Peace Researcher 38 – July 2009
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It was no surprise to either
the Anti-Bases Campaign (ABC) or the Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa
(CAFCA) when Rob Gilchrist was finally exposed as a Police spy and agent
provocateur, in December 2008. We’d known that as long as we’d known Rob i.e.
the ten years he’d been doing it. We didn’t have any proof or evidence but we
just knew. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it’s a duck.
Both our organisations have had long experience of spies attempting to
infiltrate us (indeed his arrival on the scene, in the build up to the 1999
Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC)
When Rob’s then partner,
Rochelle Rees, found his secret spying files on his computer (see her article,
below, for details) ABC and CAFCA were listed among the numerous groups that
Rob was tasked with spying upon. ABC sussed him out from the start and never
gave him any entrée into the group; equally, he soon realised that our
activities at the Waihopai spybase were not susceptible to his methods as an
agent provocateur. Most importantly, in the decade of his spying career, ABC
never did anything that the Police would have considered worth spying on. So
the completely unexpected 2008 Ploughshares action which deflated one of the
Waihopai domes must have come as terrible shock to the Invisible Men who are
supposed to foretell such things. ABC wonders if Rob’s $600 weekly wage was
withheld by the cops that week.
It was easy to pick Rob as a spy; he just
looked and acted like one who had been sent by Central Casting. He bore an
uncanny resemblance to another guy who had turned up out of nowhere in the
1980s, got involved with ABC’s predecessor, Citizens for the Demilitarisation
of Harewood, and then vanished, never to be seen or heard from again. Going
further back to the 1970s, the committee of what was then called the Campaign
Against Foreign Control in New Zealand (CAFCINZ, now CAFCA), included an individual who perfectly fitted the classic profile
of a spy. He came from nowhere, nobody knew anything about him, he had no
apparent context and he had no politics. But he assiduously attended all our
meetings, activities and protests and, being the classic helpful spy, offered
to look after things like our mailing list (which in those days was a manual
one, on index cards). He duly vanished and was next spotted by a former
committee colleague, in a provincial newspaper photo, taking part in a Police
fundraising run! He went on to a long career as a cop, retiring just a few
years ago as a senior Christchurch detective (for the record, when we
confronted him, by phone, he denied having been a spy when he was on the
committee, saying that he only became a cop after leaving us. You be the
judge). We wrote about it in the April 1980 Foreign
Control Watchdog (without ever naming him) and that article was duly
entered into the Security Intelligence Service file on CAFCINZ/CAFCA, with a
note reading: "On page 3 under the heading of ‘Spying’ there is a
valuable lesson here for Intelligence Officers in trying to arrange penetration
of a target"! I’m glad that we were able to help the SIS with its spycraft
training! (see elsewhere in this issue for articles about SIS spying on
activists, including peace activists. The article on SIS spying on CAFCA, and
many others, is in Watchdog 120, May
2009, online at http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/20/06.htm).
Not all
spies fit that profile. The Watchdog
article details a guy, now dead, who was a member of the Christchurch branch of
the former Communist Party and a large number of Christchurch activist groups
in the 1980s and 90s and who did not behave like Rob and the other two that
I’ve cited. Mind you, he did leave a broad clue in the form of unpublished
memoirs which detailed his work as a paid SIS informer in
He
Looked And Acted Like What He Was
ABC was only a peripheral target of Rob’s
spying, he didn’t devote much attention to us, probably because we were not
where the action was (our “exciting” arrestable actions at the Waihopai and
Harewood bases occurred in the decade before Rob began spying) and probably
because he knew we’d sussed him out as a spy from Day One. He certainly never
tried that bullshit on us that he’d been in the Special Air Service (SAS) – he
personally told me that he’d been in the Territorials. And that accorded
precisely with his most unprepossessing appearance. He only ever came to one
Waihopai protest, earlier this decade, and I vividly remember one of my
colleagues asking: “Do you reckon Gilchrist more closely resembles Beavis or
Butthead?” He turned up at that protest in a flash four wheel drive and when I
commented on that, he told me that his father had died and that he’d inherited
some money. I thought: “Yeah, right”, and when I was later sent his expenses
claims to his Police handlers (air fares, hotels and rental vehicles, on top of
his weekly pay) I thought: “Yeah, I was right”. At that same protest, he cut a
fine figure in a Helen Clark mask and a dress, as part of the street theatre.
Dressing up must come naturally to a spy.
He looked and behaved like a little creep, so it was no surprise to learn that encrypted files on his computer included the sexual orientation of named activists and a whole lot of other similar stuff to do with personal and sexual relationships within the targeted group. Not to mention nude photos of young women with whom he was sleeping and on whom he was spying (some taken covertly), which were sent, complete with derogatory headings, to his Police Intelligence handlers for their titillation.
Rob didn’t do any damage to us (or CAFCA) but
he did do considerable harm, both personally and politically, within various
other activist groups that he was able to infiltrate and manipulate. It is a
cautionary tale and we all need to learn the painful lessons. Peace Researcher is indebted to both
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