John Daniel

From Bird of Paradise Productions and RNZ, this is The Agency. I'm John Daniel. And I'm Guy Nespina, and this is episode one, Knock Knock.

This is Andrew Little. He's now the Mayor of Wellington, but right through the Ardern Government's time in power from 2017 to 2023, he was the Minister in Charge of the Intelligence Services, both the Security Intelligence Service, or SIS, and the Services Signals Intelligence Sister, the Government Communications Security Bureau, the GCSB.

Now, this is going to be an issue right the way through this story. A lot of information about New Zealand's role in the intelligence community, things that are done by the state in our name, is secret.

But too often we don't have well-informed discussions around security and defence, something Andrew Little acknowledged while talking to TVNZ's Jack Tame in 2023. I don't think we have necessarily had a particularly well-informed debate about national security generally and to some extent defence.

Yeah, I guess, yeah. What do you mean, I guess? Is it your turn to be cagey now? Well, I don't want to make out that our place was some sort of constant churn of spy gossip, because it wasn't. A lot of the stuff I picked up from other people when I asked them direct questions because I was working on background or whatever. Right, but some of it did just come up at home or in the course of normal conversation, didn't it?

Yeah, more often me eavesdropping as a kid. I do remember hearing about my stepfather going out for a drink with the man at the centre of the story, because he was back in the country. That would have been years after he left CIA. But when I heard he'd been with the agency, I thought that was quite interesting. So I wanted to know more, and I got the brush off, which was pretty standard. Quite interesting, all right. I mean, any other good stories?

Well, we mentioned another one last time in that podcast series we did, The Service, which made me sit up. My mother talking about that nice man from the KGB. Right. I don't suppose the KGB were flavour of the month in your house. Correct. So we're talking about Oleg Gordievski, right? Yes.

Right, but Gordievski comes into this story too. We'll get to that a little bit later on, but the point is that for you, these are real people. Exactly. They have a job to do. There's bosses and paperwork, and at weekends they're gardening or looking after kids. They're thinking about pension plans or holidays and whatnot, which I think is really worth remembering because the secrecy around the job means there's a kind of information vacuum.

And we turn to made-up stories, which are, sure, entertaining, but also sensationalised and ultimately misleading. Jason Bourne and Mission Impossible. Yeah, basically, yeah. All right, well, let's meet a real spy.

Marston must have felt even more distant from the major capitals then than it does now. But the Bennetts family had been up close with World Affairs, had seen how what happened overseas could have an effect on New Zealand. Both my parents were interested in politics. My mother was also a veteran and served overseas. My father...

And at that point, I realised that I was not interested in what was counter-subversion. Counter-subversion was looking at New Zealanders suspected of trying to subvert the government. And in the Cold War, that could mean people with legitimate political views were targeted. Yeah, like the Vietnam War protesters, those protesting against Vietnam. They were pretty widespread on university campuses.

Yeah, I think he probably did a number of things at the SIS over the years. As I've said previously, his specialty was recruitment. And I know that he got a Christmas card every year from CIA. So you'd have to guess there was a connection there. And we were firm friends until the day he died. And he was good. He was the best.

OK, so the such case. We don't want to get too deep into the weeds here. It's relatively well trodden ground. Yeah, we covered a lot of this in the service podcast. And Kit Bennett himself would go on to write a book about it 30 years later called Spy. But it's worth revisiting here because it exemplifies the fundamental issue with intelligence services who are operating secretly, wielding considerable power at the heart of the state. Do you trust them?

Yeah, you want to feel that your spies are credible and apolitical, right? That they're going to use good judgment to get it right, and they're not going to take sides. So let's just go over the basic facts of the such case again. In April 1974, SIS surveillance, starring freckle-faced 23-year-old Kit Bennett, are targeting the KGB resident, Dmitry Razgovorov, the guy in charge of intelligence at the Soviet embassy, as he drives out one night.

When Prime Minister was briefed, it was Norman Kirk, and the Brigadier went to brief him. The Brigadier was the long-time head of the service, Brigadier Sir William Gilbert. Kip Bennett had been charged with delivering supporting evidence to the PM. I spent the whole weekend...

Because it's important to convince him with the evidence they have at that stage. I mean, this is, as they say, huge if true. Not just from a political or espionage angle, it must be personally devastating for this famously decent man, Norman Kirk, to hear that someone he trusted and respected was meeting with the KGB.

And without proof, Labour supporters who are already sceptical of the SIS, who they feel target left-wingers because of their political beliefs, these Labour people can't believe that Bill Sarch was really spying for the Soviets. Because they had to see what he was passing. And this classic view of passing the submarine plans over, which is not what Sarch was doing. By then, Sarch was an agent of influence.

British intelligence were asked to send an expert over who would testify to their lining up with a KGB formula for profiles. So things like what they think of the Soviet Union, their interests, weaknesses and so on. But the Brits said absolutely not. We've no interest in going public.

If you don't have the facts, you're going to struggle to understand the real issues. And look, you can sympathise with a family who've always denied he was guilty. And it was, and still seems to be, awkward for Labour and other left-leaning organisations who've been targeted by the intelligence services and no doubt treated a bit heavy-handedly in the past.

Secondly, the KGB archive smuggled out of Russia in the 1990s identifies him in all but name. His codename is Māori, his personal and professional information lines up exactly, and he's recruited in 1950.