Guyon Espiner

I mean, they were funding parties.

Yeah, the director of the New Zealand SIS was there as well as someone from MI6.

David Lange starts out quite bullish.

The notes say he expresses contempt for a recent offer of military cooperation between the USSR and New Zealand by the Soviet deputy foreign minister during a trip here.

Lange reckons New Zealanders have way too much common sense to be bamboozled by the Soviets.

He says there's no chance New Zealand as a country would willingly hand over the country to Soviet domination.

Gordievsky says after the Labour Party was elected back in 1984, the KGB ordered its people to find contacts and agents who would be willing to go to New Zealand and other countries of the South Pacific region to promote anti-nuclear peace policies.

Now, Kit Bennett, he didn't get to meet Oleg Gordievsky when he was out in New Zealand.

By that point, he says he'd fallen out of favour pretty seriously with the service.

We'll get to how that all unfurled in the next episode.

But he did have dealings with other defectors who were clearly put to work by the intelligence services.

There was an East European guy when I was in training.

I had to do a practice recruitment of him, and he was a defector.

And I was only ever told a cover name for him, so I think he was from Czech intelligence service.

I think that's where he was from.

I'm not 100% sure.

And he play-acted the defector and I. So we had a brief meeting, and I was told to ask him to lunch.

And he was reporting back all the time on how well I was doing, and then afterwards there was a great big debrief, which he didn't come to.

I was hoping to meet him in real life, but I didn't get to meet him in real life.

I only ever got to meet him in cover.