Kit Bennett

I mean, we were, you know, we were all English speaking and that sort of thing.

But I think, you know, the Germans and the French didn't.

The Americans have always had an interesting relationship with the French.

They were all part of it too.

Colloquially we call it the Big Five, but yeah, I don't, you know, Five is a much better name.

Yes, that's right, yeah.

And it really was good.

The barriers were down a lot.

Not that there's always barriers, you know, things that have on them, NZAO, you know, New Zealand, Australian eyes only, and, you know, US eyes only, those sorts of things that you don't share everything, but a fair bit of what we were doing, we shared.

And I definitely felt I was among the good guys.

This man, Yuri Drozhin, was really good.

He was really good.

And I learnt my trade from him by being caught out by him, by just not being able to surveil him because he was so clever and so good.

which made me better and better.

And by the time he went, he was replaced by a man who wasn't as good.

And so I'd been very well trained by the KGB on how their counter-surveillance worked.

And they made the mistake of doing lots of counter-surveillance before they had a meeting in a city the size of Wellington.

in our hometown, where we worked really well.

And so if we lost him, we could pick him up very quickly because we'd worked out how to do that.

So I went off to do training there in 1979, and it was fascinating training.