Secret

by Brian Toohey

  John Howard demonstrated during the 1999 crisis in Timor-Leste that he did not understand the elementary lesson Kennedy had given Menzies in 1963—that US leaders will make their own self-interested decisions on whether to send troops to support Australian soldiers. Howard presumed President Bill Clinton would agree to his demand for American boots-on-the-ground in Timor-Leste in 1999. Clinton refused. The rebuff shook Howard, who had written to Indonesia’s President B.J. Habibie in late 1998 suggesting that Timor-Leste become independent within the decade. Habibie promptly held a ballot, on 30 August 1999, that resulted in an overwhelming vote for independence. However, Habibie didn’t control Indonesia’s special forces and their militia units, who responded with devastating violence in Timor-Leste. An outraged Australian public demanded action, and Howard then organised an Australian-led intervention force with UN approval. But he desperately wanted US support on the ground.

  The veteran ABC defence and foreign affairs correspondent Graeme Dobell observed, ‘Australian policy makers should always be reminded of two images from the epicentre of the crisis in the days when failure was still likely.’17 He said one snapshot was of Clinton’s national security adviser, Sandy Berger, telling journalists that America had no more responsibility for solving Timor-Leste than he did for cleaning up a mess his daughter might create in her apartment. The other is of Howard sitting in a radio studio ‘almost pleading over the airwaves for American “boots on the ground”’.

  New Zealand’s contribution of 1200 well-trained troops helped reduce the need for any US boots, although the US did make a significant contribution by persuading key Indonesian figures to prevent their military confronting the intervention forces. In contrast, Australia’s defence minister, John Moore, could not even get his Indonesian counterpart to take his phone calls, despite a security treaty between the two countries. In September 1999 the Indonesians cancelled this security treaty, which former Labor prime minister Paul Keating had signed in December 1995 with the Indonesian dictator Suharto. The treaty had been rendered worthless in less than four years.

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  HOW NEW ZEALAND HAS SURVIVED WITHOUT ANZUS

  ‘In February 1985, the New Zealand government’s Communications Security Bureau was receiving reports about minute details of the Iran–Iraq War, a weekly list of all the Libyan students in Britain and a lot of other marginally interesting top-secret reports. But there was nothing, among the screeds of reports on international terrorism, about the French DGSE agents who were right then on their way to New Zealand to become the first foreign terrorists in New Zealand’s history: blowing up the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior.’

  Nicky Hager1

  In 1985 the US, backed by the Hawke Labor government, booted New Zealand out of ANZUS. Its sin was to elect David Lange’s Labour government in July 1984, which had a policy of banning visits by ships that confirmed they were carrying nuclear weapons or were powered by nuclear reactors. The issue came to a head the following February with a proposed visit by an old, conventionally powered US vessel that Lange correctly assumed was not carrying nuclear weapons. The Americans refused to confirm or deny if this were the case. Implementing its policy, the NZ government exercised its sovereign right to ban entry to a foreign ship—a right possessed and exercised by the US, Australia and most other countries.

  Australian Labor and Coalition governments in earlier years had banned the entry of similar US ships without being thrown out of ANZUS—back then, the US chose to cancel proposed visits rather than say whether the ships were nuclear armed. It’s unclear why the US didn’t follow this precedent in 1984 and quietly drop the proposed visit. Instead, in June 1985 President Ronald Reagan officially suspended New Zealand from ANZUS in what amounted to expulsion. He then banned NZ from receiving any US intelligence or armed-forces training.

  The punishment did not have the desired effect: New Zealand not only lived to tell the tale—it thrived. Lange won the next election, and the antinuclear stance remains so popular with New Zealand voters that conservative governments keep it. Nevertheless, some scholars have trouble understanding what happened. American politics scholar Amy Catalinac, who has lived in Wellington, said the US formally suspended its ‘security guarantee’ to New Zealand under ANZUS.2 Never mind that New Zealand could not be deprived of something that never existed.

