Treachery

(speaking in foreign language)

“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? - It 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 door, it's the sort of thing that happened. However, maybe his vulnerabilities were identified by hands and more likely, by aims, and he might have gotten the shit.

So with the dead end technology one,

that's what we did, I wielded in a sky,

and then I was out of it. That was it gone, don't know what happened. - Do we know what they embraced the theme and technology and rights a lot of time? - I was beaten over it.

- No, I don't get to know. I was told, and officially, that we didn't

“had a success there, but I think, I don't know,”

but I think that was bland, after I've been going for a little while, by all the games. - Old Rich 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's was long gone

from CIA and New Zealand's essays.

He only found out that his operation against Vladimir was probably blown by aims through an unofficial contact. - Well, after I left the agency and I met up with an old friend of mine and I said, if it's after aims, it'd been a risk,

'cause that was after my time, someone must've told me that they thought aims had done it, and he didn't know the operation of Jaymees to eat blue. - Good. - Yeah, and I said, let him out, I'll be there to meet him.

“He said, and this guy said, hey, Kit, pick a number”

and get in line. - Okay, so this is being told as something for funny story, but emotions run pretty deep here. - It's hard to be sure exactly what happened to the Vladimir and the operation against the GRU.

Aldrich Aims began his betrayal in 1985, but it went on for nine years. It was probably the worst penetration of the CIA in its entire history. And the wider understanding of what happened

would take decades to be together. This is a clip from ABC's Nightline in 2014. - Sure, on June 13th, 1985, Rick Aims gave the KGB a list of every known human asset the CIA had in the Soviet Union. The list had 20 names on it.

Within a year, 10 of those people were executed. - And Aims also betrayed people run by other Western intelligence agencies, including the KGB Colonel and Daniel Family Friend, Aldrich Goriysky, who was an MI6 asset.

We'll come back to him. - Yeah, Aldrich Aims is only able to throw Goriysky under the bus, because of some pretty bare behaviour from CIA themselves. They shouldn't have known Goriysky's name.

Very few people at MI6 knew his name. It was highly secretful, exactly this reason. You've got to keep maximum security for the safety of the person who has entrusted you with their life. MI6 had shared the information they were getting from them

with CIA and probably other five-wise partners. But Goriysky himself was known only by a codename to them. - But Goriysky's intelligence is good. It's so good and so important.

I mean, he's credited with turning a wheel back from the brink of nuclear war in 1983. This was during the NATO Abelarch exercises. CIA, a briefing present on Reagan using this intelligence. And they find it embarrassing that they don't know

who the source actually is. And they're probably also, but nervous at the brits have been sucked in by the KGB. It's happened before. And you said, "Haz."

So CIA analysts pulled together all the information they have from the source, and by cross checking with what they know from their side, they end up being able to put a real identity to the codename. And so all rich aims is able to pass that on to the KGB,

which brings us to this little nugget, which so surprised me. - He did another operation of Jamie's to eat blue. - Did he? - Yeah. - This is Jamie Mercer, not his real name,

the guy who was my mother's boss on the Russia desk at the US, who I knew is a kid and who's specialised in recruitment. - Yeah, he tried to bring over the KGB resident,

This is Dmitry Resgavrov on RO Street in Wellington after the arrest of Bill Sutch.

“And you said he used to get a Christmas card every year”

from the CIA, that's nice. - Yeah, if it's my understanding, I didn't see it myself. But if all rich aims to CIA traitor is able to blow one of his operations, it might well have been the one

that earned him that Christmas card every year. In any case, it is pretty interesting but given all we've heard, perhaps not that surprising. That aims seems to have had access to details of an operation that involve New Zealand's essays.

Now, the story remains sensitive. KGB Bennett doesn't want to talk to us about this because he says it's not his story to tell and while it wouldn't be used to any of the intelligent services involved,

the people themselves are civilians. And they wouldn't want their story out. - Right, and while we might not know any more about it than that, it does show how tight those bonds are.

Or at least we're between SIS and CIA. We'll hear more in the next episode about where that's at today. But it also underlines that the espionage game has played for pretty high stakes.

The consequences, they aren't always the same.

It depends on who's rules you're playing by. - The journalist once asked Oleg Gordievsky, a greatest defector said, well, you did the same thing and Gordievsky said, no, I didn't. The people that I think had went to prison.

The people that he think had 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 Buddha Paradise Productions and RNZ, this is the agency, I'm John Daniel.

