John Daniel

They're probing the opposition, trying to get an advantage without resorting to the kind of weaponry that would escalate the situation.

All right, we'll come back to this, to Ruben Azizian and Vladimir Putin's Russia and the America of Donald Trump and what that all means for the Five Eyes Alliance, where New Zealand sits alongside its major security partner.

Remember, Kit Bennett and CIA are now aiming to pass on dead-end technology to Soviet military intelligence.

While it isn't necessarily a well-known technique, he says it's been around for a long time.

Yeah, we're never told exactly what the dead-end technology was, because Kit Bennett's wasn't told.

He didn't need to know that technical aspect of the story.

Now, you can hear that I'm exhibiting a certain amount of scepticism.

We'll come back to this in a second.

Kit Bennett understands why.

OK, so this is something he mentioned separately, the idea that the KGB were kissing a lot of frogs in the hope that one of them might turn into a prince.

In this case, Soviet intelligence had approached a number of intelligence officers and diplomats of Russian heritage and pitched them to come over and work for the land of their fathers.

So effectively, what Kit Bennett is saying is that, yes, the GRU aren't fools.

They know if something looks too good to be true.

Yeah, something crazy like that.

Then while it probably is too good to be true, they can't afford not to follow it up.

And in any case, there's no downside.

And he says the debate wasn't presented as clumsily as it might sound.

There's a series of, you know, very distantly spaced reprungs.

All right.

This is kind of the crux of everything we've been talking about.