Kit Bennett

Oh, well, we can't tell you that.

Well, okay, well, we could probably spend the money on health and education.

You know what I mean?

I was then the head of the research and analysis part of the Soviet.

By then I was completely disillusioned.

I wanted to get out and I hated everybody.

But one of the things I was on a joint defence committee and we would look at where Soviet maritime stuff was, you know, where ships and submarines and all that sort of stuff were, whether they were in our vicinity.

We were working on intel from the Brits and the Americans and Australians and the stuff that our Orions would be doing.

Because Soviet subs did come.

They did come.

Oh, yeah, they did.

Yeah, they did stooge around.

How?

We had this emergency meeting the next morning.

And we'd got... The Americans had got onto us and I was sent to this meeting and I had this... I was allowed to demand things.

I went to the meeting and said, well, this is what we want.

All Soviet vessels have...

what we used to call the war plans, but the ship's commissar would have in his safe the envelope that you open in case the balloon goes up and what the ship has to do, because it's a Russian-clad ship.

And obviously the Americans were keen to get a hold of that if they could.

We needed to get the Navy diving team down, so they flew the Navy diving team down from Auckland.