- And I'm Guy and Espionat. This is episode five, "Treatory." (dramatic music) 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 intelligent service.

“You have to trust some people to get anything done.”

But if you trust a 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 that 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 Kit 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 fear. - At the very highest political level, where it involves the so-called leader of the free world. - And we're also here at how New Zealand and its other five-wise partners

might need to de-risk their alliance with Donald Trump's CIA. (dramatic music) - We often hear people who go from the west to the east referred to as traitors,

whereas the ones who come across and the other direction are 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.

“- I think the pointers, if you're the one getting stared”

in the back, you really feel it. His Tim Weiner from the New York Times, talking about all-tritch aims, who he interviewed, and would go on to write a book about. - Yeah, the book was called Betrayal,

and Tim Weiner was not impressed by recames. This guy was so bad at being a spy that, you know, he did everything, but hang a sign around his neck, blinking in neon, you know, saying,

I am a spy for the Soviet Union. And by then the Cold War was open, but the damage this did to the CIA and its ability to conduct espionage against Russia and to its reputation lasted for years and years, years.

- And he effectively, I mean, I think he initially put up some sort of ethical law, geopolitical argument, but in the end, he did it for the money right, and I think he admitted as much to you, didn't he?

- I interviewed an shortly after he was arrested in the county jail outside Washington and continued to interview him by telephone and he called me, we spoke for about eight hours.

And yes, it first he put out this grandiose idea

during the latter years of the Cold War.

And he wanted to level the playing field. He wanted to lift up the hood of history and pickle with the engine, but that was all nonsense. He did it for the money and eventually after some, not to gentle questioning on my part,

“he admitted that that's why he'd done it for the money.”

- I am's received millions from the KGB over the course of the decade he was working for him. - And because of that, we lost a number of agents, assets, Susan Miller, the former head of CIA counterintelligence, worked on CIA's Moscow station in the 1990s.

Their assets, Soviets, working for them inside the system, kept turning up a rested or dead. - We had known, I didn't know this before, I was too junior, you know, but we, meaning the CIA and the FBI, had known that there was somebody spying for Russia

or for the Soviet Union. And there was aims was one of the, there's usually a list, like here it could be these 20 people because they all had access to this information. - Susan Miller worked in cover as a receptionist

at the American Embassy in Moscow. One of her tasks involved handing over large payments to Soviet sources, including someone,

“CIA hoped would reveal how their network was being rolled up,”

but there were some challenges involved in that. - How do you pay these people inside the Soviet Union when hard currency was illegal there? Meaning, we could not pay them in US dollars. - How could?

- Some days she was carrying bags of gold and diamonds around. There's diamonds in the Soviet Union, you know, there's gold. And so we would pay them in gold or diamonds sometimes. - Just to pick up on the older games story. Susan, what are puts?

- Yeah, I mean, we're not a great moment for CIA counterintelligence either, is it? 'Cause it's a few years of him doing that.

- No, and here's the thing is that,

my understanding, again, I wasn't intimately involved in this, but what I found out about this a little bit later, is that we knew we were bleeding some information.

“'Cause when I was in Moscow, we had been losing,”

once in a while, an asset would get arrested. But then what happened was we had a source, actually, was being run while I was in Moscow. - This is prologue, isn't it? - Yeah, this is prologue, yeah, 100%.

- Prologue is a kind of Russian version of older games, a KGB officer who approached CIA's more school chief of station on a train in May of 1987, and in exchange for money, began to hand over information on how the KGB

were neutralizing CIA assets. - But he's not telling them everything, is he? - No, just the opposite it turns out. CIA a very jumpy having lost so many people, good people, and so they're desperate for that information,

which is probably why they get sucked in. - So this is what we call a dangle, right? - Yeah, a very successful dangle, because prologue is telling them lies, and CIA is convinced enough by them

to dial down their own suits for a traitor. - Now this prologue operation is carried out directly by the chief of station with the information tightly held. So people like Susan were working on it,

but without knowing everything about the case. - We knew there was a sensitive case called prologue. None of us were given any information on it, 'cause that was at the top, 'cause we were all junior officers, right?

But a couple of times, we were asked to go do a dead drop, and we're not telling you what it's for, and just go do it. And one of those, as my understanding from talking to my then boss later, is one of those was actually for prologue. In fact, prologue is all about covering up for Ordrich James,

so he can continue to work in place for the KGB. - Prologue tells CIA that the assets have been discovered, because they made mistakes. They missed surveillance on them during a meeting or whatever.

