If The SIS Director Wants To Tell Us The Truth, She Should Commission Fiction.

Memorable Presentation: Rebecca Kitteridge, the first woman Director of the SIS, laments the fact that the necessarily secret work of her agents cannot become the subject of a reality TV series - as it has for Police and Custom Officers. For shame, Ms Kitteridge! If you would tell the truth - write fiction! Just think Spooks.

REBECCA KITTERIDGE is like no Director of the Security Intelligence Service (SIS) New Zealand has ever seen. There was a time when the identities of such national security bureaucrats were, if not secret, then, at the very least, invisible to the general public. In recent decades, an SIS Director’s name might have been slid into the public record, but he (and before Ms Kitteridge they were all “he”) was seldom heard and almost never seen.

 

How things have changed. Like her British equivalent, Dame Stella Rimington, Ms Kitteridge has, as the Service’s first female Director, allowed a Force 10 gale to blow through the stuffy corridors of her publicity-shy corner of the secret state. What Dame Stella did for MI5, Ms Kitteridge hopes to do for the SIS.

 

Her latest foray into the public sphere occurred earlier this week at the 2015 Privacy and Identity Conference in Wellington. Having heard Ms Kitteridge’s frank address, New Zealand’s Privacy Commissioner, John Edwards, vouchsafed to his audience that he “could not remember such a presentation from an intelligence director”.

 

Perhaps the most intriguing offering from Ms Kitteridge concerned the Service’s limited options for improving its public image. The sort of PR opportunities that were open to other state agencies – most notably the Police and Customs Officers – were simply not available to the SIS. It would be difficult, she suggested to make a reality show out of a state agency that was required to “do everything behind locked doors.”

 

For shame, Ms Kitteridge! Reality shows are not the only vehicles for showcasing the day-to-day activities of state operatives. Indeed, there’s an old saying among those who have made it their business to report the activities of the secret state: “If you want to tell the truth – write fiction.”

 

If Ms Kitteridge wants to improve the public’s image and understanding of the SIS, she has only to persuade NZ on Air to fund a television drama series about its activities.

 

Was it no more than coincidence that in the years immediately following Dame Stella’s stint at MI5 the BBC began airing the hit series Spooks? The show’s creator, Jane Featherstone, told The Daily Mail that: “At first the intelligence services were resistant, and they let that be known through former members who acted as technical advisers on Spooks.” But, eventually, says Featherstone, the real spooks came around. “They even used the first series to help with their [recruitment] campaign.”

 

Prime Recruiter? The British television series Spooks boosted the numbers of people seeking to join MI5.

 

And it’s not as if there isn’t plenty of experienced writing talent close at hand. The British-born television writer, Neil Cross, who wrote multiple episodes of Spooks, as well as the memorable detective thriller, Luther, has lived in Wellington for many years.

 

The story-lines for such a series (working title “The Service”) would no doubt include many of the issues raised in Ms Kitteridge’s speech. Imagine the possibilities of a story-line based upon Islamic State’s use of social media. Or about tracking-down the member of the public who tipped the SIS off about a plot to contaminate New Zealand’s dairy exports. More controversially, there could be an episode about a terrorist cell undergoing military training in the bush.

 

If Ms Kitteridge is really serious about letting the public know just how difficult her job can be, she could advise the series writers on how an SIS Director might respond to an attempt to use the SIS for political purposes. What does the Director do when someone from the Prime Minister’s Office approaches her with a request to blacken the name of a political opponent? Or when one of her agents discovers that the Israeli Embassy has recruited a prominent blogger to blacken the reputations of pro-Palestinian activists?

 

And, just imagine the dramatic possibilities of a “Black Hat” hacker, recruited to turn the tables on Chinese cyber-criminals who have succeeded in penetrating the defences of one of New Zealand’s most innovative companies. Should the Director use her hacker’s talents independently, or share him with the Government Communications Security Bureau’s own team of “Computer Network Operations Specialists”? And how should she fend off the furious intervention of a Foreign Minister desperate to keep New Zealand’s relationship with the Chinese Government on an even keel?

 

If Ms Kitteridge cannot give us the facts about the SIS, she could at least try to tell us the truth – by commissioning fiction.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 22 May 2015.

The Deep State Surfaces

Forced To The Surface: One of the most significant effects of the Neoliberal revolution has been the radical shortening of the distance between the surface of the State and its hitherto "deep" foundations.

 

IT IS EIGHTEEN YEARS since education lecturer, Denis Small, surprised two Security Intelligence Service (SIS) agents attempting to break into the home of the anti-free trade activist, Aziz Choudry. The SIS was to pay dearly (quite literally as it turned out) for that spectacular cock-up. Legislative change was required to settle the feathers of liberal opinion which, as always, professed outrage at the very idea of a state that was willing to break into the homes of its citizens. The bitter truth, of course, is that the agents and agencies of the “Deep State” have never hesitated to do whatever the hell they liked in citizens’ homes and workplaces.

