Rob Elliott had little time to reflect on an enjoyable shipboard dinner in Auckland, when a man from the government turned up.
“We understand that you were on board. What was the topic of conversation?” Elliott recalled being asked. His questioner never said directly, but Elliott knew he was from the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (SIS).
It was 1972. Elliott was then the chief executive of motor vehicle assembler and franchise-holder Motor Holdings. He and other importers had dined at the invitation of the captain of a Polish cargo ship, which had brought Motor Holdings a shipment of Czech-built Škoda cars from Gdańsk. As it transpired, New Zealand’s domestic security agency had been watching them for more than a decade.
The grounds for SIS interest was the company’s trade since 1961 with Škoda, during the Cold War between the West and the Soviet Union. The Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (CSSR) was then a communist state behind the Iron Curtain.
SIS officers were regular visitors to Motor Holding’s assembly plant in Ōtāhuhu, conducting interviews, sometimes over lunch, and always seeking details of contact made in Auckland and Europe, between the firm and its Czech business partners.
“They were always short of business cards, mumbling something about internal affairs, the government, just making a few inquiries,” said Elliott, speaking several decades later of the secretive inquirers. “They were sort of grey men; they didn’t really introduce themselves very well. Typically guys in their late 40s or early 50s, they weren’t too formal, usually in Harris tweed jackets and smoking a pipe. You could spot them a mile away.”
At the time, there would have been very few, if any, New Zealand businesses as deeply involved with Czechoslovakia as Motor Holdings.
Reflecting on the cloak-and-dagger SIS involvement of the 1960s and 70s, Elliott, like others at the time, views it as mostly “comical”. Though their Czech visitors often had one or two extras there for unknown reasons.
Under surveillance
The SIS, some 65 years after the scrutiny of the Czech-New Zealand car relationship began, has for the first time released selected information about its monitoring of the automotive dealings.
Less than 25 years ago, it was deemed “not suitable for release” – I know because I applied for the files in 2002 as part of my research for The Trekka Dynasty, a history of the firm that eventually built the country’s only locally designed and mass-assembled vehicle, the Trekka.
“It could put at risk the willingness of current sources, and those approached in the future, to help the service,” wrote Richard Woods, its director. The Ombudsman and then prime minister Helen Clark agreed.
That those interviewed by the SIS had happily talked of their experiences in the radio documentary The Trekka’s Tale, and the subsequent book, did not sway the service. “A private indiscretion is one thing, an official release is another,” wrote Woods at the time.
Fast-forward 22 years and the SIS is embracing greater openness, and while not releasing original documents, provided brief summaries including its monitoring of Noel Turner, the left-leaning managing director of the family-owned firm that took over the Škoda relationship in the early 1960s. “NZSIS advised that the Czech Legation (in Wellington) was considering establishing a Škoda Assembly plant. Noel Turner of Auckland involved in discussions,” is the released summary of a file from December 5, 1960.
Trade with a communist state like Czechoslovakia occurred through government channels, the diplomatic legation based in Wellington, and the state motor industry export agency Motokov.
As well as summaries, the SIS released newspaper clippings from its files, showing that from 1960 onwards it was tracking moves to set up a Škoda assembly plant in New Zealand.
An indication of the Cold War anxiety that existed at the time can be seen in an article clipped from the Evening Post, headlined “Danger seen in NZ Czech car project,” quoting coverage from London’s Daily Mail, which saw it as a “threat to one of Britain’s vital overseas markets”.
A £2 million project involving Wellington’s William Scollay Ltd didn’t proceed, with the SIS correctly noting the pendulum had swung to a different player.
“NZSIS was advised that Noel Turner has come into the picture again. He seems to have some political influence and seems to be in favour of the Czechs,” noted an SIS file in May 1961.
Turner certainly had political influence, and he needed to, in an era when New Zealand’s economy was managed by government-issued import licences for almost everything, especially cars. All players in the government-regulated motor industry cultivated political and official relationships.
The Turners, the family owners of what would become known as Motor Holdings, had previously assembled Bradford and Jowett vehicles, and secured the franchise for the emerging German car maker Volkswagen, whose Beetle and Kombi van Motor Holdings assembled in its Ōtāhuhu plant.
Turner’s stepfather, Arthur, was a true-blue National Party man, but Turner was regarded by those around him as being somewhere between anti-establishment and socialist.
With the bulk of the local car industry in the hands of the big British and Australian brands, Turner was trying to build a portfolio of smaller European franchises and needed government approval for import licences.
The ‘spy’ who drove me
This approach saw him forge close ties with influential public servant William (Bill) Sutch. Sutch himself, a cultured man and qualified economist, had held senior roles since the 1930s as a private secretary to senior cabinet ministers, a role at the United Nations, and in 1958, became the head of the Department of Industries and Commerce.