Ultimately, they gave themselves a way.

When in reality, it was all because Ordrich James wanted money, so he'd handed over a list of names. - And one of those names was Ollie Goodyevsky. - He's been some debate around that in terms of the timeline, but I asked the former chief of CIA counterintelligence.

- There's some discussions still as to whether Ordrich James was able to give up Ollie Goodyevsky to the KGB. Do you have any particular insights on that? - Whether he gave up Goodyevsky?

- I believe we thought he did. That's what I remember. - Good enough for me.

“Now remember, Goodyevsky manages to get out,”

thanks to an MI6 escape plan. It's a shame because he's about to become the resident in London. - So this would've been like Chief of Station for the KGB in London.

- Yes, so that would've put him in a very powerful position.

But anyway, he gets away from the KGB after they brought him in for interrogation, presumably, because they want to check that James's information is good. It's only the previous month that he's approached the KGB in America.

And even they can't go around bumping off their own people without checking out the story behind it. - And within a year, Goodyevsky is here in New Zealand on the first of four trips. - Yeah, the nice man from the KGB is my mother,

put it clearly likes it here from what he writes in his book, Next Stop Execution. He says 986 was his first visit of four. Obviously he does a lot of talking in the UK and the U.S. He has meetings with Fetcher and Reagan.

And he goes to CIA, where he talks with their Soviet teams,

ironically, one of the people he's talking to is order of James. - Yeah, because James 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.

- Yeah, the big call isn't it?

Now, David Longie pushes back on this at the time.

Gaudi Yveski's book is published in 1995. And there's a suggestion that Gaudi Yveski, as an MI6 agent, is running an alarmist line that suits Margaret Fetch's Britain. But we looked at this in episode three of the service.

So Geoffrey Palmer, the Labour Deeply Prime Minister at the time, talked about a full court press from the KGB. - At the time, I was involved in this Soviet Union in its dying days was extremely active in New Zealand and 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 all the 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 by memory of it.

- And this time we actually have the notes from a two hour meeting that Oleg Gaudiuski held with Prime Minister David Longie on August the 27th, 1986. These are from the Margaret Fetch Foundation. We'll put them up online.

I suspect they wouldn't have been released at our end. - Yeah, the director of the New Zealand SIS was there as well as someone from MI6. David Longie starts out quite bullish. The notes say he expresses contempt for a recent offer

of military cooperation between the USSR and New Zealand by the Soviet deputy foreign minister during a trip here. Longie reckons, New Zealanders have way too much common sense to be bamboozled by the Soviets. He says there's no chance New Zealanders' country

would willingly hand over the country to Soviet domination. - And Gaudiuski says that's not how it works. Moscow doesn't imagine that it will turn New Zealand into a client's date, but it is delighted

about the nuclear free zone in the Pacific because that will limit American military effectiveness. It's working on influencing the Labour Party and he sights invitations to visit the Soviet Union that have been accepted by the Labour Party president

and general secretary and says there'll be more like that. Visit not just to the USSR but also to Cuba and the curricula. - The cases that are aligned with the Soviet regime. - Gaudiuski says after the Labour Party was elected back in 1984, the KGB audits people to find contacts

and agents who would be willing to go to New Zealand and other countries of the South Pacific region to promote anti-nuclear peace policies. - By this point, Longie seems to be starting to get it. He says the biggest problem he's having with his party

is that the Soviets have recently declared a moratorium on nuclear testing and he's under pressure now to issue statements supporting Soviet policy. And he says the Pacific Islands

The notes end with him saying

the New Zealand government will need to pay more attention to counter communist and spite activities in the Pacific. (upbeat music) - Now, Kent Bennett, he didn't get to meet Oleg Gaudiuski when he was out in New Zealand.

By that point, he says he's falling out of favor pretty seriously with the service. We'll get to have that all unfurled in the next episode. But he did have dealings with other defectors who were clearly put to work by the intelligence services.

- There was an issue of Pian guy when I was in training, I had to do a practice recruitment of him and he was a defector. And I was only ever told a cover name for him.

“So, I think he was from Czech intelligence services.”

I think we were strong, a lot of 100% sure. And he play acted the defector and I, so we just, we had a brief meeting and I was told to ask him to lunch. - So over a number of weeks in Washington,

Kent Bennett's practices recruitment techniques on a form of spy from the eastern block. - To the point where I pitched him. And he was reporting back all the time on how well I was doing and then afterwards it was a great big debrief

and you know, which he didn't come to. I was hoping to meet him in real life, but I didn't get to meet him in real life. Only even got to meet him and cover. In an environment where deception was routine,

relationships were always hard to gauge.

