Guerrilla in Manila

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“Just a heads-up listeners, this episode contains some adult language.”

Previously, on the agency, so I was working in cover and declared targeting Soviet intelligence officers.

And that involved what we call, you know, a belly-developed contact. But the objective of someone doing what I was doing was to snuggle up to a KGB officer if you like. Get to know them. The central job of the CIA officer oversees is to commit foreigners, to commit treason against their own countries, but treat their countries in spy-friendly landscapes. And that the highest goal.

You don't necessarily tap them on the show and say, hey, come and work for CIA. But slowly, they would start to realize that there was more to you. [MUSIC PLAYING] And when it comes to the Philippines, I was there in the lead-up to the revolution. This isn't using a kit being it.

He was in Manila and a non-official cover for CIA. That's right, he is what we call a knock. So to an outsider, he's a businessman who sells sheepskin coats. In fact, he's with CIA on the comment from the SIS. But either way, he's got a bit more than he bargained for by arriving in the middle of some serious political upheaval.

Ironically, the first big Lebang demonstration was the massive demonstration.

The start of the revolution. It was me, they got the first information about it.

“Because my agency contact, I said, hey, sit and do you know about it?”

In a fortnight's time, there's going to be a massive demonstration. No, I said, well, my understanding is going to be big. And now I got that from the consumer at the hotel, I stayed at. Because I was at that hotel a lot. And I got quite friendly with her.

And you know, just on a, you know, and we used to chat and sometimes she'd have a cup of coffee with me around in the breakfast room.

And she was telling me about things that were changing. And that was when Ninoia Quino was assassinated. Opposition leader Ninoia Quino was assassinated in August of 1983 at Manila Airport by members of the Filipino Army. And a week after he was assassinated, I came back into the country and got off it. Gate whatever it was, didn't we? Right where he was shot.

And someone pointed out to me, this is where they shot the Quino a couple of weeks ago. It's not great. Then the revolution brood after I'd pretty much finished them, but it was really, really hot. For kid minutes, working in Manila was a bit different to picking up the trail of the KGB in Karori. And I was someone in town where I shouldn't have been, died then, and I got stopped by the place.

And as I wound down the window, which would have been like that, he pointed a gun at me.

“I mean, the cop pointed a gun at me, said, what are you doing here?”

The bizarre things I looked at, I looked at the gun, I thought. 38 special fringe barrel needs a fucking good clean and should be re-blood. And I'm thinking, this guy is probably a gun at me, and I'm deciding what could have been it. Anyway, he didn't seem too concerned. He really wasn't too concerned. I thought, God, I'm a firearm, I shouldn't be here.

He was, I think he was more interested in looking for Filipinos. Me and my laundry man will know how right and I really was. Behind the political upheaval, Kit Bennett says American interests tagged in different directions. The Philippines has been a lynch pen of American military power in the Pacific for decades. By the end of the Cold War, Clark Air Force Base has a permanent population of 15,000 people.

The Deep Order Port is super bait was also vital, and these are just two of a number of American bases. Filipinos' strongman Ferdinand Marcos had leveraged his links with the U.S. to stay in power for 20 years. The agency, as I understood it, because I was dealing with sort of quite pleased to see, they were keen to see Marcos gone, you know, because he was a dictator in it. And that, yes, some of the people around him like General Fabian Vera.

General Fabian Vera was Marcos's chief of staff, and widely assumed to have mastermind

These were not nice people, these are not bloodshed at home for a beer.

Marcos not so much, but some of the people around him were pretty, pretty bad. The agency sort of thought this would be a good thing to clean out the Philippines and get the democracy back on its feet. And the Pentagon not so much, because they had a cubic bay and Clark Airbase. And I'd been up to Clark on a theoretically doing some business.

And I managed to get on to the base and talk to people. Of course, the Soviets were fascinated that I was able to go and do that. And I didn't do that through CIA. I did that independent of the agency as a business person, and got on there.

“Can't even remember what I was trying to sell.”

You're following the sheets against the floor? Well, I wasn't following sheets, because I was following some imaginary item.

So that was interesting. I did the same at Subic Bay, so I did that.

But as the revolution was approaching, there was this position where the Pentagon, you know, they didn't want to upset it too much. They wanted to keep the status quo, so they didn't lose their bases, but the agency was on the anyway. That was not what I was interested in, I was targeting Soviets.

And the Soviets, with generations of experience of secret police and foreign intelligence, worked built on a culture of brutally patriotic collectivism, were the hardest of hard targets. From Buddha Paradise and Aaron Z, this is the agency. I'm John Banyan. And I'm Guy and Espener, and this is episode three, Gorilla and Manila.

