This is my essay for "Peacemonger. Owen Wilkes: International Peace Researcher", which was published in late 2022. The book - reviewed in this issue by Warren Thomson - is a book of essays, not a biography. I am the Organiser for both CAFCA and the Anti-Bases Campaign (ABC). Owen was a founder of both.

It is worth being reminded that before there was the Anti-Bases Campaign, CAFCA was an anti-bases campaign. We were founded in the mid 70s and we grew out of the anti-war, anti-bases campaigns of the late 60s and early 70s. This is our history. My source for a lot of this is drawn from my 2005 obituary of Owen (Watchdog 109, August 2005), MH.

This was Owen's signature campaign, the one he was best known for, not only in New Zealand but globally. One thing needs to be clarified from the outset - Owen was a leading light in the anti-bases campaign long before there was an actual group called the Anti-Bases Campaign (ABC). He and I were among the founders of the latter (which still exists, and for which I am its Organiser). But ABC was only founded in 1987, specifically to campaign against the Waihopai spy base, and Owen quit the peace movement in its entirety in the 90s, so he was only involved in the actual Anti-Bases Campaign for a few years before retiring.

This needs to be put into the context of his being a leading light in the anti-bases campaign for more than two decades, from the late 1960s until the early 1990s. In what may well have been his last media interview, Owen told the Christchurch Star (17/12/04: "Where Are They Now? Peace Campaigner Owen Wilkes", Stacey Doornenbal) that he retired from the peace movement in 1992.

Owen's anti-bases activism did not come out of thin air. He was born in 1940, so he was in his 20s during the 60s, that most tumultuous of 20th Century decades. By the early 60s he had dropped out of the University of Canterbury. He went to university, principally because he was "too scared to face the world outside the education mill".

He was an off and on student for several years, doing a B.Sc., majoring in Geology. He passed five units of the requisite nine but never finished it, and said that he had never been hindered by not having a degree. He was living proof that academic qualifications are not necessary to becoming a world expert in one's field. He found his lifelong love - archaeology - and plunged into it, initially in the South Island.

Antarctica

In 1962 Owen went offshore for his first big adventure, spending the summer in Antarctica working as a field assistant for the Bishop Museum of Hawaii. To quote from a 1972 profile that I wrote on him for Canta (the University of Canterbury student paper): "He did not find Antarctica particularly harsh - in fact, he found it the easiest camping he'd ever had".

"He lived and worked with the Americans at McMurdo Sound, getting $US500* per month and duty-free booze. He got on very well with the Americans, but became aware of the military nature of the whole Deep Freeze** programme, with Antarctica being used as a gigantic military training ground. Owen, however, was not politicised, and not yet disturbed enough to do anything about it".

(*To put this figure into perspective: 12 years later, in 1974, as that year's Editor of Canta, I was earning my biggest salary up until that point in my life - around $NZ150 per month. So, $US500 per month, with no living costs, was a huge pay packet in 1962. ** Operation Deep Freeze - the former overall name for the US presence in Antarctica. For more than 65 years the US has had a military base at Christchurch Airport. It is still there today. Throughout that whole time, the cover story for that multi-purpose, medium level military transport base is that it exists solely to provide logistic support for peaceful scientific research in Antarctica).

After further archaeological work in NZ and the Cook Islands: "He returned to New Zealand, was re-employed by the Bishop Museum, and went on a bug-hunting expedition to the Kermadec Islands... As soon as they landed, they were forced to leave by a volcanic eruption, and spent a week cruising around watching it".

"They put up nets in the rigging to catch trans-oceanic bugs (making the boat look like a 'transvestite') – once again he discovered the military involvement in scientific research. By checking the Museum records, he discovered that the expedition was part of a US military germ warfare research project. He was still not concerned enough to do anything. He returned to New Zealand and spent the summer working on Stewart Island".

Owen Discovers Politics, In A Rubbish Bin

"In 1965, he worked as a dustman (rubbish collector) in Christchurch, a job he enjoyed immensely - he recalls occasions such as the one when he dressed up in a white tennis dress found in a rubbish bin (this was in the days before household rubbish was disposed of in wheely bins. Today Christchurch has no dustbins and no dustmen). It was this job that led to him being politicised, an occasion straight out of Gilbert and Sullivan. He pulled a newspaper out of a rubbish bin, and read that during the Wellington visit of the US Ambassador to (the then) South Vietnam, an American Secret Service agent had dropped his gun at the feet of a student protester".

"Owen began to realise New Zealand's involvement in America's war in Vietnam - he pulled more papers out of rubbish bins, and read them so assiduously that he once fell off the truck. When Keith Holyoake (National Prime Minister, 1960-72) sent New Zealand troops into Vietnam, later in 1965, Owen decided to get involved in the anti-war movement".

"He joined the Australasian branch of the former Bertrand Russell* Peace Foundation, and as he was unemployed, made a fulltime job of 'cranking duplicator handles'. The Foundation eventually printed over one million leaflets. It was here that Owen first met Keith Duffield**, Christchurch's veteran agitator and future partner in crime".

*Bertrand Russell, 1872-1970. One of the giants of philosophy, and a pacifist and militant peace activist for many decades. In his last years he was a high-profile opponent of the Vietnam War. In New Zealand, the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation was headed by Christchurch's Larry Ross. ** My obituary of Keith Duffield is in Watchdog 18 (March 1979) and my obituary of Larry Ross is in Watchdog 130, August 2012.

"He returned to Antarctica in the summer of 1965-66, employed by the Bishop Museum, but this time he was consciously looking for evidence of Operation Deep Freeze being a military operation. In 1966, he and his wife Joan were sent to the United Nations-administered part of New Guinea" (this was a decade before the birth of the independent nation of Papua New Guinea).

"They spent six months in the Highlands, communicating by Pidgin English, and living with the tribes they encountered... His job was collecting parasites and he discovered that it was part of a $US500,000 US Army germ warfare project, a military project using the Bishop Museum as a front. He discovered this by, among other things, having to send his findings to US Army laboratories in Taiwan".

"Whilst in New Guinea, he graduated from printing leaflets to writing his own material. He wrote his first article, for the (former) New Zealand Monthly Review* on US military activities in Antarctica; he wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper complaining of its slanted coverage of the Vietnam War (the letter was published on the front page); he wrote what he describes as a 'crank letter' to Holyoake; and he wrote to the US Embassy in Canberra, about Vietnam". (*My obituary of the Monthly Review is in Watchdog 84, May 1997.)

"The Embassy wrote back to the expedition director about this - Owen was acting director at the time, he intercepted the letter, and fired off a reply complaining about the Embassy's invasion of his privacy. The Embassy circumvented Owen, and contacted the expedition director, who ordered Owen to file all his letters with him, as some of them could be 'embarrassing to his employer'".

"In September 1966, after six months in New Guinea, he was fired by the Bishop Museum for 'unsatisfactory performance in the field' - one wonders how much pressure the US Embassy had to apply. His departure was supervised by the local police, and on the scheduled date of his arrival, an American from Deep Freeze rang his parents to make sure that he had arrived (that was the last time he was employed by the US military)".

"Having been fired twice, he decided not to work for a boss again - he bought a house on an acre of land at Governors Bay for himself and his wife. They lived by commercial tomato growing, supplemented by Owen working one day per week in a Sydenham bakery" (this doesn't quite do justice to the fact that Owen worked a nightshift of 12 or more hours continuously on the bakery ovens, a hot, exhausting and dangerous job, with multiple burns a nightly occupational hazard. This one night's work gave him enough money for the week. He worked at the former Boons Bakery for more than ten years, quite often biking there and back from as far away as Oxford, a journey of 40-50 kms. In addition to this he worked throughout the day, on other work and peace research).

"In the winters he worked at Temple Basin ski field. In 1967, he returned to university again, as a part-time student. He plunged deeper into the political scene - in 1967 he donated $US1,000 (a huge sum in those days) to the (1968) Peace Power and Politics in Asia Conference (money earned from the US Army in New Guinea), to finance the participation of (a high-profile foreign speaker) after Robert Muldoon (the Minister of Finance) had refused to allow the release of overseas exchange for that purpose" (those were the days when you needed official permission to purchase foreign currency).