My friend, the defector, was a man named Yuri Nossenko. He's a really interesting guy. He was a chap who defected just after the assassination of Kennedy. And he was the guy that came and told the agency that the heavy Oswald was not, you know,

“was not, because the Soviets were terrified.”

- Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated U.S. President John F. Kennedy in November of 1963. From 1959 to May of 1962, he was living in Russia. His wife was Russian and his son had been born there. - Yeah, and wouldn't have matched for Cold War paranoia

to link his stay in Russia to the assassination. - Yuri said he walked in the KGB were frightened and they thought he was barking, so they didn't want to touch him. And I don't think they didn't recruit him, but they were very keen to make sure the Americans knew

that they hadn't recruited him. - So Yuri Nossenko reinforces that idea that the KGB had nothing to do with the assassination of Kennedy. Although, when you think about it in the context of Cold War mistrust,

they would say that wouldn't they? - And this is the era of the mentoring candidate. - To 1962 film starring Frank Sinatra about an American soldier brainwashed by the communists into assassinating a presidential candidate.

This comes out just a year before Kennedy is assassinated.

“And if you mix Hollywood sensationism with CIA skepticism”

and thin sounding Russian denials, it's quite a cocktail. And telling it straight, seems to have been an issue for Yuri Nossenko to begin with. - Yuri told so many stories that no one was, they're quite sure what was true, and so it was suggested

that Yuri was a, he was a Daniel that he wasn't a Daniel in defector. - In the mid-1960s, CIA counterintelligence led by James Jesus Angleton, the wilderness of Maris Guy,

is at the height of its Cold War paranoia. And Yuri Nossenko gets locked up and interrogated for years. - And he was treated very, very badly. This is all before my time. Then they decided that he was, in fact, genuine,

but to still some Americans have believed that he was a false flag and that he wasn't real defector. - Now there's still discussion today that Nossenko may have been a triple agent that regardless, he came out to New Zealand in the 1970s.

- But I spent a day with him, I actually took him for a bit of a drive around 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 looked at me and he squeezed it.

- Looked at me and squeezed it out. - Oh, and drink was taken in the frontiers of knowledge. - We're pushed back. - Anyway, we were talking and he said to, "I was a little bit of my bad Russian."

And he said, "Is it a near-sirich and a near-glazzy?" And I said, "What's that?" He said, "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 on Russian?" I said, "No, he said, "Will 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 night to big yellow sheets of paper "with his scroll on it," saying, "Whoy."

(beep) (laughs) He said, "Teaching me all this Russian." - Shit, I was drunk. - Apologies to the Russian speakers and our audience.

Kit Bennett says, "They had a less liquid lunch. "Some years later in the U.S." - When I was in Washington, when I was in the Zeeber come up and they said, "Yeah, well, he does.

"We can always get him up if you'd liked to meet him."

So he and I went off and had lunch together

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 Nesenko." Another KGB officer who had defected to Britain's M.I.5

in 1971 was Oleg Leyalon. Leyalon posed as a textile buyer while actually belonging to department V, responsible for sabotage and assassinations. Apparently, he had a different vibe.

And Leyalon came out. I didn't like him and he didn't like me. I just didn't kind of warm to the men. But I liked, I liked Yuri, he was good. - Kit Bennett says, "Meeting these defectors

"would often sit him thinking." - One of the things that you often think about

and 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?”

- 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's 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 wasted one,

that liberal democracies were a kind of logical endpoint for societies. - But just a decade later, America met with the shock and awe of September the 11th. - I'm on a screen, it's been hijacked.

I'm on the screen, I'm calling from the screen. I'm trying to get my lollies. - Please question a lot for the fight when in the Pentagon.

“- And with the subsequent American lead wars”

in Afghanistan and Iraq, it wasn't quite so clear that CLA was still a good guy. In a fight against an enemy fueled with their own brand of idealism. CLA had gone looking for additional leverage

to extract information and they had become its own form of betrayal. - Good evening, a scathing report issued today details what the CLA did to terrorism suspects in the name of 9/11 and in the war on terrorism.