Hello, how are you? I'm very well. How are you?

I am doing fine, and we're are you.

I'm in the Washington D.C. area. Now, we're going to take a bit of a detour here, we'll come back to Manila. But for the moment, we're going to meet someone who's clear with CIA, started in the mid-1980s. This is Susan Miller. She retired from CIA in 2024 after 39 years,

having worked as a case officer and chief of station all over the world. It gets hard targets like Iran and China. She'd rise to be head of counterintelligence at the agency. Susan Miller is going to give us some great insights about how things work at the highest levels of CIA. But that strong CV started from quite humble beginnings.

So, yeah, I was back in the day. Print Journalism major at California, Polytechnic. That's right. Susan Miller studied to be a journalist, and as she comes to the end of her studies, she's looking for a job. You remember the days before we had all this technical stuff,

“we had to go to the Career Center and look for applications to things?”

I went down at the Career Center, and I was looking for an application for like, you know, the Washington Post, the New York Times. You know, all these small newspapers, big newspapers all over the country. You know, this board, this said,

"Come work for the Central Intelligence Agency." My friend and I looked at that and we're like, "Is this a joke?" You know, and kind of looking around as somebody's looking at us. And so, we both grabbed one of these, and I'm like, "I'm just, let's just send it in for a lark."

You know, and I'll just see what happens. Anyway, long story short, a few months later, Susan Miller's moved on from a career in journalism. And then, because most of us were going to be going, apparently, to Central America or South America, because of contras and stuff like that,

they made us go through a three-month paramilitary course.

“Oh, so you're learning what had to modify Ruzzi's and submachine guns and things at that point, are you?”

Ruzzi, submachine guns, shoulder-lunched rockets, we had to learn air off. But Susan Miller has made it clear to his superiors, that she wants to work in one area in particular. The same area as Kit Bennett's. I wanted to work the Soviet target.

When she began in the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union was the number one priority. Susan Miller says, "At that time, every American embassy, even here in New Zealand, had a Soviet branch." What we did have is a Soviet branch in every single embassy, both on the State Department side, as well as the agency side, in every single place, because we were so worried about the Soviets and their influence abroad,

and what they were doing here and what they were doing there. But CLI wasn't just playing defense. And it was also places that's where we would actually recruit agents working for us, meaning sources from embassies that we would cultivate, find out, are they you pro-American, do you love the Soviet Union,

do you want money, do you like this, do you like that?

And so that's what we would do abroad.

“And so my first tour was not one of those.”

My first tour was Moscow, USSR.

So we'll hear a lot more from Susan Miller over the course of this series. That tour Moscow is going to dovetail with an aspect of kit Bennett's story. But we'll get to that. For now, there's a more recent aspect of this story. That brings us right up close to America's return to using targeted strikes on powerful people.

And to President Trump's war on Iran. Susan Miller spoke with us before the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran in February 26. But she has a story that tells us a lot about how that would have played out. Susan Miller is going to give us an insider's view of the 2019 assassination.

Of the second most powerful man in Iran, Kasim Solamani.

It's an extraordinary moment because it underlines the depth of the relationship between the U.S. and Israel. And it shows us how the CIA fits into a stack with both the U.S. military and the heart of American political power with the State Department and the White House. So the Sole money thing was highly classified. We're working it with the Israelis from the late 1990s until 2020. Kasim Solamani was the head of the Kudz Force.

Part of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Court or the IRGC. The Kudz Force are tasked with liberating what they consider Islamic land. Kudz translates as Jerusalem. And the historically being the support behind organizations like Hezbollah, Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Gihad have been widely condemned for terrorist actions. And I considered terrorist organizations by New Zealand.

In 2019, Susan Miller was CIA chief of station for Israel. We had decided that he was, how do I describe our thinking of him? He's basically the Hitler of the Middle East. It's not the Iranian regime, it's Sole money. He's the guy that wants to start the Israeli Arab war. He wants to kill every Israeli that's there because Jews can be trusted.

You know, every single thing, that's Sole money. On top of that, he also had done previously a whole lot of terrorism attacks against American troops in Iraq. And so these Israelis were like, we want to do something about this guy.

“And I said, and do you think your government would be interested in that?”

And I said, well, you know, for me in CIA, I'm not the one that makes that decision. That's the president and the NSC. So, when you guys see the president, you go talk to him or when you see somebody in the NSC, talk to them. The NSC, it's the National Security Council.

