This was first published as the cover story in Peace Researcher 36, August 2008. PR is the newsletter of the Anti-Bases Campaign (ABC) and can be accessed online at www.converge.org.nz/abc. Membership costs $20 ($NZ 25 for Australia; and $NZ30 for the rest of the world), payable to ABC, Box 2258, Christchurch.

The spectacular action, by Adrian Leason, Peter Murnane and Sam Land of the Waihopai Anzac Ploughshares group, in destroying one of the Waihopai spybase’s two huge domes succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams in putting that publicity shy blot on the national conscience smack bang in the newspaper headlines and lead stories on TV news, not only in New Zealand but globally. It was such a wonderful piece of classic, do it yourself, Number Eight fencing wire, Kiwi way to deal to the spybase (actually it involved them cutting through some fencing wire but I don’t know if it was of the legendary Number Eight variety). Even the date on which it was done – April 30 – is one of the most auspicious in the calendar of victories over US imperialism. April 30, 1975, was the date on which the Vietnamese people finally liberated the former Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), thus ending that most monstrous of wars (although the US is now intent on repeating the same mistakes in both Iraq and Afghanistan and it remains to be seen if it, or its Israeli proxy, will start a new war with Iran). Not that the Waihopai Domebusters were even aware of the significance of the date, as I later learned. And, of course, their action did not involve any army, violence or tanks smashing through the gates of a deserted Presidential Palace – although it did feature a geriatric truck that failed to even reach the spybase’s outer fence and had to be abandoned.

The Domebusters were only too happy to tell the world exactly how they did what they did. It was a triumph of low tech non-violent direct action (the only things damaged were the dome itself and some fences cut to get at it). The Catholic Worker group (with whom Anti-Bases Campaign has had a long working relationship in the campaign to close Waihopai) held a 24 hour prayer vigil outside the base during the Anzac Day long weekend. That was duly ignored by the media and the spies themselves. But they certainly sat up and took notice just a few days later when three of that group, operating as the Waihopai Anzac Ploughshares, swung into action early in the morning. Plan A was to use the truck, not as any sort of a battering ram, but equipped with a hydraulic hoist to lift the Domebusters over the electrified inner fence without having to cut it or set off any alarms (way back in the 1980s’ early days of wild and woolly protests, a vehicle was used as a battering ram by women to smash through the construction site gate and they then occupied the guard house, using its phone to ring the Prime Minister, David Lange, to tell him in person to shut the base). But the truck got bogged and had to be abandoned well short of its objective (it’s currently on loan to a local vintage machinery club, whose officeholders especially visited the Domebusters in their Blenheim Police Station cells to ask if they could borrow it until the legal system resolves the future ownership of this “vehicle used in the commission of a crime”).

Plan B : If You Can’t Go Over It, Go Through It

So Plan B swung into action and that was spectacularly straightforward. They cut through the necessary fences, including the supposedly electrified high security outer one around the base (each of the two domes has its own individual fence). Apparently something was radically wrong with the electronics; no alarms went off, no floodlights came on, no spies were interrupted from their slumbers. In a later attempt to cover its embarrassment, the NZ Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB, NZ’s biggest intelligence agency) said that the base’s security systems had been thwarted by these sneaky buggers taking fortuitous advantage of a “peasouper fog”. That story only lasted the few days until the Domebusters were released on bail, when they revealed that there was no fog (except in the spies’ imaginations) but, on the contrary, it was a lovely clear moonlit morning. Oh dear.

Having got in unobstructed and undetected, the three of them set to work with the simplest of garden tools – sickles. It’s a good thing that they didn’t use hammers as well because the political connotations of hammers and sickles would have been too much for some of the more feverish members of the media. We’d often wondered just what the domes were made of, assuming it to be kevlar (the stuff that bulletproof vests are made of). In one of ABC’s early actions we had a bullshit throwing contest (won by a strong armed man of God who is now a clergyman in a very upmarket part of Christchurch) and the dome had made a most satisfying dull boom as each plastic bag of freely available and 100% organic bullshit hit it. The GCSB said that the domes are made of rubberised material similar to that used in inflatable boats. Whatever they’re made of, the dome proved no match for a sickle. It didn’t explode like a burst balloon but let out a noisy whoosh of air and then slowly but surely began to deflate. The domes are kept up by air being continuously pumped from the inside (in contrast to the much more numerous domes at the US nuclear warfighting spybase at Menwith Hill in the UK, where the domes are in segments over a rigid frame, like a geodesic dome, and thus can’t be popped). The Domebusters reckon that it took fully half an hour to empty and collapse and they were concerned that they would be caught before they could see their handiwork in all its flaccid splendour – they never intended to get away, getting caught is the whole point of a Ploughshares action.