- This is from NBC News in 2014. The U.S. Senate had just released what became known as its torture report. Detailing the horrific abuse of prisoners that had been sanctioned at the highest levels of CIA,

driven by politicians and particular, the vice president Dick Cheney, who refused to accept methods like waterboarding were in fact torture, describing them instead as enhanced interrogation techniques.

- American conduct of the so-called war on terror had drawn the entire defense and security apparatus to a very dark place. The way from its profist values is the good guys. He's president Barack Obama responding

to the CIA torture report. - Even before I came into office, I was very clear that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, we did some things that were wrong. We did a whole lot of things that were right,

but we tortured some folks. We did some things that were contrary to our values. - War demand brutal calculations.

“What are you willing to do to keep your people safe?”

- Yeah, I mean, it's easy to see how lines can get blurred when you're charged with defending a country under attack, but you do need to be clear about how far you'll go to reach your goals. New Zealand has lined up alongside Ukraine

after Russia's invasion of 2022, and while we're part of five eyes, that's an intelligent sharing partnership, and while we work with NATO, we don't technically belong to any defence alliances.

- Which might be worth thinking about if you're poking the Russian beer, although our Russian expute sounds reassuring on this. - New Zealand, with all respect,

I'm sure it's not the first priority

for either Mr Putin or Kremlin or the security apparatus. - This is Professor Rubin Azizin, the former Soviet and Russian ambassador to New Zealand, who became an academic specializing in security studies at NASA University.

He says the current Russian regime is under so much pressure with the Ukraine war. They don't have the resources to project power into the Pacific. We benefit from what he calls a luxury of distance where geography plays in our favor,

and new opportunities for Russian interference that undermine the West, and we put that to him when we spoke with him in November of 2025. - That's more of the attack on Western liberal democracies

in terms of disinformation and misinformation, that is spreading particularly through the internet. It's something that Russia and the Soviet Union used to be very good at in the past, and it seems to be something that they're doing now

to huge defeat.

And as it was always in sort of polarization

and erosion of trust and institutions in the West, is it for you?

“- Yeah, absolutely, I think, and that's a very good point.”

The way the intelligence community, I think works in Russia and perhaps many other places. The tactic has changed. The form of penetration and influence has changed. So I remind of us, remind you this about the such case.

- Prophetsorization is referring to the such case. Remember, where former senior civil servant Bill Satch was picked up by Kit Bennett, one night in Karore, meeting the KGB resident. Although, he was ultimately found

not guilty of violating the official secret sector. - Yeah, for anyone who still harbors any lingering doubts about the Bill Satch story. It's worth noting that this is the former Soviet in Russian ambassador, referencing it,

unequivocally as an influence operation. Where a New Zealander is working for the benefit of Moscow. - That I think everything is possible. Could be a new such case, maybe. Although we have different types of such cases here already,

right, in New Zealand, we here. We have some in the Russian community

who have basically collected funding to support Russian army

in Ukraine.

“I think there was an insurance company in New Zealand”

that was ensuring the dark fleet. So whether they are connected directly with intelligence community or not, we don't know, but the form of this influence has changed. We read the New Zealand SIS reports.

Rasha, I think is mentioned alongside North Korea, maybe China is countries that are very proactive in cyber information inference. So with that caveat, I will say, yes, definitely. Distance is not a problem.

And I would think that Rasha is very active because Rasha wants to be heard, seen, and one of the ways by doing that is degrading and discrediting the Western democracy and Western values.

- Rubinism agencies, while this plays out now through social media, Rasha today, the Russian state English language broadcast television with it was dropped here in New Zealand after Rasha invited Ukraine, illustrates

“how the strategy for influencing Western democracies”

has evolved. - I mean, you compare Rasha to the program with Soviet TV programs. Soviet TV programs were all about how great Soviet Union is and every must-saw with people

who were watching that were turned off TV at the time because they see that was complete lie. But Rasha today doesn't praise necessarily, Rasha. Rasha today tries to discredit the West. And of course, the West has so many shortcomings.

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 Rasha propaganda uses that. So in that sense, infiltration

in the 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 of a kid of journalists, dissidents, defectors, in fact, anyone who challenges him. - Now, if this feels like a war from our CIA story, stick with us.

We've gone out on a bit of a loot, 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 normally 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 G-I-U, remains the G-I-U, 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 empowered 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 ZAR, the new leader, not exactly a communist dictator,

There is no much dissent. - But of 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 the question recently, he's put in 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 Russia is 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 the result element of sympathy between them. There's an element of sympathy with Mr Trump as well, given his populist agenda. - And that element of sympathy from a far-right Russian regime obtained on undermining the Western liberal democratic order

and the president of the United States,

the man ultimately in charge of the CIA.