"Also in 1967, he became Secretary of the Citizens Vietnam Action Committee (CVAC), a body newly founded by Keith Duffield. Demonstrations weren't much fun in those days - once, when a US warship was in Lyttelton, wharfies incited schoolkids to throw snowballs at the demonstrators. In May 1967, Operation Deep Freeze imported a US military band to march through Christchurch on the anniversary of the Battle of the Coral Sea" (the WW2 sea and air battle, off New Guinea in 1942, when the Americans defeated the Japanese and stopped their southward advance).

"CVAC was refused a permit to demonstrate in Victoria Square, on the grounds that they might damage the flowerbeds! Owen held a one-man protest, following the band down Hereford Street, past a jeering lunch hour crowd. An onlooker grabbed his placard, Owen went berserk, chased him and was in the process of flattening him when the police put them both in a car. On the way to Central, the counter-demonstrator convinced the police that he was mad and they asked Owen if he wanted to lay any charges".

Omega Made Him A Household Name

"Owen achieved his breakthrough in June 1968 - working with Phil Howell of the University (of Canterbury) Physics Department, he wrote an article on the proposed US Navy Omega installation at Lake Pearson (near Arthurs Pass). In brief, the Omega system consists of eight transmitters around the world, using Very Low Frequency signals (VLF), which travel through water, as a navigational guide for submarines".

"Omega would have made New Zealand a nuclear target. His article was rejected by two magazines, then printed in Canta (the University of Canterbury student paper), and published by its Editor, Bill Gruar, as a "special emergency edition" - this particular Canta eventually ran to 72,000 copies. The article sparked off the massive anti-Omega campaign - the spontaneous demonstration at Harewood (i.e., the US military base at Christchurch Airport), the massive march through Christchurch...".

I was not involved in the Omega campaign and didn't know Owen then. It was slightly before my time. In 1968 I was in my final year of high school. I got involved in political activism in 1969, which was my first year at the University of Canterbury. So, I'll draw on the excellent work of Maire Leadbeater, in her article "Omega Campaign 1968-69: An Important And Well-Earned Victory, Flaws Aside" (Watchdog 149, December 2018).

"The debate in New Zealand was sparked by a June 1968 article in the Christchurch Press stating that the US Navy planned to build an Omega transmitter in the mountains of the South Island. US naval experts favoured a mountainous site because at the time the favoured way of setting up the transmitter antenna was to string it across a valley from high points on either side. According to the Press report, US experts had already inspected three sites in the Lake Sumner and Lake Pearson areas and the Omarama district of North Otago".

"A Special Emergency edition of the University of Canterbury student paper Canta came out less than two weeks later and it spread throughout the country with a record total sale of 72,000 copies. Canta told its readers that an Omega station was set to be an essential submarine navigation aid and would therefore make us a key nuclear target if war broke out. On 28 June when 4,000 people marched through Christchurch it was the largest anti-war demonstration the city had seen. In Wellington trade unions demonstrated at the opening of Parliament".

"After a solid ten days doing preliminary research in the Library, Owen Wilkes sent away requests to obtain US Government Research and Development reports, one of which specifically described how Omega was compatible with and enhanced the performance of navigation aids already installed in missile submarines".

To cut to the chase, the massive opposition to NZ hosting Omega led to it never being built here - it went to Australia instead. And that campaign achieved unprecedented success in the history of the anti-bases' movement in New Zealand, in that it stopped, dead in its tracks, a base from being built. Bases have been and gone, with much protest, in the decades since, but we've never replicated that 1960s' success of stopping one before it started, unfortunately. Owen was instrumental in achieving something absolutely unique in New Zealand and very rare anywhere in the world. After Omega, Owen Wilkes was a household name, and he stayed one for the next quarter of a century.

About Omega, Owen wrote: "I think the ultimate cause of the June 1968 events ... was simply that this was the first time that New Zealanders were faced with a direct, immediate, unpleasant consequence of an alliance with America" (from Owen's 1973 "Protest. Demonstrations Against The American Military Presence In New Zealand: Omega 1968, Woodbourne 1970 (sic), Mt John 1972, Harewood/Weedons 1973". The subtitle contains an error - the Woodbourne protest was in 1971, not 1970).

That Was Not The End Of The Omega Saga

To quote Maire Leadbeater's Watchdog article again: "In 1982 Owen Wilkes, key contributor to the 1968 campaign, returned home to New Zealand after working at the prestigious Stockholm Institute for Peace Research (SIPRI) and the Oslo Peace Research Institute (PRIO). He had continued to research navigation aids, including Omega, and he said he had got it wrong - Omega was not used for ballistic missile submarine navigation".

"In 1987 Owen and his Norwegian peace research colleague, Nils Petter Gleditsch, published a scholarly tome about radio navigation aids Loran-C and Omega, which details the uses for Omega - not for ballistic missile submarines but for a wide range of other roles in US counterforce strategy, including hunter-killer submarines. The key driver of the project seems to have been the need to coordinate anti-submarine warfare - for hunter-killer submarines to work in coordination with Orion long range aircrafts, anti-submarine helicopters and ships. This would be facilitated if all used the Omega system".

"So, the protestors were right and wrong at the same time. Right that Omega was planned as a key element of US nuclear strategy, but wrong about the ballistic missiles' submarines. Instead, these vessels used a combination of inertial guidance and the global low frequency radio navigation aid Loran-C. The explanation for this error is complex - it is likely that Omega was considered for ballistic missile submarines until 1966 and authoritative technical literature including defence publisher Jane's supported this scenario based on Omega's underwater reception capabilities. With the benefit of hindsight, Wilkes and Gleditsch suggest there should have been a stronger research focus on the Loran-C navigation system".

Owen was always adamant about telling the truth as he saw it. In many respects, he was too honest for his own good. When he involuntarily came home in 1982, having been expelled from Sweden, he held a well-attended press conference in Christchurch. The reporters basically ignored everything he said but headlined his throwaway line that he now thought that some of his conclusions about the 1960s' aborted Omega project had been incorrect. His name on a Press billboard was sufficient to explain the story: "Wilkes. I Was Wrong About Omega".

From 1968 onwards, Owen was a central figure in the anti-war, anti-bases movements, not only as a researcher of unrivalled ability but also as an activist. He regularly found himself in a leadership and spokesperson role, one with which he wasn't particularly comfortable. I first met him in 1970, when I was a leading light in the Christchurch Progressive Youth Movement (PYM), which became the key organisation in the first generation of anti-bases campaigns.

In 1970, Owen came to our flat to attend a meeting to plan the next year's protest against the top-secret US Air Force Project Longbank, which was located inside the Royal New Zealand Air Force base at Woodbourne (which is also Blenheim's airport. Following the closure of Christchurch's RNZAF Wigram, Woodbourne is now the only remaining Air Force base in the South Island).

For each of the first three years of the 1970s, there was an annual national protest at one of the bases, all of which were in the South Island - Woodbourne (1971), the US Air Force observatory atop Mt John in the Mackenzie Country (72) and the US Navy and Air Force transport base at Christchurch Airport (73) - the first two are long gone, the Christchurch Airport base is still with us. Owen was in the thick of all of those protests, as they grew progressively more militant.

Woodbourne (Project Longbank)

Mysterious and unexplained US military buildings and personnel were observed inside Blenheim's RNZAF Woodbourne as far back as the early 1960s. The first protest there was in 1968, by students attending the annual Curious Cove student congress in the nearby Marlborough Sounds. The major protest, of several hundred people, took place in early 1971.

The best place to view original 1971 TV news footage of this is in "Islands Of The Empire*", the definitive 1980s' Vanguard Films documentary, which was digitalised and re-released in 2020. That includes a 1980s' interview with protest leader, Tim Shadbolt, describing what happened. He remarked on one unique feature - the police handed leaflets to the protesters (not vice versa), telling us where we could and couldn't go. The whole Air Force base was sealed off. *"Islands Of The Empire" can be viewed online on YouTube.

"But there was a surprise in store. Permission had been granted for a small group to be shown over the base; by whom was obscure, but the Prime Minister was mentioned. Eight journalists went in, together with Owen Wilkes, David Cuthbert, President of the NZ University Students' Association, and Roger Cruikshank, Editor of the Victoria University student paper, Salient. The equipment was explained and questions answered very cautiously without giving away secrets".

"No doubt it was assumed that the visitors would lack the technical knowledge to draw any conclusions themselves; but Truth had sent an electronics expert and Wilkes and the students saw enough to realise that Longbank was there to detect nuclear explosions. In fact, it was one of a network of similar stations. Wilkes later obtained other data which satisfied him that the Americans were monitoring tests by France and China".

