Something New

 We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“SECRET HISTORY – State Surveillance in New Zealand, 1900-1956” by Richard S. Hill and Steven Loveridge (Auckland University Press, [hardback] $NZ79:99)

            I’ll begin this review of Secret History - State Surveillance in New Zealand, 1900-1956 with a very dry and matter-of-fact of description. This is the first volume of a planned two volumes. The second volume, yet to be published, will take the story from 1956 to the present. Secret History is written by two distinguished and experienced historians. Emeritus Professor Richard S. Hill is noted for his three-volume history of policing in New Zealand  and his two volumes dealing with the interaction of Maori and the Crown. Steven Loveridge is noted for his Calls to Arms , an account of New Zealanders’ response to the First World War; his editing of the collection of essays New ZealandSociety in War 1914-1918 ; and his co-authorship [with James Watson] of The Home Front – New Zealand Society and the War Effort [all reviewed on this blog]. Secret History is a scholarly work carefully noting all its sources. The 287 large and closely-printed pages are followed by 70 pages of end-notes, 30 pages of bibliography and sources and 19 double-column pages of index. Appreciate this as a very serious and informed work. 

Like any worthwhile work concerning history, it has a number of important themes. First, it concerns itself with the way policing became involved in surveillance and spying on the activities of New Zealanders; and how its organisation evolved. But second, and perhaps as important, it concerns itself with how ethical or unethical such surveillance was. Hill and Loveridge clearly have their views on these matters.  The front-cover blurb tells us that Secret History “explores a hidden and intriguing dimension of New Zealand history, one which sits uneasily with cherished national notions of an exceptionally fair and open society”. The same string is plucked 280-pages later when the “Concluding Remarks” declare “The history of surveillance over civil society sits uneasily with both the national foundational ideals and the dominant self-image which emerged over time...many of the methods of surveillance jarred with New Zealand’s sense of itself.” [pp.282-28] In brief, many New Zealanders regarded police surveillance, and especially the surveillance of people’s beliefs and the parties to which they belonged, as little more than butting unnecessarily into other people’s business. Though frequently critical of official surveillance, however, the authors concede that “while assigned members of the New Zealand Police Force (NZPF) were the major surveillers in our period, with the ability to arrest and prosecute, their work was a far cry from that of the security police of totalitarian, authoritarian or other regimes whose powers or practices have extended to torture or killing.” [Introduction, p.5]

 

            Secret History in arranged chronologically, working step by step through the decades of the first half of the 20^th century. The opening chapter, called “Surveilling Colonial New Zealand”, takes us quickly through police practice in the mid- and late-19^th century, when police were mostly concerned with the possibility of Maori uprisings, but when very few people were regarded as “subversive” and a threat to the nation. Police were largely recruited from rural (and therefore conservative) families. The Liberal government was in power in the 1890s with a programme that appealed to urban and industrial workers. But ironically it was in this decade that more left radical movements began to challenge the government and the arbitration system to resolve industrial disputes. Only in the 1890s was a specific police detective force created, and thenceforth surveillance was in the hands of the NZPF (New Zealand Police Force).

            Chapters Two and Three take us from 1900 to 1918, the end of the First World War. Only in the 1910s were New Zealand detectives professionalised according to British models.  It was clear that “… even if New Zealand had technically ceased to be a colony in 1907, [the task of New Zealand police] formed part of an Empire-wide effort to ward off challenges to British hegemony.”(Chapter 2, p.37). Thus began fear of subversion by other states – Russia, China, Japan and particularly Germany, with its interests in the Pacific (especially Samoa) and its formidable fleet now challenging Britain’s fleet. Even before war broke out, there were rumours of alien spies at work in New Zealand.

Yet far more prominent in the minds of the “political police” [as this text calls them] were the radical industrial unions and the Red Feds (Federation of Labour) as well as agitators like the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World, or “Wobblies”). When Bill Massey’s “Reform” party took over in 1912, it set out to break the unions and police stepped up surveillance of radicals and unionists who called for strikes. Notoriously, in 1912 a major strike in the mining town of Waihi was broken when a large force of police escorted non-union workers (“scabs” according to the strikers) into the town. Worse, police may have encouraged the strike-breakers to attack the union’s headquarters. At any rate, police didn’t intervene when the strike-breakers smashed up the building and in the fight one unionist was killed, Fred Evans, the only striker killed in an industrial confrontation in New Zealand’s history. “Under the umbrella of police autonomy… the state accommodated extra-legal policing methods, including those used by the  political detectives and other watchers. Such methods were most especially used in times of crises in defence of the realm, and their potential use underpinned the decision to engineer a decisive showdown with militant labour in 1913.” (Chapter 2, pp.60-61). In the major waterfront strikes in 1913, police swore in mounted deputies (mainly farmers) to break strikers demonstrations. The deputies became known as “Massey’s Cossacks” and an example of police endorsing violence to resolve an industrial dispute.

