Steve Wright has been a significant figure in British state research, at the difficult, technical end, for about as long as this magazine has existed. In a very interesting essay, ‘The Echelon Trail: An Illegal Vision’,(1) Wright gives us both an autobiographical sketch and a guide through some of the developments of this field in the UK from the late 1970s, from the ABC trial, Statewatch, his Omega Foundation, through to his role in the revelation of the Echelon network.
The New Zealand end of this American intercept network got exposed recently when The Christchurch Press got access to the papers of the late David Lange, former New Zealand Prime Minster, who was at the helm in the mid 1980s when NZ tried to implement a ‘nuclear free’ policy in its waters. Since the Americans regarded the whole ‘nuclear free’ movement as a Soviet operation, and ‘nuclear free’ meant one or two of its ships would not able to visit New Zealand, little New Zealand was challenging the US. (The world we have lost.) Inadvertently released in the Lange papers, was the 1985/6 annual report of Government Communications Security Bureau – the New Zealand outpost of the NSA’s net-work of listening/interception stations. (We have GCHQ at Cheltenham and Menwith Hill.) The report shows that GCSB was intercepting, tasked mostly by the US, and doing translation/decoding work for GCHQ and NSA – intercept outsourcing, as it were.(2)
Murray Horton, of the New Zealand Anti-Bases Campaign, commented that the report
‘….listed just who it was that the Bureau was spying on 20 years ago – the list included any number of friendly countries, including Pacific neighbours. Most damningly, it also included the United Nations. Why would New Zealand be spying on the UN? How could that be in our national interest? As was revealed in the buildup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US National Security Agency (NSA, the Big Daddy of all the GCSB’s Big Brothers) systematically spied on the UN. So, the answer is that spying on the UN is in America’s interests, and that the very junior NZ spy agency in the covert alliance is simply doing what it is told. Nothing has changed in 20 years, the UN is still a prime target for US intelligence and, doubt-less, little old New Zealand is still doing its bit.'(3)
Were an equivalent report on GCHQ to turn up in the UK, would any of the British broadsheets report on it? Or would they merely hand it over to the state? And could a figure like Murray Horton prosper on the British Left? As well as a leading campaigner against the US presence in New Zealand he is also one of the main people at the Campaign Against Foreign Control of New Zealand.(4) In New Zealand some of the Left still cares about the issue of who owns the country’s economy.
1 <www.statewatch.org/news/2006/mar/wright-echelon-s-and-sur.pdf>
2 <www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/sundaystartimes/0,2106,3540743a6005,00.html>
3 Anti-Bases Campaign is at <www.converge.org.nz/abc>
4 Campaign against foreign control is at <www.cafca.org.nz>