Get Gough! The loans affair conspiracy
Dennis Freney
(Dennis Freney, PO Box A716, Sydney, New South Wales 2000, Australia – £4.50 airmail, £3.75 seamail: international money orders only)
In Lobster 11 (p31) we referred to CIA operations in Australia in the middle 1970s. Since then we have received Freney’s Get Gough!, the most detailed account of those episodes we know of. This is A4 format, 75 pages, many photographs, and although it is difficult to follow in places – a profusion of new names and organisations – there is enough that can be understood to make it worth acquiring. There are lots of interesting trails here, Nugan-Hand, Task Force 157 among them.
This period takes on a new significance at the moment because it appears that the CIA is running the same “loans affair” operation against the Lange government in New Zealand. The background, the four year anti-NZ campaign by the US government, is detailed in ‘How the US tries to subvert Lange’, Robin Ramsay, in Journal of European Nuclear Disarmament No 26 (from END,11 Goodwin Street, London N4 3BR – £1.00 plus postage). But this piece, written in mid-January, finishes just as the NZ “loans affair” began. A mid-February update on the “loans affair” by Owen Wilkes appeared in Wellington Confidential February 1987 (PO Box 9034, Wellington, New Zealand – no price, but £1.00 should secure a photocopy).
Other NZ sources of information of interest are:
- Watchdog – the journal of the Campaign Against Foreign Control of New Zealand, from PO Box 2258, Christchurch, New Zealand;
- Big Sister – newsletter of the Organisation to Abolish the Security Intelligence Service, Box 1666, Wellington, New Zealand;
- New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone Committee, PO Box 18541, Christchurch, New Zealand, which publishes and distributes material on US/CIA operations in the region.
As multi-national capital shifts east in search of cheap labour and new markets, the focus of CIA et al operations is shifting also. The Pacific, including Australia and New Zealand, is going to be the “hot” area for the foreseeable future.