It's a handful of the most powerful people in the American government.

Typically, you've got the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Advisor, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. So, ahead of the military, these kinds of people. Often, they will invite people with a specific knowledge to feed into these discussions. And this council is cheered by the president. And so that happened.

And I'm not sure about all the details about how that happened when and how, you know, etc. We did have an ambassador at the time who was a very close friend of President Trump. Really nice guy though, unlike Trump. Put a pin in there. We'll definitely come back to Susan Miller's dealings with President Trump, because she's now basically in open conflict with him. Anyway, she says Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, goes to Donald Trump in 2019.

And Trump signs off on the assassination of KSM Soleimani. But there are the inquisctions about exactly how it's going to go down. So Susan Miller has to go and talk to Yosie Cohen. They hit him all set. He's really external intelligence service, equivalent of CIA, in order to who would not have planned. They said there are these several choices. And this is what we want you to talk to Yosie Cohen about is, what does he think if the Israeli said it?

What is his assessment if the Israeli said it? When did his assessment be, if you know, if we did it, CIA did it, and what about centcom?

“And so that's how it kind of worked out.”

And so we were all talking together about this and everything else. And the plan was already done and how we're going to do it. And that was what the drone and all the rest of the stuff. But it wasn't, we hadn't decided who yet.

comes to Israel for a routine visit and Susan Millie meets with him in a secure area, of course, of the American embassy. To discuss the operation against Soleimani. Susan Millie wants to walk through the reasoning for such a major escalation.

“But I think it's fair to say that for Mark Millie, this time it's personal.”

We were talking about this and I said, hey, General Millie, you know, I know we're going to be going after Soleimani. And we're still trying to figure out who's going to do it and blah, blah, blah. And I said, but I just want to know, you know, assassinating somebody like what been modern is a big deal. And Soleimani, in my opinion, is, you know, seems like, you know, to be the right kind of target. But I want to know your opinion, because you're, you had troops on the ground.

You had this, you had that, what do you think? And he says, Susan, I can't hear out of my fucking right here. Because of that guy. Brought say bomb went off. We're going for him. This is all that was left of a convoy of cars carrying Iran's most senior military commander.

His killing by the United States will shake the Middle East to the core.

Custom Soleimani was headed the elite goods force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

This is from BBC News on January 3rd, 2020. Several missiles launched from a US reaper drone had a convoy of cars carrying Soleimani just outside Baghdad airport in Iraq. Ten other people in the same convoy were also killed. At the end of the day, what happened was they decided that Mossad would not take the shot

because that actually could bring Iranian troops in if they found out. And they would find out because the leaks and everything else. So the US had worked in close concert with their Israeli allies. But took sole responsibility for the strike on the basis that no one wanted an Israel Iran war. Not at that point anyway.

And you'd have to say that the optics for President Donald Trump, they were pretty good too. Yeah, it's really worth noting now because before President Trump and Israel launched a full-scale year war on Iran, much of the commentary was about comparing it with the much more surgical approach taken in Venezuela.

And in fact, this strike on Kissing Soleimani towards the end of Trump's first term was probably

the more relevant comparison. It's noticeable too.

“How much of a different time we were living in back then?”

It's not something they worry about much these days, but back then, the first Trump administration went to the trouble of actually explaining the legal reasoning behind Soleimani's assassination. American legislation under Jimmy Carter's presidency in the late 1970s, then, under Ronald Reagan, right through the 1980s, it had moved to outlaw assassinations. But there's a kind of legal carve out of your life.

Issued later, that says targeted killings are okay if the individuals pose a direct threat to the U.S. or its citizens. This is the BBC news story again. In a statement, the Pentagon said the air strike had been carried out at the direction of the president and that the U.S. military had taken decisive defensive action to protect U.S. personnel abroad.

Now, as we know, this story keeps going and kind of spreads out in many different ways. Six months later, an Iranian is reportedly executed for passing information on Soleimani's whereabouts to CIA and Mossad, which suggests there was a human or human intelligence angle involved. And there is later a reported assassination attempt on Mike Pompeo, who had been CIA chief but was the Secretary of State at the time of Soleimani's killing.

“And seems to have been the key advocate of the operation.”

There's even reports of assassination plots against President Trump himself as revenge attacks Iran denies this. Inside Iran, there are national demonstrations and three days of mourning and outpouring of grief for the death of a great warrior. ISIS are apparently pretty happy about Soleimani's death, but there's also an argument

that the Assad regime in Syria falls once Soleimani is no longer there to hold it all together in an alliance with Russia.