  The Hawke Government decided in March 1985 that it would no longer give New Zealand any document containing references to classified US information. Defence Minister Kim Beazley later told me that a laborious effort went into checking a wide range of Australian documents to ensure they didn’t include material from US sources when passed on to Wellington. He didn’t know at that stage that the NSA had secretly kept supplying New Zealand with the highly sensitive intelligence that the Australians painstakingly deleted. The NSA was defying government policy. A deputy assistant secretary of state, William Brown, officially stated that ‘All intelligence flows to New Zealand would be stopped.’3 The reason for the NSA’s perfidy was simple: it considered the continued supply of signals intelligence from the intercept facilities it effectively ran in New Zealand as more important than punishing the country for refusing to let a ship into a port.

  Nicky Hager, an authority on intelligence subjects, wrote that ‘While governments, journalists and the public around the world were led to believe that United States–New Zealand intelligence ties had been cut, inside the five-agency network [US, UK, Canada, Australia and NZ] it was mostly business as usual. The US military was unsentimental about its decades of alliance links with the New Zealand armed forces. Military exercises, exchanges and other visible links were completely cut. However, New Zealand’s involvement in the UKUSA [Five Eyes] intelligence alliance was too useful to the overseas allies to be interrupted by a quarrel over nuclear ships.’4

  Hager obtained a copy of the 1985–86 annual report of the NSA’s tiny partner the New Zealand Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), which confirmed that it continued to receive SIGINT from its partners. The GCSB even managed to increase its output of SIGINT reporting by 33 per cent over the year. The report said relations with the NSA evolved into a mixed state of ‘official cautiousness and private cordiality’, while ‘close relations continued’ with Australia’s Defence Signals Directorate.

  After becoming PM, Lange was never told that the GCSB’s director of policy and planning was an American employee of the NSA.5 It is less clear how much Lange knew in 1987 when he approved a new station that would deliver a large increase in New Zealand’s SIGINT collection capabilities and would perform most of its intercept work on behalf of the NSA and its other Five Eyes partners. Like the DSD base built at the same time near Geraldton in Western Australia, the new station at Waihopai near Blenheim allowed the NSA and its local partner to intercept all signals transmitted via particular communications satellites in geo-synchronous orbit above the equator.

  In 2013, Edward Snowden released details of the extraordinarily sophisticated new equipment at Waihopai and how it was being used for the bulk collection of communications in the Asia-Pacific region as part of an integrated Five Eyes system.6 The NSA’s closeness to the GCSB was also illustrated in a report by Hager and Ryan Gallagher about a joint hacking project to eavesdrop on Chinese diplomats in Auckland.7 They said the project apparently required the agencies to violate international treaties, signed by New Zealand, that prohibit the interception of diplomatic communications. Diplomatic eavesdropping is widely practised, including by Australia, although it is against the rules. This does not stop Australia hypocritically insisting that China obey a ‘rules-based international order’.

  Snowden released a 2013 NSA report saying that China was first on a list of targets the GCSB monitored on the NSA’s behalf. Hager and Gallagher said the documents highlighted discrepancies between secret and official foreign policy adopted by New Zealand in running spying operations against twenty or more countries, including friendly nations and trading partners. The GCSB targ
ets these countries by using the Waihopai satellite intercept base and from covert listening posts hidden in New Zealand’s diplomatic buildings.8 The wider consequence of allowing the GCSB to follow the NSA’s targeting directions is that it partly undermines the increased foreign policy independence New Zealand gained from being kicked out of ANZUS.

  The value of participating in the Five Eyes arrangement was put to a crucial test when France undertook an act of state terrorism by attacking antinuclear activists in 1985. On 10 July that year, an arm of the French foreign intelligence service (DGSE) exploded two bombs on the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour. The attack killed a photographer on the ship, which was due to lead a protest at the site of forthcoming French nuclear tests at Mururoa Atoll in the Pacific. France denied responsibility well after New Zealand police caught two members of one of the three terrorist teams involved. Australian and NZ police arrested three of the other French terrorists on Norfolk Island after their boat stopped there following the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior. The police wanted to hold them on murder charges but Australian authorities, with the approval of their New Zealand counterparts, ordered their release on the grounds of insufficient evidence. Evidence materialised soon afterwards.9 After the court case, the French government negotiated an extraordinary concession that allowed the terrorists to serve their ten- and seven-year jail sentences on the idyllic French island of Hao in the Pacific. Compounding the insult, the French government released them after less than two years and promoted both of them.

