An elaborated version of the article published in “The New Zealand Herald”, 7 June 2008.
I had already seen the just-released security file Dr Sutch. Preparing the entry for William Ball Sutch in The New Zealand Dictionary of Biography I approached the NZ Security Intelligence Service. The then director, Don McIvor, an intelligent urbane likeable man, explained the policy decisions which restricted access. On his coffee table was a small manilla folder, no more than a centimetre thick. That is all I saw, not the contents. I think McIvor wanted me to know the summary distillation was not an enormous file, and that it would not be much help.
Which was true because, detail aside, we already knew most of its contents. Sir John Marshall, who had been Sutch’s minister, wrote in his 1978 autobiography that the file contained very little damaging to Sutch. The current director, Warren Tucker, confirmed this in the covering letter with the released files saying that while the service ‘had long regarded Dr Sutch as a security risk, prior to the discovery of the meeting between him and [KGB operator, Dimitri] Razgovorov in April 1974 the NZSIS had never considered Dr Sutch to be a Soviet agent.’ (His underlining.)
The ‘spy’ trial of 1975 broadly confirmed it too, for the Crown prosecutors presented no evidence of Sutch being a Soviet agent. The jury found Sutch not guilty. There is nothing in the released files which would have changed their minds.
The covering letter says that some of classified material from foreign intelligence services could be not disclosed. Some consists of ‘early accounts of Dr Sutch’s association with USSR-aligned individuals and organisations’ which are probably as fragmentary as the material the NZSIS released. There is also ‘recent reporting of historical information of Russian origin, document a long-standing association between the KGB and a New Zealand civil servant who very precisely (and uniquely) fitted Sutch’s background and profile’. The term ‘association’ is spook-speak, and presumably intended to indicate that the informant was vague. There is almost certainly a KGB file on Sutch starting in the 1930s when he visited Russia twice, but there may be little in it.
We now know something of what is in some foreign security agencies files. None of Sutch’s (Australian) ASIO, his FBI or his UNRRA files have anything of significance . The Mitrokhin Archive based on KGB files has reported nothing either, suggesting that his KGB file what was not thought sufficiently significant for its librarian Vasili Mitrokhin to bother to smuggle out.
Another not very helpful source is the book Spy by Kit Bennetts, a low level NZSIS employee. which adds to our knowledge of how the service operated but, as Bennetts himself says, the NZSIS functions on a need-to-know basis so he added rumour and conjecture where he was not informed.
Having a security file is not evidence of being a spy. There are files on people who will be astonished to find they were under NZSIS surveillance. Sutch had to have one because he was a senior civil servant, ultimately Secretary of Industries and Commerce to 1965. When he was appointed, the American and British military expressed vague concerns and it was agreed that information from them would not be seen by Sutch. This was in 1958, with the cold war and the stench of McCarthyism still hanging around. On occasions Sutch got on the wrong side of officials and politicians, including some overseas ones; but that did not make him a spy.
There is no denying that Sutch was pro-Soviet, and that he remained so long after most people of goodwill realised how repressive the regime was. He greatly admired its achievement in turning a feudal society into an industrial power, strong enough to resist the Nazi war machine.
But he was never a Marxist. Some of the informants in the files claimed he was, but I doubt they knew what Marxism is. An exception was a Marxist who had left the Communist Party who said that he concluded that Sutch ‘ had not read Marx, let alone Lenin’. That sounds right. Writing his biography I concluded that Methodism rather than Marxism shaped his thinking.
The quality of the information in the files is poor and incomplete. Some of the errors are laughable. One describes the Reserve Bank (which Sutch helped establish) as ‘socialistic’; an odd thought given that international financial capitalists are desperate for central banks to rescue them. One is struck that the informers are so often poorly informed.
There are only two documents in the files after April 1974 ,when he was first observed meeting the Razgovorov. One is a twenty-seven page ‘target assessment’ in which the SIS reviews what they knew about Sutch. Its contents are erratic, petty and often wrong. There are gaps in the assessment where information is withheld because its sources are foreign intelligence services. Often a biographer can guess their broad contents.