And finally, well, as we record this at least, we have the war in Iran

with missiles and attack drones flying across the region with far reaching economic and geopolitical consequences echoing basically everywhere. Now, it's important to say, this level of high-impact military operation isn't necessarily

Intelligence workers often invisible to the naked eye. It's more about quiet pressure and behind the scenes maneuvering.

“The important thing with this story is for us to see how CIA plagues into the wider American government.”

And understand that the agency is always thinking about pushing American political goals.

And to do that, they can call on the massive war machine that is the U.S. military. That situation in the Philippines that Kit Bennett's was talking about earlier where the military wanted to keep Marcos and power to keep the bases safe, but CIA wanted him out, so they could get back to it democracy. That's ultimately resolved by a political decision because the top politician, the president,

out ranks both the military and the CIA. Remember, the elephants aren't rogue, they're under instructions from the elephant driver. And the armed driver was the president of the United States. And Kit Bennett's gets to go to the elephant driver's home, at least according to this photo that will put up on the website.

He's pretty cagey about what he was doing there. Will do you recognize where I am? No, I don't. It's the White House. Oh, really?

That's the door where the cows come into the White House.

“You recognize that light shade there is the thing.”

Wow. So I have an appointment there, but someone unimportant. I didn't go to the West Wing anywhere near the West Wing. He's a bit clear about this meeting at the White House. We just don't know anymore about it.

In a later episode, we'll come to a different high-level meeting. We keep minutes sits down with the director of CIA. And that ties into big picture politics between New Zealand and the U.S. But for now, let's get back to Manila. What was the mission?

There was a recruitment. So I was looking to recruit and so I got some targets, not just in that country, but in somewhere else as well. And I ended up working against the GIU, which is the military intelligence. And the KGB.

Of course, as you know, the KGB later broke down into the FSB, the internal and then the first chief director at the KING, the external intelligence service of the new Russia.

But the GIU has never changed.

It's still a GIU. The KGB used to call them boots. Russian were called in boots because they said, "Bunch of bloody soldiers and clumsy and all." My experience, not so much.

I thought they were pretty professional. And I had a major operation against them. So yeah. So what can tell us about that? Well, the thing about intelligence operations is that they can change direction

and colour from, you know, they're on busy trying to recruit him and suddenly he's trying to recruit me. So he has realized that there's more to me. And he thinks he's got the chance.

“And I remember when he asked me to get him some things from here.”

And I went and told my colleague, and he said, "Oh, we're going to crush his balls." You know what I'm saying? So we're going to focus now on this element of KGB. It's work for CIA.

His operation against a GIU officer. As he says, they're military intelligence. And well, Vladimir Putin might be XKGB. His old outfit would pull the part after begging the wrong horse in the 1990s.

But the GIU have gone straight through from the U.S. to Russia, from Stalin and Khrushchev through Gorbachev and now Putin. Yeah, that's less well known. But they do include the Russian Special Forces outfits,

known as Spetsnas. So it's a very loose equivalent of our essay, Yes and New Zealand, I guess. They're used to taking on riskier, often paramilitary missions. The sole's reports and things of the scoupals, for example. That was the GIU.

Yeah, they make the KGB look quite cuddly, by comparison. One GIU defector from the 1980s wrote a book saying, part of his initiation into the unit was watching a video of a traitor, stripped into a streetcher, being fed into a quimatorium, whilst in a life. So just say when you go into medium and middle,

you'll really know that he is GIU. And he had got the introduction already from your friend at the Soviet Embassy in Wellington, the KGB guy. And so you go in to meet him in Mollabal, or something like that. No, I made an appointment to go out and see him out in his office.

And using the introduction and so I went out there, and took a cab out there. And we took a risk. Now, could Bennett say we here, because he's working with his CIA handler, who he meets in the Philippines, and while it doesn't sound like much,

KGB and it has been given a list of Soviet embassy people who might be interested in his sheepskin wears. He's fed the names back to CIA, and they've identified this man. Operating in cover is a Soviet trade representative in Manila, as GIU. So this guy is a perfect target.

There's a legitimate reason to approach him as a trade representative. You can start asking him how to get things like import licenses. Yeah, or you could measure him up for an expensive but beautiful coat that's been made in New Zealand as a, that have a bribe. Yeah, that would also be a pretty standard could pro quo for an export,

an export hoping to get access to a nuclear market. So, generally, you're just going to start to get to know the target a little better. Then, after this fruitful meeting, the favour is returned. They've met in this industrial zone on the edge of Manila. And at the end of the meeting, kid minutes, knowing that he won't get a cab in this part of town goes to leave.