As war neared, police stepped up surveillance of pacifists and spent much time tracking down young men who had dodged compulsory military training. Intelligence sections were set up by the armed forces, including the novel use of wireless, and there were fears of German spies and saboteurs. By 1914 all foreign tourists were monitored by the police and a number of citizens of German descent were incarcerated. There was a widespread assumption that a major threat to the country overrode the customary police procedures. Very few people protested at surveillance and censorship. Even large scale “postal censorship [police opening private mail] occasioned little dissent” [Chapter 3, p.91] as the general New Zealand consensus was that these things were necessary in wartime conditions. For the first time, films were censored and, in the name of “efficiency”, pubs had to close at 6 p.m. (a law that remained in place for the next fifty years). Publications that questioned how the war was being fought were either prosecuted, shut-down or raided, as happened to the left-leaning newspaper the Maoriland Worker. The police were very busy. In the interest of religious harmony, towards the end of the war the police also monitored the activities of the Protestant Political Association which promoted propaganda against the Catholic church.

Chapters 4 and 5 are linked together under the title “Latent Cold War, 1919-1939”, as there was a strong antagonism towards the Soviet state almost as soon as it was formed. In the 1920s, the military had to yield back to the police the power to gather and analyse intelligence relating to foreign powers. In each of New Zealand’s four main cities (Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin) there was stationed “a detective with a virtually full-time commitment to political surveillance.” [Chapter 4, p.108] Regarded as radical and disruptive, the New Zealand Labour Party had been shadowed by the police as soon as it was founded in 1916. But “the Labour Party was moving in a distinctively reformist direction and in 1922 affirmed that ‘Labour did not support revolution’ ” [Chapter 4, p.98] By the late 1920s, the Labour Party embraced liberal democracy, regularly denounced Communism and expelled members who promoted Communist ideology. Police turned their attention to the Ratana movement and to Irish sympathisers with Sinn Fein [seen as helping to break up the British Empire]. But more than other groups, the New Zealand Communist Party, founded in 1921, was being watched by the police. Increasingly informers were recruited to infiltrate Communist meetings and in some cases informers took positions in the Communist executive. Yet the number of active Communists in New Zealand was greatly overestimated by the police. On the files in the late 1920s “1660 names were recorded as Communists at a time when CPNZ membership totalled a mere 99.” [Chapter 4, p.125].

The impact of the Depression changed the scene considerably. With a [then] record number of people unemployed, there was much civil unrest and, in the early 1930s, there were riots in the main cities. An extreme right-wing movement sprung up, but it quickly faded away. The “police were especially concerned that militant activists, especially Communists, might be able to utilise social distress to attack the authorities and the economic system they protected – one which, in times of crisis especially, seemed to belie the New Zealand mythscape of fairness and equality of opportunity. … this had led, in the immediate post-war years, to a discrete political police operation being established at Police Headquarters  and in the detective offices, together with a secret filing system to underpin their work.” [Chapter 5, p.146]. The “political police’s” “intelligence system that had been consolidated in the 1920s continued without fundamental change in the following decade, but its level of scrutiny intensified in line with the rapidly expanding threatscape perceived by the authorities. In particular, the widespread suffering caused by the Depression was viewed as a recruiting tool for the CPNZ.” [Chapter 5, p.160] The police often assumed that Communists were uniquely behind such movements as the Unemployed Workers’ Movement, and it is true that in the 1930s more people were attracted to Communism during what appeared to be the collapse of Capitalism – but even then, Communism attracted only a very few New Zealanders. The police were also able to influence university councils and suggest who could or could not be appointed to a position on the basis of how radical a candidate might be – a situation which caused much scandal as a number of very capable academics were denied the posts they were most fitted for.

A coalition government tried to balance the books and was wary of anything that looked radical. Things changed with the election of the Labour Party in 1935, but there were some ironies here. First, a number of front-bench Labour MPs, now respectable ministers with portfolios, had been fiery radicals at the time of intense industrial strife twenty years previously – the very people who had been spied upon and sometimes jailed by the police. Second, the new government’s attitude to Communists was now as hostile to Communism as the previous and more conservative government had been. Former Red-Feds were now eager to squelch Communists and they had Fintan Patrick Walsh (a former Communist) in charge of the trade-unions and able to strong-arm unions into not striking when a strike seemed imminent.

As the Second World War approached,  German clubs (including one with Nazi leanings) were observed and/or shut down.

