A soldier who appeared before a court martial at Linton Military Camp for attempted espionage said he was terrified and wanted to leave New Zealand. Pool photo / Adele Rycroft, Manawatu Standard
A soldier who appeared before a court martial at Linton Military Camp for attempted espionage said he was terrified and wanted to leave New Zealand. Pool photo / Adele Rycroft, Manawatu Standard
A soldier with links to two white supremacist groups says he became desperate after the Christchurch mosque shootings after becoming the focus of a police investigation.
The man, whose name is suppressed, was pulled in for questioning several times by police and allegedly asked about what targets the groupshad and what their endgame was.
“The investigators were incredibly aggressive towards me, often getting in my face and shouting. To me, their approach was actually violent,” the soldier said in an affidavit presented at a court martial hearing this week.
“There was no ‘end game’, ‘targets’, or anything like that. When I said that, I was obviously not believed.”
The soldier said he was terrified he had become a target of his own country and all he wanted was to be able to leave New Zealand and get to another country where he thought would be safe.
This week's court martial was five years in the making after the soldier was first arrested in 2019. Photo / Jeremy Wilkinson
Becoming increasingly desperate, the soldier made contact with a third party, indicating that he wanted to defect.
“That was my only motivation. I was not thinking about anything else,” he said.
That’s when the New Zealand Government stepped in.
He also offered to install a covert device at Army headquarters and supplied the undercover officer with his own NZDF identification card and IT login details.
“As people [the undercover officer] contacted me, that was still my motivation. As their demands grew greater and greater, I felt that I was in further and further above my head.”
‘Espionage is one thing; this is espionage by a serving soldier’
The soldier pleaded guilty to attempted espionage this week at the start of the court martial hearing.
Crown prosecutor Grant Burston said the man had tried to “ingratiate himself in the eyes of the foreign country concerned”.
“He not only obtained the information, but he also provided it to an undercover officer.”
Burston said the soldier had placed his own self-interests above those of the NZDF and of his country.
Parts of this week's court martial were heard behind closed doors. Photo / Jeremy Wilkinson
While he conceded no actual harm resulted from the soldier’s actions, there could have been serious repercussions if the information had ended up in the hands of a foreign country as intended.
“He believed he was interacting with a foreign agent,” Burston said.
While the soldier’s lawyers claimed the information was not of a high value, Burston disagreed and said it had the potential to cause real harm.
Burston said the punishment should be more severe because the man was a serving soldier at the time.
“Espionage is one thing; this is espionage by a serving soldier,” Burston said.
“[His] offending is the antithesis of his oath and the trust placed in him.”
‘The actions of this individual were deplorable’
It was the violation of his oath that Chief of Army Major General Rose King focused on in a statement after the soldier was sentenced to two years in military detention and dismissal from the armed forces on Wednesday afternoon.
“The offending strikes at the core of the oath of allegiance all members of the NZDF take when joining the Armed Forces, which commits our personnel to faithfully and loyally serve in the defence of New Zealand,” Major General King said.
“In this case, the offender sought to disclose official, including classified information, to a foreign entity.
The soldier pleaded guilty to charges of attempted espionage by attempting to give military information to what he thought was a foreign agent. Pool Photo / Adele Rycroft, Manawatu Standard
“The actions of this individual were deplorable.”
Major General King said the soldier’s actions were incredibly poorly judged and brought risk to all of those he served alongside, as well as the wider New Zealand public.
“Courage, commitment, comradeship and integrity are not just words or lip service – they are the foundation on which we serve. We don’t just say or read these words, we live and honour them,” she said.
‘Stuff got real very quickly’
However, the soldier’s lawyer, Steve Winter, said his client had simply gotten “out of his depth” when police focused on him and other members of the Dominion Movement and Action Zealandia after the mosque shootings.
“Stuff had got real very quickly for him,” he said, noting that it “might sound like something out of a movie”.
“He was lost, in his own words, he was desperate.”
Winter said it was important for the court to consider that no information was actually passed on to a foreign country, and said an undercover officer pressed him to provide it.
Winter said many of the items handed over to the undercover officer were phone books, which were widely distributed within the NZDF and of “limited intelligence value”.
While none of the material was classified higher than restricted, and much of it had no classification at all, the court martial panel that sentenced the soldier found that it still could have caused harm if it landed in the wrong hands.
Chief Judge of the Court Martial of New Zealand, Kevin Riordan, said the panel had taken into account the soldier’s desperation in sentencing him, but didn’t consider that attempting to pass on the information he did was justified.
“As a response, it seems so truly disproportionate to the situation you found yourself in that it defies belief,” Judge Riordan said.
“The court wonders how you could have been so naive.”
The soldier lost a bid for permanent name suppression but his lawyer appealed that, meaning his interim name suppression continues for now.
Jeremy Wilkinson is an Open Justice reporter based in Manawatū, covering courts and justice issues with an interest in tribunals. He has been a journalist for nearly a decade and has worked for NZME since 2022.