So, what I did was I said to my, "Can you call me a cab?" I said, "No, they don't do that here. You know, you've got a helicopter." And I said, "Well, a helicopter." He said, "No, not many cabs out here." He said, "But look, I've got to go into Makati." So, I'll give you a drive-in, which was exactly what we wanted to happen. So suddenly, from this meeting, which was relatively formal, what I was doing,

but I could make do these sheets and coats, to driving into Makati,

you develop a different kind of friendship and that was really powerful.

But, you know, that was the start of our friendly line to each other. Yeah. Oh, our dance. Oh, our dance. Yes. Exactly. Exactly. And so, who was leading to start with me? You will need me.

“Yeah. Because I was looking at gradual involvement. That's what I was looking at.”

And that was very, very, very much how we developed it. So, kid minutes, leaves his catalog of sheepskin products with his new friend, and asks if he can take him out to lunch to thank him for his kindness. One lunch turns into another, and they're often quite liquid. Well, the Russians are known to enjoy a call drink on a hot day.

There's no doubt about that. And you know, it's not an easy job to do if you don't. I couldn't do it now. I couldn't keep up now. Not sure I kept up much then. So, the plan is to get close to his Russian target and gain his trust. Then get him a little loose and find out if he's open to an advance from Western intelligence. Oh, plenty of drinking. And, of course, I was looking to see if he had missed behave.

Kid minutes, he wasn't looking to use blankmail. Just to find out whether his target was prepared to live dangerously. All I was trying to find out is would he miss behave? And I don't mean it's a rule breaker. A rule breaker. Yeah. And if he's a rule breaker, then it's just another little tick in the box.

“Yeah, he might break another rule. Yeah. So, that's what I wanted.”

So, the thought that there was going to be any coercion was never ever a part of that.

By then, it isn't going to work. It isn't going to work. And even in the service, it was even in our service. It was a bit more sophisticated than that. So, they have a few drinks one after no. And it rolls into the evening. It kept me and it suggests they move on to a kind of first base of behavior.

The playboy club we thought would get away was because the playboy club is sophisticated. There's no stripping, no naked women. And there were great shows and things like that. And I wanted to, that wouldn't even count as breaking the rules for us. If he can get his man to first base, he'll try to move to second base. And Kid Bennett says, there were quite a lot of options in those days,

particularly near the military bases. The establishments that offer different services to the playboy club. If I were to count things we get quite raw on the adult entertainment circuit in early 1980s, Manila. And that's pretty tiny. The playboy club was tiny. Oh yeah, that's tiny.

But the GRU operative isn't interested in even getting to first base.

He certainly enjoys a drink, but he says, he's a family man. And the authorities would know if he was to get into anything too spicy. But this is the other place that I cast out purely professional reasons that was naughty. That would have been over the light. Yeah. And he made that quite clear to me.

And I don't think I pushed beyond that. Kid Bennett says, over time, he became close with his target.

“And we both, I think we both generally liked each other.”

We did. In fact, the two men, both in the early 30s, and drawn to the adventure of espionage work, enjoying a drink and a chat and good company, have quite a lot in common. And keep Bennett's flings himself, belly to belly with his opposition, literally.

It's interesting, different between our cultures, certainly then rather than now, where I didn't hug my father until he was an old man,

And that sort of thing.

“But the Russians, of course, have a totally different culture.”

So with the guy I was working with, working against, we started off shaking hands, how do you do? And then we're to shake hands with both hands. And then the hugs and fill that sort of thing. Do you want to give him a name?

Can you give him a name? I don't don't need to be the his name. But I mean, let's hear about him in a more personal instrument way, if you can. Okay. Let's call him Vladimir for the wanted name.

That's not his name. And I met his wife. I knew his wife. We had lunch together. And we met.

And I'd be in that country for a couple of weeks. And I'd maybe see him. I'd go up and down and I'd see him maybe twice. And of course, I had to build up covers of what I was doing. Not just, you know, she took him.

Coach was just a favour I was doing. I was, I was an officer equipment. I was an all sorts of stuff. All completely made up. But to he doesn't.

And no point does he realize that you'll see. No. But the objective is, my objective initially with him was to develop. At the relationship of recruitment, what's called recruitment by graduate involvement where he slowly gets to realize that there's a little more to me.

And he basically recruits himself.

“Now, you get to a point where sometimes you have to do something.”