The assessment shows absolutely no understanding of the intricacies of politics of the left, which can be as confused as those involving Christian sects. There is no recognition that the British strand of democratic socialism has been largely anti-Marxist.
There is not a skerrick of evidence that Sutch was ever a member of the Communist Party. (His wife, Shirley Smith joined in the 1930s but let her membership lapse in the 1940s.) The CPNZ term is used loosely without any mention of the schisms from the early 1960s. That Sutch favoured a trade deal with China was not because he supported the China-lined CPNZ but because he was three decades ahead of his time – as he was on many other matters.,
If the information in the Target Assessment is inadequate, even more concerning is its mode of argument. It assumes [its expression] that Sutch was recruited by the KGB, with the promise to evaluate the assumption later in the paper. No such analysis appears; there is no attempt to provide an appraisal in which the assumption is weighed against an alternative. Yet, by the final page the assumption becomes a ‘conclusion’. The report would have been compiled by top analysts in our intelligence service. They showed little intelligence.
Even so they concluded that ‘during his 66 years we have accumulated six files on SUTCH, and yet can prove nothing of which he was suspected.’ This did not deter the then director, Brigadier Bill Gilbert.Writing following his discussion with Prime Minister Bill Rowling just before the arrest in 1974, ‘I [Gilbert] explained that we regarded prosecution as the final resort. We would hope to induce STREAKER [Sutch] to cooperate with us and provide us with intelligence rather than merely prosecute him, with its attendant publicity [sic].’ So Gilbert had no doubt that Sutch was guilty.
But it was guilt by association. One of the ironic items in the file is a quotation from one of Sutch’s book pointing out that fallacy. The NZSIS did not believe everything in their files.
Despite the lack of evidence, the NZSIS seemed so convinced of his guilt, that planning went ahead based on this assumption, without contemplation that they could be wrong. But nothing compromising was found. There was absolutely no evidence that he passed official secrets to any enemy. How could he have had any, since he had retired from the public service almost ten years earlier?
Sutch was charged under the Official Secrets Act which Sir Geoffrey Palmer described as of ‘unrelenting severity and unreasonableness’, and which contained ‘an ugly provision which cast the burden of proving innocence on the accused person’. Given the determination of Gilbert and others to proceed, one cant help feeling that Sutch was subjected to a show trial which had a political purpose rather than a determination of criminal guilt. Fortunately, unlike that of the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the New Zealand judicial process relies less on politics and more on the commonsense of a jury, who threw the charge out. Had they seen the just-released file they would have laughed the case out of court.
As well as lying to the Prime Minister (who unwittingly misled the nation) , the NZSIS illegally searched Sutch’s office. It was they who broke the law; not Sutch.
There will always be obsessive paranoiacs who will think Sutch was guilty despite the lack of evidence, who will rely on rumour and hearsay as did the informants, who will start out with the assumptions of guilt and twist the evidence to confirm their suspicions as did the SIS target assessment. But if the evidence is presented to any fair-minded group of New Zealanders they will concluded he was not guilty, just as twelve of them did at the trial.
The draconian Official Secrets Act, from a mind-set of the Star Chamber, was repealed in 1982, replaced by the Official Information Act (under whose provisions Sutch’s file has been released). The absurdity of the trial precipitated the more open information regime.
But sadly, as Gilbert presaged with his promise of publicity, it is hard not to think that the trial contributed to Sutch’s early death, just seven months after the trial.
As a biographer I am disappointed there is so little in the files which adds to our knowledge of the man. It would not cause me to make any major change in any of my writings about him. Sutch has a unique place in New Zealand’s history; a public intellectual many of whose ideas and policies are now accepted as integral to New Zealand’s development. We demean our national heritage when we forget Sutch’s nation-building achievements and recall him only as a ‘spy’. In any case, there is no evidence in the just-released files – nor, apparently, anywhere else – that he was.