John Daniel

Yeah.

It's interesting because I've heard someone else say that there were.

He says after that sales course and in consultation with the CIA chief of station in Wellington, he decided to offer his Soviet and East European contacts a product that was uniquely of New Zealand and would be useful in countries where they often had snow on their boots.

Now, Kit Bennett's is selling these sheepskin products at cost price as samples.

And the beauty of this product is that it effectively does its own marketing.

The catch now was that to follow up on these very promising contacts, Kit Bennett would be operating offshore.

So with the service paying his salary and the agency paying his expenses, Kit Bennett is going to spread himself and his sheepskin goods around the Asia-Pacific area.

He'll meet up with Soviets and Eastern Europeans at a range of different embassies across East Asia, but we're going to dig into one particular contact that will go a long way.

We have previously discussed it.

I mean, I think a long time ago.

And I think the thing is that it's actually quite important in the sense that we've got that whole, you know, the strategic importance of the Philippines and of the bases, the naval bases and all that sort of stuff.

Often the best Cold War recruits were people who wanted to change sides for ideological reasons.

Oleg Gordievsky, the KGB colonel we mentioned.

Yeah.

Oleg Gordievsky was ultimately known as a defector, but where he did his most valuable work was those years he was in place as a double agent for MI6 inside the KGB.

And he was what they call a walk-in.

He approached the Brits on his own.

He just thought the Soviet regime was terrible, and he was very clear that he was doing it for honourable reasons.

He didn't want any money.

It's hard to know the reality of that, but it is quite an image, isn't it?