And basically, I might do it myself. In my case, I didn't. I'd piggyback someone and who would do the pitch. You know, which is a Vladimir. You know, have I got a deal for you?

So what's really happening here is kit minutes. It's trying to get close enough to Vladimir to understand it. To see the points where pressure might be applied. Remember, the aim of this whole operation is to get Vladimir ready for an approach from a CIA officer specialized in recruitment.

Who knows the buttons to push. Anyways, the authority to push them. And the classic acronym for the pressure points is, "Yice isn't M-I-C-E, so M stands for money." Just paying someone off, although that might be linked up with

ultimately coming across to the west so they can spend it safely. The eye is for ideology. So this is appealing to their conscience. The C is for coercion. So that could be through compromise or blackmail.

And the E is for ego. So you're targeting people who might have very high opinions of themselves. And you can flatter them and get in like that. Yeah, although as kit minutes are saying earlier,

something like coercion or blackmail might be quite a blunt instrument.

“You don't know how that will play out over time, right?”

Yeah, it might work as a one-off, but it's quite a risk to think that someone will keep doing what you want them to against their own will. That's right.

Appealing to a target's loyalty will always be a smart way

of making them think they're doing the right thing. So they can carry on in good conscience. Rather than feeling guilty all the time. And if the recruiter was able to convince a target to keep working on the inside, that could mean access to some very precious material.

Here's Susan Miller, the CIA veteran, former Chief of Counterintelligence, who worked in Moscow Station in the 1980s. So what happens is, you know, these people are recruited abroad. And then the ones that we think have the temperament to come in work when they return to Moscow, they will work with us inside.

And the temperament means we had to do what's called impersonal operations. Once in a while, we meet an in-person in Moscow. But most of the time we would do things like dead drops, like you see in the movies. Any person in Moscow during the Cold War would have been under permanent KGB surveillance.

So any intelligence officer meeting an agent, that would have been very risky.

We never carried guns, by the way, at Moscow, or anything like that,

overseas, the only place I would carry to gun was Israel. But not because of these railings, because we would go into Palestine sometimes. But we didn't have guns or anything like that. But what we would do is, one of these, you know,

people that we decided, let's say, was recruited in Mexico City, that he had the right temperament to work inside Moscow. We were trained him on how to do things with given some sites that he could use. These sites, probably somewhere like a public park, where anybody can legitimately walk and then stop or sit down for a moment.

These would be used for dead drops as opposed to a live drop, where objects would be handed off face to face. And at these sites, small objects hidden in plain sight, could contain secret messages. If we went into communicate with them,

we would put something that, in something that looked like a rock or looked like, you know, a log or something like that.

The messages passed through these dead drops would be used

to extract vital information. And we also have a list of a requirements, like if you're in the military,

“what are your war plans, what are this, what are that?”

If you're in the KGB, what is this, this and this, or if you're in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, what is this, this and this? So that's what we do. So as Kip Bennett, under the direction of a CIA handler, is trying to get closer to Vladimir.

He decides to draw on some of his own real-life stories. Yeah, remember, he was obsessed with flying as a young man. He actually left school and joined the Air Force. That background became very useful material for cover. We decided to drop my being in the reserve of the military,

but this was part of getting him to see that there was more to this little long-head guy than just, you know, chief concotes and office furniture and other stuff I said I was doing there. To show that there was some depth there. Now, it didn't go the way we thought it would go.

We thought that he would, or we were hoping he would think, "Oh, this is interesting." And allow me to develop it further.

“Slowly, you know, softly, softly, sketchy monkey.”

And as that was the intent. But obviously that came up in light. And the next time I write back in Manila, he gave me the shopping list. Okay, this is the moment everything changes. Because just as Kit Bennett's had been trying to get Vladimir to this behave,

to see if he was a risk taker or a rulebreaker. Now, Vladimir wants Kit Bennett to do something a little bit out of the ordinary for hand. And this shopping list has some interesting items. Things Vladimir wants his new friend to get fam in New Zealand. Yeah, so they've been getting to know each other

the course of what six months or so. They'd meet a couple of times a week. Whenever Kit Bennett's was in the Philippines. But he says that he'd have to be a decent interval between visits to keep his cover intact.

It would have been on about my third or fourth visit.

Yeah, you know, what we were doing was progressing well. This gave us a bit of a surprise when he turned the tables. And he didn't do a clumsily. He did it well, but it was pretty clumsy, really. And as I think I've mentioned,

there was this indication, I must be pretty naive if some guy says, "Can you get me some fantasy charts?" And you can get them from this place. You know, I'd have to have some idea what was going and that was a testing me.

