Guyon Espiner

I don't have an answer.

I don't know.

You could have offered me millions of dollars and that wouldn't have affected me.

The way Kit Bennett tells it, he was running on the kind of idealism that meant he wasn't for sale.

But I was always conscious of the fact that they were the other side, that they were the baddies and that we were the goodies.

The Cold War finished years ago now.

It all ended, of course, with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the sense that the West had won, that liberal democracies were a kind of logical end point for societies.

This is from NBC News in 2014.

The US Senate had just released what became known as its torture report, detailing the horrific abuse of prisoners that had been sanctioned at the highest levels of CIA, driven by politicians, in particular the Vice President Dick Cheney, who refused to accept methods like waterboarding were in fact torture, describing them instead as enhanced interrogation techniques.

Yeah, I mean, it's easy to see how lines can get blurred when you're charged with defending a country under attack, but you do need to be clear about how far you'll go to reach your goals.

New Zealand has lined up alongside Ukraine after Russia's invasion of 2022.

And while we're part of Five Eyes, that's an intelligence-sharing partnership, and while we work with NATO, we don't technically belong to any defence alliances.

This is Professor Ruben Azizian, the former Soviet and Russian ambassador to New Zealand, who became an academic specialising in security studies at Massey University.

He says the current Russian regime is under so much pressure with the Ukraine war, they don't have the resources to project power into the Pacific.

We benefit from what he calls a luxury of distance, where geography plays in our favour.

But the internet has led to radical change and new opportunities for Russian interference that undermine the West.

And we put that to him when we spoke with him in November of 2025.

Yeah, for anyone who still harbours any lingering doubts about the Bilsach story, it's worth noting that this is the former Soviet and Russian ambassador referencing it unequivocally as an influence operation where a New Zealander is working for the benefit of Moscow.

The lead figure in the Russian intelligence community is the President, the man who started out as a KGB officer and under whose regime multiple suspicious deaths have occurred of journalists, dissidents, defectors, in fact anyone who challenges him.

And Vladimir Putin, drawing on the people and the methods from his background in the KGB, has now been in power for more than a quarter of a century.