Only when the dome began to deflate did the security guards discover something was amiss. Meanwhile the Domebusters went about their work of erecting a shrine and praying over it for the innocents killed in the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They came equipped with banners; they took photographs to be uploaded to the newly created Ploughshares Website ( www.ploughshares.org.nz) and to be distributed to the media. It was only when the dome was down that they saw torches coming towards them, presumably alerted by computerised systems that something was amiss with the air pressure in that dome. But, incredibly, the torches went away again. When they came back a second time the Domebusters felt moved to help the hapless spies by shouting “Over here” and waving. It was only then that they were detected, apprehended and eventually arrested by the Police and held in custody in the Blenheim copshop for five days while the whole country went apeshit about what they’d done.

Symbolic Base Closure Textbook Example Of Non-Violent Direct Action

And let’s be very clear about what they have, and have not, done. They demolished one of the two domes (there is a third, very recent satellite dish, which has never been covered with a dome). In the immediate aftermath, Bruce Ferguson, the GCSB Director, had some success in peddling the nonsense that the function of the domes is to keep the dishes weatherproof. After a few days of this the media obviously thought : “Wait a minute, our TV network has got a bloody great satellite dish on the roof of our Auckland HQ and it doesn’t need a dome over it to stop it going rusty. And, come to think of it, what about the hundreds of thousands of Sky TV dishes on houses throughout the country. None of them seem to require little white domes to enable them to function properly”. The function of the domes is one of the things that instantly identifies Waihopai as a spybase (the Government has never attempted a cover story for it). They are there purely and simply to conceal from public and media view the direction in which the dish is pointing, from which can be deduced which satellites are being spied upon. Ferguson put the replacement cost at $1 million, which seems an awful lot of money for something that is supposedly just intended to keep the weather out.

So, by destroying one dome (they thought about doing the second one as well but decided not to push their luck) they committed a purely symbolic act. Those domes are the most identifiable things about Waihopai, dominating the valley and big enough to be seen from passing aircraft. They are the very symbol of Waihopai. But that’s all they are, they’re not one of the integral parts of the spybase’s function. Those are the dishes themselves, and the computers inside the buildings. The Domebusters made no attempt to touch those - and they could have done serious damage to the dish they exposed. They had more than 30 minutes undetected at the dish and they had the tools to inflict damage upon it if they’d so wanted. But they didn’t and that is probably one of the reasons why the Police backed away from the threat to charge them with the very serious offence of sabotage. This was the very opposite of a terrorist act – nobody was hurt, nothing was bombed, set on fire or even seriously damaged. The “terrorists” were unarmed (to a comical degree) and went out of their way to be caught. It was a brilliant piece of political theatre, a perfect example of non-violent direct action affecting only property. And a most bloodstained, obnoxious bit of property at that.

So why did they do it? That doesn’t require any explanation for readers of Watchdog. Waihopai is NZ’s single most important contribution to each and any American war (be it in Iraq, Afghanistan or “on Terror”) with intelligence gathering having been elevated to critical importance by that war machine. It fatally compromises our supposed nuclear free and independent foreign policy. They did it for all the reasons that ABC (and CAFCA) has presented why Waihopai should be closed down forthwith, in the 21 years that we’ve been campaigning about this spybase. In everything except name it is an outpost of US Intelligence operating with impunity on NZ soil and, to add insult to injury, we pay for it, to the tune of tens of millions per year (the GCSB’s 2008/09 budget is $48.9 million, up from $40.3 million the previous year).

Waihopai Is A US Spybase In All But Name

Another piece of bullshit peddled by the GCSB and some wilfully ignorant “experts” in the immediate aftermath was that Waihopai is a purely NZ operation, fully under “our” control and only working to gather intelligence of use to NZ. That is complete nonsense – Waihopai is but one of a global chain of such spybases operated by the Intelligence agencies of the five members of the top secret UKUSA Agreement – the US, UK, Canada, Australia and NZ. All of them (bases and agencies) operate at the behest of, and in the interests of, the US National Security Agency (NSA), the world’s biggest spy agency. Bruce Ferguson immediately undercut his own assertion of Waihopai’s “100% stand alone Kiwi owned and operated” status by revealing that as soon as he learned of the attack, he immediately contacted the GCSB’s Bigger Brothers to alert them of possible internationally coordinated Ploughshares attacks on their spybases. Why would he bother to do that if Waihopai was truly independent? Nicky Hager wrote “Secret Power” (1996) the definitive book on Waihopai, the GCSB and their role in the international spy network (I reviewed it in Watchdog 83, December 1996). He has long since moved onto other subjects – see Jeremy Agar’s review elsewhere in this issue of the 2008 film of Nicky’s 2006 book “The Hollow Men” - but is still an unparalleled expert on this. In the Sunday Star Times (11/5/08; “Waihopai : our role in international spying”) he set the record straight :