Through all of this, some agencies had been uncomfortable about Sutch’s relationships with Soviet Union representatives. Sutch championed the notion of New Zealand becoming a more industrial, self-sufficient economy, dealing with a wider range of European countries, and he promoted policies that aligned with Turner’s efforts to assemble larger numbers of French, Italian and Czech vehicles.
Turner took over the Škoda franchise in 1965 from Palmerston North’s Phil Andrews, who, along with friend and lawyer Brian Elwood, had also been monitored by the SIS. Andrews had travelled to Czechoslovakia in 1958 to negotiate a deal for Turner to assemble Škoda cars on his behalf, returning in 1961, and again with Elwood in 1965 to strike a deal for Škoda mechanical kits for the New Zealand-designed utility vehicle, the Trekka.
In interviews for The Trekka Dynasty, Elwood recalled being invited to Wellington to meet an SIS officer at the railway station, who was keen on being kept up to date on their contact with the Czech legation. Andrews’ rendezvous with the SIS was in the car park at Freyberg pool in Oriental Bay. The SIS wanted information about the layout of the legation’s offices and who was there.
All players in the government-regulated motor industry cultivated political and official relationships.
The SIS’s 2024 information release includes none of that detail but shows ongoing knowledge of who was meeting whom.
“Noel Turner and (his brother) George Harry Turner, both of VW Motors, reported to have attended a cocktail party at the Grand Hotel, Auckland, for people who deal with the USSR,” according to a note dated December 14, 1965.
In April 1966: “Noel Turner of VW Motors reported to have attended a cocktail party at the commercial section of the Soviet Legation in Wellington on April 20.”
Škoda had a permanent engineer at the Ōtāhuhu assembly plant for much of the 1960s, and others visited from the firm’s HQ at the factory city of Mladá Boleslav.
Elliott recalled that in any visiting group, two were engineers who worked in the plant, while a third, better dressed and with no obvious purpose, was thought to be a communist official.
The SIS report precis includes a lot of Czech names, who came and went, both from Czechoslovakia and from the Wellington legation.
Noel Turner’s nephew Robin Vernon headed the division selling Czech Zetor tractors, and in the 2001 radio documentary The Trekka’s Tale recalled one SIS visit. “Once I was taken to lunch by the SIS and questioned about a specific [romantic] relationship that had happened within the firm, with someone from the Czech legation,” he said.
Elliott said he was interviewed after trips to Czechoslovakia in the early 1970s, during which he had adopted “the old James Bond thing” of stopping at shop windows to see if he could spot anyone following him – which he was sure happened on each trip.
In 2024, the SIS, in response to a specific request about a visit in 1969 by New Zealand Škoda dealers to Czechoslovakia, said it had no information on it.
The visit took place just a year after Soviet tanks rolled into the CSSR to end signs of liberalisation in the Prague Spring and re-establish Moscow rules.
Had the SIS indeed followed up, it might have been told the anecdote of the dealer group member who got unwisely lippy with security officials at Moscow airport, earning a night in Soviet cells.
Some of the most detailed material released by the SIS relates to the relationship between Turner and Sutch. Nearly a decade after retiring from the public service, Sutch was in 1974 arrested and charged with allegedly passing on official information in a meeting with Soviet diplomat Dimitri Razgovorov. Sutch was acquitted the following year.
Turner retained Sutch as a consultant until late 1970, and SIS material taken, not from the Motor Holdings file but from another undisclosed file, includes correspondence between the pair.
As well as seeking advice on government regulations, Turner also employed Sutch to buy Christmas gifts for contacts in Wellington, whose names are blacked out.
“For the senior person, I got an electric soldering iron, for his wife, a dress ring and a ceramic pot to hold a plant. Each piece was gift wrapped, and in each parcel was a card with the compliments of Noel Turner,” wrote Sutch to Turner in December, 1968.
The formal consultant relationship ended in 1970, a time in which Motor Holdings was facing a financial squeeze. A letter from Turner to Sutch released by the SIS outlined that Motor Holdings’ board had decided that Sutch’s $158 monthly fee (nearly $3000 in 2025 terms) could no longer be afforded.
Czech mates
In a covering letter accompanying the 2024 information release, Andrew Hampton, the director-general of the SIS, outlined that at the time, “the primary focus of the NZSIS’s interest was the USSR”.
Motor Holdings’ dealings were “a much lower priority for the NZSIS than New Zealanders’ dealings with Soviet nationals, especially when it became apparent that the focus of the Czechs’ visits was entirely business-related.”
Škoda has moved on, and is now owned by VW.
The Škoda-based Trekka in 2014 was added to the carmaker’s factory museum in Mladá Boleslav. Its production in the 1960s, promoted internationally as an early sign of Škoda’s global savvy, is now regarded as a pioneer of the SUV trend.