Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Just a heads up listeners, this episode contains some adult language.
Previously on the agency.
Maybe the guy that I piggybacked in wasn't successful, no matter how hard he tried. Maybe he was successful and maybe they wasted a lot of time and effort on it. Would they necessarily blame Vladimir?
That depends how you define World War III. We could very well define what's happening as a World War III. You know, it's like at the draw.
It's the sort of thing that happened. However, you know, maybe his vulnerabilities were identified by Hansen, more likely be by Ames, and he might have gotten the shit. So with the dead-end technology one, that's what we did. I wheeled in this guy, and then I was out of it. That was it, gone. Don't know what happened.
Do we know whether they embraced the dead-end technology and wasted a lot of time in it? I don't get to know that. No, I don't get to know. I was told unofficially that we'd had a success there, but I think, I don't know, but I think that was blown, after being going for a little while, by Aldra Games.
Aldrich Ames, or Rick Ames, had worked for CIA in various guises since the early 1960s. He'd risen to a lead role in the Southeast Asia Division of the Soviet and East European section when he began passing secrets to the KGB in 1985. But this wasn't discovered until 1994.
And by then, Kit Bennett was long gone from CIA and New Zealand's SIS. He only found out that his operation against Vladimir was probably blown by Ames through an unofficial contact.
Well out after I'd left the agency and I met up with an old friend of mine and I said, if it was after Ames had been arrested, because that was after my time, someone must have told me that they thought Ames had done it. And he did another operation of Jamie's too. He blew. Did he? Yeah, and I said, let him out, I'll be there to meet him.
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Chapter 2: How did Aldrich Ames betray the CIA and its agents?
And Gordievsky said, no, I didn't. The people that I fingered went to prison. The people that he fingered were shot in the back of the head. And there's a bit of a difference, you know. So we're the good guys.
This is a job where manipulation and deception and a certain amount of cynicism all go with the territory. But it doesn't necessarily mean there's a moral equivalence between the two sides. From Bird of Paradise Productions and RNZ, this is The Agency. I'm John Daniel.
And I'm Guyon Espiner. This is Episode 5, Treachery. Who do you trust? Who can you trust? In this episode, we're going to look at what is perhaps the most important question of all for an intelligence service. You have to trust some people to get anything done. But if you trust the wrong person, well, that can sometimes do enormous damage.
You expect the opposition to be acting against you. But if your own people do it, the blow is that much harder. Not just because they've had access to your secrets, but also because it spreads fear and mistrust. Has anyone else been turned?
At the same time, it's great if you can get someone from the other side to come over.
Yeah, the recruitment in place of Vladimir that Kip Bennett's was working on, that would have been very useful. But it's also a question that occurs at a political level. And we're going to hear from a former high-ranking CIA official how a breach of trust might apply there.
At the very highest political level, where it involves the so-called leader of the free world.
And we'll also hear how New Zealand and its other Five Eyes partners might need to de-risk their alliance with Donald Trump's CIA.
We often hear people who go from the West to the East referred to as traitors, whereas the ones who come across in the other direction, they're just defectors. The language, of course, is emotional. You could say it's a bit like two sides of the coin being the terrorists and the freedom fighter.
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Chapter 3: What role did Oleg Gordievsky play in the intelligence community?
Yeah, the nice man from the KGB, as my mother put it, clearly likes it here from what he writes in his book, Next Stop Execution. He says 1986 was his first visit of four. Obviously, he does a lot of talking in the UK and the US. He has meetings with Thatcher and Reagan. And he goes to CIA where he talks with their Soviet teams. Ironically, one of the people he's talking to is Aldrich Ames.
Yeah, because aims won't be busted for years. And just in terms of that connection to New Zealand, it's pretty interesting here, isn't it? Because while he comes here four times, he only goes to Australia twice. And he says the work he did in New Zealand was, quote, particularly important because the country had been under massive propaganda and ideological attack from the KGB.
And he says, quote, the ruling Labour Party seemed unaware of the extent to which the fabric of their society was being damaged by subversion.
It's a big call, isn't it? Now, David Lange pushes back on this at the time Gordievsky's book is published in 1995. And there's a suggestion that Gordievsky, as an MI6 agent, is running an alarmist line that suits Margaret Thatcher's Britain. But we looked at this in Episode 3 of The Service.
