There are three types of non-fiction spy books. First, the Daily Express exposé, popularised in the 1970s by writers such as Chapman Pincher and Nigel West, usually with lurid titles such as Their Trade Is Treachery and A Thread of Deceit. As the historian Edward Palmer Thompson acerbically noted, “The columns of the Daily Express are a kind of official urinal where high officials of MI5 and MI6 stand side by side patiently leaking …”
The second is the rather rare official history, where a “friendly” academic is allowed into the archives of the intelligence agencies, a particularly difficult job when the juiciest morsels from the archives are provided by the guardians of that knowledge.
The third is the straight academic history, usually a combination of declassified files and social history. They are often grounded in a perspective that frames intelligence history as a continuous series of abuses of power by reactionary, and sometimes downright Mephistophelian, state servants.
In the absence of an official history of either the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (NZSIS) or the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), we are fortunate that two historians, Richard Hill and Steven Loveridge, have put in the long hours to fill the gaps. Secret History is the first in what aims to be a two-volume work. The year 1956 is when the NZSIS was created.
Writing an intelligence history of New Zealand at a time when there were no proper intelligence agencies is not a simple task. This is perhaps why Secret History takes the approach of a surveillance state instead. Despite this, it does incorporate the intelligence cycle – a scholarly model of the process of tasking, collection, analysis and dissemination – into its explanatory framework. This is likely to cohere more in the second volume.
The focus on surveillance drives some early assumptions. Early in the book, the writers challenge the Kiwi “mythscape”: the idea that New Zealand was a classless society with the best race relations in the world, and a social laboratory where women got the vote in 1893. Instead, we see New Zealand as a divided society, where the state protects its power through a police force initially, and where spying on its citizens is a natural outcome of its preference for a sinister status quo. The authors use the term “political police”, which has uncomfortable associations, but must have been chosen with some discussion.
Yet if German political economist and sociologist Max Weber is right, and the state possesses the monopoly on violence, then it is a jealous god and will keep a careful eye on potential challengers. All states – from the benign to the malign – will surveil their realms, and in fact, we expect them to do so in order to protect us from terrorism and foreign espionage. What we don’t want is for the watchers to be rednecks, reactionaries or in the pocket of certain interest groups (the rich). The great strength of Secret History is that it documents this part of our history well. For instance, you cannot read the chapter on Prime Minister William Massey’s “Cossack” strike-busters without outrage: they are the state-sanctioned Proud Boys of the 1910s.
The book moves up a gear when dealing with the Cold War. The high-profile Petrov Affair not only confirmed a view that the Soviet Union was conducting espionage in the South Pacific, but also the security breaches of that time convinced the US to restrict the intelligence sharing it did with Australia and New Zealand.
This brought pressure on NZ to professionalise its intelligence gathering and eventually led to separating the tasks of investigation and arrest. The authors begin this period with a list of people who came under the eye of the state for their communist leanings. It is hard to stay neutral on this subject, as some people were forced out of civil service careers on flimsy evidence.
The Vegetable Club in Wellington certainly appears to be one example; “Cambridge spies” Paddy Costello and Ian Milner are still largely mysteries. Bill Sutch, who came under surveillance in the 1930s and was acquitted of spying charges in 1975, is another case where the evidence points towards guilt and then swings to innocence.
We don’t have our spooks leaking at the urinals, but they are not washing their hands in the handbasins of regret, either.
Writing in 2002, Richard Aldrich, one of the UK’s foremost intelligence professors, claimed “the historian, armed with a pencil, is pitted in adversarial contest against the efforts of the authorities”.
New Zealand’s intelligence agencies may have their work cut out for them dealing with the world’s problems, but they could make public perception of their work more positive if they were willing to engage with their histories.
Secret History: State Surveillance in New Zealand 1900-1956, by Richard S Hill and Steven Loveridge (Auckland University Press, $79.99 hb).