"Thus, they obtained information from atmospheric tests which they were unable to conduct themselves after signing the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963" ("Peace People: A History Of Peace Activities In New Zealand", Elsie Locke, 1992). My obituary of Elsie is in Watchdog 97, August 2001.

The mention of the former Truth is worth fleshing out. It was a weekly, stridently Rightwing, muckraking paper, with a huge circulation at that time. Boasting a string of inflammatory billboards and front-page headlines (my favourite was "Let's Hit Ratbag Students Hard"), it was an unlikely outlet for any critical analysis of the US/NZ military alliance. Indeed, it had editorially declared itself fully in support of that, but it equally declared that New Zealanders had the right to know the details of that alliance.

So, it opposed the secrecy surrounding Project Longbank. For several consecutive issues after the protest, it turned several pages over to Owen to detail what the US military was doing inside RNZAF Woodbourne. A wonderful example of strange bedfellows. That 1971 protest demanded the closure of Project Longbank - coincidentally or not, it was closed and gone within less than two years. Jeremy Agar's review of "Truth: The Rise And Fall Of The People's Newspaper", by Redmer Yska, is in Watchdog 126, May 2011.

Mount John

This was the US Air Force observatory atop a hill overlooking Lake Tekapo in the Mackenzie Country. It had been set up in the 1960s on land subleased from the University of Canterbury for $1 per year. The official cover story was that it was there to "track space junk" (Project Longbank's cover story was that it was "monitoring atmospheric disturbances"). "In 1970 the Editor of Canta, David Young, decided it was time to find out what was going on at Mount John. He and Owen Wilkes made personal visits" (and were given the space junk explanation).

"But official US Air Force information obtained by Wilkes showed that the Mount John facility was one of four supplying data to the Aerospace Defense System headquarters beneath a mountain in Colorado. It was helping to provide targeting data for a US anti-satellite weapon system, and it was also gathering information about a particular type of Russian communications satellite" ("Peace People", Elsie Locke, ibid.).

Canta published its findings and the call was made for the University of Canterbury to break its ties with the US military (that particular campaign went on for several years. Both Owen and I were involved in it). The University would not budge, so a national protest was called for March 1972 (it was organised by an ad hoc committee). Several hundred people attended and on the Saturday night, some of them (including me) climbed the hill in the dark.

"At the top of the hill, (1095 metres) above sea level, with a gusty nor'wester sweeping through the snow grass, we came upon what must be the weirdest demonstration New Zealand has ever seen. The satellite tracking station was surrounded by floodlights and police, while about 50 demonstrators were gathered on a nearby rock knob. Above the noise of the wind, we could alternately hear chants of 'Go home Yanks' and the barking of police dogs".

"The police had ordered the demonstrators to 'stay up there' on the rock knob and this they were doing when a large group of police moved away from the Air Force and towards the demonstrators. An officer was heard to command the two dog handlers to 'disperse those people with the aid of your dogs', and police moved in on the demonstrators, many of whom were sitting down" ("Protest", Owen Wilkes, ibid.).

"Policing was very aggressive and two demonstrators were seriously injured - a schoolboy suffered a fractured jaw after he was kicked in the face by a dog handler and two others were bitten by police dogs, one of them on the penis. (When the protesters went back up the hill on the Sunday) feelings were running high".

"'Somebody vented their frustration by placing a large boulder on the Mount John access road and triggered off a glorious episode of mass vandalism. At least 90% of the 300 or so people present were soon straining and sweating to move every available boulder'. The road was rendered completely impassable, littered with hundreds of tons of rocks" ("Our History As An Anti-Bases Campaign: From CAFMANZ To CAFCINZ To CAFCA (& Then To ABC", Watchdog 135, April 2014, Maire Leadbeater)). The quote within the quote is from Owen's "Protest".

"Everyone arrived at the bottom of the hill smiling and satisfied, the catharsis of physical labour having dissolved away the bitterness and anger of the morning" ("Protest", ibid.). This predictably led to a hysterical reaction in the media and from politicians. But our Mount John campaign gained at least one victory.

The University of Canterbury terminated its lease to the US Air Force and the land reverted to the Crown; the 1972-75 Labour government promptly leased it to a US transnational corporation, which ran the military observatory on behalf of the USAF until the whole thing became obsolete in the mid 1980s when it was closed, dismantled and flown back to the US.

That prompted me to issue the shortest press release I've ever done: "Good riddance to bad rubbish" (Press, 15/6/83). The base was actually being dismantled when the "Islands Of The Empire" film crew arrived up there in 1983 to interview me for the Mount John segment of the documentary. And another significant point worth noting is that, after Mount John, the cops have never used dogs again at a protest.

Christchurch Airport (Harewood)

The next (and last) in this original series of anti-bases protests was the 1973 one at the US military transport base at Christchurch Airport and the military communications facility located inside RNZAF Weedons, outside Christchurch. The protest called for the demilitarisation of Harewood (the US military aircraft used Christchurch Airport to service not only Antarctica but also US military and spy bases in Australia and elsewhere in the global empire of US bases).

For the first time, this protest was not organised by an ad hoc committee but an ongoing organisation - the Campaign Against Foreign Military Activities In New Zealand (CAFMANZ, the very first precursor to what became today's CAFCA - the Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa). As with the Woodbourne and Mount John protests, hundreds of people came from around the country. As with Mount John it was a militant protest, with the difference being that most of the militancy came from the hundreds of police and RNZAF personnel deployed to seal off Christchurch Airport and RNZAF Weedons for that weekend.

That 1973 demo was used by the Police as a dry run for that year's scheduled Springboks tour (which was called off by the Kirk Labour government), and was a full-blown assault by both cops and the military (for example, RNZAF helicopters were used, both to transport cops and military from point to point around the airport perimeter, and also to intimidate protesters by hovering low overhead, utilising deafening noise and downdraft). It was the biggest Police operation against a protest until the forcible end of the Bastion Point occupation in 1978.

There were mass arrests, the police used tactics of systematic violence that weren't seen again until the 1981 Springbok Tour protests, Owen was personally injured in the face by one of the country's most senior policemen, and was later charged and convicted for "encouraging disorder" Ironically, the judge who convicted him was Harold Evans, who later became a distinguished peace movement activist himself, achieving international fame with his drive to get the World Court to declare nuclear weapons illegal.

He gave Owen a lenient sentence of community service. Years later they met as fellow peace researchers and activists. Harold gave Owen a character reference when he was later on trial in Sweden, on much more serious charges. Harold Evans' obituary, by both Kate Dewes and myself, is in Peace Researcher 33, November 2006.

"Islands Of The Empire" (ibid.) includes 1973 TV news footage of the protest, and a news interview with Owen sporting his facial wound inflicted by the cop. Owen was "Islands" 1980s' interviewee for the Christchurch Airport segment and, in that interview, he says that his 1973 facial injury was inflicted by Gideon Tait, whom he describes as the Police Commissioner. That is not wholly correct. In 1973 Chief Superintendent Gideon Tait was the Christchurch District Police Commander. Later in the 70s he left Christchurch and became Assistant Commissioner (but never Commissioner).

The fact that the Christchurch cops regarded him as a bogeyman was illustrated a few months later in 1973 when two people were arrested and imprisoned for firebombing the city's US Consulate. When the cops grabbed the bearded male of the couple, they shouted: "We've got Wilkes!"" - which is laughable, because that sort of thing was never Owen's style. As for the American military presence at Christchurch Airport, it is still there, but changed and reduced.

Tradecraft

By now, Owen was recognised as the pre-eminent peace researcher in the country. To quote, again, my 1972 Canta profile of him: "He is quite happy to divulge how he gets his information on the US military in NZ - he uses libraries, reading all the reports of US Defense Department research, plus trade journals of the US aerospace industry, which contain classified information. He subscribes to US technical publications, and he has a network of correspondents around the world".

"Then there is his fieldwork - his job as a dustman gave him good practice. He has searched the rubbish tins at Washdyke (the US headquarters for the Mount John observatory, in an industrial suburb just north of Timaru), and scoured the matagouri bushes on Mount John for blown-away documents. Occasionally there is a bit of amateur spying - such as 'mushrooming' in the fields around Woodbourne, equipped with a brass telescope".