  So what warning did the vast eavesdropping capability of the Five Eyes network offer New Zealand about what was planned? Given that these agencies stress how detecting early-warning signals is one of their most valuable attributes, it’s reasonable to expect they alerted the government. But as quoted above, there was nothing among numerous reports on terrorism about the French state terrorists who were on their way to blow up the Rainbow Warrior.

  Much of the original rationale for the US punishment of New Zealand disappeared after the September 1991 agreement between President George Bush and his Soviet counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev, to remove all tactical nuclear weapons from surface ships and attack submarines. But the US didn’t reinstate New Zealand as a functioning member of ANZUS.

  Nor has New Zealand been eager to rejoin. A common explanation is that many voters fear this would increase US pressure on the country to boost its military spending and support tough American policies against NZ’s major trading partner, China. Although President Bill Clinton tried to sell or lease twenty-eight F-16 jet fighters to New Zealand, Helen Clark’s Labour government decided in 2001 not to go ahead with the deal because it didn’t need—and couldn’t afford—them. Conservative governments subsequently supported the decision.

  Many Australian ministers and officials initially welcomed their enhanced status when New Zealand no longer attended ANZUS meetings, but the two countries have common defence interests regardless of ANZUS. In 1991, they agreed to a formal ‘closer defence relations’ arrangement, and in 1999, New Zealand made a welcome military contribution to the Australian-led intervention to restore order in Timor-Leste.

  In a paper published by the Australian Defence College in 2011, Mark Keenan and Colin Richardson said New Zealand was a Pacific Island country with an identifiable Polynesian element to its culture, and has always felt it has a destiny separate from Australia. They said its remote location meant there was no credible external threat to its territory or immediate interests.10 In these circumstances, most New Zealanders seem comfortable with the added independence gained from being ejected from ANZUS.

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  THE LONELY DEATH OF A GOOD POLICY

  ‘It is the Government’s policy that our armed forces must be able to defend Australia without relying on the combat forces of other countries. We must be the sole guarantor of our own security. It is not healthy for a country to become dependent on another for its basic defence. Further, if Australia was ever to be directly threatened, our allies may well be engaged elsewhere and unable to assist. This may sound unlikely, but it was a hard-learned lesson from the Second World War.’

  Australia’s National Security: A Defence Update 20071

  The message above makes refreshing good sense, and was reinforced by the reminder during the 1999 conflict in Timor-Leste that the US is not obliged to provide troops at Australia’s behest. Nor is Australia required to do so at America’s behest.

  The lesson has been slow to sink in across the political spectrum, as Foreign Minister Alexander Downer discovered during a doorstop interview in Beijing in August 2004. Reflecting the wording of the ANZUS Treaty, Downer said Australia was not bound to help the US defend Taiwan in any future military action. Labor’s shadow foreign minister, Kevin Rudd, then promptly claimed that Downer had ‘blundered into a diplomatic minefield’.2

  Downer’s remarks were not a blunder, unless ANZUS can never be discussed in other than reverential terms. His critics overlooked the fact that Australia formally recognised China in 1972 as the ‘sole legal government’ of China, including both the mainland and Taiwan (as a province). Most governments, including that of the US, have given a similar form of recognition, although the US’s position is complicated by its security treaty with Taiwan. The upshot for Australia is that a conflict between China and Taiwan can be regarded as an internal Chinese issue. Either way, ANZUS does not oblige Australia to do anything. Prime Minister John Howard told ABC Radio National’s PM program on 20 August 2004 that Downer hadn’t ‘stumbled’ and that ‘We must support the One China policy [and] make no apology’ for our close relationship with China.

