Kit Bennett

But sadly, when they had people like Ames and Hanson who were traitors and worked for the Soviets, the Soviets were catching our people and killing them.

But the objective of someone doing what I was doing was to snuggle up to a KGB officer, if you like, get to know them.

You don't necessarily tap them on the shoulder and say, hey, come and work for CIA.

But slowly they would start to realize that there was more to you, that you were.

And that meant that if they had the seeds of doubt in their minds, as an awful lot of them did, they'd be weighing up in their mind.

They actually recruit themselves.

In the agency, we always talked about Time magazine recruitments.

And Time magazine recruitments were KGB officers who are highly skilled, highly trained, well-educated, came out to the West.

And for the first time, they were exposed to the media in the West, which they really didn't understand.

So they'd pick up a Time magazine and they'd open up the first page and there's Brezhnev

being ripped up for all the bad things he was doing.

And that's typical.

This is exactly what you'd expect in the West.

Turn the page, and they're into Ronald Reagan and how badly he's going.

And they go, what's this about?

They'd see the media getting stuck into, you know, leaders of Great Britain and Germany and, you know, Australia and that sort of thing.

And so they would then... That'd almost be... There'd be Time magazine recruitments.

They would see that there was something...

There was a certain fairness in our media, often not recognised today as it should be.

You don't know what you've got until it's gone.