John Daniel

A KGB officer leafing through a Time magazine and the cogs starting to turn in their head.

And the Soviets, knowing they might lose people who just flat out preferred to live in the West...

ran their own operations back at these Western intelligence agencies with fake defectors, known as dangles, presenting themselves to Western intelligence agencies.

In fact, these guys were so common that every walk-in had to be scrutinised with enormous scepticism.

It took months and even years for them to be properly vetted, including a guy like Oleg Gordievsky.

When Kit Bennett finally comes belly to belly with his Soviet target in Manila, it isn't going to go the way anybody thought.

Original music by Anthony Tonnen.

Graphic design by Oliver Wall.

For RNZ, sound production and final mix was by Mark Chesterman.

Production coordinator was Brianna Eurotic-Greek.

Thanks to Steve Burridge, Ali Marsden, Jeremy Ansell and William Saunders.

Thanks to Megan Whelan and thanks also to Susan Baldacci.

Thanks also to CNN, TVNZ, BBC, the ABC, Universal and Paramount.

To read more about the documents and articles we've mentioned, you can go to rnz.co.nz forward slash the agency and you can see the links in the show notes.

before we kind of get started. I don't want to sound coy and I don't want to sound like I'm, you know, important. I mean, I was a foot soldier, you know, I wasn't, you know, I wasn't making decisions about the Cold War. We're in a hotel room in Masterton, about an hour and a half north of Wellington, at the very beginning of two days of interviews with a guy who was born and raised in this wairarapa town.

He's going to tell us an extraordinary story about how he worked for years at the tip of the spear of America's central intelligence agency.

Yeah, he doesn't want to use the real names of the Russian intelligence officers he targeted in case there are real life consequences for them. The modern Russian state, even today, is quite prepared to use lethal force against former intelligence officers it considers traitors.

In fairness, we're all a bit nervous. I've known him since 2019, when Guy and I interviewed him together for The Service, a series about a joint SIS MI6 raid on the Czech embassy at the height of the Cold War. But even before that, I knew he'd worked with CIA.

And so for decades now, I've been hoping he'd talk about that, waiting for him to be ready to tell his story. As he put it right from the start, the Americans can be sticky about this kind of thing. Knowing this at the back of my mind, I've been wondering, what is the appropriate level of paranoia when you're dealing with one of the most powerful and secretive institutions in the world?

Because while it's not unusual to hear from former CIA officers, they normally get official clearance before they talk to the media. So they know what they can say and what they can't. But the man we are talking to has decided to ask for forgiveness rather than permission. And we have no idea how that is going to play out.