His unparalleled researching abilities even earned grudging admiration from those spying on him. This is my favourite passage from the very small amount of Owen's file that has been released by the NZ Security Intelligence Service (SIS). It was written during Owen's later stint as a paid peace researcher in Scandinavia:

"In his extensive writings both here and abroad in support of his campaigns, WILKES has been variously described as an entomologist, New Zealand physicist, military strategist, and scientist. In fact, he 'dropped out' from Canterbury University after passing five units of a science degree. He does, however, have a well-developed flair for ferreting out, from obscure but unclassified sources, what would appear to constitute classified information, and it seems he has continued to exploit this special skill in Norway".

Long March, Resistance Ride

In 1974 Owen, his wife Joan and I were amongst the contingent of 11 New Zealanders who took part in the grandiosely titled Long March, which was actually a three-week bus trip right across Australia, from Sydney, to protest at the huge US Navy nuclear submarine communications base at North West Cape, the westernmost point of Australia. My God, that was an adventure - I wrote several Canta articles about it (I was the Editor that year). Here's an extract from one (issue 12, 14/6/74):

"Owen Wilkes, a New Zealander, emerged as the major spokesman on any technical questions, and was the only person with any throughgoing knowledge of the topic. For instance, the Perth people didn't know that North-West Cape has its own procurement office in Perth until Owen found out by looking it up in the phone book!".

That spokesperson/technical expert role made him a marked man for the uniformed knucklemen that comprised the various Australian police forces and he was one of a number of people arrested at an "illegal" protest in Perth, and charged with "creating a disturbance". He simply did not turn up in court, so the charge was dropped. A whole book could be written about the Long March and, indeed, it is the subject of a short 1974 film (which was not actually finished and released until 40 years later and can be viewed online).

The actual trip, let alone the protests, was an epic in itself. For example, we crossed the Nullarbor Plain, several hundred kilometres of it, before that highway was sealed. Here's what I wrote in Canta 13 (24/6/74): "I developed a special affection for the Nullarbor - sitting over the axle, bumping your guts out all day and night, ploughing through sheets of water, staring through dust-caked windows at twisted scrub right down to the road's edge, and then a horizonless vista of treeless plain".

The Long March was a hugely influential trip for the NZ delegation, which decided that we would organise our own equivalent. This was the 1975 South Island Resistance Ride (on which several Australians took part) and, instead of the usual ad hoc or short-lived committees that had been set up to organise our previous activities, we decided it was time for something permanent. Thus, was born the Campaign Against Foreign Control In New Zealand (CAFCINZ), which later changed its name to the Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa (CAFCA, as it is today). Owen was a founder of this organisation and he and Joan and I were amongst those on the two-week long Resistance Ride.

"Although the purpose of this trip was for education - of themselves and for people wherever they visited - they were followed all the way by two policemen, nicknamed Tom and Jerry, who often had nothing much to do and went fishing. However, they did act as liaison, so that ten to 20 police turned up at times, plus a mobile command post which followed them everywhere. Besides revisiting Harewood and Mount John - where police, reporters and cameramen waited at the base of the hill just in case they aimed to get onto the road to the top - the Resistance Riders visited many places of environmental concern..." ("Peace People", Elsie Locke, ibid.).

CAFCA finally received our Security Intelligence Service (SIS) file in 2008 - we had first asked for it in 1985 - and, as far as I'm aware, CAFCA remains the only organisation to have received the SIS file on it as an organisation, as opposed to the SIS files on individuals within it, like me and Owen. "Indeed, the very earliest batch of reports in the file, relating to the period leading up to and including our foundation activity, the 1975 South Island Resistance Ride, indicates that there may have been more than one (spy within CAFCA), as those earliest reports include features such as complete reproduction of minutes of our meetings and the full two-page list of names, addresses and phone numbers of all Resistance Ride participants (including Australians)".

"At the bottom it reads: 'Please note: This list has been compiled from the original addresses given to CAFCINZ for the Resistance Ride...' The Resistance Ride was the subject of extensive State surveillance" ("SIS Spied On CAFCA For Quarter Of A Century", Murray Horton, Watchdog 120, May 2009).

Arctic Circle Adventures

Owen lived in Scandinavia from 1976-82, most of it in Sweden, where he worked at the world-famous Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). That time also included 18 months in Norway, working at the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo (PRIO). This whole period has been written up by another contributor to "Peacemonger", so I won't go into any detail. But there were still connections with the New Zealand anti-bases campaign.

In 1978, I and my then partner, Christine Bird, did our Big OE, part of which included crossing the former Soviet Union on the Trans-Siberian Express and staying with Owen in his Stockholm apartment. In this most sophisticated of northern European cities, he still dressed and acted like The Wild Man of Borneo (when I inquired about toilet paper, he told me that he used the phonebook). It was quite a sight to visit the SIPRI office full of oh so proper Swedes and there was Owen working away at his desk, naked except for shorts.

We met up with him for a reason, which was to accompany him on a "spy" trip through Norway's northernmost Finnmark province, which was chokka with North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) military bases and lots of Waihopai-like spy bases. Norway was then one of only two NATO members with a land border with the Soviet Union (the other was Turkey).

Off we went, the three of us, on this mad adventure, travelling by boat, train, bus and hitchhiking. We slept in a tent wherever we could pitch it. Christine and I went by bus right up to the Soviet border; Owen got the deeply suspicious driver to drop off him beforehand so that he could walk up and check out a spy base in the border zone (photography was strictly forbidden near any of these bases, even at Oslo Airport, because it was also an Air Force base). He told us that if he hadn't rejoined us within a couple of days, it would mean that he had been arrested and to ring the office in Oslo to let them know. Right on time he turned up.

Now, at such close quarters, with everything on his own terms, Owen could be a very difficult person indeed (the main speaker at his funeral looked meaningfully at his coffin, saying: "And yes, at times you could be a grumpy old shit"). So, it proved in the Arctic Circle. I'll give one example. When we were camped out next to a river, he mistakenly cooked the food in the local equivalent of meths, rather than water (they were in identical containers). Despite being hungry, Christine and I gagged and threw the food away. Owen not only ate it but insisted on giving us a lecture on how eating meths was good for you.

We duly delivered the rolls of film back to PRIO in Oslo and they were used in a book co-authored by Owen and Nils Petter Gleditsch, the PRIO Director. The book, "Uncle Sam's Rabbits" (a pun on the rabbit ear aerials used at some of the listening post spy bases) caused such a sensation in Norway that both authors were charged, tried, convicted and fined for offences under the Official Secrets Act. A much more high-profile official secrets case followed in Sweden, which led to him being ordered expelled from Sweden for ten years.

So, in 1982, after six years of high drama in Scandinavia, he returned home in a blaze of publicity and CAFCINZ sent him around the country on an extremely successful speaking tour. Christchurch academic, Professor Bill Willmott*, nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize (funnily enough, he didn't win it. It was never likely that the Scandinavians would ever award their homegrown prize to a peace activist who had been convicted for "spying" on them). For better or worse, Owen was home and he never lived overseas again. He was now an international legend, not merely world famous in New Zealand. *Bill Willmott's obituary, by Kevin Clements and myself, is in Watchdog 159, April 2022,

That wasn't the end of our Scandinavian working partnership. When I made my second OE trip, all over Europe in 1984, Owen told me that if I checked out a particular university library in Denmark, I would find fascinating stuff about recent US/NZ relations because that library collected the papers of all US Presidents. I duly broke my holiday to go there and came home with material so newsworthy about how the Johnson Administration had (unsuccessfully) tried to pressure the Holyoake government into committing more NZ troops to the Vietnam War, in the 1960s, that the Christchurch Press stuck the 20-year-old story on its front page and on its billboard.

Black Birch

"In 1981, from faraway Norway, Owen Wilkes wrote for New Zealand journals about the US Navy's plan to build a 'transit circle' facility on the Black Birch mountain range near Blenheim. The new Black Birch observatory was designed to accumulate data about the exact position of thousands of Southern Hemisphere stars, Owen had already established that Black Birch was almost certainly linked to plans to improve the stellar guidance systems of long-range missiles" ("Peace, Power & Politics: How New Zealand Became Nuclear Free", Maire Leadbeater, 2013). Furthermore, it would play a key role in providing the "increased accuracy" needed for a nuclear first strike.

