Kit Bennett

But I also don't, I just need to be a little bit careful about some of the guys I dealt with. So a GRU officer and a KGB officer. Now, they could still be alive.

One of those operations I believe was blown by Ames. But the other one I don't know. And if he's still alive... And if he's still alive, then he could, even in this regime, could still be at risk.

When we talked last time where I said that I, you know, used to go through customs and I would then later meet in a hotel room with a colleague who would give me some of the equipment I needed, the sort of thing that might raise eyebrows going through customs. And you immediately said, you know, did you carry a gun? And I don't want to talk about guns either. No matter what I say, I sound like a wanker.

It's also an intimate story about one man's work inside the belly of the beast and the risks he took. So I was there for a week or so. I don't think I slept much because I knew that if this was going to happen, it wouldn't matter if I was walking around with an M16. They would have got me.

Masterton in those days was a town funded and financed by a very successful farming industry. Of course, you know, my father worked for the council. He was a hydatids control officer. Pretty much every farmer in this part of the Wairarapa

This is Kip Bennett. He was born in 1951 and grew up in Masterton at a time when provincial New Zealand had one of the highest living standards in the world. This was definitely a very successful part of the country, you know, because we were living off the sheep's back even in the 60s at that stage. And a neat town to grow up in. I mean, you couldn't do anything that everybody knew who you were. And so, you know, you had to behave, but...

We had a lot of fun, lots of parties and things like that. There wasn't just rock and roll in the 1960s. There was a generational clash around values. And my father was, you know, always a kind of a Tory type supporter. And as a young person, I was, you know, bucking against that, which was great. And there were interesting things happening in the world, you know, troubles in the Middle East and the Cold War, the development of the Cold War. And my best subjects at school were history and English, and I really loved history.

It started off in the first independent companies and the commando units, and that was then attached to the Eighth Army. So he went through the Western Desert, was wounded three times. And like lots of those men, came back, didn't want to go back to university. Only found out later in life he'd been to university and didn't want to go back, just wanted his family around him. My father was always interested in politics, and I think he and I used to, we were very close, but we used to argue fiercely about politics.

politics and things like that. Was there fun over the kitchen table? Yeah, dinner table. And my mother would say, oh, fight your buggers. But in this case, that generational clash was perhaps more a series of skirmishes rather than an all-out war. I was not anti the war in Vietnam. You know, I bought into the fact that it was the domino. That was the general thinking at the time.

Just a quick note here, the domino theory, that was the idea that if one country fell to communism, then its neighbour would fall too, and then the next neighbour, and so on. Yeah, it was one of the justifications for the war in Vietnam to stop the spread of communism before it hit other countries. And there were the good guys and the bad guys, and we were the good guys. And, you know, and communism could take over the world. And, you know, I mean, I bought into that, not perhaps politically,

Totally naively, but I guess a bit naively. You know, I was a 16, 15, 16, 17 year old boy and I was interested in lots of other things like flying aeroplanes. I spent all my time at Hood Aerodrome flying as I could. Now my parents couldn't afford for me to fly so I worked as a telegraph boy and a postie at Christmas and that sort of thing to pay for my flying. And I had a plan that, you know, if I could take girls flying in aeroplanes, you know, how good was that going to be?

Yeah, well, not so much. But anyway, I wanted a career in aviation, so I took subjects at school that would get me a career in aviation, got into the RNZF. Kit Bennett had a pilot's licence, but he didn't just want to be a pilot. He wanted to be a fighter pilot.

But that wasn't what happened. His career took an unexpected turn during training. We'd had a guy from the military come and talk to us about intelligence stuff. And I realised I'd always been interested in that, you know. And not even so much in the glamour of spying, not the James Bond stuff. I was more fascinated with the politics of it all. And, you know, the...

You know, I don't think I can pretend to know anything about, or at that stage as a 19-year-old, any understanding of geopolitics, but I was interested in it. And that political element is really important to understand, because what the intelligence agencies do is all about politics, and that was particularly the case during the Cold War.

And it was just when I suggested in the Air Force and they kept saying, no, that's not going to happen. You know, you probably need to get more realistic. And I thought, no, I don't want to be realistic. I think I'd like to do it. And so why did you get shoulder tapped? Well, I actually contacted the service and heard nothing. And then they came and saw me and asked me if I'd like to do it. Yeah, so it was a combination between me dropping this note and this one guy in the service that said,

And he took on myself and another guy who had both been through this and said, you know, the Air Force has some of the most rigorous selection processes. You know, we should take advantage of these guys. Now, whether the SIS had seen something special in him or it was just a confluence of circumstances, Kit Bennett's was not the usual kind of recruit. And so I went in, but I was at that point the youngest recruit.

I was told, the youngest person ever to have worked in a Western intelligence service. And of course, I didn't have a degree. And so I was on a training program for two years in the service. And that was when I learned how it all worked. I had a brief to read anything I wanted to. Now, intelligence services work on the need to know principle. But I was told to, you know, if I was working in the registry, I could read whatever I wanted to read. And I read myself into the job.

And I thought the only reason I was interested in going to the anti-war stuff was to go to the parties afterwards. They would have been good. But it just seemed to me that I didn't believe that the revolution was coming and the commies were going to be running up the beaches at Lyle Bay.

I don't know why anyone would run up the beaches at Laobai. But anyway, you know, I didn't think that, but I was fascinated by the Soviet target and by the USSR and by the Cold War. And one man in the organisation that I decided very early in my time, I want to work for him. This is a guy we've previously called Jamie Mercer. Before Kit worked for him, he was my mother's boss at the SIS. So he ran the Russia desk.

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