Sir Geoffrey Palmer, the Labour Deputy Prime Minister at the time, talked about a full-court press from the KGB.
At the time I was involved in this, the Soviet Union, in its dying days, was extremely active in New Zealand in trying to penetrate our systems. There was something of a blitz of it, as far as I could see, and we had a lot of problems with that.
And what were they up to? I mean, they were funding parties.
Well, they were doing all sorts of things and they were trying to get hold of people who were sometimes members of the government, sometimes supporters of it, sometimes influential people in other areas. And... They had a sort of full-court press going, as far as I could see my memory of it.
And this time, we actually have the notes from a two-hour meeting that Oleg Gordievsky held with Prime Minister David Lange on August 27, 1986. These are from the Margaret Thatcher Foundation. We'll put them up online. I suspect they wouldn't have been released at our end.
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Chapter 4: How did New Zealand's political landscape influence intelligence operations?
And he was treated very, very badly. This is all before my time. Then they decided that he was, in fact, genuine. But there were still some Americans that believed that he was a false flag and that he wasn't a real defector. Now, there's still discussion today that Nosenko may have been a triple agent. But regardless, he came out to New Zealand in the 1970s. I spent a day with him.
I actually took him for a bit of a drive around town. And then he said, come on, we'll have a drink.
So a bottle of vodka was procured.
And he took off the cap and he looked at me and he squeezed it. Looked at me and squeezed it.
I thought, oh no. And drink was taken and the frontiers of knowledge were pushed back.
Anyway, we were talking and he said, I was a little bit of my bad Russian, and he said, And I said, what's that? He said, do you know what that is? And he said, do you not understand? He said, literally, it means don't piss in my eye, but it means, you know. He said, can you swear in Russian? I said, no. He said, well, you can't speak Russian.
So he said, so we're in this hotel room sitting on the floor and I've still got the notes, big yellow sheets of paper with his scrawl on it saying, They're teaching me all this Russian. Shit, I was drunk. Apologies to the Russian speakers in our audience. Kit Bennett says they had a less liquid lunch some years later in the US. When I was in Washington one time, I said, does he ever come up?
And they said, yeah, well, he does. We can always get him up if you'd like to meet him. So he and I went off and had lunch together. It was good. I really liked him. There were a number of these Soviet defectors who came out to New Zealand to meet with the SIS over the years. But Kit Bennett says they weren't all as chatty as Nisenko.
Another KGB officer who had defected to Britain's MI5 in 1971 was Oleg Lialin.
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Chapter 5: What were the implications of the nuclear-free policy in New Zealand?
Lialan posed as a textile buyer while actually belonging to Department V, responsible for sabotage and assassinations. Apparently, he had a different vibe. And Lialan came out. I didn't like him. And he didn't like me. I just didn't kind of warm to the man.
But I liked Yuri. He was good. Kip Bennett says meeting these defectors would often set him thinking.
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? What would have turned me to work for the Russians? What was your answer? I don't have an answer. I don't know.
He says money would not have been a motivation.
You could have offered me millions of dollars and that wouldn't have affected me. The way Kit Bennett tells it, he was running on the kind of idealism that meant he wasn't for sale. 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. The Cold War finished years ago now.
It all ended, of course, with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the sense that the West had won, that liberal democracies were a kind of logical end point for societies.
But just a decade later, America met with the shock and awe of September the 11th. And with the subsequent American-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it wasn't quite so clear that CIA were still the good guys. In a fight against an enemy fueled with their own brand of idealism, CIA had gone looking for additional leverage to extract information, and that had become its own form of betrayal.
Good evening. A scathing report issued today details what the CIA did to terrorism suspects in the name of 9-11 and in the war on terrorism.
This is from NBC News in 2014.
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Chapter 6: How has the relationship between New Zealand and the CIA evolved?
I mean, this is a democracy. This is people don't like each other. People can compete with each other. You have all sorts of issues. And Russian propaganda uses that. So in that sense, infiltration through social media, other ways into New Zealand society, democratic values is part of the business of intelligence communities.
The lead figure in the Russian intelligence community is the President, the man who started out as a KGB officer and under whose regime multiple suspicious deaths have occurred of journalists, dissidents, defectors, in fact anyone who challenges him.