In those days CAFCINZ was still an active anti-bases campaign, so we organised a 1982 protest at the base of Black Birch Mountain. "For Owen, raising awareness about Black Birch was a priority: not long after his September 1982 return to New Zealand, he set out on a national speaking tour. He hoped peace groups would take up the issue as a contribution to the regional campaign against the deployment of the new Trident submarine which would rely on Black Birch data to support its stellar inertial guidance system" ("Peace, Power & Politics", ibid.).

The Black Birch campaign proceeded on several levels - there were our experts, including Owen, who were allowed into the observatory to ask questions of the Americans. There was publicity - I was the interviewee, on behalf of CAFCINZ, in the Black Birch section of "Islands Of The Empire", which was released in 1985. And there were protests, such as the 1986 one by CAFCA (as we had since become), which scaled the 1500 metre hill, without asking anyone's permission, beat the cops to the top and strung a big banner on the observatory. Incidentally, that was CAFCA's last ever anti-bases protest. The Anti-Bases Campaign was born in 1987 and continues today.

"Campaigning against Black Birch was damned hard work. To start with, it took years of ferreting through reams of US official documentation to find out what its real function was... Secondly, the issues were all mind-numbingly complex - how do you go about explaining to the public in simple language why a lonely astronomer staying up all night on a storm-blasted New Zealand mountain will make Trident missiles more accurate in the year 2010? Writing a snappy news release about Black Birch was a nightmare".

"Thirdly, Black Birch could hardly have been better hidden away from public and news media attention. To hold a demo outside the installation took half a day to climb up and half a day to get down again, with serious risk of hypothermia along the way. And there was no way that the news media were going to climb the mountain to report on protest activities there, so demos tended to get ignored" (Peace Researcher 2, October 1994, "Black Birch To Close! What's Going On? Have We Won?", Owen Wilkes).

Black Birch operated from the mid 1980s until the mid-90s, then closed down, its mapping mission complete. "All along, the Anti Bases movement has conceded that Black Birch data has some legitimate scientific uses. We did not oppose these uses. We simply demanded that the US military stop funding this work, and then we would see if the scientific uses were important enough for the scientific community to continue funding them".

"My bet was that no university would step in and take over Black Birch, and none has. There is no scientific justification for Black Birch. The several hundred tons of massive concrete pedestal for the transit circle on Black Birch will eventually become an archaeological monument to the first strike nuclear madness of the late Twentieth Century".

"...We helped delay the programme several years, and we helped to generate lots of suspicion in both Wellington and Washington about Navy truthfulness. We have helped stop the US Navy wasting US taxpayers' money on science which no-one needs. We ought to be awarded a US Congressional medal for helping to prevent waste in the US Federal Budget. And we have demonstrated once again that no foreign installation with the slightest relevance to nuclear warfare is welcome in this country" (ibid.).

Tangimoana

"In April 1984 Peacelink magazine published its most sensational story ever, in which Owen Wilkes exposed New Zealand's role in electronic spying: 'Tangimoana: Our Most Important Foreign Base'...The Tangimoana radio eavesdropping station (in the Manawatu) had opened in 1982 as the site for Project Acorn, operated by the Defence Communications Unit of New Zealand for the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB)".

"The existence of the facility had been kept secret from the public and there was no mention of its establishment in Defence Ministry estimates. Its staff were forbidden to say where they worked, let alone what they did there. Now, for the first time, New Zealanders learned that we were involved in sophisticated electronic spying. Owen was emphatic that all the evidence proved that the facility was really a foreign military base, built to US specifications and run according to US instructions".

"Owen was familiar with similar electronic eavesdropping, and the antenna arrays that characterise the Tangimoana facility, from his time as a researcher with the International Peace Research Institute in Norway in the late 1970s. He was in no doubt that the spiderweb-like Tangimoana antenna array was part of a network... Owen concluded that Tangimoana was probably cooperating with similar bases in Australia…and contributing precise information about vessel movements - including Soviet ships across the Pacific - to the US Naval Ocean Surveillance Information System (NOSIS)" ("Peace, Power And Politics", ibid.).

"Project Acorn thus integrates us much more closely into US war fighting strategies than does mere membership in ANZUS* or our hosting of nuclear warships. Day after day we are feeding intelligence data to the US, where we have little or no control over how it is used, either in peacetime or in war ...Do we want to provide intelligence data which helps give the US the confidence that it can start, fight and win a nuclear war?" (Peacelink 18, April 1984, "Tangimoana: Our Most Important Foreign Base", Owen Wilkes). *The Australia, New Zealand, US military treaty that was the foundation of all New Zealand's defence and foreign policy from its inception in 1951 until the US, under President Ronald Reagan, kicked us out in 1986. It remains in force today, but only between the US and Australia.

"The agreement under which New Zealand played its part in collecting signals intelligence was also secret - the UKUSA agreement designed in the post-World War II years to formalise the cooperation of the US, Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Almost nobody knew about the existence of the UKUSA agreement for four decades - let alone what it was for...". UKUSA Agreement is now universally referred to as Five Eyes.

"The significance of the 1984 Tangimoana exposé cannot be overestimated: it was the opening salvo in the critical campaign to reveal New Zealand's secret intelligence links and raise the challenge they posed to our sovereignty. It marked the first Government admission that the GCSB existed" ("Peace, Power & Politics", ibid.). A campaign sprang up against Tangimoana - for example, several hundred people protested there in 1984. And it became the subject of publicity. Christine Dann, Owen's partner and peace research colleague at that time, was the interviewee in the Tangimoana section of "Islands Of The Empire".

At the end of the 80s, Owen and I made a memorable trip there, from Wellington. He was driving minus a licence (he never bothered getting one of those until the last few years of his life) and he was wearing a red cap inscribed "KGB Agent", which he'd bought at a World Peace Council jumble sale. Dressed thus, he drove up the private road to the spy base and, to the intense interest of the spies, we hopped the fence to inspect the various aerial configurations all the more closely.

Owen was a world-famous peace researcher, so he attracted acolytes from everywhere. That day our companion was a young Swedish woman who was only too aware that Owen had been convicted of "spying" in her country. Hence, she was terrified and refused to get out of the car while Owen and I wandered around the spy base (with no adverse consequences, I might add). Tangimoana is still there today, having been the subject of sporadic publicity and protests in the intervening decades. It is much less well-known than the GCSB's other spy base, Waihopai (see below).

Christchurch Airport (Harewood): An Arrest & Deep Freeze's Deep Throat

Throughout the 80s Owen was a leading light of the anti-bases' movement, both as a researcher and activist. Harewood was a hardy perennial, with regular protests in those years by Citizens for the Demilitarisation of Harewood (CDH), the immediate precursor of the Anti-Bases Campaign. Bob Leonard was the leading light in CDH. Bob was the presenter in "Base Deception", a short 1994 film about Harewood by Sam Miller, which is a few years more up to date than "Islands Of The Empire".

In 1988, Owen and I shared another experience - we were arrested together, for the only time. The new-born Anti Bases Campaign (ABC) had decided to focus attention on some sovereignty issues at the US base, by the simple method of several people getting arrested, and us then forcing that issue to be heard in court (that was the theory, anyway). Those of us who had decided to be arrested duly entered the base (brimming with hyped up cops who had suppressed a major Christchurch prison riot and fire the day before).

Owen was among the crowd that stayed outside, indeed he was rather the worse for a hangover (a large bottle of gin was his constant travelling companion). But suddenly there he was, holding the other end of my banner - he had rolled under the base fence. What's more, he refused to let go of the banner or go with the cops when they told us we were all under arrest. So, one testosterone overdosed cop started full force kicking his knuckles to try and break his grip, which only made Owen more pigheaded. It made compelling TV news footage that night. It was a weekend, so we were bailed after a few hours to appear later in the week.

But that didn't suit Owen, he had things to do and didn't want to be mucking around with inconvenient court appearances. So, he refused bail and opted to stay locked up for 24 hours so that the cops had to produce him at the next day's court hearing (which was more convenient for him), where he duly got bail.

He told me that he'd found some old Readers' Digests in the cells and had had a wonderful uninterrupted time reading their Rightwing conspiracy theories about how the KGB was behind the 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul 11. In the meantime I was left to deal with his then partner, who was frantic about how come he'd ended up in custody, as that hadn't been part of their South Island holiday plans. In the end, we fought the good fight in court, were convicted and got a small fine each.

