John Daniel

Whether he'll get to first base.

Because if Vladimir can get Kit to first base, maybe he can get him to second base.

Did it occur to you that he might have been

you know, dangling or whatever.

I mean, you know, were you... I mean, there are just multiple layers of deception available, aren't there?

Either way, the stakes have just been raised and they start to get into an area of technology that would be of enormous use to the Soviet military.

So having already established that he had previously spent time in the Air Force, Kit Bennett is going to take it up another notch.

Remember, the GRU are military intelligence, and it's worth noting that the F-16 is still very much in use today by the US and allied air forces, so information about it would be treasure for any opponents.

Rather than just trying to stop that information from getting stolen, CIA have decided to run an operation around what's known as dead-end technology.

Technical information that looks viable, that appears even to scientists to be something that might work, until you waste a lot of time building it and find out it doesn't work.

The Russian space shuttle, the Buran, flew just once in November 1988 after swallowing an enormous amount of time, money, and scientific expertise.

The Soviets had made great strides initially by just copying the American space shuttle program,

Then the bad science was passed on to them.

So this is the plan that's put together by CIA over months.

Kit Bennett isn't just doing this on the fly.

The information is going back to Langley, being poured over and discussed, perhaps not at the highest levels, but pretty high up.

And it's no doubt being taken very seriously before it gets signed off.

Yeah, because he wasn't just running this operation in Manila.

He was working in a number of cities across Southeast Asia.

This was a kind of gentleman's agreement between spies, where Kit Bennett says there was a central rule.