Now, if this feels like a warp from our CIA story, stick with us. We've gone out on a bit of a loop, but we're about to come back to it. Let's just remind ourselves that the Russian state moved from the communist politics of the Soviet Union to a country that is at least nominally democratic. But the state security services remain very similar to the Soviet era.
The KGB has been split into the domestic FSB and the foreign SVR, but with much the same people and methods. And Soviet military intelligence, the GRU, remains the GRU. It's just that now it's Russian military intelligence.
And Vladimir Putin, drawing on the people and the methods from his background in the KGB, has now been in power for more than a quarter of a century.
And what we see in Russia is probably close to an ideal political system for Mr Putin, where he's basically the new czar, the new leader. Not exactly a communist dictator, but someone who keeps everything under control. There is not much dissent.
But if Putin is a man whose leadership style owes a lot to the Soviet model, it's important to understand just how far the political ideology that underpins his government has changed.
Interestingly also, I was asked a question recently, is Putin left-wing or right-wing? I mean, this is a transition phenomenal that has happened in Russia, which I don't think people are really following. They still sometimes think of Russia as a communist country. Not at all. Russia has moved in the pendulum to the very right.
So Russia can be compared today with some ultra-right political parties in Europe. And this is where there is an element of sympathy between them. There is an element of sympathy with Mr Trump as well, given his populist agenda.
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Chapter 7: What challenges does the Five Eyes alliance face today?
The report also said, Now, it's important to say that while they saw this evidence that Russia was trying to influence the election, that in itself is not new. Russia has been running political interference campaigns forever. And ultimately, they said that the Russian efforts were not enough to have made a difference. So Donald Trump was the legitimate winner.
Trump said at the time, okay, that sounds fine.
But that wasn't going to last for long. There are a lot of claims and counterclaims about President Trump and Russia that we won't get into here, from the Steele dossier to the FBI-led Crossfire Hurricane investigation, Trump's extraordinary summit with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki in 2018, and the Mueller report. But basically, Trump's point is that there's nothing to see here. It's all a hoax.
The Russia hoax. And after the pressure on President Trump has built up for a while, he decides the public officials involved in the story are going to pay.
So, one day, a couple of years into the first Trump presidency, Susan Miller gets a call. She says a friend is warning her.
that Trump is going to go after the people that did the Russian influence paper.
Susan Miller and others from the American intelligence community have been repeatedly targeted for reporting on the level of foreign influence from Russia.
Susan Miller had to hire a lawyer at her own expense to defend herself against accusations from the first Trump administration.
Trump's Attorney General William Barr appointed a federal prosecutor, John Durham, to investigate the Trump-Russia investigation.
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Chapter 8: How is the Trump administration impacting intelligence operations?
this Russian information with this ambassador here because he's a Trump appointee. And then the chief of station is not necessarily a Trump appointee because that's actually appointed by the DCIA. But the DCIA is totally pro-Trump. And so is Tulsi Gabbard. And look at what she's doing. I would think that there would be a couple of thoughts about, you know, what should we be doing here?
Susan Miller, the former head of CIA counterintelligence, says American intelligence, starting with CIA, should now be excluded from certain areas of Five Eyes cooperation.
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? That's what I think is probably going on.
Yeah. What would your advice be if you were in that room?
I would say be very careful about sharing Russian information with him. China is probably OK. But I personally think and I don't think I'm going to be telling them something they are not already thinking. So I'm just going to go with that. They themselves have already come to this conclusion. We can't share everything with this guy. I can't trust him.
Maybe they can on some China things and things like that. But when he's acting like this and they know the reality and they've worked with the U.S. government for longer than Trump has been president twice.
And they know that we in the intelligence community and State Department and everybody else, we're always very focused on our relationship with Five Eyes, et cetera, and our joint things that we do. on hard targets, whether it's terrorism or China or name something else that comes up in the day.
Susan Miller says she hopes New Zealand and the other Five Eyes partners will keep one eye on the long game.
It's super important that we have this. And I would ask them to stay as long as they can and doing what they are doing. Keep that door open. Don't completely break off from us. But they may not want to go and now declare to Americans, hey, by the way. We're running a really cool Russian down in Brazil, and we think that you guys could use this information.
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