In 1989, Owen scored a real coup. A most unlikely senior figure inside the base personally handed to him, in a Christchurch meeting straight out of a spy novel, five rubbish bags full of fascinating US military files. And they were originals, not copies. Apparently, the source chose Owen as the recipient because he hated my guts. It's a pity that Owen died first because I would have given him first refusal to write the obituary of Deep Freeze's Deep Throat. The contents of the rubbish bags were so newsworthy that the Listener devoted an entire cover story to them ("Frozen Out: The Deep Freeze Drugs And Customs Dispute", Bruce Ansley, 13/11/89).

Those files were so extensive that Owen planned to write a book based on them. But, alas, Owen was a depressive, who set very high standards for himself. When later meeting with the ABC committee, he told us that he had reached some self-imposed age by which he had vowed that he should have personally been responsible for the removal of the US military from New Zealand; that it had not happened, which he saw as his failing; that it was all a waste of time, and he planned to throw the manuscript of the book he was working on into Wellington Harbour. We took the practical step of relieving him of the manuscript but the book was never written (and never will be, because eventually we gave it back to him).

Throughout the 80s, Owen was an enthusiastic member of The Bearded Patriarchs, as the ABC committee was known, regularly attending meetings, which were held in our lounge. He would borrow my wobbly old bike and pedal out to Harewood, spending entire days with his trusty binoculars, watching the comings and goings at the US base. He came to Christchurch to spend time in Christchurch with his aged parents (he always referred to them as "the parents"). Both of them died within a few months of each other in 1993, he never stayed at our place again (he'd been a regular house guest for many years), he stopped coming to Christchurch, and he "retired" from the peace movement.

Australian Adventures: Liberated Trophy & A Jandal Held Hostage

In 1988 Owen and I had another Australian adventure, making our second trip to the US Navy communications base at North West Cape (it has since been "Australianised"). This wasn't as arduous as the 1974 epic, only involving bus travel within Western Australia, rather than crossing the entire country and back again. Mind you, WA is Australia's biggest state and the bus was an old school one, so it was more uncomfortable than the original trip (which used proper, brand new, tour buses).

Not only were we the only Kiwis, we were the only two had also been on the 1974 Long March, so once again, the cops, the media and the protest organisers all looked to Owen to be the resident expert, the group leader and spokesperson. And once again, we ended up camping in the extremely hostile Exmouth, the support town for the base (and a leading candidate for the keenly contested title of Arsehole of Australia).

The all-time classic Owen Wilkes story happened there. While I was being a good boy, asleep in our tent, he went to the pub (the tellingly named Potshot Inn, whose logo was a nuclear mushroom cloud). Behind the bar was a mock shield engraved: "1974. Police 1, Protesters Nil" and ditto for 1988. This was too much for Owen's Aussie sheila (his holiday romance on that trip). She vaulted the bar, snatched the thing, hitched up her tie-dyed skirt and ran for it.

When the braying pissheads closed in on her, she chucked it to Owen who hoofed it into the bush, and passed it on to somebody else. The drunken rednecks were in uproar and rushed to form a cavalcade to come and burn down our camp. But Exmouth was swarming with cops, headed by the State's Commissioner of Police. They stopped the "yobs" (their word) in their tracks by threatening to breath test them. But we had to promise to return the shield by the next day at the latest.

It was duly done but Owen held out for an exchange with one of his jandals, which had got lost in the mad scramble the night before. Just as we were about to board our buses to leave (to the intense relief of all sides), up drove a cop car with siren blaring, the loudspeaker called out "Mr Wilkes", and out stepped the Commissioner clutching the missing jandal. The cop was a good sport and agreed to put on his Commissioner's hat to pose for a photo solemnly handing over the jandal.

To give you some of the flavour of that trip, here's an extract from my Foreign Control Watchdog report (issue 60, December 1988): "The trip was definitely organised on a tight budget. We travelled in a grossly overloaded school bus, driving the 1,350 km from Perth to NWC in one unforgettable all-night, all-day epic. The Aussies loved it - they must have cast iron arses".

"On the way back we slept on a beach. It may have been the tropics, but I needed the balaclava that I had bought in Christchurch's record cold spell. Food was a BYO affair and Owen and I lived a week on a diet of bread, sardines and gingernuts". Afterwards Owen did a month-long Aussie speaking tour. Our paths crossed again in Sydney, where we visited the King's Cross bar owned by a notorious CIA figure. "Owen had to be dissuaded from stealing the Stars and Stripes" (ibid.).

Waihopai

This is the best known of the GCSB's two spy bases and, courtesy of the huge white domes covering the two satellite interception dishes, the most conspicuous (those domes and dishes were removed in 2022, as they'd become obsolete). It was the same Lange government that made NZ nuclear free that also approved the Waihopai spy base, announcing in late 1987 that it would be built.

"It was thanks to Owen Wilkes that we learnt about Waihopai and its role. New Zealand defence officials had been working with their Australian counterparts since 1984 on ways to improve signals intelligence interception. They had two new bases in their sights: Waihopai and its 'big brother' station at Geraldton in Western Australia... In November 1987 Prime Minister Lange agreed to the construction of the base. The public was only let in on the secret the following month...".

"Owen Wilkes was soon able to put two and two together. The choice of a quiet location indicated that the base was designed to listen to signals we were not intended to hear... by a process of elimination, he concluded that the base would be targeting the international Intelsat system...which carried the world's telephone, fax and telex systems...Owen also emphasised that New Zealand was about to acquire the capacity to spy on private communications emanating from its small Pacific neighbours" ("Peace, Power & Politics", ibid.).

"Big brother GCSB will be working with bigger brother DSD (Australian Defence Signals Directorate) for Biggest Brother, the US National Security Agency. Its data will end up being used to undermine whatever privacy, secrecy, independence and sovereignty South Pacific microstates currently enjoy" (Peacelink 60, April 1988, "Big Brother Will Be Listening From The Waihopai Valley", Owen Wilkes).

Owen wrote the definitive, seven page "Backgrounder On Waihopai Satellite Spy Base" in Peace Researcher 17 (first series, February 1988). "It would be nice to think that GCSB was going to eavesdrop on US military satellites or the French satellite. But it seems unlikely. Neither the US nor France would tolerate it. The US would not sell us the computer for it if they thought there was a tiny chance we were going to spy on the US or its close ally France...".

Initially, the GCSB said that there wouldn't be a dome over the solitary satellite dish (the second one was added in the late 90s). Owen pointed out: "Once the station starts operating, anyone with a theodolite will be free to measure the dish orientation and state precisely which satellite it is pointed at" (ibid. So, Owen was the indirect "father of the domes"). He concluded his "Backgrounder" with a section titled "Do We Want Waihopai?":

"The peace movement is mostly agreed about the undesirability of Tangimoana. Tangimoana, amongst other things, is contributing to targeting of US naval weapons. There is no question of Waihopai doing this. It is not part of any nuclear war system. Yet, in some ways, Waihopai is worse. Tangimoana is, at least, eavesdropping on military operations - ships and aircraft, and maybe submarines. If there were a Soviet submarine snooping around Aotearoa, Tangimoana might detect it".

"But Waihopai doesn't even have the justification of spying on other nations' aggressive military activities. It will be spying on ordinary people, people who are trying to bring independence to their own countries, people who are campaigning for a nuclear-free Pacific. It will listen to microstates trying to negotiate with superpowers, grassroots businesses that are trying to fend off multinational takeovers. Tangimoana implicates us in nuclear war preparations. Waihopai implicates us in undermining the privacy, security, independence and sovereignty of our neighbours in the South Pacific. The short answer is NO, we don't want the Waihopai spy base" (ibid.).

Owen was a leading figure in the late 80s' campaign that protested against Waihopai, from conception to commissioning. It was that campaign that led to the birth of the Anti-Bases Campaign (ABC), in 1987, and he was a founder and leader. He was a fixture for the first few years of Waihopai protests. His name on a billboard right round the South Island was sufficient to explain what the story was about. "Wilkes: We'll Stop Waihopai" was one such.

We didn't, of course, but not from lack of trying. As Maire Leadbeater wrote: "...it was a remarkable achievement, unknown elsewhere in the world, for a protest campaign to be mounted against an intelligence base that was yet to be built" ("Peace, Power & Politics", ibid.). And ABC has been running that campaign since the first protest in 1988 until now, calling for the Waihopai spy base to be closed.

