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Chapter 1: What hidden dynamics exist in the Five Eyes alliance?
Just a heads up listeners, this episode contains some adult language.
Previously on The Agency.
One of the things that you often think about in this is, you know, they always say everybody has their price. And, you know, I often used to think about what is my price? What is it that would make me turn? But I was always conscious of the fact that they were the other side, that they were the baddies and that we were the goodies.
I'm not going to be in that room when the Five Eyes minus America, you know, probably sit down and say, what do we do? Do we share Russia with him? Do we even claim that we're allies anymore when he's doing this? What do we do?
How difficult is it to reintegrate to real life after living in the shadows?
I think it was much more difficult than I realised. I don't think I realised how... I don't think I... Because for me, it was my normal.
This is Kip Bennett's. He spent six years working in cover as a NOC for America's Central Intelligence Agency on exchange from the New Zealand SIS in the 1980s. He says at the end of his time, as the nuclear ships route escalated between New Zealand and the US, going back to the SIS was hard because nobody quite understood the toll clandestine work took on the people doing it.
And that reintegration didn't go well. I don't think it was my fault and I don't think it was their fault. I just think it was that no one understood. There were no psychologists, no one spoke to me. So, you know, I didn't know why I was, why I didn't want to do it. I don't know why I was bitter about coming back to the service. But it was just so hard.
And while I disliked the director, you know, I don't think he understood either. So none of us understood.
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Chapter 2: How does living in the shadows affect reintegration into society?
He said, no, what else have you done? Tell me what else you've done. And I said, oh, well, I was in the intelligence world, in the wilderness of mirrors for nearly 20 years. He said, ah, what did you do in there? And I said, no, you know, I'll have to kill you if I tell you. And he said, did you do operational work? And I said, yeah.
He said, were there interesting operations that you were involved in there? I said, yeah. He said, you've got some stuff sitting back there that's probably still evident, and it's come out because of this incident.
From Bird of Paradise and RNZ, this is The Agency. I'm Guyon Espiner.
And I'm John Daniel. This is Episode 6, The Price of Freedom.
I mean, it's the reality of the world. You have to have intelligence services, like you have to have a transport system.
Now, whatever you might think about that statement from a former spy, the people who actually run the country agree. Intelligence agencies are part of the critical infrastructure of government.
Yeah, this has been true of governments of all political stripes, hasn't it? It was interesting to see Jim Anderton, the head of the Alliance, and he was a big sceptic of the intelligence agencies over the years, certainly historically very critical of the SIS, when he came to power with Helen Clark's Labour government in 1999.
After that, he had to grapple with the responsibility for the safety of the nation. He ended up agreeing that the intelligence agencies were essential. So in this final episode, we're going to dig into what this really means for New Zealand in terms of where these agencies sit in relation both to our government and New Zealand's place in the world today.
New Zealand has been part of the Five Eyes Alliance alongside Canada, Australia, the US and the UK for nearly a century now. And that alliance has given us a seat at the top table of the Western security networks, making us an important player relative to our size. But the world is changing and there's no guarantee the future will be the same as our past.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did Kit Bennett face after leaving the CIA?
the American body politic, to further weaken our democratic tradition and to push the president of the United States farther and farther toward the destruction of not only the architectures of national security that the United States and its allies set up after World War II, in large part to protect the world from Russian imperialism,
but through these acts of political warfare, sabotage, subversion, espionage, to actually destroy our democratic system.
Tim Weiner says that chaos would present an opportunity.
I fear that if indeed the United States were struck again, at home or abroad, by a lethal terrorist attack, the President of the United States could well declare martial law and cancel the next election. And that is the great fear that I'm hearing from the people I talk to in the American intelligence community.
The actions undertaken by this new regime have already led to some erosion in terms of trust in the partnership. We know, for example, that British intelligence, they suspended sharing information in the Caribbean in the latter part of 2025 as the US ramped up a campaign supposedly against drug smuggling boats by blowing them up.
And that appeared to be a flagrant contravention of international law.
And so, while there is a school of thought that this is all kind of business as usual for American interests, minus the usual hypocrisy, more and more people and governments, close allies of America, are concerned that Donald Trump's America is abusing its power to extract short-term gains for itself, and those will weaken the Western Democratic Alliance in the long run.
And there are multiple flashpoints that could turn very nasty. Internally, things like, as Tim Weiner says, US elections, or maybe immigration enforcement, that could blow up even further.
War with Iran might spiral out of control, if it isn't ready. Or the Americans might go back and push harder on Greenland.
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Chapter 4: How has the relationship between New Zealand and the US evolved?
We need intelligence agencies to defend our democracy. But they say they need to do that in secret. And that can feel anti-democratic. Kip Bennett is alert to the risks of keeping the public in the dark.
I'm a long way away from intelligence work nowadays, but, you know, I do understand first principles. But one of the things that I think you have to do is you have to be able to justify your position. And I think in many respects, from what I read about what's happening in New Zealand, that I think the service does... a pretty good job, but you've got to stay on that all the time.
Because if you lose the faith of the people in a modern society, you know, it's very dangerous. And intelligence services, you've got to have them. He says as times have changed, there's been something of a shift in public expectation. In the past, in my time, people would say, you know, what is the SIS doing for its money? Well, we can't tell you that. It's a secret, I'm afraid.
And in those days, people would say, well, that's fair enough. I suppose that's what they do. Nowadays, The new generation says, yeah, that's all very well, but what are you doing? 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?
We can accept that there's always going to be tension around what the intelligence services can and can't tell us, but it is frustrating. We do know that those ties between SIS and CIA remain tight.
We know that New Zealand SIS has certainly historically had a close relationship with CIA.
We're talking here with Susan Miller, the former high-ranking CIA officer.
Did you have any experience of working with the New Zealand SIS?
Absolutely. I came down there. I even met your, it was a female prime minister.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of Trump's presidency on international alliances?
By early 1986, Kit Bennett had finished his time with CIA but was still with the SIS. He was based in Wellington.
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?
Did they? Yeah. Never mind the submarines. A little after 5.30pm on February 16, 1986, the Soviet cruise liner Mikhail Lermontov hit a rock in the Marlborough Sounds. Apparently, the pilot had taken it too close to the shore because he wanted to give the passengers on board a better view. By 10.30 that night, the ship had sunk. A Soviet crew member died.
Kit Bennett and the SIS still had tight links with the CIA.
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.
While the Lermontov as a passenger ship wouldn't have been involved in any fighting, that information carried in the ship's safe would help Five Eyes intelligence agencies understand more about potential Soviet war plans.
We needed to get the Navy diving team down, so they flew the Navy diving team down from Auckland. So there's a couple of Herc captains that owe me a beer big time because they had to fly them low level because they were going to go down. They couldn't fly them high.
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