Guyon Espiner

Ohakia, yeah.

So they allowed you to, what, to actually fly?

Sure, but you were in the A4s.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

They allowed you to do that so that your cover would be good enough to do this.

That's extraordinary, isn't it?

Ukrainian intelligence officials say that not only did the CIA give them warning of the imminent invasion, troops they had trained were on the front lines and able to push back against the invaders.

Grey zone attacks are deliberately kept below the threshold of the kind of thing that would lead to a flat-out declaration of war and an escalation of conflict that could be hard to stop.

Just to keep it hard to understand, Russia typically refuses to acknowledge responsibility.

But there has been a ramping up of grey zone warfare over the last few years that makes you wonder whether we haven't moved from a kind of cold war into a hot one.

And you can see why.

And remember, what the intelligence agencies are doing here is often referred to as political warfare.

And while what is happening in Ukraine is definitely a hot war, the one that's playing out across Europe is in this grey zone where intelligence agencies operate, as they did back in the Cold War.

Yeah, this kind of moment in Ukraine and across Europe is a pretty useful reminder of the stakes involved in these more intimate spy games.

If Kit Bennett's can manoeuvre Vladimir into the right spot, there could be a payoff for the US and the West more generally in this Cold War that, through the 1980s, is still pretty hot.

So, having carefully crafted a deception around his level of expertise as a pilot, Kit Bennett and the CIA determined that the most credible next step is to use this story to get in a new man with ties to the US military.

This new man will offer fresh possibilities for the GRU.

Which must be pretty frustrating, but given we know this new American man was posing as an expert in missile guidance and weaponry, you would imagine it's something along those lines.

those really meaty mechanical details that interest the Soviets, either to be able to counteract the weapons or to copy them.

So this is the parallel he's drawing with the operation against Vladimir and the GRU.