Touching The Bases Tour; Doris

ABC organised the Touching The Bases Tour in late 1990. "Waihopai was included (in the Tour), which also took in Tangimoana, Black Birch, Harewood and an Owen Wilkes-led day trip around 'secret' Wellington. The unique aspect of this information-cum-protest action was that a number of activists from the Asia-Pacific region took part, including several Filipinos and representatives from Bougainville and Fiji…It was also a great chance to meet with some of the very activists working for a nuclear-free and independent Pacific who could well have been targets of UKUSA spying".

"In fact, we really understood the personal determination and commitment of our colleagues when they insisted on walking with us to the 4,500-foot summit of Black Birch ridge in snow and gale conditions. Hardy Christchurch organisers Murray Horton and Warren Thomson became concerned that our guests from tropical climes might suffer hypothermia and worked hard to persuade them to keep their layers of woollen clothing in place even when they felt warm from their strenuous climbing" ("Peace, Power & Politics", ibid.).

ABC's Warren Thomson reported on the Tour in Watchdog 66, March 1991; "Secret Wellington. With sixty-five people crammed on a fifty-seater bus we visited the places where intelligence and security operations go on night and day, year in, year out. In honour of our visit, some buildings were temporarily declared defence areas and entry prohibited while we were there. At Defence Headquarters we deposited a bag containing some of their old rubbish. They panicked and thought it was a bomb!".

"Owen Wilkes' commentary on buildings, incidents and organisations has prompted others to think about what goes on in their own home towns, behind drawn office building curtains". In a separate Thank You section of that same report, I extended thanks: "To Owen Wilkes, who overcame illness and pain to guide us through both Military Auckland and Secret Wellington" (I don't remember what was his health problem then).

Earlier in 1990, there was a sensational revelation about a hitherto secret foreign military facility in one of the most remote parts of the country. Owen wrote it up, in his usual meticulous detail, in Peace Researcher 26 (first series, March 1990; "Spot-On With Doris: French Satellite Beacon Discovered In Remote Corner Of New Zealand"): "Wednesday, 10 January 1990, was Doris Day" (you have to be of a certain age to get that joke. MH).

"On that day TV3 broke a story about a French radio beacon transmitter which had been installed on the Chatham Islands, 800 km east of, and part of, New Zealand, without the New Zealand government becoming aware of it. The beacon was part of a system called Doris, and it provided for precise determination of the orbits of French 'Spot' photographic satellites. Because these satellites could be used for locating targets for French nuclear missiles, the installation had obvious strategic value".

"The revelation caused an immediate scandal. New Zealand is still strongly opposed to French nuclear testing, and feelings still run high about the Rainbow Warrior bombing. So, how had it come about that New Zealand was hosting this installation? Doris was a front-page media sensation for a couple of days, enhancing considerably the French reputation for perfidious sneakiness, and the NZ government was made to look rather silly about the whole business. Less than a month later, on 12 February, the NZ Prime Minister announced that France was being asked to remove Doris".

"...We should thank and congratulate the Government for eventually doing the right thing about Doris. The arguments for and against Doris are remarkably similar to those revolving around the US Navy's Black Birch facility; each facility contributes to increasing the accuracy of the respective nuclear arsenal, although the means by which this becomes about in each case are quite different".

"Doris would have made French nuclear targeting more accurate. Black Birch will make US nuclear guidance more accurate. Yet New Zealand insists that Black Birch continue to operate, although the evidence for its missile guidance role is far better documented than was the evidence for Doris. The significant difference between Doris and Black Birch is, of course, that the latter is American".

CAFCA

People who only know of Owen from reputation associate him with the anti-bases and broader peace movement. He was never a committee person, never a joiner, but he was tickled pink to be invited to be an honorary member of Christchurch PYM (Progressive Youth Movement), particularly as he was a good decade or more older than the rest of us. He proclaimed that membership for years after PYM ceased to exist, in the early 1970s.

The Anti-Bases Campaign spun off out of CAFCA (the Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa) in the late 1980s. CAFCA had started as CAFCINZ in the mid 70s; CAFCINZ had previously been CAFMANZ. Owen was a founder and key figure in all of those various iterations. As previously mentioned, he and his then wife Joan were among those on the two-week long 1975 South Island Resistance Ride, which was CAFCINZ's founding activity.

He was an active and activist member of CAFCA for decades. For example, in 1989, CAFCA organised a major protest against the meeting, in Christchurch, of the nasty international Rightwing think-thank, the Mont Pelerin Society. It was Owen who alerted us to it; it was Owen who impeccably researched the record of every delegate, all of which we gratefully published in Watchdog. And Owen was quite happy to be CAFCA's most trenchant internal critic. From the Minutes of our 1993 Annual General Meeting (Watchdog 74, December 1993): "Quote of the AGM: 'This has got to be the most unsuccessful campaign in New Zealand's history'" (I beg to differ but perhaps I'm biased).

Security Intelligence Service (SIS)

Owen appears right throughout the SIS file on CAFCA (as distinct from the SIS file on him, of which only a small portion has been publicly released). He is portrayed as being some sort of mastermind, for example, the first SIS memo to the US Central Intelligence Agency about us (1975) says: "Owen R. WILKES is the main organiser and activist in both CAFMANZ and CAFCINZ". When I went overseas in 1978 the SIS attached great significance to the fact that I, and my then partner, were going to visit Owen in Sweden.

The most fascinating report on Owen is a December 1985 one entitled "PROTEST ACTIVITY AGAINST THE SERVICE: ASSESSMENT OF CURRENT CAMPAIGNS". In it they recognised Owen as a formidable foe. Some extracts: "CAFCINZ and its leading personalities have had a longstanding involvement in protest against this Service. Under the direction of Murray Donald HORTON (Personal File), CAFCINZ was responsible for coordinating protest and harassment activity against Service premises in Christchurch in the mid-to-late 1970s...".

"The Service regained prominence in CAFCINZ's interests in late 1983 with the acknowledgement by New Zealand Customs of its referral of WILKES' incoming overseas mail to the NZSIS. CAFCINZ took up the cause of one of its founding members with gusto and apparently cooperated with WILKES in the formation of the Christchurch Peace Research Institute (PRI)...".

"For a variety of reasons, the temperature appears to be rising in anti-SIS feeling over recent months. CAFCINZ appears to be taking the lead and this may be because of WILKES' personal vendetta as much as CAFCINZ's need to find a new issue on which to focus, now that the nuclear free and anti-ANZUS issues have become more widely popular and self-sustaining".

"WILKES brings a sophistication to anti-SIS activity that has not been much in evidence in the past. His Scandinavian experience has already been evident in CAFCINZ and PRI activity and there is, as yet, no reason to disbelieve that the type of information gathering techniques WILKES claimed were being used against Government Communications Security Bureau and Defence (irrespective of their success) were not in fact undertaken and could not be used against this Service".

"The failure, by CAFCINZ and others, to achieve any measure of success against the Service via the Official Information Act does not appear to have dampened their enthusiasm…A campaign to expose the activities of the NZSIS is being initiated. It is possible that a degree of sophistication and perseverance not previously seen may be employed by individuals involved. There is an apparent climate of support from the radical Left for such a campaign".

Apparently, It Was All A Communist Plot

Owen and I were comrades in arms for several decades. So much so that some of our more fevered enemies on the Right saw it all as one big Communist conspiracy. This reached its zenith with the publication of the May 1988 issue of Plain Talk, the journal of the Plains Club, which was an influential Christchurch-based Rightwing, pro-US, lobby group during the 1980s' battle to make New Zealand nuclear free.

This particular issue devoted no less than 12 pages to its cover story, which was titled: "Rent-A-Demo: New Zealand's Longest Playing Soap Opera", and listed the "Leading Characters" as "Horton, Murray" and "Wilkes, Owen". In great detail, it listed all the joint activities and memberships of Owen and myself (and a "Supporting Cast" of co-conspirators, such as Bill Rosenberg and Bob Leonard*) since the 1960s. It even had a diagram to prove that CAFCA and the ABC "grew out of" PYM and so were the latest manifestation of the Communist plot (yes, shock horror revelation - the postal address of CAFCA and ABC is the same Box 2258, Christchurch, that was first used by the PYM, in 1969). *My obituary of Bob Leonard is in Watchdog 134, January 2014.