Vladimir asks his friend, "Kit for U.S. made under sea charts available through New Zealand distributors. The kinds of things that might be very useful for sea, Russian, fishing, trawlers, maybe geological expedition, or depending on how suspicious you are, submarines."

Or maybe it's just to see whether Kit will do this for Vladimir.

With it, he'll get to first place.

Because if Vladimir can get to first place, maybe he can get him to second place. I bought stuff back from, but I didn't bring everything back. We did that on purpose.

Some stuff we didn't do. I'm thinking I said to him, "I've been doing an economic report on, and I've got that written." "Did it occured you there?" He might have been dangling or whatever.

I mean, there were just multiple layers of deception available out there. "Yes, it is." We worked at that point on the fact that he was playing on the friendship. Now, there are different ways to interpret all this. Does Vladimir think "Kit is a useful idiot?"

Someone who can be manipulated or bored? Or does he think there's more going on here that he might be some sort of spy? And so he's just feeling him out to see what happens next. Either way, the stakes have just been raised

and they start to get into an area of technology that would be of enormous use to the Soviet military. So, these are the things that the GIU was released. Yes, that was what they wanted. What Motorola Intel let sort of come to.

Yeah, I mean, the economic information out of it. Yeah, and that stuff was all about semiconductors. Yeah, right.

“How do you know that that's what they wanted?”

Is that what they told me? Yeah, you did. You said it's a shopping list. Okay. And the Americans were just so wanted to cry.

As I said, the only reason. Oh, crush is balls. You know, when he turned the tables. So, having already established that he had previously spent time in the Air Force, Kit Bennett is going to take it up another notch.

Because by then, it was clear he was trying to recruit me. And so, you know, I made myself more wind-swept and interesting.

Kit Bennett's would travel to Wohake Air Base.

Go up in a plane. Get photographs standing next to an A4 Skyhawk. All to flesh out this role of him as a territorial pilot. A plausible partner and his old Air Force job. So, we then came up with a very elaborate scheme.

And it involved me being on an evaluation team in New Zealand, to look to by the year of 16. Now, so we're talking about the late 80s. And it was the Spitfire of the 80s. And it's still, hugely valuable airplane.

The New Zealand Air Force would eventually get quite close to buying F-16s a few years later.

But at the time, this idea of an official group assessing whether or not to purchase F-16s

is totally made up for the benefit of the CIA operation against the G-I-U.

“Remember, the G-I-U are military intelligence.”

And it's worth noting that the F-16 is still very much in use today by the U.S. and LED forces. So, information about it would be treasure for any opponents. The Russians, the G-I-U in particular, but both the K-I-U and the G-I-U were interested hugely in two things. And the Americans were right onto this.

So, we needed to try and do something about it. They were after technology on semiconductors. Nothing's changed, so, you know, computer chips. They were particularly interested in anything that Texas instruments were doing and Motorola were doing because they were the lead people 40 years ago.

You know, it's a bit different now, but they're still, that's stuff that's still after. And the other thing that they were interested in was guidance systems for all sorts of rocketry, whether it was aircraft-based or cruise missiles. Those sorts of, it's a very birth of those, that sort of technology.

“So, we were there, we were trying to prevent them from getting that information.”

Rather than just trying to stop that information from getting stolen, CLA have decided to run an operation around what's known as "dead in technology". Technical information that looks viable, that appears even to scientists to be something that might work until you waste a lot of time building it. And find out it doesn't work.

This wasn't necessarily new as a concept, but it was effective because the Soviets, by the 1980s, were really struggling to keep up with the technical advance. So, they were stealing technology wholesale from the West, in a vast operation, run by their intelligence services.

Basically, you let them think they're recruiting you, and you pass information to them,

which then goes back to the Soviet Union, and they work on the technology, and it just takes them down a hole. It's dead in, it takes them somewhere, and they've been spent six months, eight months, all the technical people working on this, and it takes them nowhere. So, what you're doing is basically delaying and slowing them up, and that sort of thing.

And some of that was very successful. For example, in the Russian space shuttle, and this is information that's publicly available, and they didn't, I don't think it ever flew, did it at the Russian space shuttle. The Russian space shuttle, the Piran, flew just once in November 1998, after swallowing an enormous amount of time, money, and scientific expertise.