- The elephant trainer himself. - Yeah, I mean, that is worth examining. - I was head of counterintelligence for CIA at the time when we had some good information coming in that was telling us that the Russians were trying

to influence the election in Trump's favor. This is so similar again, talking about the 2016 U.S. presidential election. - Susan Miller was one of the leaders of a team set up under the Obama administration in 2016

to report on the possibility that Putin's Russia were looking to influence the American election. - And what we did find was multiple data points, not just on one source, but multiple data points that the Russians were indeed trying to influence the elections

in Trump's favor.

“And that's what we basically put out in our report.”

- This is from the PBS NewsHour, July 31, 2025. - The report's purpose to document what was known about how and why Russia interfered to help Mr. Trump win. In unclassified version of the report,

concluded Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency.

The report also said, "We further assess Putin and the Russian government developed a clear preference for President elect Trump." - 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 for Eva.

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 gonna 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 steel dossier

to the FBI lead Crossfire Hurricane investigation. Trump's extraordinary summit with Vladimir Putin and 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 decided the public officials involved in this story are gonna 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 gonna 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. - In 2019, I had to do the bar dirham thing and I had a lawyer 'cause it might lead to criminal charges and that didn't work out.

And I just go on my way and I go to Israel and I'm doing fine and... - Susan Miller continues to have very senior roles in CIA. - And I headed up our China Mission Center and all the rest of the stuff.

- Yeah, they've never been able to make anything stick against her,

but that hasn't stopped the persecution. Susan Miller left the agency after 40 years and began working as a government contractor until something strange happened. - I have retired from CIA,

but I still had my security clearance

for like up to four years if you get it re-upped. Like you get the polygraph again and they go and talk to neighbors again

“and you need to make sure that you aren't doing cocaine at night”

or something like that. - So I was getting ready to come up and I called my contact. And as I said, you know, which building are going to where did you want me to park this time

and blah blah blah. - Bucking is clearly quite important at CIA. - Yeah, the other thing that's quite important is your security clearance. And my security guy goes and looks into it

because you don't have a clearance. - Initially, Susan Miller thought this was some kind of bureaucratic cock-up that could be sorted out. I wasn't yet connecting this.

I thought it was a some kind of error. And then I called the people you call when you're retired and you have a question inside CIA. Hello, my name is Susan Miller. Here's my social security number.

Here's my badge number. What it was, you know, all the rest. What is going on? And they looked at it and they said, your clearance has been removed.

And I said, why? I haven't had a security violation ever. Why? And they're like, we don't know.

“We think you should call this other office.”

- Finally, she gets an answer.

- And he just says, hey, you lost your clearance 'cause Trump took it away. And I said, what did I do wrong? And he's like, the question. And he goes, all I know is it's been taken away

and it's been taken away on order of the president. - How concerned are you about the impact of Trump, on the intelligence apparatus, of the United States? - Well, see, after he did me, he's done it to dozens.

I think it's up to 90 people he's done this to. And here's my biggest concern. Why is he so focused on this Russia thing? Is there something there? We've seen from these stories of double or even triple agents

that it's hard to know what's really inside anyone's heat. - Well, it doesn't feel like Donald Trump keeps his cards. That close to his chest. In any case, Susan Miller says the situation with President Trump isn't giving any bidder.

- When you see who Trump is now,

he was bad enough the first term.

But now he's talking about a third term. Doesn't that sound like Putin? That's anti-constitutional. That is totally against our constitution. - Susan Miller says there's a wide message here

for anyone looking to challenge President Trump or even just understand what's behind his thinking. - All I can think is he has something really serious that he's trying to hide. That's all I can say.

And he's worried about it. And what he's doing by punishing me and my team and other people around there, is he's like saying, don't any of you ever speak out,

“'cause that's what's gonna come for you.”

