The untold story behind New Zealand's ANZUS breakdown.(The Australia, New Zealand, United States Security Treaty)

• Author: Moran, Bernard
• Position: 173717046
• Pages: 21(16)

Twenty years after the Nuclear-Free Zone Disarmament and Arms Control Bill passed into law on 4 June 1987, the event has assumed a heroic mythology. New Zealand dared to stand up to the United States and forge its own independent foreign policy.

So powerful is the myth that in early 2007, John Key, the new leader of the National Party, made it clear that his party would adhere to the status quo on any potential visit by nuclear-powered warships. He recognised domestic political and cultural realities.

The success of the NZ peace movement in creating a doomsday panic was described by Merwyn Norrish, the secretary of foreign affairs, back in 1984: (1)

"There was much that was dispiriting in the way in which the public debate on nuclear matters and peace issues was conducted in the months leading up to the general election of November 1984.

"Assertions with no basis in fact were often made. Visitors like Helen and Bill Caldicott, the anti-nuclear campaigners, stated actual falsehoods with such astonishing self-assurance that they were uncritically believed.

"Prejudices, often those of small minorities, were paraded as though they were the will of the majority. Factors relating to the security of New Zealand, and quite different factors relating to superpower rivalry, were presented as one and the same thing.

"Government policy was alleged to be different from what it actually was. The differences between the main political parties were portrayed as wide, whereas they often were rather narrow. Emotion ran away with common sense."

By late 1986, the NZ peace movement contained 367 disparate groups; this in a population of under four million. One thousand, or one-fifth, of NZ doctors belonged to the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW). Town councils voted to become nuclear-free, erecting notices at their boundaries that one was entering a nuclear-free zone. By 1987, 70 per cent of New Zealand's population were living in such zones.

New Zealand was heralded as a shining example to the world. Its home-grown peace movement had triumphed, and is still giving most New Zealanders a sense of pride in their non-aligned status. They have created their own destiny.

SOVIET CLANDESTINE ROLE

However, previously untold evidence indicates that the anti-nuclear movement served the strategic interests of the Soviet Union. New Zealand was specifically targeted in a clandestine political operation, designed to remove it from the Western alliance.

In the late 1970s, policy-makers in the International Department of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) developed doctrine about exploiting what they termed the "correlation of forces" within a particular country to achieve a specific outcome. This implied expert direction of the "correlation".

A key force to be "correlated" was the New Zealand trade union movement. It would be helpful at this point to outline the changes that were occurring. Tony Neary (now deceased), the Irish leader of the Electrical Workers Union, chronicled the infiltration in a paper he gave at a conference in Washington DC, in March 1987, organized by Owen Harries under the auspices of the Hoover Institute.

Neary claimed that the Soviet Union, through one of its main front organisations, the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), had successfully infiltrated the New Zealand trade union movement and changed its direction.

He noted that, until the mid-1970s, there was a good working relationship between the NZ Federation of Labour (equivalent to the ACTU) and the United States labour federation, the AFL-CIO.

The change began in May 1979, when Jim Knox was elected New Zealand FOL president, and regular visits by NZ trade unionists to the Soviet Union and other Eastern bloc countries commenced.

By 1986, known communists from the Moscow-aligned Socialist Unity Party (SUP) and the Maoist-leaning Workers Communist League (WCL), along with their sympathisers had considerable control in seven of the eight largest trades councils (branches of the FOL), covering 70 per cent of the FOL membership.

Bill Andersen, president of the SUP and the Auckland Trades Council, attended the 27th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in March 1986.

Joint communiques, signed by Jim Knox on behalf of the FOL and by the heads of visiting Soviet delegations, had been adopted by delegates at the 1984 and 1985 FOL conferences.

Behind Jim Knox was Ken Douglas, the affable, competent and powerful general secretary of the FOL and chairman of the SUP. In 1986, he took two months' "sick leave" to visit the Soviet Union.

That year, Jim Knox also visited the Soviet Union where, according to the Soviet news agency TASS (22 February), he pledged to "pool efforts in the struggle to prevent a new war with which the imperialist states, above all the United States administration, threatened mankind." He also said: "Soviet peace initiatives are highly appreciated in New Zealand and are supported by broad sections of the population."

TASS (February 1985) quoted Knox as saying that "contacts between the trade unions of New Zealand and the USSR grow stronger from year to year. New Zealand trade unionists follow with interest the Soviet people's strides, and come to see for themselves that the socialist system acts in the interests of the working people."

A vignette from that era illustrates the relationship. Each year, the Soviet embassy in Wellington invited delegates from the FOL conference to an embassy function. During the 1986 conference, most delegates attended this reception. To emphasise the importance of the NZ-USSR relationship, at the conference Jim Knox warmly presented the Soviet delegates with large expensive sheepskin rugs.

The American guest from the AFLCIO, received a small brown paper parcel. From the rostrum Knox told delegates that the parcel contained a book on New Zealand; but when the American visitor opened the paper, he found a small cheeseboard. The New Zealand Herald reported that "it was a case of hard cheese for the American delegate". (2)

Tony Neary had considerable public respect for the lonely struggle he undertook; but his criticisms of Soviet trade unions as mere appendages of the state were rejected within the FOL. He was regularly accused of seeing "Reds under the bed", to which he responded: (3)

"In the New Zealand trade union movement, those who mutter about Reds under the beds must be joking. The Reds are already in the beds and have been there for some years. By now they are sitting up and getting breakfast brought in." The "Reds" were the Socialist Action League (Trotskyites) and the Moscow-aligned Socialist Unity Party.

TESTIMONY OF A FORMER SOVIET

INTELLIGENCE OFFICER

Oleg Gordievsky, a former high-ranking officer of the Soviet security service, the KGB,--who, from 1974, worked as a long-serving undercover agent for the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) until his formal defection in 1985--recalled: (4)

"KGB activity in Australasia was ... increased as the result of the election of David Lange's Labour government in New Zealand on an antinuclear programme in 1984.... The [KGB] Centre ... was jubilant at Lange's election...." Gordievsky visited New Zealand on four occasions from 1986 onwards to brief that country's Security Intelligence Service on Soviet clandestine activities in the region. For years, he said, New Zealand: (5)

"... had been under massive propaganda and ideological attack from the KGB and the [Soviet] Central Committee, and the ruling Labour arty had seemed unaware of the extent to which the fabric of their society was being damaged by subversion.... "In its attempts to draw New Zealand into nuclear-free activities, the Soviet authorities had made tremendous efforts to penetrate and strengthen the Labour Party, partly through the local Party of Socialist Unity (in effect the Communist Party of New Zealand) and partly through the Trades Union Congress." Gordievsky alleged that New Zealand and Australian communists were being run by International Department of the CPSU. He said: (6)

"I know the situation in New Zealand very well; only 500 members of the Socialist Unity Party, but they are invaluable because each was ready to do...