I must say it is a peculiar sensation to read your own life (and that of Owen) chronicled in such detail by your enemies, and all presented through a distorting filter. The conclusion: "While Wilkes, (Nicky) Hager, (Maire) Ledbetter (sic), Horton, Rosenberg, Leonard, (Larry) Ross and the many others may not be overtly pro-Soviet, they are socialists. They are steeped in the doctrine of Marxism and have a natural affinity for that cauldron of revolutionary socialism, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Their activities pose a very real threat to the future stability, and indeed the freedom, of the countries of the South Pacific region". Phew! To put it in text message language: lol (laughed out loud).

As for that "cauldron of revolutionary socialism" (for which I never felt the slightest affinity, and yes, I did go there), the USSR disappeared without a trace three years after this diatribe was published. The Plains Club also vanished decades ago. And as for Owen's politics, I'll quote my 1972 Canta article again: "He says he is a 'Leftist', but stays strictly clear of policies or ideologies". I can't remember ever discussing politics with Owen, I think he was allergic to any word ending in "ism" and if he ever voted, I have no idea for whom (a couple of attendees at the 2005 Christchurch memorial meeting for him told me that he voted Labour at least once and "maybe" once for the former Values Party).

Writer Of Crank Letters

Owen quit the peace movement in the 1990s. That is not my topic, therefore I won't go into details. So, he was gone from the peace movement and the progressive movement in general, but he was determined not to be forgotten. There is no easy way to say this, but in the late 1990s his behaviour towards his old mates in Christchurch veered from the odd to the downright offensive.

He wrote a letter to the ABC addressed to the "Flat Earth Society". In it, he urged that we give up the campaign on bases such as Waihopai and Harewood, which he now declared to be innocuous; that we should stop publishing Peace Researcher, have a holiday and get a life. Basically, he was renouncing, in writing, his lifetime's work on this subject.

And CAFCA was not spared - in classic Owen style, he wrote us a blistering seven pager (with 20 footnotes), ripping the shit out of us (and more specifically, the judges of the first [1997] Roger Award for the Worst Transnational Corporation Operating in Aotearoa/New Zealand). As an archaeologist, he took grave umbrage at the judges' findings regarding one of that year's placegetters, a US mining transnational, which operated a highly polluting tailings dam in the Coromandel. His letter was punctuated with outbursts such as "What utter crap!".

Here is an extract: "I suspect that you (i.e., the four judges, rather than you, dear Murray) have been led astray by the Coromandel Corgi (his derogatory name for the Coromandel Watchdog group). I have spent a bit of time in the Coromandel and have met some of the people who have Coromandel Corgi bumper stickers on their shiny new Rangerovers. They are mostly selfish rich bastards and rich bastards' selfish children (many of them 'foreign persons' in the eyes of the Overseas Investment Commission) who have made their wealth destroying the environment someplace else".

"Now they want to enjoy their wealth and they don't want the tranquillity and charm in the vicinity of their multi-million-dollar baches disturbed by mines paying wages to working class Kiwis. Old mine workings are picturesque, operational mine workings offend their tender sensibilities..." (letter to Murray Horton, 2/8/98).

So, what we were to make of these raves? It goes without saying that we didn't agree with Owen. I'm afraid that we still haven't got a life. We knew from personal observation that he was a depressive and we attributed these outpourings to being the products of him being affected by that condition. But we also knew, as he was so accurately described in the main eulogy at his funeral, that he could be "a grumpy old shit at times". It was part of his unique charm. And in the same time period as he was firing these broadsides at us, he was also writing friendly personal letters to the likes of ABC's Bob Leonard, discussing subjects like US military aircraft that he'd spotted whilst in transit at Christchurch Airport.

I only saw Owen once in the last 11 years of his life. I was in Hamilton on my 2002 national CAFCA speaking tour. Quite unexpectedly, he and his partner May Bass came to hear me (this after no personal contact for something like eight years). He listened attentively, thanked me for rekindling his interest in the subject, invited me to their house the next morning and it was just like old times between very old friends and colleagues.

His raving letters were never mentioned, and we sat for a long time discussing all manner of things. I was delighted to be once again in the presence of such an incredibly focused inquiring mind, a man of such energy. And he couldn't help himself - he whipped out a photo he'd recently taken in Auckland Harbour of a Chinese ship bristling with domes and antennae, describing it as "a floating Waihopai". He drove me to the bus terminal (he assured me that, unlike our 1980s' trip to Tangimoana, he now had his driver's licence) and personally loaded my luggage so he could spend longer talking to me. We shook hands on very warm terms. It was the last time that I ever saw him.

Christchurch Memorial

Owen killed himself in 2005, aged 65. On the very deliberately chosen date of July 4th, CAFCA and the Anti-Bases Campaign co-hosted a memorial meeting for him. Well over 100 people attended (quite extraordinary when you consider that he hadn't lived in Christchurch since the 1970s, or in the South Island since the early 80s). The final touch was a permanent Christchurch memorial, which has been in place since 2007. We were hoping for a statue but, with the support of Christchurch's then Mayor, Garry Moore, settled for a park bench and a plaque bearing a pictorial representation of Owen.

Beckenham Park was particularly significant to Owen, as he grew up just metres away in a riverside corner dairy (which is still there) owned by his parents, and went to Beckenham Primary School, which neighbours the Park and uses it for sports grounds. Owen was very proud of his Beckenham background.

Many years after he left Christchurch, when he was staying with me, I found him rummaging through my pretty sparse wardrobe. He said he was looking for a respectable shirt, because he was in town for the Beckenham Primary School reunion and was off that night to go dancing with his girlfriend from when he was 12 years old. He found something, put on a pair of trousers (now that was a rare sight), jumped on the wobbly old bike that I loaned him and pedalled away down memory lane. When he got back, he reckoned that he'd had a great time.

Up to 50 people attended the September 2007 Mayoral "opening" (if you can open a park bench), including family, friends and colleagues. People were there from as far as Wellington and even Sydney. The Press sent a photographer. As master of ceremonies, I read a variety of messages from right around the world from people and organisations sending apologies (such as Owen's partner, May Bass) and ringing endorsements of Owen's life and work from Australia, England, Norway, Denmark and NZ. Those vulgar Australians hoped that his bench might put a deserved splinter into the arses of the powerful should they choose to sit on it.

We'd done hours of speeches about Owen at his 2005 memorial meeting, so we kept this brief. I spoke for a short time about him, the significance of the setting for the bench, thanked everyone who needed to be thanked, and gently chided Mayor Garry Moore about having got nowhere with the statue idea (other messages referred to that as well). Garry, who had been known to bite like a big fish at real or imagined criticism, confined himself to suggesting that the Council might like to have me stuffed when it came to my turn (that greatly appealed to my darling wife).

Garry told us how pleased he was to have been invited to do the honours and told one Owen Wilkes story that we hadn't heard before. He said that he'd first met Owen at a 1970s' summer school at Arthurs Pass. When lunchtime arrived, Owen suggested that his class go for a walk and before they knew it, he'd got them to climb a bloody mountain!

At the conclusion of Garry's short and funny speech, he invited Owen's relatives present to perform that actual opening - thus denying the Press a front-page photo of the Mayor of Christchurch holding a banner calling for the US Air Force to get out of Christchurch Airport. A small group of old friends and former colleagues, some of whom hadn't seen each other for decades, stayed on to picnic in the sunshine in beautiful Beckenham Park. Stories were told and much hilarity ensued.

The next day I got an e-mail from "Gazza" once again thanking me for having invited him to do the honours, and once again repeating his preference for a memorial park bench rather than a statue. He concluded by saying "statues are so bloody passé". The Press ran a photo and small story on the Monday, omitting all mention of the Mayor's involvement, and including a quote from Owen's 2005 suicide note (which is a bit odd, don't you think?).

We're very pleased that this seat is in place for perpetuity - having survived thousands of earthquakes unscathed - in such a beautiful setting and one which held such personal significance to Owen. The plaque reads: "In Memory Of Owen Wilkes, 1940-2005. International Peace Activist, Researcher, Archaeologist, Who Spent His Early Years In Beckenham".

Iconic Figure

Owen Wilkes was a founder of both CAFCA and ABC, he was an absolutely indispensable figure in the anti-bases campaign, the peace movement and the broader progressive movement for decades. Globally, his word was gospel in his numerous fields of expertise. In this country he was a household name and an iconic figure. The words "giant" and "legend" are sadly over used but they both apply very accurately to him. The people of New Zealand and of the wider world owe him a heartfelt vote of gratitude. I'll conclude by simply saying, Owen, on behalf of all of us, thank you.