John Daniel

Being a New Zealander is a good start.

But if anyone following him sees him doing this counter-surveillance, they will immediately be suspicious because businessmen aren't supposed to do that kind of thing.

They'd put a team on me to follow me.

Kit Bennett says these interviews took up the best part of a week.

And the following week, the psychiatrist came back with the results.

There were other practical skills as well.

Kit Bennett took another course, one that would help him in his cover role as a businessman.

So this goes back to something that keeps coming up in the espionage world.

Who do you trust and how much do you trust them?

And perhaps also, what's in it for me?

There's a photo of Kit Bennett, you'll see it on the website, young, mustachioed, wearing dark glasses with a brimstone necklace, taken sometime around 1980, in the early months of his engagement with CIA.

And you managed to get yourself invited into these sort of diplomatic situations or whatever.

Now, how does that work?

Yeah, so those diplomatic functions, you've got the Western bloc and the Eastern bloc, as it were, all in the same space at the same time.

So you'd have lunch at the French embassy or whatever, but the Czechs and the Russians and the Americans are there as well.

Is that right?

So you're talent spotting effectively at these things.

You're working out who the best target might be, reporting back presumably to the chief of station.

So are you being debriefed by the service and CIA at the same time?

How many people were in the CIA station in Wellington when you were there?