The previous issue of Watchdog included a very long article by me, detailing what was in the Security Intelligence Service (SIS) file on CAFCA (“SIS Spied On CAFCA For Quarter Of A Century”, Watchdog 120, May 2009, online at http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/20/06.htm), so I suggest that you read that for the background. The huge media publicity accompanying the release of the CAFCA file, and the release of their historic Personal Files to some individuals, unleashed a tsunami of people writing to the SIS asking if it held/holds files on them. That has led to a huge backlog of applications for such files and applicants being told that they will have to wait many months for any kind of response (this is what happens when an obsessively secret organisation suddenly has to interact with the real world). As for me, as of the time of writing, I am still waiting for my Personal File (I have been sent three pages of it) – it has been many months now since Warren Tucker, the SIS Director, wrote to me to confirm that it held a historic file on me and that it will be sent to me in a “timely fashion”. I have complained to the Privacy Commissioner, asking for a definition of that phrase, whereas other people have received replies saying that they will have to wait X number of working days (120 is the longest that I’m aware of). The Commissioner replied that: “I am aware that the Service has in recent times been inundated with access requests, and that this has resulted in administrative problems for the Service, which they are endeavouring to overcome. As a consequence of the large volume of work they currently have, I am sympathetic to the delays… (letter to me, 12/6/09). In other words, you can keep on waiting.

But other people certainly have received their Personal Files – see the below article by Maire Leadbeater about being spied on for 50 years, since she was a kid (although, to the best of our knowledge, CAFCA remains the only organisation to have received its organisational file), and there have been further splashes in the media as a result. Brian Edwards, who for decades was one of the country’s top media figures, has received his, which concentrated on the 1970s when he was a regular media critic of the SIS. In June 2009 Green MPs Sue Bradford and Catherine Delahunty received their files ( Dominion Post, 23/6/09, “Spooks spied on high school ‘revolutionaries’’, online at http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/2524921/Spooks-spied-on-high-school-revolutionaries).

Spying On Schoolkids

Catherine was kind enough to immediately supply a copy of her file to CAFCA (we are building an archive, including from people who want no publicity about them) and has given us permission to quote it. As the newspaper article highlights, her file is almost entirely about her early life as an enfant terrible, an organiser of fellow high school kids in Wellington in the early 1970s. The SIS, and the politicians that it reported to in those days, was obviously very concerned about the prospect of a youth uprising in those turbulent days of protests. Mind you, they were not the only ones alarmed by that prospect – one report in her file is from a Wellington Communist Party meeting that the SIS was spying on and quotes one (name deleted) Commo as saying that “ Catherine Delahunty is the most foulmouthed girl he’d ever met and if he was a policeman he’d like to use his baton on her” (this rings true to me, as I remember my own turbulent early dealings with the Christchurch Commos who were very wary of the brash young activists who had burst into “their” territory).

Her file includes a feature that I haven’t seen in anyone else’s – logsheets of round the clock monitoring of Wellington radio and TV news bulletins, recording anything of interest to the SIS, ranging from developments in the Vietnam War to transcripts of the teenaged Catherine’s radio and TV interviews. She was surprised to find that her file included virtually nothing on her (adult) period as a leading activist in the successful struggle against mining transnationals in the Coromandel Peninsula (a struggle which CAFCA fully supported and with which we were actively engaged for nearly two decades). But it does add a fraction more detail to the SIS file on CAFCA and me. Warren Tucker told CAFCA that it closed our file in 2001 (although the most recent material actually released to us was dated 1998). However, Catherine’s file includes a record of her being the Gisborne contact for the last CAFCA speaking tour that I undertook, in 2002 (mind you, Tucker’s letter to me says that my “moribund” Personal File spans from 1969-2002, so it may show up in that when my file finally is released to me). Unlike the Personal File of their fellow Green MP, Keith Locke, who was spied on until 2006 (seven years after he was elected to Parliament), the files of both Catherine Delahunty and Sue Bradford were closed before they became MPs.

