Chapter 1: What is the background of Kit Bennetts and his recruitment into the CIA?
He kona eipurangi tēnei ngā te reo irirangi o Aotearoa.
before we kind of get started. I don't want to sound coy and I don't want to sound like I'm, you know, important. I mean, I was a foot soldier, you know, I wasn't, you know, I wasn't making decisions about the Cold War. We're in a hotel room in Masterton, about an hour and a half north of Wellington, at the very beginning of two days of interviews with a guy who was born and raised in this wairarapa town.
He's going to tell us an extraordinary story about how he worked for years at the tip of the spear of America's central intelligence agency.
It is an extraordinary story in its own right. And it's also an important story because it shows just how deeply entwined New Zealand's intelligence community has been with its American ally and the way they have targeted adversaries together. And it's going to help us understand how that relationship works today.
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.
And I don't want to do that. I'm just going to clap for that. OK. Right now, it's fair to say our interviewee is a bit on edge. There's any number of unintended consequences that might come from talking to us on the record.
Yeah, he doesn't want to use the real names of the Russian intelligence officers he targeted in case there are real life consequences for them. The modern Russian state, even today, is quite prepared to use lethal force against former intelligence officers it considers traitors.
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.
In fairness, we're all a bit nervous. I've known him since 2019, when Guy and I interviewed him together for The Service, a series about a joint SIS MI6 raid on the Czech embassy at the height of the Cold War. But even before that, I knew he'd worked with CIA.
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Chapter 2: How has New Zealand's intelligence community been involved with the CIA?
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.
And we contributed to it meaningfully, but, you know, proportionate to our size. But there's no question that there was some intelligence that we provided to Five Eyes partners that was of value to them. And they told me that, their ministers told me that.
What, the head of the CIA or someone? Or the ministers or senior national security people like the Director of National Intelligence at the US or National Security Advisor in the UK expressed to me the appreciation and gave examples. Oh, did they? They would give examples? This is your opportunity to tell me what they were. Yeah, yeah.
I don't think I'm going to get that, am I? No. But there were specific examples. I mean, were they related to China? Can you give us any information about what those examples were? No, I won't, except that they were, and they were of value to those partners. And they expressed that to you? Yes.
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.
And while you can see why up to a point, it is also incredibly frustrating because it limits our understanding of what is really happening, which means we struggle to evaluate the stakes involved. Yeah, and at a time when there's rising geopolitical tension, keeping the public informed goes to the heart of our democracy.
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, it just goes to show the tension of being in that position, doesn't it? And at the time he was minister for the intelligence agencies and defence too, you get the impression that he himself is frustrated to be making decisions based on what he hears inside the corridors of power without having buy-in from the public because a lot of the time we are not having those conversations.
We don't have a deep-seated discussion about the policy or strategic issues that underpin it. He did say some interesting things when he spoke to us though.
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Chapter 3: What significant events occurred during the Bill Sutch case?
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.
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...
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.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of the 'pen portraits' found in Sutch's office?
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.
And that was just a two-car surveillance. And they get lucky. We got this clandestine meeting at the Koori bowling club. So anyway, we housed him, which is the standard thing. After the meeting, you don't worry about where the Russian goes. You've got to find out who that guy is. We followed him to his home in Brooklyn, up some of the windiest streets at the back of Arrow Street there that you've ever been up. Housed him at this house. Still didn't know who he was. And then we'd house him to this location. So when we got to work first thing in the morning, who lives at that house?
All right, so this is a big deal because it looks like the SIS have caught a big fish. Bill Such, he's been a really high-flying public servant and he was still highly influential. He was a public intellectual, a writer, economist, historian. And very much a man of the left, a man who had been close to the Labour Prime Minister, Norman Kirk, who had to be told what had happened because the PM had to sign off on what would happen next.
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 apparently handing over state secrets to the Soviets. But I remember the brigadier came back and said, and he'd said this to me personally, that the Prime Minister was, he didn't use the term gutted, not a term he would have used, but he said he was horrified and desperately disappointed. He was really upset. So the SIS won surveillance for months. So we ultimately saw four clandestine meetings and I was lucky enough to see all of them.
But bungle it when they go to snatch him because the heavy surveillance team lose him at the crucial moment just as they want to pounce. And the last one up on Aro Street that everybody knows about in the pouring rain and I stuffed that one up because he got in a taxi and took about a two minute ride when we were at him walking up the street.
And Bill Such hands off an envelope to the KGB. The envelope is given to a driver who takes off, goes straight back to the embassy and can't be touched. So Bill Such is not caught red-handed because he's already passed on this envelope. But he is arrested all the same.
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Chapter 5: How did the public perceive the intelligence services during the Sutch trial?
They didn't want to know about it, did they? It was basically, the message from MI6 was basically clean up your own mess. So while an analysis of these profiles has been released, it's less convincing without the files themselves. But we've obtained these files and we're going to publish them because we think it's important to establish facts wherever possible, especially in this rather murky world of espionage.
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.
Yeah, but this is pretty important because these profiles really do establish beyond doubt that Dr Bill Such was spying for the Soviet Union. We can only guess at the extent to which he passed on information. And look, there's a detailed article on the website around all this.