So we come to Chapter 6 labelled “Total War 1939-1945”. Penalties for pacifists were as hard as they had been in the First World War, anti-war tracts were banned and a number of enemy aliens were interned on Somes Island and elsewhere. Once again, many eyebrows were raised by the fact that some members of the war cabinet had themselves been anti-war and anti-conscription in the earlier war. In the first two years of the war, Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany had their “Non-Aggression Pact” (in effect an alliance) and in those two years the Communists attempted to present the war as a fight between capitalist countries having nothing to do with the proletariat. Surprisingly the New Zealand Communist Party itself was not banned but it was closely scrutinised and largely went underground. In 1941 the situation changed. Hitler’s armies invaded Russia and suddenly Russia became an ally… but [dare I say, even if the authors don’t] the government remained justifiably wary of the CPNZ which could so easily change its allegiances. So, in the last three years of the war, such causes as the Society for Closer Relations with Russia were closely watched and reported on by the police. It was at this time that the Communist Party acquired its largest-ever membership, thanks in part to the prestige of the Red Army’s successes that were reported – though CPNZ membership rapidly faded away once the war was over.

Arising in the war, there was “the struggle between two models of security intelligence: the ethos of police-based surveillance versus a military-style operation falling outside the criminal justice system…” [Chapter 6, p.211] An attempt was made to produce an intelligence bureau as a completely separate agency from the police… but the attempt ended in farce. This story has often been told. Briefly, an arrogant English army officer called Kenneth Folkes was recruited to create a Security Intelligence Bureau (SIB) to deal with foreign spies and saboteurs and to monitor signals coming from enemy forces. The police were annoyed that they had been supplanted in this work. Alas, Kenneth Folkes proved to have little spycraft of his own and to be supremely gullible. Sydney Ross, a con-man just out of jail, managed to persuade Folkes that he had discovered a huge network of fifth-columnists and he alone would be able to contact them and report on them. Folkes gave Ross the money and wherewithal to carry out his investigations… and Ross merrily lived a life of ease while concocting nonsensical reports for Folkes. When this time-wasting was finally revealed, Folkes lost all credibility and crawled back to England while the SIB was dissolved and intelligence gathering went back to the police and armed forces.

            Although the authors clearly criticise much of the surveillance that was actioned during the war, they do make this important concession: “The general constraints on freedom, and the authorities’ acts of repression through 1939-45, cannot of course be examined outside the context of total war and a cause which almost all New Zealanders regarded as necessary in view of the nature of the Axis powers. Thus, when hints of covert surveillance measures occasionally surfaced, they seemed to be at least tacitly approved by the great majority of the population. Had most people been asked, they would no doubt have agreed with the government that severe measures in the short term were necessary in the long-term interests of the sought-after ideal society.” [Chapter 6, p.211]

            Finally we reach Chapter 7, labelled “Early Cold War, 1945-56”. In those eleven years of the Cold War, New Zealand became as much influenced by the United States as by the United Kingdom. The Korean War and Britain’s “emergency” in Malaya were both focused on pushing back Communist forces, and this was the era of McCarthyism in the U.S.A. In late 1949, with a conservative National government elected, the “political police” within the general police force, were centralised and formalised as the Special Branch. In 1951, an Official Secrets Act was passed.  Prime Minister Sid Holland  took a very aggressive attitude to trade unions and refused to bargain in 1951 when there was a major lockout on the wharves. Instead, Holland called in the army to unload goods from waiting ships, and then brought in non-union workers. Once again, though the most charismatic union man, Jock Barnes, was not a Communist, it was Communists who were held to account by the government. Disturbed by much official surveillance, a New Zealand Council for Civil Liberties was set up in 1952. Sophisticated intelligence made it clear that there really were Soviet spies in New Zealand – especially in the Russian embassy – and suspicion fell on some civil servants with leftist leanings.  Suspicion also fell on some eminent people like Paddy Costello and Bill Sutch. One memoirist labelled this era as “a New Zealand McCarthyism” (quoted in Chapter 7, p. 274). Finally in 1956, the cabinet minister John Marshall pushed for the idea of a security service separated from the police force and partly modelled on American and British lines. Sid Holland gradually warmed to the idea and Brigadier Bill Gilbert was sent off to train in intelligence-craft with Britain’s MI5. The Security Service was set up and in 1957 the Special Branch was dissolved. For the first time, surveillance and the gathering of foreign intelligence was no longer in the hands of the police.

            What I have given you in this review is a very simplified version of a detailed and nuanced book. The question of the ethics of surveillance is raised again and again. The authors are implicitly critical of many operations carried out by the “political police”. At the same time, context has to be considered. The era in which criticised operations were carried out is not our era and the consensus of 1912 or even 1956 is not the same as the consensus of the present age. It's up to the reader to decide what can be endorsed and what can be condemned in this chronicle of surveillance.