John Minto

Veteran political activist John Minto is another to have received his file but without any media publicity. John was also good enough to give CAFCA a copy (it fills two big envelopes) and is happy for us to quote it. At the time he received it (April), he e-mailed me: “ It seems to be particularly spartan. Lots of documents withheld and most names removed aside from my own - most is just media transcripts and newspaper articles with the odd assessment of the anti-tour movement thrown in. It may be that following the release of the Christchurch material they have been more conservative in holding onto material which could identify sources etc. Hardly anything of real interest to me - bloody boring in fact”. And now having read it, I have to say that I agree with him. The first batch of files released, to Christchurch people and to CAFCA, were promiscuously strewn with umpteen lists of names and extremely indiscreet personal details about all manner of clearly identified and very much alive third parties – this is the very reason why we didn’t go public with them; they only ended up in the media when they did because a Christchurch Press journalist found out that we had them and came to us begging for an “Exclusive”. John’s file is nothing like that – instead it includes page and pages comprised solely of lists of documents that the SIS withheld from him.

There is still plenty of fascinating material in it, as you would expect in an SIS file on John Minto. During the near civil war that gripped the country during the 1981 Springbok Tour, John Minto was “The Most Hated Man In New Zealand” (the file includes a transcript of a radio interview where he is referred to by that title), and was among those whom Prime Minister Rob Muldoon publicly branded as “radicals and subversives” on the basis of information supplied to him by the SIS. John’s file includes the SIS report written for Muldoon, wherein he is referred to as a “fanatic and extremist” but the conclusion was that he was not a “subversive”, that Halt All Racist Tours (HART) was not “a subverted organisation”, and the SIS also backed away from being able to substantiate claims that he encouraged anti-tour protesters to make bomb hoax calls. At least a couple of those maligned by Muldoon took successful legal action against the Crown and as a result of us discovering that CAFCINZ (as we then were) featured in one of the SIS files released to the litigant, we made our very first attempt to get the SIS file on us, way back in 1985. It was unsuccessful and we had to wait until 2008 before we got anything out of them.

Reading John’s file was an enthralling trip down a particularly action packed memory lane, there was an awful lot of details that I’d forgotten about the whole anti-tour, anti-apartheid movement, one of the greatest success stories in New Zealand’s political history. Warren Tucker’s letter to him (19/12/08) said: “I have remarked to other correspondents that it seems from some of the information requests we receive the NZSIS is regarded as the historian or diarist of last resort of the requester’s activities as revolutionary or activist, which would be ironic if true”. HART is, of course, long gone (my obituary of it is in Watchdog 72, March 1993 – both me personally and CAFCINZ/CAFCA had a long involvement with the anti-apartheid movement and HART) but John is still very much a leading political activist to this day (not to mention having been both a Roger Award judge and event organiser, and a current Press weekly columnist).

Another recently released file of one of our members also includes what she assures me are factual errors. The file concentrates on her 1980s’ Wellington membership of the former Workers Communist League and Philippines Solidarity, including a year spent in the Philippines (which is where I first met her). The SIS’ spies reported that she had met two members of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party who were visiting NZ, and that from the Philippines, she planned to visit Libya and India. She said that both of those claims are wrong and is most adamant that she has never had any interest in visiting either Libya or India. Although most of the irrelevant tittle tattle has been deleted from the recently released files, there is still the odd bit. So, in her one, there is mention that at a particular social function where she was in charge of the beer, it ran out in five minutes (what a cardinal sin in New Zealand!).

More And More “Neither Confirm Nor Deny” Replies

There is an interesting pattern emerging of recent applicants receiving a “neither confirm nor deny” reply when they have written to the SIS asking for their Personal File. During the first wave of applications, in 2008, a number of people received such replies and, without identifying anyone, I wasn’t that surprised as they included people that I would expect to still be the subject of current SIS files. But in 2009 I have been contacted by, or become aware of, other people who have received that same reply and in their cases, I can’t imagine that they would be the subject of current files and, if so, why. Once again I won’t identify anyone, as I don’t have their permission to do so.