Yeah, it's a good read this. It's a great piece written by Sarah Gaitanos. She's a highly respected historian. She's got really detailed knowledge of the Such case because she wrote the book. She wrote an award-winning book on Dr. Such's wife, Shirley Smith. And what we can say here is that basically there are three big bits of evidence against Such. Firstly, he is observed by the SIS meeting on multiple occasions around Wellington with Dmitri Rezgovorov of the KGB.
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.
And finally, these profiles, they're of six people, all civil servants, all of them now dead. You can read these as they were written. Obviously for a foreign reader with an interest in how the subjects feel about the Soviet Union, but also things like their vulnerabilities and their fields of expertise.
The SIS determined the profiles were probably written by Dr Such and handed on to the KGB as information that could be used for recruitment. We debated whether or not to give you these names. They are, as far as we know, entirely innocent people who happened to be in senior public service roles at the time Such was working for the Soviets. So there is perhaps no sense in dragging them into this.
But on the other hand, this is how many of the big stories in our nation's history evolve. Bit by bit, we learn more. And with the addition of each chapter, a more detailed picture emerges.
These guys were unwitting characters in a dramatic story, but characters they were. So let's just look briefly at one example. Someone at the Asian side of external affairs, which is effectively today's MFAT or Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. And it says, as a young man, he was one of the left wingers suspected by the Americans, but they didn't have enough evidence to ask for his removal.
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Chapter 6: What challenges did Kit Bennetts face as a young intelligence officer?
But as it turned out, his fears and the fears of the SIS around these secret identities being revealed were never realised. Everyone forgot about Mr S and Mr T and Mr X and we just got on with our jobs. And so in 1979, four years on from the such trial, even after having been publicly outed, Kit Bennett is able to go into a secret role.
We had this little program going and I'd just say at the beginning, you know, people saying, well, why would...
the NZSISB working with CA, well, we're a member of Five Eyes and, you know, when you see these international pacts and agreements, what we see on television always is the conference where all the people sit around a big round table and they get funny jackets and they have all the flags there and people imagine that this is what these alliances and things are and that's not what they are at all, of course. Things happen below that and that's where I was, well down the list, but
ko-oporation between countries. And so the reason why the agency could use us was because of the way I spoke. I didn't have an American accent. And why would anyone be concerned about a New Zealander?
We're, in that regard, politically very beige. Yes, definitely members of Five Eyes, definitely a part of the Western Alliance, no doubt about that. But, you know, bottom of the world, couple of islands, pretty harmless really. So if you're surprised to hear that a New Zealander was working for CIA, chances are the Soviets would be too. So in other words, they wouldn't necessarily, the KGB wouldn't necessarily see us coming.
Whereas someone who's had a university education at one of the Ivy League universities and speaks with a Boston accent, you know, this guy's from the agency. So that's where Australians and New Zealanders were particularly useful to them. By 1979, Kit Bennett had been working for the SIS for nearly a decade and throughout that time had been in counter-espionage.
working against the Soviets and the East Europeans. And I was asked if I would be interested in being on the project, on this project. And I had to think about that for about two and a half seconds and said, yes, I would. So then there was an interview program with the American Cheetah Station and we went to lunch at the Wellesley Club and
They would have been attached to the embassy? Yes. Yeah. In all American embassies, everywhere, there is a CIA presence. And that would be true today, wouldn't it? Absolutely. Oh, I can't imagine. Yeah, it would definitely be true today. I would certainly hope so. And so the chief of station, the KGB call it the KGB resident, but they are normally clandestine and there'll be people in the embassy that are working for the KGB or the GAU and undeclared. But...
In a country like New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Great Britain, Germany, the agency people there would be identified and known to the local intelligence service, mainly doing liaison work. That's what they were doing.
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Chapter 7: How does the Five Eyes alliance impact New Zealand's intelligence operations?
It's in the open! Anyway, as you've probably guessed by now, when Kit Bennett goes to Langley, joins the CIA as an exchange officer and starts his training, he isn't going to be an analyst or an IT guy or hang around in the office. Kit Bennett is going to become a NOC.
The Agency was produced, written and hosted by John Daniel and me, Guy Nespina. Our executive producer for RNZ was John Hardervalt and our executive producer for Bird of Paradise Productions was Noel McCarthy.
Original music by Anthony Tonin, graphic design by Oliver Wall. For RNZ, sound production and final mix was by Mark Chesterman. Production coordinator was Brianna Euretich-Greek. Thanks to Steve Burridge, Ali Marsden, Jeremy Ansell and William Saunders. Thanks to Megan Whelan and thanks also to Susan Baldacci.
The visual director at RNZ was Cole Easton Farrelly and our camera operator was Jess Charlton. Thanks also to Sarah Gaitanos for the article about Bill Such that appears on rnz.co.nz. Thanks also to CNN, TVNZ, BBC, the ABC, Universal and Paramount. To read more about the documents and articles we've mentioned, you can go to rnz.co.nz forward slash the agency and you can see the links in the show notes.