“…Waihopai is entirely a New Zealand operation, not part of the War on Terror, they said. It is, in the words of one newspaper, just to ‘keep New Zealand competitive in diplomatic, political and trade negotiations’. They are completely wrong. New information prised out by former Chief Ombudsman John Belgrave, and from intelligence insiders, makes it clear that Waihopai, and the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) that runs it, have been heavily focused on supporting the US War on Terror since September 11, 2001…

“All of this makes it clear that, whatever you think of the Christian protest at Waihopai, they were correct when they described it as an important part of the Bush Adminstration's War on Terror. But the GCSB is generally so secret that it's easy for people to sound off in uninformed ways. Peter Cozens, head of the Centre for Strategic Studies, for instance, said the base is used strictly to collect and analyse information, often of ‘a political, trade and diplomatic nature’, for the New Zealand government. He told the New Zealand Herald that Waihopai is ‘entirely, totally cosa nostra New Zealand. It is New Zealand's mafia, if you like. It's our thing. It's got nothing to do with the Americans’.

“Incorrect. The Waihopai station, like the GCSB itself, is staffed and funded by New Zealanders. It is not a US base in the sense of US personnel being stationed on New Zealand soil. But it has everything to do with the Americans. The station is part of a network of similar stations set up at US prompting by allies around the world. The same equipment, manuals, codewords and communication systems are found in each station.

“This US intelligence system, codenamed ‘Echelon’ in the 1990s, was the subject of a 2000-2001 European Parliament inquiry that confirmed and added extra detail to the descriptions of Echelon provided by GCSB staff for my 1996 book about the agency. It uses computers codenamed Dictionaries to sift intelligence from the millions of satellite communications intercepted at the various facilities. The key to the system is that each station does not just collect intelligence for the home nation. Waihopai, like the others, has separate US, British and Australian search lists (keywords, email addresses etc) that are used to identify and collect intelligence for the US, British and Australian electronic spying agencies. Thus at the same time as Waihopai collects intelligence on the South Pacific and other subjects for the GCSB, it also functions in effect as a foreign base collecting intelligence for the intelligence allies.

“The intercepted messages collected for the New Zealand agency go by an encrypted link across Cook Strait to the Freyberg Building headquarters in Aitken St, Wellington. They are stored in a computer database inside a large vault room 12.11 on the GCSB's 12th floor until processed by the intelligence analysts. But the messages collected at Waihopai for the other allies, which mostly means the United States, are routed straight from the 14th floor GCSB information centre to Washington DC and allied agencies…

“The GCSB's role in the US-led network is well known to its own staff. When they arrive at headquarters each day, they walk along corridors displaying framed pictures of the signals intelligence bases that are the foundation of their work: photos of Waihopai and its US and allied sister stations dotted around the globe. There is no good reason why other New Zealanders should not also be allowed to know the basic facts of these intelligence ties, and whose foreign policies they are supporting”

Who Are These Domebusters?

Their profiles can be found on the Ploughshares Website ( www.ploughshares.org.nz). We’re proud to say that all three of them are ABC members (although one didn’t join until after the action – one is also a CAFCA member) and all three, plus a swag of their relatives, kids and fellow Catholic Workers, were at ABC’s latest Waihopai protest, in January 2008. Indeed that group, complete with truck (not the same one used in the attack) made up a significant proportion of our numbers at that protest. Of the three, Hokianga farmer Sam Land is the one best known to us. He has been to more than one previous Waihopai protest; when he was living in one of Catholic Worker’s Christchurch houses throughout the winter of 2007 he was a regular participant at ABC’s fortnightly committee meetings and other activities; after they were bailed from the Blenheim Police Station in May 08, Sam came back to Christchurch for several weeks and resumed attending our committee meetings. He even attended CAFCA’s 2007 AGM (he’s now back home, where the winters are rather warmer). Sam’s anti-bases activism is not confined to Waihopai or indeed to New Zealand – during his 2007 Christchurch sojourn he was very keen to campaign against the US Air Force base at Christchurch Airport; in October 06 he was amongst those arrested at the main gate of the Americans’ nuclear warfighting spybase at Pine Gap, near Alice Springs in Australia. That action was in support of the Christians Against All Terrorism group, four of whom faced draconian charges for getting into that top secret base (in 2007 they were convicted and fined; both sides appealed and in 2008, to the enormous chagrin of the prosecution, the spies and the Australian and American governments, they were acquitted of all charges, dealing a huge blow to the Australian covert State). With his wide awake hat and gumboots ever present at each end of his gangly frame, Sam cuts a striking figure. He looks like a comic book country bumpkin (he reminds me of Cooch from Footrot Flats) but don’t be deceived – he is one deeply thoughtful and very committed peace activist. He was a very welcome addition to ABC’s ranks when he was in Christchurch and we look forward to working with him again in future.