  This did not stop the American ambassador, Tom Schieffer, claiming on the same program that Australia was obliged to come to the aid of the US if there were a conflict over Taiwan. Although the ANZUS Treaty is a brief document, Schieffer admitted he hadn’t read it. Had he done so, he would have discovered that Australia has no such obligation, any more than the US did to support Australia in Borneo in the 1960s or in Timor-Leste in 1999. Another US ambassador, Robert McCallum, confessed at the National Press Club on 14 February 2007 to not having read the treaty.

  Against this backdrop, the Howard Government publicly outlined the dangers of military dependency in its 2007 Defence Update, cited above. Despite the update’s strong evidentiary basis, it surprised and annoyed some who had never expected a Coalition government to declare that it was unhealthy for one country to become dependent on another for its defence. Defence Minister Brendan Nelson, who wrote the introduction, clearly felt there was nothing controversial about this.

  The Rudd Labor government had no intention of differing with the US. Thanks to WikiLeaks, we now know it secretly sucked up to the Americans by telling them to take no notice of what it said in its 2009 Defence White Paper, with the paper’s principal author, Michael Pezzullo, telling the US embassy that the government would ‘continue its missile defence research and development cooperation with the US system’.3 But the White Paper unequivocally stated that the government was ‘opposed to the development of a unilateral national system by any nation because [this] would be at odds with the maintenance of global nuclear deterrence’. Pezzullo, who now heads the Home Affairs Department, explained that the wording of this key policy document was only to mollify the Labor government’s left faction. However, the White Paper deceived a lot more than a party faction—it deceived the Australian public, who were told that the wording represented government policy.

  Some Labor politicians continued to sound more unthinkingly loyal to the US than some Coalition ministers. After Defence Minister David Johnston correctly stated on the ABC’s Lateline on 12 June 2014 that ANZUS didn’t always require Australia to back the US militarily, Labor’s Michael Danby claimed that Johnston’s words ‘will be causing shock waves in Washington, Tokyo, Hanoi, Manila and even in Beijing’.4 No shock waves were detected.

  A policy of not depending on an external guarantor doesn’t mean that
Australia must design and build all its own military equipment. It makes sense to import items such as highly sophisticated fighter planes, submarines, frigates and some electronic systems. The caveat is that the supplying nation doesn’t have a de facto veto over their use.5 The US doesn’t need any incentive to sell expensive weapons systems to Australia and other countries—it pushed hard to sell F-16 fighter jets to New Zealand after kicking it out of ANZUS in 1985 and banning weapons sales to that country. In the unlikely event that the US refuses to sell weapons to Australia in future, high-quality alternatives are available from Europe and elsewhere.

  The US’s refusal to sell has been confined to technology considered too sensitive to supply to other countries. It banned the export of its F-14 fighter because it wanted to keep its Phoenix missile technology secret. The only exception was Iran: the US encouraged the big-spending Reza Shah Pahlavi to buy the fighters. The Shah had been restored to the Peacock Throne in 1953 by a covert US–UK operation that overthrew the democratically elected secular prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh. After the Shah fled the country in 1979, he was replaced by the distinctly non-secular Islamic Revolutionary Government, which was then able to use some of the world’s most advanced jet fighters against the US-backed Iraq in the 1980–88 war between the two countries.

  Australian forces don’t need the same weapons as the US for the two nations’ forces to operate together. They have done so in the past despite having different ships, fighter planes, tanks, artillery and rifles. The benefit from exchange of ‘intelligence’ is also open to question, as much of what the US supplies to Australia is irrelevant. Political leaders such as Malcolm Fraser and Gareth Evans have stated that they did not find intelligence information particularly useful when they were in office.6 Intelligence, like any other form of information, can be distorted to influence or deceive governments—as happened before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when the US eagerly supplied bogus intelligence about the continued existence of Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. It quickly became obvious that Iraq didn’t have these weapons—despite Howard’s unqualified statement to parliament in 2003 that he ‘knew’ it did.