 

Before the responsibility for defending “national security” was handed over to stand-alone agencies like the SIS it had been divided between the Police (Special Branch) and the Armed Forces (Military and Naval Intelligence).

 

Sometimes, as in the Waihi Miners’ Strike of 1912, the Police worked hand-in-glove with the government of the day to bring agitators and subversives under control. On other occasions – as in the  early years of the First Labour Government – the Police kept tabs on their political masters without their knowledge. (What other choice did they have when the agitators and subversives had become the Government!)

 

This is, of course, the defining characteristic of that nexus of defence, control and administrative institutions we call the Deep State: that it feels perfectly comfortable determining what is and isn’t in the “national interest”; and that it carries out this function without paying too much attention to the democratic niceties. The people’s elected representatives might be consulted if they are the right sort of representatives (with the emphasis on “right”). “Left” representatives, on the other hand, don’t “need to know” and should not be told too much about the Deep State’s activities.

 

In Margaret Hayward’s Diary of the Kirk Years she makes it plain that Norman Kirk was not only the subject of more-or-less constant SIS surveillance from the moment he became Leader of the Opposition, but that even as Prime Minister he could not count on his spooks keeping him in the loop of their surveillance activities.

 

As a young, fairly radical back-bench Labour MP, Helen Clark made no secret of her belief that her phone-calls were being monitored by the SIS. Given Clark’s long association with such dangerous beasts as the Nicaraguan Sandinistas and East Timor’s FRETILIN freedom-fighters, the SIS was probably the least of Helen’s worries. The Americans cannot have been happy with her appointment to the Chair of Parliament’s Peace and Disarmament Select Committee – especially when it became clear that David Lange (his solemn promises to US Secretary of State, George Shultz, notwithstanding) was about to take his party’s anti-nuclear policies seriously.

 

Had the Fourth Labour Government not been equally keen on implementing a radical series of neoliberal reforms, the Deep State would almost certainly have set in motion the same kinds of “defensive” measures that led to the dismissal of Gough Whitlam’s errant Labour Government back in 1975.

 

In 1984, however, a major power-shift was underway within our Deep State apparatus. From being just one of a number of important government institutions, the Treasury was moving to assert a decisive role in the governance of New Zealand.

 

All over the capitalist world power was migrating from the military to the economic sphere. The money men were beginning to count for more than the men in uniform. With the fall of the Berlin Wall this shift became complete. The Soviet Union did not fall to generals driving tanks, it was broken up by economists wielding lap-tops.

 

Francis Fukuyama called it the “end of history” and in a way he was right. If history is understood to mean the steady pressure of the masses to throw open the closed institutions of the elites, then the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dismantling of the social-democratic institutions that made possible the post-war boom did, indeed, mark the terminus of the “progressive” historical experiment.

 

The most significant effect of this massive disempowerment of the Western working-classes is the radical reduction in the distance between the surface of the State and its foundations. For the neoliberal victors of the ideological struggle, only the institutions of the Deep State are deemed worthy of preservation. The Courts, the Police, the Prisons, the Armed Forces, the Security Services: all are needed to manage the consequences of the free-market revolution. In Fukuyama’s “liberal capitalist democracies” the only remaining legitimate role for elected politicians is to keep the agencies of repression and social control adequately funded and fit for purpose.

 

To justify this “night-watchman” role, the modern politician is required to manufacture a menagerie of enemies frightening enough to keep a majority of the voting public clamouring for safety and security. Democratic politics is thus reduced to a combination of cheap vaudeville routines and spectacular conjuring tricks. The electoral “audience” is first persuaded to identify and bond with their political impresarios, and then impelled to seek protection from the succession of scary monsters which their masters periodically summon to the stage.

 

This sort of politics cannot succeed without the active participation of the news media. Even more than the traditional agencies of social control and repression, the media has become integral to the Deep State’s protection of the neoliberal revolution. For the “Politics of the Spectacle” to work its magic of misdirection and distraction, the media must be fully engaged in the process. This not only requires the transformation of politicians into media “talent”, but also the Deep State’s active collaboration in fuelling and maintaining the media’s evolving political narratives.

 

Back in 1996 David Small’s surprising of two SIS agents at Aziz Choudry’s residence spelled political disaster for the Service. Eighteen years later, the Director of the SIS, Rebecca Kitteridge, fronts-up to the television cameras and openly argues for a “temporary” curtailment of civil liberties. Her predecessor in the job, Warren Tucker, is shown to have willingly inserted himself into the machinery of a media smear operation run out of the Prime Minister’s Office.

 

The Deep State has surfaced.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Saturday, 20 November 2014.