Peter Murnane is one of the Auckland Dominican priests who provided a home for Ahmed Zaoui for the three years between his release from imprisonment without charge or trial and the conclusion of his case, which saw the dropping of his classification as a terrorist and being allowed to live a normal life in New Zealand with his family (another shining triumph for NZ’s Intelligence agencies; see PR 35, December 2007; “At Long Bloody Last: A Happy Ending To Ahmed Zaoui’s Ordeal”, by Murray Horton, which can be read online at http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr35-153.html). Peter is a well known Auckland peace activist, who has campaigned vigorously against the Iraq War and, specifically, the impact of “our side’s” depleted uranium weapons on the men, women and children of that unfortunate country. An Australian, he didn’t wait for the long overdue Prime Ministerial apology to the Aborigines. “In 2005 I made a 2,700km Pilgrimage of Reconciliation by bicycle, from Parliament House, Canberra to Uluru in central Australia to mark 40 years as a priest and to look more deeply at the terrible injustices done since 1788 to Australia’s Original People, as they were displaced from their land”.

ABC has had an excellent working relationship with both Catholic Worker and Ploughshares for the two decades of our existence, not only in the campaign to close Waihopai but also that to demilitarise Harewood (the US Air Force base at Christchurch Airport). There are obvious differences – their Catholicism is a central tenet of their anti-bases activism; ABC is most definitely secular. But those differences have never caused us any problems, and have even given us a few laughs. Back in the days when Ploughshares’ regular vigils at Harewood comprised almost exclusively middle aged Catholic women, the cops made a beeline for ABC’s Bob Leonard, the only bearded male present, to explain what was going on as the women enacted the Stations of the Cross at one Easter protest. Bob, quite honestly, told them that he didn’t have a clue and that they needed to speak to the women. The April 30, 2008, Waihopai disarmament action (the Biblical injunction to beat swords into ploughshares, from whence the group takes its name) was the first of its kind in NZ but such actions have been commonplace overseas for years, with Ploughshares activists spending years in prison as a result. Moana Cole is this country’s best known Ploughshares activist, having spent a year in a US prison and been deported as a result of her part in an action to symbolically disarm a US Air Force bomber in a base in the US to protest the imminent 1991 Gulf War. Both Moana and fellow disarmer, Ciaron O’Reilly, were ABC committee members in the mid 90s and they were arrested and fined together for trespassing at the Harewood base (see PR 3, December 1994). Moana is now a Christchurch lawyer and she is representing the Waihopai Domebusters.

Saturation Media Coverage

As already mentioned, this one single action succeeded in getting more saturation media coverage of the Waihopai spybase than anything else in the 21 years since it was first announced. It was all over the papers, TV and radio, not only in NZ but overseas as well. And why not – spectacularly deflating a spy satellite dome is not an everyday occurrence anywhere. This is the area where the Ploughshares action was most a victim of its own wonderful amateurism. They had a media spokesperson on the day who duly announced the deflation and by whom and the why of it to a startled world. He also candidly stated that they had never really expected to succeed. He wasn’t one of the Domebusters so he was only held a short time by the Police and then released. He then, for whatever reason, became uncontactable by the media.

