Introduction
The mid 1970s was not a good time to be a social democratic ally of the United States. In Britain we had “the Wilson plots’; in Australia Gough Whitlam, Jim Cairns and the Australian Labour Party got Governor Kerr and the CIA; in Germany Willi Brandt resigned after a “security scandal’; in New Zealand a series of domestic scandals blighted the Labour Party. Were these events connected? Co-ordinated? If so — and there is no evidence yet — what was the mechanism? The CANZAB counter-intelligence conferences begun in the 1960s look interesting…. Below, Owen Wilkes discusses the first book, albeit a novel, to attempt to elaborate the New Zealand situation; and Stephen Dorril pulls together the English-language material on the fall of Willi Brandt. None of this is satisfactory yet but it is a start; and, as usual, we seem to be just about the only people interested.
RR
Museum Street
Michael Wall
Manderin, Auckland, New Zealand, $(NZ)15
The death of Labour Prime Minister Norm Kirk in August 1974 began a rather weird period in New Zealand politics. Kirk died while we were still digesting the Watergate scandals, before the major Watergate-related disclosures about CIA dirty work and assassinations, and before the CIA- assisted “Kerr coup’ against Gough Whitlam in Australia. Even so, many people close to Kirk believed he was murdered. He was a very sick man, certainly, but he should not have died from what made him sick.
Then there was the arrest, trial and acquittal under the Official Secrets Act of the respected and influential retired economist, civil servant and author, Dr. Bill Sutch. There was the Moyle affair in which a police report about Colin Moyle’s nocturnal activities on the streets of Wellington somehow got into the hands of Conservative leader Muldoon. There was the “Think tank’ affair, in which the newspaper Truth concocted a conspiracy fantasy in which Labour was going to nationalise all the financial institutions of the country. There was the Freeman-Jays affair, in which Rohan Jays, a supposed NZ SIS man (who we now know to have been MI6) passed a police report from SIS files to Auckland businessman Paul Freeman, who embarrassed Labour Prime Minister Bill Rowling by handing him the papers in public. (Freeman has been most recently sighted as an arms broker for Colonel Rabuka of Fiji.) There was the O’Brien affair, in which one of the more radical MPs in the Labour Government was beaten up in a Christchurch motel and then accused of having committed a homosexual assault. (He was acquitted.) These events and personalities form the basis of Michael Wall’s story, and they are all described with scrupulous accuracy. From them Wall constructs quite an impressive conspiracy theory.
This book is quite important because there probably was dirty work going on in the 1970s with the aim of discrediting Labour and installing the National Party: and it was effective too — National’s landslide in November 1975 was as big as Labour’s had been in 1972. In no other period in our political history have there been as many unexplained mysterious happenings as in 1974-76.
The possible conspiracy was hinted at in reporting at the time but has never been properly recounted since. The usual interpretation is that it was mostly a conspiracy between National Party leader Muldoon, Truth and the NZSIS. In particular it is believed that the Sutch Affair came about because a Soviet diplomat wanted to defect and went to the NZSIS for help. The SIS agreed, but only if he did a little job for them first, arranging a series of pseudo-clandestine meetings with Sutch, so that Sutch could be smeared as a spy. The main evidence for this being a set-up was the clumsy “tradecraft’ of both Sutch and the Soviet, and the fact that the SIS was always on the spot in advance to spy on the meetings between Sutch and the Soviet official. (In one case the SIS even rented a room overlooking the spot where the next meeting was due to be held.)
In Wall’s book the conspiracy is shifted off-shore. Rather than blaming it all on Muldoon, Truth and the SIS, Wall ascribes all the dirty work to the CIA, MI6, and a rogue assassin who refuses to retire. The US bases in New Zealand as well as Tangimoana are also part of Michael Wall’s mystery. (Unfortunately his basic proposition — that the US wanted to ship their bases at Pine Gap and Nurrungar in Australia to New Zealand — is not supported by the technological facts.) As a result, in Wall’s account National Party politicians emerge with integrity smeared all over their faces, and Muldoon as the innocent beneficiary of other people’s dirty tricks.
Wall has National Party connections. His most recent job was as campaign organiser in the October 1990 election for National Party leader Jim Bolger; and prior to the 1975 election Wall was with the advertising/PR firm Colenso which did the National Party campaign. Wall actually got the National Party account for Colenso, and was responsible for the infamous “red dancing Cossacks’ anti-Labour TV cartoon, reportedly supplied to the Nats for a fraction of its production price. The deduction made by Labour at the time was that the CIA was subsidising the Nats’ 1975 election campaign. None of this gets into Wall’s book. Wall also shifts the origins of the Wellington conspiracy back in time to World War II. Most investigators of the era believe that if there was a conspiracy, it originated in the New Zealand Borneo Batallion which was involved in the so-called “confrontation’ with Indonesia in the mid 1960s. Freeman, Jays and several of the other personalities of the time all served in Borneo.
Museum Street is a good yarn, reasonably well told, and if it encourages people to think about what did happen in Wellington in the mid-1970s then it is performing a useful function. If we could get to the bottom of what happened then we might have a better chance of establishing intelligent and independent foreign and defence policies now.