief of station.

This is Dmitry Razgovorov on Arrow Street in Wellington after the arrest of Bill Such.

You said he used to get a Christmas card every year from the CIA.

That's nice.

Right, and while we might not know any more about it than that, it does show how tight those bonds are, or at least were, between SIS and CIA.

We'll hear more in the next episode about where that's at today.

But it also underlines that the espionage game is played for pretty high stakes.

The consequences, they aren't always the same.

It depends on whose rules you're playing by.