John Daniel

So one of the many strange things about this dance is how much there is riding on the lie that Kit Bennett is a businessman.

Our understanding is that the GRU did not have a presence in New Zealand at the time of a such trial.

So it makes sense that this cover, even using his real name, would hold with the GRU.

After numerous meetings, around the time he discovers that another CIA operative has been killed during an operation against the GIU, Kit Bennett and his handler start to push towards an endgame involving warplanes.

But before he's come up with the seemingly chance photo, and amongst some other snaps of his wife and whatever he's been up to lately, weeks and months of work have been put into his backstory through CIA liaison with the SIS and then through the Royal New Zealand Air Force.

who had taken Kit Bennett up in the A-4 Skyhawk, an attack aircraft with guns, missiles, rockets, even capable of carrying nuclear bombs.

All this so his cover would sound legit.

Yeah.

And so there's a, you know, but something comes up in conversation about something or other and you can answer honestly and knowledgeably.

While the RNZAF combat wing was disbanded in 2001, back in the mid-1980s, 75 Squadron, running the A4 Skyhawk, was headquartered just outside the small town of Bulls.

In fact, all of this is designed to get Kit Bennett to a point where he can quietly, ever so discreetly, allow Vladimir to discover that he's on a Royal New Zealand Air Force committee evaluating the possibility of buying F-16s, a more up-to-date combat aircraft than the A-4 Skyhawk.

One of the recent CIA success stories has come in Ukraine.

This is an ABC News story from January 2025.

While we understand that Ukraine and Russia have been in this hot war since 2022, what's less obvious is that Europe is now in conflict with Russia.

This is driven largely by what are described as grey zone attacks from Russia.

Not direct attacks that kill people, but things like unidentified drones over airports, the destruction of undersea cables, sabotage of rail lines, that kind of crucial infrastructure.

And so we asked Professor Azizian if he thinks there is actually an unannounced hot war going on between Europe and Russia.

Professor Zizin was then pointing to the way countries are lining up on either side of the Ukraine-Russia war as an indication of how the battle lines are drawn, as I say, back in November 2025.

Yes, so they're working on containment of their adversaries.

intelligence and counterintelligence.