That set the baying hounds onto me and my phone went crazy for the next couple of days. Let’s clarify one thing here – this was not an ABC action, we knew nothing about it until the rest of the world learned of it. However that fine distinction was lost on the media and so ABC was suddenly being pressed for comment on all sides (by journalists who in some cases stated that they’d never previously heard of Waihopai and asked questions like “isn’t it there to protect us from terrorists? What’s wrong with that?”). Not only was I asked to comment about the base itself and what I thought about the action but to also explain the religious philosophy of Ploughshares (I declined that invitation, from Radio New Zealand’s Morning Report, for obvious reasons). I had a TV crew come to the house while I was in the middle of the mailout of the April Watchdog, much to the bemusement of my CAFCA colleagues (the interview never screened); I was deemed unsuitable for another TV interview when I didn’t meet their criteria of ever having “penetrated” Waihopai; I did one pre-dawn live studio national TV interview where I was asked if I thought Ploughshares are “religious extremists” (“no” was my answer, call them “militant activists” instead). I ended up doing one radio interview because the journalist couldn’t get hold of Nicky Hager (who told me later that he was oblivious to the whole thing, being in Dunedin giving a “how to write a book” speech). And, because they are Catholics, the Ploughshares action got big coverage in publications that we normally never see (such as the Church’s official New Zealand Catholic) and led to an invitation to me to write a guest editorial about it in Tui Motu, an independent Catholic monthly magazine (a publication that I’d never previously seen and with which I’d never had any dealings).

ABC put out our own press release congratulating the Domebusters for their brilliant and courageous action; we had no hesitation in declaring our support. All up, it was the most intensely sustained period of media work that ABC has ever had, suffused with the ignorance and prejudice that the media demonstrate when covering a major “outrage” story like this and it was a very high pressure few days – without ABC having done anything to earn all this attention (beyond having campaigned for the base’s closure for 21 years, of course).

The media frenzy continued when the Domebusters were bailed after several days in the Blenheim Police Station and emerged blinking into the spotlight (minus items such as their footwear, which was kept for forensic evidence). All three proved extremely articulate spokespeople for why they had done what they had done. They have been charged with causing intentional damage and entering a building with intent to commit a crime (that’s an interesting one, as I’m not sure that a fenced enclosure containing a dish and dome meets the definition of a building). Initially their bail conditions were absurdly restrictive – having to report to the Police several times a week, being barred from any contact with each other, prohibited from entering the province of Marlborough except to appear in court or consult lawyers, and barred from going within 100 metres of any military installation. By June, some of those restrictions had been dropped (but not the ones about Marlborough or military installations). No date has yet been set for the trial. Their application to have the venue shifted to Wellington has been refused by a judge.

At the May Blenheim court hearing at which they were granted bail, they were supported by a crowd of up to 50 people (the papers said 20) organised by ABC (and CAFCA) Committee member Lynda Boyd. The crowd included family members of the Domebusters and those who had come specially from Christchurch, Nelson, Motueka and as far north as Auckland, as well as from Blenheim itself. Despite the freezing cold weather, the people rallied with placards, banners and chants on the steps of the court, marched through Blenheim and went out to the base. It was the first time since 1997 that ABC has rallied support for Waihopai protesters appearing in the Blenheim court. In Christchurch, there was a support action, organised by women, at the US Air Force base at the airport. Both actions got media coverage (which they otherwise wouldn’t have).

Shut It Down Now

Will this have an effect on ABC’s Waihopai campaign? Of course, it already has. For years, we have been granted permission by the base to bring various foreign anti-bases visitors up to its inner gate. But we were denied permission to do likewise with Cora Fabros from the Philippines when she was in Blenheim in July 2008 as part of her “Bases Of Empire” speaking tour organised by ABC. And I have no doubt that they will refuse future requests for our regular protests to come up to that inner gate (being barred from setting foot on any of the base, including the surrounding farm paddocks, was the status quo for the first decade of our campaign, a policy which led to dozens of arrests for trespass). Well that’s tough but ABC is actually in this campaign to have the base closed down, not to cultivate a comfy, cosy, co-dependency “relationship” with the spies. The Domebusters have done the whole world a great big favour by literally and figuratively letting the air out of Waihopai, symbolically closing the base in the process; they embarrassed the covert State by shattering the spybase’s high security aura of invulnerability; and they have done what the spies and their political masters fear most, namely exposing them to the sunlight of public scrutiny. They will pay a price for that and they are prepared to do so. ABC salutes them and we will support them throughout this whole process.

If you want to help the Domebusters, donations can be made to:

Bank transfer : Westpac, Account Name : TE WAIRUA MARANGA TRUST, Account Number : 03-1703-0036346-04 - donations are not tax-deductible.

If you do not have Internet banking, please send your cheque payable to Peace Movement Aotearoa - Special Projects, with a note saying it is for Ploughshares Aotearoa, and your name and address (if you'd like a receipt) to Peace Movement Aotearoa, PO Box 9314, Wellington 6141.