You know, that's what I feel. - So from a New Zealand perspective, that sounds pretty chilling. - It should. - In an operational sense,

Susan Miller says that Trump and influence reaches down to the people who run CIA on a daily basis. And remember, these are people who are effectively networked into our intelligence organizations here in New Zealand. - Do you feel that there has been a politicization

of the agency by the Trump administration in this regard? - 100%. By the leadership, I should say, there's still so a lot of really good people there, but by the leadership, 100% there,

they're, you know, couch howling to him, 100%. (gentle music)

- CIA's role has always been to stick close to the present,

but the way it was supposed to work was that no matter what he wanted to hear, they told him the truth. - It is no accident that the president of the United States, this one exempted receives the presidential daily briefing

that everybody knows about. - This is Kit Bennett, again, talking about the PDB, the presidential daily briefing. President Trump apparently doesn't read it, but you can. - Yeah, you can actually see examples of this online.

CIA had put up versions going up to the 1960s, although back then it was called the central intelligence bulletin. Copies also go out to people listed inside, so the head of the FBI, the vice president,

secretary of state and so on. These are incredibly densely written. Just as an example, I randomly pulled up the one from January the 18th, 1961. It's got notes on the situation in Berlin,

maps and explainers about what's happening in the last, Soviet aircraft movements there,

then in the Congo, a bit of intel, but a lot of redacted stuff. Patrice Lemumba formerly, the elected leader of the Congo, has been assassinated the day before. - Not apparently by CIA,

although it's understood that they did have planned to do it if necessary. Basically, this is an incredibly well-informed personalized new service. - When my day was prepared by 40 odd people in the agency,

and they would gather together the information that would appear on the president's desk in Hardcopy,

then about the most important things,

“or the important things that the most powerful man”

in the world needed to know. - Now, it would be naive to think that politics and personality had never entered into that relationship between CIA leaders and the president. - Yeah, if you remember, back to the second episode,

we kept Bennett's arrived at CIA. Jimmy Carter was the president, and Stan's field turn it was the director of the agency, but he wasn't popular. - And I remember the guy say, "I want to meet him."

He's an asshole. - By 1981, there was a new president and a new director. And he came out to New Zealand and sat down with Kip Bennett and the Chief of Station here. - Reagan was in the White House,

and a new director, a man named Bill Casey, and Bill Casey was a man I greatly admired, because he'd been in the wartime OSS. - Now, the OSS, as he's talking about there, is the office of strategic services.

It was set up during World War II,

“and was, obviously, speaking the predecessor to CIA,”

running special operations, sabotage, and so on. - So he was, you know, he was the real deal. - Although he probably went a bit far, and had he not died when he did. He probably would've ended up in jail

over the Iran Contra scandal. - Iran Contra was another CIA overreach that we won't give into 2D pre. It all blew up in 1986, 1980, see it. - Yeah, I mean, in a nutshell,

the CIA director had been overseeing a scheme

where US weapons were sold to Iran's revolutionary guard

for a massive markup. And the profits were then skimmed off the top and fed to the contras. They were a guerrilla out for trying to bring down the Coragua's socialist government.

In principle, this was supposed to be in A of some American hostages held by his blower in Lebanon. But underneath it all was a desire for regime change in the Coragua. - When the Iran Contra affair came to light,

it nearly brought down the Reagan administration. As Kip Bennett says, Bill Casey died, just before he would probably have gone to jail. He was the first DCI to be in the cabinet, the US cabinet. So he was in Ronald Reagan's cabinet.

And he'd been Ronald Reagan's campaign director, so a New York businessman.

I was lucky enough to have lunch with him,

the private lunch with him, which was just with the Chief of Station of a Self, and his body guards, he said to me, "You know, the problem I'm not gonna do the accent, "the problem with you guys,

"and he was referring to clearly to Australia, New Zealand and Great Britain." He said, "Did you have a left-wing culture?" And you have the socialist left-wing culture, which we don't have in America,

and that means you are more susceptible. Kip Bennett says, "He bristles at this lazy generalization, "but under the circumstances, he pushes back gently." And I said to him, "Well, to get it in perspective, "we've only had three labor governments since the war."

And he said, "How come so many?" And I remember thinking then, "That's a bit interesting, but it's not the communist party, "this is a kind of a soft socialist, you know, Labor Party." So the subtext seems to be that democracy is great.

Provided you end up with the government that we want. It's worth underlying that this conversation was taking place in the New Zealand of the early 1980s, under Prime Minister Robert Moulton, a national government firmly in favour

of a close relationship with the U.S. So it's interesting to hear that level of preconception from a man at the heart of American security. When the next Labor government arrives in 1984, that is going to have all sorts of ramifications

for New Zealand U.S. relations, the Anzostriti and for Kip Bennett. New Zealand became a pariah, really. And it wasn't because of the nuclear ships thing.

