1 WARNING In 1995 someone tried to blow up British Prime Minister John Major during his visit to New Zealand for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Conference. A massive explosive device was located at Auckland’s Sheraton Hotel. Police decided not to inform the hotel or evacuate guests or alert the media, for fear of creating panic. They took the risk and defused the device in situ. On another occasion, the lives of everyone on board an airliner carrying a visiting world leader came within a nano-second of destruction, when an armed police officer shot a hole in the aircraft. The common denominator in both cases? The public have never been told. What else haven’t they told you? 2 ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ben Vidgen is a freelance writer/researcher and defence intelligence analyst. His work has been published in New Zealand, Australia and the US. As a researcher he has worked for Canterbury University and a number of corporations and non-profit organisations. State Secrets, his first book, draws on his first hand experience (and the subsequent contacts he developed) within the Royal New Zealand Army, the intelligence community, corporate media and various subcultures within New Zealand. State Secrets also draws upon his academic studies and long term research into intelligence, espionage, terrorism and organised crime. Ben lives in Nelson. He states his hobbies as stand-up comedy and playing in traffic. 3 STate secrets Ben C Vidgen Howling At The Moon Publishing Ltd 4 First edition published 1999 (September) by Howling At The Moon Publishing Ltd, PO Box 302-188 North Harbour Auckland 1310 NEW ZEALAND Email [email protected] Web http://www.howlingatthemoon.com Copyright © Ben Vidgen, 1999 Copyright © Howling At The Moon Publishing Ltd, 1999 The moral rights of the author have been asserted. State Secrets is copyright. Except for the purpose of fair reviewing, no part of this publication may be copied, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including via technology either already in existence or developed subsequent to publication, without the express written permission of the publisher and author. All rights reserved. ISBN 0-9582054-3-4 Typeset in Berkeley 11pt Cover design by Heidi & Ian Wishart Cover emblem: courtesy US Central Intelligence Agency Book design by M & F Whild Typesetting Printed by Publishing Press Ltd 5 CONTENTS 6 THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED To: Tim of the Moa, Queenstown, 1994-95, because I promised for your generosity, and your kindness I gladly keep my word. To All My Friends: I Cannot Describe The Pleasure I Experience When I Can Make You Laugh, And The Grief I Feel When I Can’t. in memory of Major Robinson Richard Cocks, my mentor, my hero, my grandfather. FOREWORD For hospitality workers and anyone else who has ever had to deal with troublemakers on a daily basis. Every day in crowded cafes all over the world, people read newspapers as they wait to be served. And every day, in crowded cafes all over the world, they find themselves drawn to specific articles - articles upon which they, the reader, may have some related first-hand knowledge. When this happens, people in crowded cafes all over the world promptly draw the conclusion that what is reported and what is reality are separate things. Although purposeful suppression of information happens from time to time within the corridors of the corporate media, generally, the telling of half-truths falls more into the category of technical failure, ie. incompetence, rather than being an example of orchestrated manipulation. Often the reason why the final copy from your press hack misses the point completely lies in the erroneous belief of many journalists that they are “jacks of all trades” or, as one journalist put it, “we’re paid to act like smarmy little know it alls, to be the universal expert”. This is a task bound to fail, due to the very human factor that not everyone can speak knowledgably about everything. When specialisation is discarded, the end product becomes a glaring declaration of the journalist’s own general ignorance regarding the specific history and particular culture of the organism which they have been sent to scrutinise in the first place. The more complex the issue, the more appropriate and likely this gross generalisation becomes. On both television networks, for example, the journalists for the most part have no expertise in any one area. The same talent they bring to 7 bear on a story about a missing pet will be brought to bear on any other story they do. They are given a formula to build their stories with: an introduction for the newsreader, then two paragraphs, then a seven second “interview” with one protagonist, then three more paragraphs, then a seven second interview with another protagonist, then a final two paragraphs and the story is complete. In Kindergarten this is called “joining the dots”, in art terms it is “painting by numbers” and in television it is “the network news”. The inability to report accurately is often compounded further by the fact that the media, as a collective creature, simultaneously suffers from ADD (attention deficit disorder), illiteracy, and gross amnesia. To translate information into byte form, the media defines the term “news” literally - “yesterday is only ever mentioned today if there’s space to be filled”. Once in a while, mutants do come along to test this hardened formula; however, the need to earn a paycheck normally has the desired effect, and the search for truth and justice soon gives way to the pressure of mortgages and hire purchase repayments. In the press, the offenders most likely to be found swaying to the tune of maintaining the status quo are the “political commentators” - sad little creatures who take their cues from the civil service, where incompetence, self-importance, office politics, careerist motivations and hangovers dominate like decaying wood on a dead tree. In New Zealand a few mavericks, such as Bill Ralston and Warren Berryman, do exist. Yet the rule of thumb clearly states that in the norm, political journalists who are commercially successful, socially acceptable and actually talented (though operating under the spirit-destroying pressures of self-censorship) are rare. In theory, a political analyst should be objective, without ideological bias, and should realise that to understand what’s going to happen tomorrow today, one must first understand what happened yesterday. In short, the ideal is that they should be educated and without a political agenda. The sins of the press gallery runneth over, but they shine brightest when the media is assigned to deal with the truly complex - defined as any event where the spin doctors at the Beehive fail to release a press kit or where they use the words “No comment”, the standard response the Government wheels out whenever the issues of intelligence or espionage are raised. “Catholic” style conspiracy theorists say that such a response is proof of the corporate media’s duplicity with the powers that be, the power of 8 the intelligence agencies, and plans for world domination. The truth, however, is (probably) raw and boring. The media’s inability to report on espionage can be compared with an individual attempting to umpire a game in which they are ignorant of the protocol, having failed to study the rules - an attitude which, if applied to the grading of students, would result in an appropriate F for effort. Conspiracy theories involving the media and the powerful do exist, ie. Robert Maxwell and Mossad, Cecil King and MI6, Tony Blair’s “New” Labour and Rupert Murdoch. Yet basically, the reasons for poor media coverage of (at least) espionage lie in the fact that there just are not that many journalists specialising in intelligence matters. It is simply not a good career move - and after all, why base your reputation and livelihood on people who are as fond of interviews as a royal in a French tunnel. From an editor’s point of view, it is more logical to invite a former government analyst to write a column on the subject whenever such deviant issues escape long enough to become news. This option saves the editor the logistical and political problems of assigning a journalist to become specialised in this area. So what if, as a consequence, objectivity is put at risk? Some call it damage control, the editor calls it practical. In exotic places like London and Washington there do exist small cliques of journalists specialising in espionage matters. Yet here in New Zealand, where no “friendly” agency has been caught red-handed sticking a dagger in the back of some law-abiding citizen (bar the Rainbow Warrior affair), the editor is safe to ask, “Why bother?” - ignoring the possibility that crimes may in fact be succeeding due to the failure of the Fourth Estate to investigate. The irony of the situation hasn’t escaped the New Zealand intelligence community, in that the danger of unaccountability stems from the unclear position regarding the nature of its charter. Professional press coverage would certainly increase the pressure on policy makers to be more decisive in their dealings with the security services. As for why this situation exists, and why there is so little in-depth reporting on a bureau that is certainly in need of constant vigilance (as much for the agency’s sake as for the sake of the public), it is time to ask the waiter for the reality check. The corporate media is not about delivering information (at least not to the public): it’s about making dollars. This is why it is called the corporate media, and not the “tobacco kills people media”, or the “war is profitable media”.