But to give one example, that of one of my oldest friends, a political colleague going back to our days together in the Progressive Youth Movement, and a founder of CAFCA – he has lived overseas since 1983 and, in his own words, retired from politics when he permanently left NZ. He features throughout the SIS file on CAFCA (he was also a member of the Christchurch branch of the Communist Party for a while, decades ago) and is identified in it as being the subject of a Personal File. So it is total nonsense for the SIS to “neither confirm nor deny” that they’ve got anything on him, as we know that he was the subject of a historic file. If they didn’t have a file on him, they would tell him, as they have done in other cases; equally, if they had destroyed his file, they would tell him, as they have done with others. It is a mystery to him and us why they might have a file on him now (which is our educated guess as to what that “neither confirm nor deny” response means). So maybe the SIS is now using that response to fob off the never diminishing tide of people applying for their files or asking if they’re the subject of one. It was the response that CAFCINZ got way back in 1985 when we first applied for our one. Warren Tucker has been lauded by some commentators as a new broom, opening up the SIS to public scrutiny. Maybe he has decided that it’s gone far enough or maybe he’s been given the message that it has.

“Oversight” Committee Won’t Divulge Even The Most Trivial Details

Just don’t expect to achieve or learn anything by approaching the laughable Intelligence “oversight” body, namely the Intelligence and Security Committee, which is not a Parliamentary Select Committee but a committee of Government, controlled by the Prime Minister. It has “oversight” of not only the SIS but also the bigger and much more secretive Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), which runs the Waihopai and Tangmoana spybases, and whose immediate past Director was none other then Warren Tucker.

The Committee only has five members – the PM, Leader of the Opposition and their respective appointees. Since the 2008 election, the three new appointees are: Act Leader Rodney Hide, Maori Party Leader Tariana Turia and Green Co-Leader Russel Norman. There has been some media comment that these three (two from the governing coalition and one from the Opposition) may spice things up a bit and start to turn the Committee into a proper oversight body, instead of a Government rubberstamp. But any would-be reformers face an uphill struggle – members are committed to secrecy about any proceedings of the Committee, which only meets a couple of times per year (and for less than an hour per meeting). And it gets worse. Wearing my Anti-Bases Campaign hat I wrote to the Office of the Prime Minister, under the Official Information Act, asking to be notified, retrospectively, of each meeting; how long each meeting lasted; and a list of who attended each meeting. We received a reply saying that, as the Committee is not a department or organisation as defined in the Official Information Act, it is not subject to it, and our request was declined. They are not prepared to divulge even those most trivial of details.

Partying With SIS Director

I will conclude by emphasising that none of this is personal, not from our side anyway. New Zealand is a very small country and everyone is connected to everyone else, even the most unlikely people. One of my oldest friends (indeed we went to high school together, back in the 1960s), a founder of the Progressive Youth Movement, to which we both belonged, and a current CAFCA member, has Warren Tucker as his ex-brother-in-law. His marriage with Tucker’s sister ended more than a decade ago but my mate and Tucker have remained as family. Through that connection I had previously met several members of Tucker’s family, namely a couple of each of his siblings and children (his brother was a peace activist who sailed a protest yacht to Mururoa Atoll when France resumed testing nuclear weapons there in 1995). This year I went to Wellington to attend my friend’s 60 th birthday party, where the guests included Warren Tucker, his wife and their youngest son. I took the opportunity to introduce myself to him, we made small talk (no business), his wife made a point of saying hello and later that evening Tucker brought his 18 year old son over to talk to me (it turns out that he is in the same Victoria University hall of residence as John Minto’s son). Indeed NZ is such a small country that two of the other party guests has just, that day, received letters from Tucker “neither confirming nor denying“ that the SIS held files on them.

Everyone who has met Warren Tucker or had dealings with him says that he is a very affable fellow, and I can only agree with them. But this is not about personalities – it is about a covert agency which for decades has spied on, and amassed files on, all manner of New Zealanders, people who were simply exercising their democratic right to disagree with the prevailing orthodoxy. That is what is reprehensible here and that is what needs to be ended. So far we have had no indication that it has, nor that it will be.