“It was because, and I remember being told this,”

it was because Schultz believed that he'd been lied to by the Prime Minister David Lime. Now, there are different versions of this and no doubt deeply felt. Labor are elected on a nuclear free ticket in 1984,

but at the time, no one quite knows what that means. The Labor government in Australia arrive in 1983 saying, then nuclear free but it seems to be an aspiration because in practice there's no change.

that's why I'm here to say, they're into nuclear,

“but over time, it becomes clear, that's not the case.”

- To put it mildly. And with New Zealand, there's some discussion as to whether we might allow nuclear power but not nuclear weapons, it's all quite fluid for a while. And at the time, a majority of New Zealanders

wanted to remain in the Anzostriti Alliance, but they also wanted to take a stand on the nuclear issue. David Lime seems to have wanted to find a way through that would satisfy everyone, but in the end, that didn't happen. - As I understood, long he said to the Americans,

"Leave it with me. "I'll be able to tone all this down." And of course he wasn't able to tone it down. And I think he probably tried to, I don't know what time it down might have meant,

but short-scape him the time to do that.

And it didn't happen and the Americans felt really betrayed that the Prime Minister had done that. And I don't think he did it on purpose.

“According to this version, what really sits the Americans off”

is the sense of betrayal rather than the policy itself. But either way, the end result was the same for keep minutes. I've certainly found himself at the end of this two-year program that had lasted six years. - The nuclear ships in a passport with a silver fair

and I meant that we were not clever at the moment. - And you were literally knocked out of the agency, and now that we weren't really allowed to get in. You know, wasn't really from parking up front on the side, saying park where you like, Kiwi,

and you know, to not even being allowed to go back there. There were a few drinks organized away from Langley itself. And I kind of felt, you know, after all I've done, but having said that, all the officers I dealt with were kind of apologetic, they, you know,

'cause they eat it. - Keep minutes is the breakup felt pretty brutal. - Thanks for all the work you've done and all that, and have a happy life, you know, that was what it was supposed to be. But that was a bit funny when I couldn't even go to headquarters

and, you know, no one really seen your game and shook my hand, and so, you know, that was, and that was just because of what was happening in New Zealand, you know. - But that was more than 40 years ago now. Susan Miller says more recently,

"The relationship has once again become incredibly close." - I mean, when you think about the five eyes, we share everything with each other. - If New Zealand was running a really cool, you know, spy inside Russia, you would be sharing the information

from this, but you're not gonna tell us his name or anything like that, but you're sharing it with us, 'cause five eyes, that's what we do. - Susan Miller describes the five eyes relationship as a form of teamwork.

- Like when we would sit down in the five eyes of us and we would talk something out,

we would always come up with this really great solution, you know.

- But she sees the politicization of intelligence under the Trump administration is now at a level that is going to cause issues for the rest of the team. - We've been sharing it this kind of information with each other all over.

And I would think that your leadership right now would be at a minimum thinking to themselves, wait a minute, I might not wanna share this Russian information with this ambassador here, 'cause he's a Trump appointee,

and then the chief of station is not necessarily a Trump appointee because that's actually pointed 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 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 gonna 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's probably okay, but I personally think,

and I don't think I'm going to be telling them something they are an already thinking, so I'm just gonna 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 US government for longer than Trump has been president twice.

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, you know, name something else that comes up in the day. - So as you mentioned, she hopes New Zealand

and the other five eyes partners will keep one eye on the long day.

- 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.

“I think that would be a harder thing to for them to do.”

And that would be a shame.

(upbeat music) - So even if New Zealand puts a wall around its Russian intelligence when it comes to the US, Susan Miller says, "Keep a door open for more reliable future administrations." - And that seems to be what we're doing,

because if we shut out America, we might be the ones who find ourselves in the coal. (upbeat music)

“- The agency was produced, written and hosted”

by John Daniel and me, Guy and Espinum, a executive producer, four RNZ was John Harvelt, and our executive producer, four bird of paradise productions, was Noel McCarthy. - The 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 Eurotitch Greek. Thanks to Steve Barrage, L.E. Marston, Jeremy Insult, and William Saunders.

Thanks to me, and William, and thanks also to Susan Velvet Action. - The visual director at RNZ was coal, Eastom Farrely, and our camera operator was Jess Chalton. Thanks also to Sarah Guy Tarnos,

for the article about Bill Sachs that appears on RNZ.co.inZ. - 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.inZ/theagency, and you can see the links in the show notes.