The Soviets had made great strides initially by just copying the American space shuttle program, then the bad science was passed on to them. They were working on one. That was based on technology that had been rejected by Boeing, and they had worked, and that was the technology they were introducing,

and that had gone as a dead end technology. So, this is the plan that's put together by CIA over months. It's not just doing this on the fly. The information is going back to Langley being pulled over and discussed, perhaps not at the highest levels, but pretty high up,

and it's no doubt being taken very seriously before it gets signed off. And all of this information would be coming to Kit Bennett through his handler, who he'd meet on site, and whatever country he was operating in. Yeah, because he wasn't just running this operation in Manila. He was working in a number of cities across Southeast Asia.

So, you know, I'd arrive in the city, and this isn't in any city that I was working in, and there would be an arrangement, generally a little bit spy, where there'd be a message for me, saying, you know, something about, you know, we'll sit in, you know, if you settle the invoice, I can do such and such, and in there would be an indication of where we were going to meet.

And, or I'd have a number and I'd ring and he'd just give me the room number then, and I'd go to that hotel room in the days, when you could go press a button and a list and go to any floor in a hotel, nowadays you can't do that.

“And I'd go up and we'd meet in a hotel room, generally that's what we'd do.”

So, it wasn't all that spooky, really, but we'd meet. And that's where he would give me some of the equipment that I might need,

and then all sorts of things like that.

“The technical things that I didn't want to be on a businessman.”

And then I would get started with what I was doing. He'd give me a briefing on what was happening in the environment, and what was it, what they knew about what was happening with the targets, that sort of thing. But one day, at a meet with his handler in Manila, before starting the next phase of the operation against Vladimir,

Kent Bennett is in for a bit of a fright. In that initial briefing with the agency officer, he said to me, "Listen, we lost someone in Europe last week, last month." The CIP, the counterintelligence people have looked at it. And I understood he was an officer, so he could have ended up,

you know, his widow and children might have had a cup of coffee in the director's office, and he got a star on the wall at Langley.

You know, but he may not have been.

But they said CIP guys looked at this in the agency, the counterintelligence guys, and they looked broadly at operations that were running, and the one paralleled what we were doing was my operation.

“So he was working against an officer from the same intelligence service”

in the Soviet Union. They were at about the same stage. It was a recruitment by gradual involvement. And he ended up, if I don't know, face down in the Danube, I don't know, but he was killed.

Now, that's really serious in the game in those days. You know, you don't take people out. It's not like James Bond. And you'd lose someone like that,

then people are very, very grumpy.

This was a kind of gentleman's agreement between spies. We kept their senses, there was a central rule. So you know, can shoot your own, but don't shoot ours, you know, that sort of thing. Normally, this would mean if his cover had been blown, then Vladimir would have just passed a message to him that he wasn't available to meet with his friend, Ket,

and communication would have been broken off. But now it seems that someone, somewhat on the Soviet side, may have taken the decision to escalate. And they appear to have access to good information, coming from inside the agency.

And that means Ket Bennett, who's running solar, in cover as a knock, is potentially incredibly vulnerable. So they said to me, given that, your two operations look very, very similar, and that stage, I think that probably we're looking,

let me know who they were looking for, but, you know, there were three baddies in the agency. We'll come back to these CIA baddies, one in particular, who sold out John's family friend, the KGB kernel, all they got his key to the KGB.

They knew they had a problem, but I didn't know that, I was just a foot soldier, I didn't know that, but they told me, okay, so this has happened, and they should look,

“you're an exchange officer, if you want to get on the airplane,”

go ahead and do that, you know, we understand, we'll wait till the dust settles, and then you can come back, it's over to you, and I gravely said, you know, young and silly, I said, no, no, we'll carry on. And I went back to my hotel and hit a sit down,

think about this, and I thought, if that coming for me, I won't even see it coming. I won't, it'll just happen, and I won't even know. So I was there for a week or so. Okay, let me go, I don't think I slept much, but,

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. The agency was produced, written and hosted by John Daniel and me, Guy and Espenham.

Our executive producer, four RNZ, was John Hardvelt, and our executive producer, four bird of Paradise Productions, is Noel McCarthy. The original music by Anthony Tonon, graphic design by Oliver Wall.

For RNZ, sound production and final mix was by Mark Chesterman. Production coordinator was Brianna Eurich-Greek, thanks to Steve Varidge, Ellie Marston, Jeremy and Sue and William Saunders. Thanks to Megan Willen and thanks also to Susan Belldachin.

The visual director at RNZ was Cole, he's temporarily, and our camera operator was Jess Chalton. Thanks also to Sarah Guy Tarnos for the article about Bill Sachs that appears on RNZ.co. 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/theagency and you can see the links in the show notes.