Book review: Maire Leadbeater has spent her life on the wrong side of the political tracks. Her parents were communists (although her mother broke with the party in 1956), and Leadbeater spent her teenage years protesting against nuclear weapons and Vietnam. In 2008, at her request, the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (NZSIS) provided her with the records they held on her family. Her own file was opened in 1955, when Leadbeater was 10 years old, and her brother, former Green Party MP, Keith Locke, was 11. Not surprisingly, Leadbeater wants to put an end to secretive state spying. She argues that surveillance by the state serves to “undermine movements for social change and marginalise or punish those who challenge the established order”.
The New Zealand state’s spying on opposition political parties, trade unions and working-class strikers, anti-war movements and indigenous independence movements is well known. It is the subject of a more comprehensive history, Secret History, edited by Richard Hill and Steven Loveridge. They employed the term “political police”, which embeds a narrative that spying on citizens is a constant. It isn’t. But the propensity for abuse is, and needs to be guarded against.
Leadbeater’s book tells the story from the perspective of a committed activist and many of the stories are of people she knew, for example Bill Sutch, whom she considered a friend, and her brother as a member the Socialist Action League and frequent protester against the Waihopai spy base. It also includes Kim Dotcom and Nicky Hager.
Why would any intelligence officer open a file on a 10-year-old girl? It’s possible, but far from excusable, that Leadbeater’s investigator was just being overly bureaucratic. Worse, that he saw her as a future threat, a sleeper agent in school uniform. Leadbeater is right to point out that, even if the file started out as comparatively innocent box-ticking, it could take on a life of its own.
In the early 1950s, the CIA’s intelligence analysts were requested to make threat assessments: predictions of one or two pages on whether the Soviets, in particular, were going to start World War III this week or not. Because the agency’s analysts were predominantly social science-trained, they argued that any assessment must cite references – where they got the information from, or how it was calculated. They also argued that facts that were wrong but unreferenced couldn’t be checked. Once on file, a document gains authority and their successors might be wary of challenging evidence that was approved by the organisation.
For the intelligence business, the 1950s was a decade of developing professionalism. For New Zealand, the turning point came with the visit of MI5′s Percy Sillitoe in late 1951, and the establishment of NZ Security Intelligence Service (NZSIS) in 1956. The visit and the founding were a result of Australia’s high-profile spy cases in 1947 and again in 1954, and the view of the US and UK that the antipodeans were the weakest link in the security partnership. NZSIS has recently declassified the files of Vladislav Sergeyevich Andreyev, a KGB agent operating in Wellington from 1961-62, which detail his attempts to recruit New Zealanders to Moscow’s cause. NZSIS would do well to publish its own official history.
Leadbeater, however, gives us a more personal account. The Enemy Within is a social history which future historians will value as much as any NZSIS record. It’s a reminder that change isn’t always the foe, and sometimes injustice is delivered by just defending the status quo.
